I’m never quite sure what to do with the races where a smart young Democrat raises tons of money in a race that may not be winnable — Beto in ’18, Amy McGrath (running against Mitch in KY) and Jaime Harrison (running against Graham in SC) this year. My thinking is that it’s actually complicated — Senators like Mitch and Graham will probably do whatever it takes to outspend their opponents anyway, so maybe every dollar you raise against them results in Rs blowing more than a dollar of resources on defense. And then also, I do think Dems need to have more “stars”. Every fucking Republican who’s remotely charismatic gets called a “rock star”. We should have that too.
It turns out that the race in South Carolina looks pretty close now. Harrison is a great candidate. Let’s raise some money for him.
Elizabelle
In.
Retire Lindsey Graham.
evap
Done! I really wish the race in Kentucky was closer, McGrath seems like such a good candidate.
PsiFighter37
@evap: I think she looks good on paper, but I would much prefer that Schumer did not focus on recruiting losing House candidates for high-profile Senate races. Texas seems like another race where if we had someone with a bit more experience, we could be running closer with Cornyn – I just don’t see MJ Hegar winning this race…I would have preferred that her (like McGrath) tried to win their House race again. I also have to think Beto is heavily regretting his ill-intentioned presidential run at this point.
cain
Rose twitter seems to be all in a tizzy over some polls with McConnell ahead of McGrath by 17 points. Even though other polls have shown a closer race, these folks are all accusatory because voters didn’t pick their person.
The ways they express themselves is really annoying and provokes immature response in kind.
Ken
Grammar question: Can you use “every” when there are fewer than three?
J R in WV
We started a monthly donation for Mr. Harrison some months ago, but are always willing to pitch in to help a Balloon Juice cause.
Thanks to everyone for pitching in here.
@PsiFighter37:
How do you think Beto’s presidential run was ill-intentioned? He was trying to destroy the Democratic Party from within? You hate ambition? What?
Omnes Omnibus
@Ken: You have to consider that some would call the members of Nickelback rock stars.
PenAndKey
Seriously, that secondary headline annoys the hell out of me. Given the GOP conduct since they took over the Senate the first thing the Democrats should do if they gain a majority is gut that stupid rule, not worry about how their majority isn’t “big enough”.
A rule that only one side follows isn’t a rule, it’s a leash. There’s no incentive for us to even pretend to play nice until we’ve crushed McConnell’s whole operation into the ground for at least a full election cycle.
DougJ
I hate the anti-Beto stuff. He worked his ass off and almost freaking won in Texas.
Citizen Alan
@J R in WV:
I think he meant ill-considered. Unless there’s some Beto subtext I’m missing.
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJ: It’s funny. People keep saying they want a 50 state strategy from the Dems but then they bitch if some of the Dems are too conservative or if they lose. You can’t have one without the other.
Omnes Omnibus
@Citizen Alan: Why was it ill-considered?
Geminid
@PsiFighter37: In 2018 Hegar lost by 3 points in a district that has voted redder than Texas as a whole. She has a compelling biography, and may have certain charisma. She may be inexperienced politically, but she has accomplised much in her professional and personal life. Her lack of political experience may be an asset. Cornyn is very much an insider, and Hegar is an outsider, which I think works to her advantage this year.
PsiFighter37
@Citizen Alan: Yes, that is what I meant.
As for Hegar – yes, she has a compelling biography. But I get the sense, particularly in Texas, that being viewed as moderate and someone who is perceived / having a record of being business-friendly gets us somewhere. For all the progressive fawning over Beto, his actual record and policy beliefs would definitely make him more of a moderate.
waysel
So the advice is ‘don’t contribute to McGrath?’. Is she a lost cause at this point?
Geminid
@PsiFighter37: An Austin area jackal also expressed scepticism about Hegar’s chances. He lives in the 31st TX district that she lost by 3 points. The Dallas Morning News just reported a poll from Morning Consult showing Hegar trailing by 6 points. Cornyn’s lead was low double digits a month ago. Hegar is not afraid to throw a punch: after Cornyn’s campaign called her “Elizabeth Warren on a motorcycle,” she called Cornyn “a spineless bootlicking lackey.” And in her primary runoff debate, while she didn’t fight dirty, Hegar showed she wasn’t afraid to punch around the belt.
misterpuff
Re; Title of Post
I would have went The Byrds
So You Want To Be A Rock and Roll Star
OK a little on the nose.
piratedan
@cain: its kind of amazing with Rose twitter isn’t it, when their preferred candidate wins a primary, they expect us to close ranks and support them (which has happened to my knowledge) but when their candidate loses in a close race at the primary, they appear to be much more inclined to take their ball and go home rather than close ranks to defeat the Republican…
they’d much rather than neither of us get any pie unless they get the whole pie rather than sharing said pie with us.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@PenAndKey: I don’t think there’s much doubt the filibuster is dead once the Dems take the Senate.
