We find it amazing that the Democrats and the mass media are not making a big deal out of how much trouble the Republicans are in at the moment. Even liberal leaning pundits seem to think that the Bin Laden bounce for Obama has run its course. We do not know where they get this idea because we cannot find one poll that is not positive for Obama and they actually are getting stronger for Obama with every passing day. If the presidential election were to be held now, Obama would be a shoo-in.
Now it is true that the Democrats and the media tried to convince the public that the special election held in New York's district 26 showed that the Ryan budget plan is the kiss of death for the Republicans in 2012 and most pundits did not buy that. The problem is not with the Ryan budget plan but rather with the Republican messaging. They are trying to sell it as as a necessary reform to balance the budget. They keep pushing that line and not only will they not gain control of the Senate in 2012, but they will not defeat Obama and will come close to losing the House of Representatives as well.
At the time of the 2010 elections, the generic congressional ballot was running from 7 to 15 points in favor of the Republicans depending upon which poll you looked at. Right now our average of those polls is actually slightly in favor of the Democrats. Clearly the Republicans have a gigantic messaging problem. How about a message that proclaims they are try to SAVE Medicare before it goes bankrupt? Is that too much to ask of the Republican leadership? The voters voted for Republicans in 2010 in hopes that the Republicans would jam the brakes on all that the Democrats had done in the previous two years.
What have they gotten in exchange for this vain hope? They have gotten Democrat-lite from the Republicans instead. As Obama has said, Democrats bring a gun to a knife fight. The Republicans do not bring a knife or even martial arts to the fight. The Republicans are wimps and they have no clue on how to go for the Democrat jugular. The Democrats run ads proclaiming that the Republicans are trying to destroy Medicare and kill granny. How do the Republicans respond? They point to charts and figures that there is a problem with the financing of Medicare. How about proclaiming that the Democrats are sitting idly by while Medicare goes broke and that this is what will kill granny?
Republicans seem to think that the baby steps they have taken towards controlling government spending are all it takes to win public approval. How about wielding a meat axe instead? Whole departments need to be axed as they are doing more harm than good. Polls showed that a majority of the likely voters did not have a problem with shutting down all but the essential parts of the federal government if that was what it took to get the Democrat's attention to their habit of spending other people's money like a whole carrier group of druken sailors. What did the Republicans give them instead? They gave them cuts that did not even come to the amount the government borrowed while they were arguing about it.
The debt ceiling hike is the last chance the Republicans have to make good on their promises for the 2010 elections. They have just one chance to make believers out of the voting public that they are serious about cutting government spending. They need to refuse to raise the debt limit no matter what cuts the Democrats agree to. The public will support this stand. The folks in Congress need to learn to live within their means just like everyone else has had to do. The Republican leadership (and that means you, Mitch McConnell) need to get in the Democrats' face and stay there no matter how much the media beats up on them for doing that. Frankly, we doubt that the Republicans have the guts to do this and that means that we get four more years of Obama and continued Democrat control of the Senate and perhaps the Democrats regaining control of the House to boot.
The Republican Messaging Problem
Not Just Right but Center-Right
There are a lot of Republicans running around insisting that only true-blue conservatives need apply to run as a Republican. While it is true that the Republican Party slowly lost its way after 1994 by becoming Democrat lite, this is a center-right country and not just a right wing one. To effectively control Congress, you need a decent majority. Red States alone cannot supply enough Republicans for effective control of the House of Representatives. We are listing below each state in order from the reddest one to the bluest ones according to our table in Presidential Elections. We show the partisan breakout for each state as it stands today after allocating the vacant seats to the Party that won the last election.
