We Interrupt our regularly scheduled GOTV fundraising for a quick candidate money drop: Tony Vargas (NE-02) and Senate challenger Dan Osborn.
We’ll get back to NCAAT in a day or so (and there’s an active Angel match with 6x donations) so please carry on with that if you are so inclined. But we figured we’ll all be distracted with he debate, so it seems possible that this might be a good day for candidate donations, too.
Balloon Juice is heading to NEBRASKA! Nebraska? Yes, Nebraska.
US HOUSE SEAT: NE-02
The race between incumbent Republican Don Bacon and Democrat Tony Vargas is close.
Fun Facts:
- Madame VP is running ahead in CD 2, and the incumbent Republican, Don Bacon is vulnerable.
- This year is a rematch between Don Bacon and Democrat Tony Vargas.
- Bacon beat Vargas by only three points in 2022, and off-year election with middling turnout.
- We supported Vargas in 2022 to the tune of $5,011.
- Bacon is now unpopular with Republicans in Nebraska, for being partly sane about a couple of issues.
- Bacon had a bruising primary, with 40% of Cornhusker Republicans voting for his far right opponent.
- While Vargas holds a slight Q2 fundraising advantage, the NRCC will surely dump more $ into NE-02.
NEBRASKA SENATE RACE
The big surprise in Nebraska is the Senate race.
Incumbent Senator Deb Fischer is not particularly beloved in Nebraska. As a result of her lukewarm support, the darkest of dark horse candidates – a political independent named Dan Osborn – is nearly tied with Fischer in four separate surveys. And this is without the overt support of the Democratic party.
Who is Dan Osborne?
Osborn is a blue-collar union worker and political newcomer, who is running as an independent. He’s backed by the UAW and other labor organizations, but is not accepting endorsements from the Democratic party (undoubtedly a smart strategy in Nebraska). Here’s more on Dan. (No paywall.)
Needless to say, Dan Osborn is lagging in fundraising. Are these polls complete outliers? Perhaps. But the momentum is with the Democrats in NE-02, aka CD 2, which Osborn needs to carry handily to outweigh rural Nebraska. It’s NE-02 when we’re talking about the House; it’s CD 2 when we are talking about the electoral college.
Will it help that Tim Walz is a native Nebraskan who has already held a wildly successful rally in Omaha?
NEBRASKA CD 2 (ELECTORAL COLLEGE)
Nebraska, like Maine, awards its electoral votes by Congressional District. Nebraska CD 2 (essentially, greater Omaha) is perpetually up for grabs – Obama won it in 2008 and lost it in 2012. Trump won it in 2016 and lost it in 2020.
What’s more, the website 270ToWin Electoral College Tie Finder shows at least three plausible electoral outcomes that lead to a 269-269 tie.
If that happens, Nebraska CD 2 could decide the election. One way or the other. Let’s help make sure it goes our way, eh?
THE NEBRASKA EFFORT IS AN INVESTMENT
This is an investment in regaining the house.
This is an investment in possibly (although perhaps unlikely) picking up an unexpected Senate seat.
This is an investment in helping to drive turnout in CD 2 to help secure its potentially tie-breaking electoral vote.
QUICK NOTE ON STRATEGIC CANDIDATE FUNDRAISING
A quick note on strategic candidate fundraising.
It’s bears repeating that “close” and “toss-up” and “Republican incumbent in a Biden district” are not the same as “needs money” or “this would be a good strategic use for our money.” That’s why we’re mostly keeping our powder dry on candidate fundraising until later this month, when we’ll have a better idea of who is overlooked and underfunded.
But we’re rolling out Nebraska now, in honor of the debate tonight, and you can expect a candidate component for the upcoming Operation Blue Arizona! (As soon as we finish NCAAT.)
We are hoping to raise $10,000 for Osborn and Vargas. And we may revisit one or both of these later, but for now $5k each seems like enough to make a difference. If you want to contribute to one of these races and not the other, or give more to one than the other, click on Customize Amounts before you enter your dollar amount.
These two Nebraska races fit our strategy of narrow-targeting those races that potentially have the most impact, and where our funds can make a difference.
Side note: Click on “here’s more on Dan” above if you want to read the story about how Charlton Heston (yes the gun-humping actor) got Dan Osborn fired from his job waiting tables. I guess Charlton Heston was always a dick.
One more thing. Now that we’re heading toward the final stretch, we’ve added a new page under 2024 Activism – Strategic Candidate Fundraising. It’s similar to the Targeted Fundraising page, which is focused on the organizations we are supporting. Strategic Candidate Fundraising is where you’ll find all the candidate fundraising as the final weeks progress.
Besides that, this can be an open thread to talk about the debate and anything else.
WaterGirl
We have an Angel match for the first $2,500 that goes into the thermometer for these two candidate races. No need to tell us in the comments or send me an email.
But if you wantto be matched for NCAAT, then send an email message or add it in the comments.