Jaime Harrison has been on our list of 10 (now 12, I think) list of monthly Senate candidate donations since at least early spring. He’s smart, personable, and most important, he’s running against one of the most despicable creeps in the Senate. But I can always throw in a couple more bucks, just to see that smile.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@Omnes Omnibus: YES! We have to put up candidates, and support them, even though we suspect or even know they will lose. That’s the only way to build the party in 50 states.
@waysel: See above. I mean, an individual with limited dollars, who can only choose 1 or 2 candidates to back, may not choose her. But the party needs to back her. I would say that Balloon Juice, as a party ‘stub,’ as it were (re: that reference, I’m currently reading William Gibson’s The Peripheral), should. Just my 2 cents.
rikyrah
Harrison is a terrific candidate, and if you don’t fight everywhere, you won’t catch the bankshot. Harrison is worth the try, the same way Doug Jones was and still is.
rikyrah
@PsiFighter37:
When Beto didn’t run, Schumer had to go with what he had in Texas.
L85NJGT
Those not skinning can hold a leg.
A. Lincoln
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: Did you end up watching Indian matchmaking?
Parfigliano
schrodingers_cat
@Parfigliano: The eye patch guy. Paul Ryan.
Josie
I’m in with a little bit for Harrison. I’ve been impressed every time I’ve seen him interviewed.
cain
It’s their way or the high way – they threaten to not vote at all. You can bet that is some serious white entitlement as they are only interested in the economic policies but never the social ones that are important to PoC. It’s like they want their brand of democratic socialism or fuck it, let’s try fascism.
cain
@schrodingers_cat:
I avoided that show – I already did the arranged marriage thing.
Roger Moore
@piratedan:
The fundamental problem with Rose Twitter is that they’re a bunch of privileged whiners. They simply assume they deserve to get their way, and they come up with inconsistent arguments to justify it. The core element is they believe they’re the true Democratic base, so everyone needs to cater to them. Unfortunately, the true base- in the Democratic party, that’s people of color- rarely gets catered to; everyone assumes they’re going to vote loyally for the party, so it’s safe to ignore them in favor of chasing swing or occasional voters.
DougJ
@waysel:
I’m not totally sure yet, but maybe. Trump won KY by 30 points so it’s a tough state.
kitfoxer
Donated! Back to lurking…
schrodingers_cat
@cain: rikyrah was going to watch it so I was interested in her opinion.
I haven’t watched it, I don’t get Netflix.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
Made it through 3 episodes. I only like one of the singles. I really hope she finds someone. She was pretty, sweet and endearing.
The other main two – geesh!
PsiFighter37
@rikyrah: Let me know if you’d like me to ‘spoil’ the ending of the show (which TBH isn’t an ending at all…had to research on the Internet).
Elizabelle
@kitfoxer: Lurking money spends too. Thank you. And do comment some time.
Haroldo
Donated! And, as always, thanks for the opportunity, DougJ.
Roger Moore
@DougJ:
OTOH, Beshear managed to get elected governor and AG before that, so it’s clearly possible for Democrats to win statewide elections in Kentucky.
piratedan
@Roger Moore: yeah that would imply that somehow Mitch McConnell is somehow more beloved than the former Ky Governor, something I would have a difficult time wrapping my head around. I think the more McGrath intertwines DJT with MM, the better her chances, despite the common wisdom. Pretty easy to see the fact that these guys failure to act now will even have an impact on Kentucky Basketball being allowed to play this fall.
Mary G
O/T Such a shame:
From the Orange County Register, they have a paywall so I haven’t read it, but I get their daily email. The OC Covid stats are getting better, probably because of things like this. She seems to have been in the hospital for almost six weeks.
Also, too Biden leads Twitler in California by almost 40 points – 67/29. Getting close to the magic number!
PsiFighter37
@Roger Moore: Beshear had tight races in both of them, and arguably only won in 2019 because Bevin was detestable enough for a good chunk of Republicans to vote against him.