RED STATES PURPLE STATES BLUE STATES State Dems Reps State Dems Reps State Dems Reps Utah 1 2 North Carolina 8 5 Wisconsin 5 3 Wyoming 1 Missouri 4 5 Minnesota 5 3 Idaho 1 1 Virginia 6 5 Pennsylvania 12 7 Oklahoma 1 4 Florida 10 15 Oregon 4 1 Alaska 1 Colorado 5 2 Michigan 8 7 Nebraska 3 Ohio 10 8 Washington 6 3 North Dakota 1 Nevada 2 1 New Jersey 8 5 Kansas 1 3 Iowa 3 2 Maine 2 Alabama 2 5 New Hampshire 2 Delaware 1 Texas 12 20 New Mexico 3 California 34 19 South Dakota 1 Illinois 12 7 Kentucky 2 4 Connecticut 5 Mississippi 3 1 Maryland 7 1 Montana 1 Vermont 1 South Carolina 2 4 New York 27 2 Louisiana 1 6 Hawaii 2 Indiana 5 4 Rhode Island 2 Arkansas 3 1 Massachusetts 10 Georgia 6 7 Tennessee 5 4 West Virginia 2 1 Arizona 5 3 TOTAL 54 76 TOTAL 53 43 TOTAL 150 59
As you can see, there are only 226 seats in all of the red states and purple states put together. Since there are Democrat pockets even in the red states, let alone in the purple ones, there is no way that the Republicans can win all 226 seats. Even if they could, that gives them control by a 226 to 209 margin. However, there are Republican pockets in the blue states but electing a "true blue" conservative is hard to do there. As the Democrats found out, the only way to get a sizable majority is to get some seats in the red states and those are not going to be "true blue" liberals or they cannot get elected. The point is that neither party can govern from the left or the right because they need folks from the center to have a majority.
Since the Republicans have been reduced to nothing but the heavily red pockets, guess where the extra seats are going to come from? To illustrate this political fact of life, here is a table showing where the seats will come from in order of the size of the gain for the Republicans using our Vulnerable Democrats by State ratings.
RED STATES PURPLE STATES BLUE STATES State +20 +40 +60 +80 +100 State +20 +40 +60 +80 +100 State +20 +40 +60 +80 +100 UT
NC
1 3 4
WI
1 1 1 2
WY
MO
1
MN
1 1 1
ID
1 1 1 1 1
VA
1
2 3 3 4
PA
1
3 3 8 8
OK
FL
1
1 3 3 3
OR
1 1
AK
CO
2 2 2 3
MI
1
2 3 3 3
NE
OH
2
3 3 5 6
WA
1 2 2
ND
1 1 1 1
NV
1
1 1 2 2
NJ
1 1 1 1
KS
1
1 1 1 1
IA
1 2 3
ME
1 1 2
AL
1
1 1 1 1
NH
1
1 2 2 2
DE
TX
1
1 2 2 3
NM
1 1 2
CA
1 1 1 1
SD
1 1 1 1
IL
1 1 3 4
KY
2
CT
1 2 2 3
MS
1 1 1
MD
1
1 1 1 2
MT
VT
1
SC
NY
3
4 6 8 10
LA
1
1 1 1 1
HI
1
IN
1
2 3 3 3
RI
AR
1
2 2 2 2
MA
1 4 4
GA
1 2 2 2
TN
1
1 1 1 2
WV
AZ
2 3 3 3
TOTAL
8
15 20 20 24
TOTAL
6
10 17 23 30
TOTAL
6
15 23 37 46
Now you can see the problem because as the Republicans capture more and more seats, the number coming from purple and blue states goes up rapidly. The foot totals on the red states says that only 20 of the 40 needed to gain control of the House are going to come from there and they will not supply the last four unless the Republicans gain more than 80 seats. By the time you get to gaining 40 seats, the blue states are already supplying as many seats as the red states. While different analysts would produce somewhat different results, the proportions coming from the three groups would be pretty much the same as shown here.
The bottom line is that this business of no RINO's allowed needs to stop. If you want seats in those blue states then you are going to get a Scott Brown type Republican. Since those seats are absolutely necessary for Republican control, learn to live with moderate Republicans. Just remember that they are better than any Democrat. Every last Republican in both houses voted against the final health care bill including the 59 House members from the blue states. How many of the 150 Democrats from there voted no? Only a very small handful did and even then only those already in danger of losing this fall with the exception of Rep. Lynch from Massachusetts.