WaterGirl
Later today or tomorrow I’ll be adding a spot in the sidebar where you can post your suggestions for other candidates to support. That way they will all be in one place, which is such more practical than being spread across 5 or 10 individual posts.
We’ll have to look into all the suggestions, and chasing the info across a multiple threads is mostly conducive to getting some good potential candidates lost in the shufflle.
Geminid
Don Bacon was primaried in the last cycle also; Trump supported a challenger because Bacon voted for the Infrastructure bill. I suspect this time some die-hard MAGA fanatics will leave the Congressional line blank, maybe enough to make a difference if the race is close.
I’m hoping the same happens in Maryland, where Republican Senate hopeful Larry Hogan has crossed his party’s knucklegraggers on several occasions. Those prople are vindictive, and some of them hate “RINOs” more than they hate Democrats.
cmorenc
The availability of the NE-2 electoral vote for Ds reveals a potential very dark cloud in the constitutional EV system, which is the possibility of literally gerrymandering the electoral college by states with GOP-dominated legislatures (but 50-50is electorates) by awarding EVs generally by congressional district, but keeping winner-take-all in states where both the electorate and legislatures are GOP-dominate. IIRC, in a previous presidential election cycle, both the Pennsylvania and Michigan legislatures contemplated such a change, but backed off from going forward.
Not that we should turn down NE’s splitting out its Omaha CD EV in our favor this cycle -but nevertheless beware this EV splitting practice becoming more common across other states.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: GOOD MORNING!
Jim Appleton
Not liking the required fields in this (address, occupation), as opposed to previous which only ask name and email.
TaMara
OMG, Watergirl, you Rock!! I was happy to just boost them in a few random posts, but you brought the details, gurrrrl!
I would love for my adoptive “home” state (where this military brat graduated high school and college) to turn a corner. When I was there it was definitely, much like Iowa, more purple than red. But that was decades ago and I’d basically written it off and worried about various family members being blue dots in a very red sea.
Belafon
@Jim Appleton: They’re trying to avoid getting in trouble with campaign finance laws, and giving Republicans a chance to sue.
TaMara
@Jim Appleton: This is because we, as random individual donors, have to jump through hoops to prove we are not foreign money, etc, while the corporations who are people just get to throw money wherever. (Yeah, I’m bitter like my coffee this morning)
Geminid
@cmorenc: Right now only Nebraska and Maine splits their Electoral votes. I don’t think this practice will spread so long as state legislatures can gerrymander districts, because of the potential problems you discuss..
Maybe Congress will pass voting rights legislation that mandates non-partisan, independent redistricting for Congressional districts, following the practice of California, Michigan and a few other states. I’d still want to see how well they work before more states started splitting their electoral votes.
Almost Retired
@Jim Appleton: I think – although I’m not 100% sure – that occupation and address information is required for candidate donations, but not for the organizations BJ supports. There’s some public policy reason behind it, centered on monitoring whether employers are circumventing campaign finance laws through employee ‘donations.’ Nothing says you can’t say “retired.”
Matt McIrvin
@cmorenc: It’s basically only a danger in cases where the state government is Republican-controlled but they think the state will go Democratic… and in such situations, many state politicians are also aware that their constituents will be pissed off. I think that’s a brake on it actually happening.
When Maine and Nebraska adopted the congressional-district system, an actual split vote was much less likely than it is today, which probably made it less controversial–it wasn’t a transparent move to torpedo the state’s presidential electoral votes. When Obama got an electoral vote from Nebraska in 2008 it was a real shock.
WaterGirl
@Jim Appleton: I did set these up so that your information won’t be shared with the candidates unless you click the box to share your info when you donate. So you shouldn’t be getting follow-up asks from the campaigns.
WaterGirl
I a correcting some of my typos – for the past few days my “m” and “n” keys have been on strike. So I have to paste in the missing letters. Sometimes, though, they add 2 or more of the letters instead of 1 or none, and then autocorrect jumps in and decides it’s a different word altogether. And sometimes it takes so long for the offending letter to show up that it reverses the order of the letters.
It’s driving me nuts, but I can’t take it in until I get caught up with work.
cmorenc
@Geminid:
Article II, sec 1 says, in relevant part:
The SCOTUS lineup of maybe 30 years ago may have been inclined to view Congressional Districting legislation such as you proposed as a kosher logical extension of Baker v Kerr, but the current far-RW SCOTUS lineup may instead view such an effort as violating the “original” text language “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct” (wrt the electoral college) and Baker v Kerr only requiring substantially equal numbers population in each district, not necessarily requiring equal partisan split in each district.
dnfree
I have not yet donated to Kamala because it seems she’s getting plenty of money. So I appreciate opportunities to donate where I feel like it might make more of a difference.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: The one state where I might see a move to the congressional-district system as likely is Georgia, if they ever think the state’s Democratic lean in presidential elections has become permanent but a Republican is still Governor. But that’s going to be a fragile and temporary situation in itself. As long as the Republicans think they have a chance to take the state, it’s not happening. And if there’s a Democratic Governor it’s probably not happening (depending on the possibility of veto override, I guess).