I think the only way Democrats make a comeback in KY is if the GOP becomes very de-Trumpified if he gets his ass handed to him this fall…and even then, I highly doubt that is what happens.
PsiFighter37
@Mary G: If Biden wins almost 70% of the vote, I think we easily recapture Katie Hill’s old seat, with an outside shot of garnering Duncan Hunter’s seat and knocking off Nunes. At the very least, it probably means we solidify our lock on the OC seats, as well as the San Diego-area seats that only became much more Democratic.
Falling Diphthong
Every surprise upset started as a long-shot race that shouldn’t be winnable.
As a partisan, it’s really frustrating when Dems are like “Oopsie doodles, looks like a wave election, guess we should have contested more seats” or “Well if we’d known the incumbent would become mired in scandal, we’d have put in a solid opponent. Too late now.” The Howard Dean 50 state strategy should be the full-time strategy.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@schrodingers_cat: We just watched the first couple of episodes of that last night. Food for much discussion. We’ve known many Indian couples.
Sab
@schrodingers_cat: Some of your admirers are annoyed with you last thtread. So you moved to next thread. We still admire you but we are irritated that you commented and then moved on.
I ususally do that when I fall asleep. You are awake because you are commenting.
Just moved on because comments were uncomfortable?
Ceci n est pas mon nym
About the topic of this post: I’d make a probability argument. If you have, say, a 40% chance of winning a tough race, then the chance of losing one is of course 60%. But if you have three of those, the chance of losing all three of them goes down to 22%. In other words, by contesting every “impossible” race, there’s a decent probability that at least one tough one will go our way.
That’s modeling them as independent. But they aren’t. The more races the RNC has to throw money into, the less they have for each. That makes the argument even stronger for fighting on all fronts.
PenAndKey
I know this is off-topic for the thread, but holy hell has anyone else seen the footage coming out of Beirut right now? There was a massive explosion that near as I can tell was in their port district and the shockwave from the mushroom-cloud forming secondary explosion was large enough to shatter glass kilometers from the epicenter. I honestly don’t know enough about explosions to guess at what could have caused something that large, with a compressed shockwave that intense, that doesn’t make me extremely worried.
Omnes Omnibus
@Sab: Please leave it.
Martin
@J R in WV: We had a pickup opportunity in TX-Sen. A candidate like Beto could have made it competitive. He really had nothing to add to the presidential field. You want the party to throw their weight behind you, you need to do the job the party needs you to do. We need to take votes in Texas. Beto has been our best shot at that in a while.
Roger Moore
@piratedan:
Bevin managed to screw up especially badly as governor. He gutted Kynect, the popular state implementation of Obamacare, got into a fight with teachers over school funding, and made a whole bunch of awful pardons. By the end of his term, he had a 33% approval rating.
I think this gets back to the same basic point that governors can’t afford to be ideologues the same way legislators can. People tend to judge legislatures as a whole rather than blame their individual legislator for the failures of the institution, even when they’re a legislative leader like McConnell. Governors can’t hide their performance as part of a group, so when they blow up the state with their dumb ideological crusades, they have to take the blame personally.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: Hindsight is always pretty good.
Mary G
@Omnes Omnibus: Amen. Leave SC alone.
Sab
@Omnes Omnibus: Why?
Geminid
@Falling Diphthong: Political analyst Rachel Bitecofer says her 2018 model showed several congressional seats left on the table because the party mistakenly assumed they were out of reach. Bitecofer had predicted a 42 seat gain, to the scepticism of many, but in the event there was a 41 seat gain. But this year I think donors and voters will support all candidates with a fighter’s chance. Here in the Va. 5th C.D. there is an open seat in a district trump won by 10%, but we have a good candidate and the Democrats are energized like I have never seen before. I can’t help but think this dynamic widespread.
Roger Moore
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
There are two ways the races could be linked though. One is the one you suggest, in which there are limited resources, so improving the chances in one race hurts them in others. That might argue in favor of the Democrats picking only some of those races to focus on so they can really dump energy into them and maximize their chances of winning those races. The other way they can be correlated is that the country as a whole could swing so the chances for all the races move together. That kind of movement argues in favor of fighting about equally on all the unlikely races in the hope the national swing makes them all good bets.
Elizabelle
@Geminid: And, Dr. Webb was on Obama’s first list of candidates he endorsed.
Along with Abigail Spanberger and Elaine Luria. All important districts.