No Instinct for the Jugular
If there is one thing that has become clear to me after almost 50 years in Republican politics, it is that Republicans have no instinct for the jugular. Professional Democrats always play hardball and do not take prisoners. Most Republican politicians, especially those in leadership positions, have some need to be loved or if not loved at least to be approved of. These types just cannot handle rejection and this causes them to roll over and be complete wusses rather than be labeled by Democrats and the media as anything negative.
Democrats pros do not play nice in the sandbox but Republicans seem to be determined to play under some sort of Marquis of Queensbury rules. They insist on operating in politics with one hand tied behind their backs and then seem surprised and hurt when the Democrat operatives hand them their heads. Strangely enough, there is a total reversal of the two parties in attitudes when it comes to foreign affairs. Here Republicans know that needing to be loved is a losing proposition and that respect is required. Democrats, on the other hand, cozy up to leftist and Islamo-Fascists because they recognize a kindred spirit who believes in the power of the mailed fist.
When I first got elected to public office, it was at a time in Arizona politics when enough Republicans had moved into the Phoenix area to allow the Republicans to gain control of local offices. On taking office as the first Republican to ever have held that office, I soon discovered that the majority of my employees were Democrat precinct committeemen. This did not provide an optimum situation. So what was the first thing the other Republicans wanted to do? They wanted to form a civil service system and lock all those committeemen in place before I could ascertain which ones I could live with.
Needless to say, I protested vehemently but they insisted that eliminating political patronage was the "right" thing to do. I pointed out that there was no danger of our being accused of political patronage like the Democrats had been doing for the last 100 years since where could we find any Republicans to work for the lousy wages the County was paying? They paid no attention and went right ahead and put a civil service system into place to the approval of editorials from the media who had never said boo about the Democrat political patronage.
Fortunately the really rabid Democrats quit right away and I won over the remaining ones by creating a new series of job classifications at significantly higher wages using the savings from not replacing the ones that had quit. However, that is beside the point. Paying decent wages was the right thing to do but installing a civil service was a politically stupid thing to do at least until we had weeded out the bad apples. All a civil service system does is lock bad employees into place.
Under the new rules, it took 3 bad employee reviews to fire an employee. This forced me to go to a system of quarterly employee reviews over the the screams of my supervising employees who hated evaluating other employees. That allowed me to get rid of an employee that did not work out in 9 months instead of three years. My other problem was that some of my employees were unionized but not all of them since Arizona is a right to work state. I went to the AFL/CIO seeking their support since I was treating my employees better than the Democrats had. They refused because I was a Republican and opposed me at every turn. Doing the "right" thing does not mean beans to Democrat activists.
That was only the beginning of a continuous barrage of my fellow Republicans not wanting to play hardball to even out the playing field. Thanks to me and three legislative reapportionment plans I had drafted and helped get approved by the federal courts, the Republicans controlled both houses of the legislature. I drafted a bill to overhaul the elections laws and to remove their bias towards the Democrats in them. While I got it introduced, the Republican House leadership did not want to move the bill because it was too "partisan". They only agreed to move the bill after all the language was removed that eliminated that bias towards the Democrats so in that form it passed the House.
Over in the Senate, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee was not a wuss and put all the language the House had deleted back into the bill over the screams of the Democrats. That was when the Democrat minority leader made the mistake of making it a party issue and getting unanimous agreement in the Democrat caucus to oppose the revised bill. I immediately went back to the House leadership and asked what they were going to do now that it was a partisan issue. My parentage was questioned but they also said that they would pass the amended bill since they now had no choice. That was just the beginning of the Republican leadership at all levels trying to get me to be a "team player" (translation: roll over and let the Democrats have their way). After three trips to the U.S. Supreme Court and umpteen sit-ins in my office by the great unwashed, they finally got rid of me, but that is another story.
Believe me when I tell you that this was the first of a long string of such cases when the Republican leaders refused to stand up and be Republicans instead of go along and get along Democrat lites. One other incident will suffice to make the point I am trying to make and that was lowering the voting age (and adulthood) to eighteen which the other Republicans were all for. I showed them an analysis of the voter registration rolls by party and age using a computer program I had written for that purpose. It demonstrated that voters under 30 were much more inclined to register Democrat than Republican so why did they want to add more Democrats to the rolls to vote against us?