JoeyJoeJoe
@cmorenc: Republicans actually did slightly gerrymander NE-2 to make it more republican. They moved some of the suburbs around to do so. Joe Biden won the district in spite of it
Matt McIrvin
@JoeyJoeJoe: Yeah, I recall that as a reaction to 2008, to make sure the Democrats could never get that electoral vote again. Didn’t work permanently.
This is one of the problems with the congressional-district method as a way to mitigate the Electoral College’s problems. Among other things, it’s vulnerable to gerrymandering. It also doesn’t eliminate the “small-state bonus” (if anything it makes it worse), though as I keep saying, that’s not the EC’s biggest partisan problem at this point.
In theory, the National Popular Vote Compact could eventually do it… but I kind of suspect it would only work in a “spherical cow” idealization. In practice there’s going to be giant judicial and bureaucratic pushback as soon as it becomes a serious threat to the system. It assumes that non-cooperative states will actually report an accurate popular-vote count for use by the NPVC states, for one thing.
Belafon
deleted
Geminid
@cmorenc: This is true, but it seems to me that Congress should pass legislation it deems fit and neccesary regardless of potential action by the Supreme Court. The current makority might not interfere eith Congress’s prerogatives in this case and if they do, that will be one more reason to add Justices.
Jim Appleton
@WaterGirl: OK, in for $50.
Thank you!
stinger
In for $20.
Maxim
@dnfree: I donated once, more symbolically than because I thought she needed it. Happy to have done so, but otherwise I like sending my dollars toward efforts like this.
Madeleine
In for $50, evenly split.
StringOnAStick
In for $25.
WaterGirl
Just $10 left on th Angel match for Nebraska!
WaterGirl
Nebraska Angel match is complete!
This was our only Angel match for Nebraska. It’s a great start!
Mai Naem mobile
I just wish the Dems in some fluke election would win the electoral college but lose the popular vote. The GOP would get rid of the electoral college so fast it would make your head spin and ofcourse a conservative SCOTUS would agree with a one off no precedent decision like Bush v Gore.
PaulWartenberg
I think the Democrats can flip Nebraska… and Kansas. Both states are primed to support Walz as a veep candidate, and the fallout from the Dobbs ruling on Kansas voters can make them receptive to a pro-choice Dem ticket.
PaulWartenberg
@Mai Naem mobile:
Mai, that’s the funny thing about “minority party” rule: there’s no way the Republicans will win a national popular vote.
The best way to reform the Electoral College – there is no way to abolish it outside of constitutional amendment – is to have the Democrats win congressional seats to such advantage as to end gerrymandering nationwide as well as increasing the Electoral power of larger states like California and New York to reduce the skewed Electoral hold of small states.
Yet Another Haldane
Sorry I missed the angel, but I kicked in $100 anyway. Which I guess I didn’t need to mention here? But just in case, here it is.
Sister Golden Bear
In for $50
Matt McIrvin
@Mai Naem mobile: That very nearly happened in both 2000 AND 2004. In fact, in 2000, there was a lot of media buzz about how the Republicans were preparing to cast aspersions on the Electoral College to try to swing the election if the EV/PV split went the other way. In 2004, Bush actually did win a popular-vote majority, but Ohio was pretty close and there were imaginable worlds in which Kerry took it.
In 2012, there was a false rumor going around that Romney had won the popular vote, and Donald Trump started bloviating about the evil of the Electoral College and calling for a revolution.
Matt McIrvin
@PaulWartenberg: I actually don’t think Republican popular-vote pluralities or even majorities are impossible under conditions similar to the present day, just unlikely. If the Democratic campaign whiffs hard enough it can happen–it depends on our voters staying home. They routinely win popular-vote majorities in midterm elections, though that has an extra level of selection added in that people are only likely to turn out in the most competitive races.
Jesse
I chipped in $10 to this thermometer when I saw it on the sidebar earlier today, but before this post was published.
lowtechcyclist
Just tossed in $100 for NCAAT and $200 for Nebraska.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
I remember that brief moment in 2000 when the GOPers were talking about persuading electors to switch their votes because they thought Bush would win the popular vote and lose the EC.
Sure would have been nice if it had happened that way. They’d have been ready to amend the Constitution to get rid of the EC; instead, it became sacred to them.
Cheryl from Maryland
Donated $50.00. I want a D-majority Senate. Dan Osbourne may not declare himself a Democrat, but he isn’t going to caucus with the GOP, so it will work.
WaterGirl
@Jesse: Yours was matched! Anything in the thermometer until it hit $2,500 was matched.
I didn’t think the early donators should be punished for doing exactly what I hoped they would do. :-)