Omnes Omnibus
@Sab: Because if she wanted to continue that discussion, she could have. When I “drove” Kay away a couple years ago, one of my transgressions (and the only one I actually feel bad about) was pursuing her to answer things that had been asked in a previous thread. It is rude. No one has an obligation to read or respond to every comment in every thread.
ETA: I am not going continue discussing this. You asked why and I answered. End of sort as far as I am concerned.
Kropacetic
@Omnes Omnibus: Good advice. I wonder if you’d be arguing the same thing if you didn’t like the person being anger-stalked across threads.
I don’t actually. It’s no, the answer is no.
Still good advice.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kropacetic: I like Kay.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
This criticism of Beto isn’t just hindsight. There were plenty of people who criticized his presidential campaign on the exact same grounds while it was still ongoing.
Kropacetic
@Omnes Omnibus: OK, good, now broaden your view of situations where this may have been applied even farther.
schrodingers_cat
@Sab: I have replied to many of the comments in the last thread. I checked the new thread and went for lunch.
Geminid
@Martin: in her own way, M.J. Hegar might be as good a Senate candidate as O’Rourke. Maybe even better. And Texas Democrats may have learned lessons from his campaign. As in, don’t campaign in all 254 counties, go where the voters are. Bitecofer and others point out the obvious: the Hispanic vote is critical in this and many other Texas elections. Veronica Escobar (D-El Paso) has campaigned for Hegar already, and could be a strong ally.
schrodingers_cat
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: And?
misterpuff
OK I finally found the right thread for this question.
Has anyone modeled the fact that many blue college towns will be much less blue due to the COVID?
If colleges do not open or open and shift to remote learning, what will the effect be on the voting demos in the traditional blue areas?
And the effect of all these blue voters back home in their parent’s districts?
Does this affect the projections in a positive or negative way?
schrodingers_cat
@misterpuff: I live near a college town. And I did some data mining when we did our voter registration drive. Majority of undergraduate students were registered to vote at their permanent addess which was where their parents lived. So I don’t think that the voting pattern should change much.
Geminid
@Elizabelle: Cameron Webb was a White House Fellow, as were freshmen representatives Colin Alredd (TX) and Sharice Davids (KS). It seems like that program is somewhat of a farm team for prospects. Webb, Spanberger and Luria have sizable cash advantages over their Republican opponents, probably because republicans had tough if not bitter nomination contests. Spanberger and Luria were unopposed, and while Webb faced three sound opponents, compared to the two 5th district republicans the Democrats could have been singing “Kumbaya.”
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@schrodingers_cat: The topic we’ve discussed most is how impossible the criteria are that some of the people set on paper for their prospective spouse. And the thin basis for rejecting candidates.
In many ways the “arranged marriage” doesn’t seem that different from how marriage works in the US, once a couple meets and gets acquainted. The difference is in the formalized process of selecting candidates, as opposed to being invited for dinner to your parents’ house or a friend’s house and they invite “someone they’d like you to meet.” Instead there’s a broker finding you candidates from a database.
Aleta
@misterpuff: It’s a question here (and may affect two other college towns in the state I read about last election), as most of those students had registered to vote locally, and did influence the 2016 and 2018 results on referendums and in the 2016 Dem primary.
Citizen Alan
@Roger Moore: In Beto’s defense, I believe his thinking was that he would not have a shot against Cornyn but even if he didn’t win the nomination, a respectable showing might get him the VP nod. He failed to anticipate that (a) the eventual nominee would (for good reasons) only consider female VP options and (b) Shitgibbon would turn the whole country into a leper colony and ruin the GOP brand so thoroughly that by summer, Cornyn would be vulnerable. Both of those were really only apparent in hindsight. Hell, I watched it unfold in real-time, and I still can’t fully believe that #2 happened.
Barry
I kicked in a one-time payment for $250.
Anybody care to match?
WaterGirl
@Barry: I don’t have that, but I like your style, and I hope someone steps up.
DougJ
@Barry:
I’ll kick in some more
Raoul
I think there can be value in supporting a Dem like Harrison, even if he may end up with 47% of the vote. If he can turn out marginal votes that shift a state legislative seat or another, and if Trump finds himself in a difficult E.C. position, every state like South Carolina that can move the national total vote more for Biden, that’s helpful.
But I’ll also add this note from FutureNow: If you want to send some smart money to South Carolina, State Rep. J.A. Moore has been a leader in fighting for COVID relief but represents a Republican-leaning seat.
SWMBO
Posted elsewhere but:
https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/1290771226491682816?s=20