I got the usual answer of it being the right thing to do and would garner all this supposed approval. All it did was elect more Democrats to the state legislature. Is it a coincidence that the three congressional districts in Arizona that went Democrat in 2006 or 2008 have huge state universities in them with those folks voting at the urging of their professors including hordes of out of state students? The Republicans kept pushing to make voting easier just like the Democrats wanted them to do by easing voter registration requirements and going to the motor voter method of registering voters. They felt it was more democratic to have more people voting. Maybe so but the Republicans were already registering to vote and voting at twice the rate of the Democrat inclined groups. I pointed out that these new voters would be much less informed and the most easily swayed by demagogues.
In vain I kept pointing out that all these new voters would be predominately Democrats so why were the Republicans so anxious to help the Democrats by making things easier for them? Well, you know what happened not only in Arizona but all over the country. Just where do you suppose all those new voters who ordinarily would not have bothered to register let alone vote and who elected Obama came from? I have gotten used to the Republicans committing political suicide by doing what Democrat operatives want them to do after being convinced by them that it was the "right" thing to do. It is this tendency among Republicans that prevents me from projecting a massive landslide for the Republicans in November.
I just witnessed John McCain lose an election that should have been a piece of cake because he did not want to be too partisan and say not nice things about Obama when there were a boatload of things (or lack thereof) that cried out in Obama's background to be made an issue. I protested in vain as the McCain bozos sat on Sarah Palin when her selection was the only thing the campaign had done right. They kept her muzzled and threw away the one thing they had going for them. It was not until the night before the election that I realized that the McCain campaign had totally blown the election when I saw hordes of young people out in force to taunt him at his last campaign stop and knew they would turnout and vote for Obama when they never had bothered to vote before.
There is no way the Democrats can win this fall but the Republicans will always try to lose an election that should be a cakewalk. They just threw away a potential 53rd Senate seat when Pataki decided he would not run because a Republican cannot win in New York. Gee, that was what everyone said about Massachusetts, too. Even there, I had to write a non-stop series of articles about how Scott Brown could win to get any support for him. Now I have to keep pounding on the clear fact that some so-called "experts" are hopelessly biased in favor of the Democrats.
The Republicans did not bother to even do battle in FL-19 because the Democrats convinced them that it would be a lost cause. The same thing can be said about not fielding candidates in marginal districts in New York like NY-21, NY-27 and NY-28. The Republicans need to wake up and smell the coffee. They could win as many as 100 seats in the House and as many as 11 in the Senate (instead of 12 thanks to Pataki) but you have to field good candidates who can win and then support them fully. The easiest way to lose a sure thing election is to concede defeat before the election is even held. In my personal experience, Republicans are very good at doing just that.
Not 1994 but 1938 Instead
For some time now we have been trying to convince everyone that 2010 will be just like 1994 only more so. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has an article called How Bad Could 2010 Really Get For Democrats? His answer is that it could be not only as bad as 1994 but even as bad as 1938. While we are not ready to say that the Republicans will pick up 79 seats like they did in 1938 yet, we have been saying all this year that it would be well over the 51 seats they gained in 1994. Right now we are projecting a 66 seat pick-up with a loss of two seats for a net gain of 64 seats. That puts us halfway between the 1994 and 1938 in terms of seats gained by the Republicans.
Real Clear Politics was projecting that the Republicans will pick up 18 seats with a decent chance at 29 more and that was more than twice as many as any other analyst except for our own. We can understand their being cautious at this point because as Sean points out, a "V"-shaped recovery might cause their projections to be correct. Right after that article appeared, they shifted 4 more seats to the Republicans for a total of 22 and added 3 more to the toss-up group for a total of 32. That is getting them to 54 seats seriously in play with the Republicans losing 2 seats for a net gain of 52 if all the toss-ups go Republican. They also shifted shifted a net 10 likely Democrat seats to leans Democrat.
As we pointed out in Seeing What you Want to See, all the other analysts were totally biased in favor of the Republicans. Apparently one of them read Sean's article and/or our own critique and began making some changes in favor of the Republicans. The Rothenberg Political Report shifted 44 seats to a more favorable rating for the Republicans. Since that report was by far the most biased in favor of the Democrats, this change was long overdue. He now gives the Republicans 17 seats with another 13 Democrat seats in the toss-up category. While still quite low, this does give Stu Rothenberg some cedibility when has had none before.
The title of the most biased then shifted to Congressional Quarterly Politics which responded by shifting one of the four measly seats they were willing to give to the Republicans to the toss-up group (KS-3). The only reason they were willing to give even the original four to the Republicans is because the Democrat is not running for reelection. They had only 20 seats in the toss-up group so now they have 21. Their ratings can no longer be given any credibility.
The next most biased was and still is the Cook Political Report. They are still showing the Republicans gaining a whole six seats while losing 2. All of these are open because the Democrat is not seeking reelection. Charlie Cook has no pure toss-up category but he does list 26 Democrat seats in the Democrat toss-up category. That is up 3 seats from his last change. Yet Charlie is on record as saying that the Republicans will most likely gain control of the House as we discussed in Charlie, You Have Us Confused. It is hard to give Charlie any credibility any more.
Even now, there are still some ratings by all the other analysts that making no sense whatsoever. Below is a table of those ratings with information that points out how ridiculous they are. The * on the 2008 for NY-20 is because that margin was for Senator Gillibrand when she was elected to the House. Scott Murphy was elected to replace her in a special election in which he won by 0.45%. The Republicans are way ahead in voter registration but this district will go Democrat in a banner Republican year?
Notice that in every case, there was a Republican incumbent in 2002 by good margins. In 14 out of 16 cases there was one in 2004. Where the Republican lost, it was by less than 4%. In 7 cases, Republicans even survived the 2006 bloodbath and now these districts will stay Democrat? Without Obama on the ballot to bring out black and under 30 voters like he did in 2008, a lot of Democrat incumbents are in serious trouble so high margins in 2008 but not in 2006 do not mean much now.
| Rank | Seat | Democrat | Poll | Margin 08 | Margin 06 | Margin 04 | Margin 02 | Rep Reg% | Dem Reg% | Oth Reg% | Obama | Ours | CQ Pol | Cook | Rothbrg | RCP |
| 3 | NY-20 | Scott Murphy | R+9 | *24.26 | 6.20 | -32.13 | -49.33 | 41.13 | 26.98 | 31.89 | 3.00 | Likely R | Likely D | Likely D | D favored | Leans D |
| 8 | PA-3 | Kathy Dahlkemper | 2.47 | -11.57 | -20.16 | -55.36 | -27 votes | Likely R | Leans D | Likely D | D favored | Toss up | ||||
| 23 | NJ-3 | John Adler | 3.31 | -17.37 | -28.78 | -31.10 | 5.38 | Leans R | Leans D | Leans D | Leans D | Leans D | ||||
| 26 | WI-8 | Steve Kagen | 8.10 | 2.14 | -40.32 | -48.69 | 8.47 | Leans R | Leans D | Leans D | D favored | Safe D | ||||
| 27 | GA-12 | John Barrow | 32.00 | 0.61 | 3.62 | -10.38 | 8.84 | Leans R | Likely D | Likely D | Safe D | Likely D | ||||
| 28 | OH-16 | John Boccieri | R+11 | 10.73 | -16.68 | -33.09 | -37.74 | -2.61 | Leans R | Likely D | Leans D | Leans D | Toss up | |||
| 32 | PA-10 | Christopher Carney | 12.66 | 5.89 | -85.68 | -85.81 | -8.43 | Leans R | Leans D | Leans D | D favored | Leans D | ||||
| 35 | MI-9 | Gary Peters | 9.45 | -5.35 | -18.91 | -18.22 | 12.96 | R toss up | Likely D | Safe D | Safe D | Leans D | ||||
| 37 | CA-11 | Jerry McNerney | 10.55 | -6.53 | -22.46 | -20.63 | 39.37 | 39.15 | 21.48 | 9.33 | R toss up | Leans D | Leans D | D favored | Toss up | |
| 39 | IL-11 | Debbie Halvorson | R+6 | 23.92 | -10.19 | -17.35 | -28.64 | 8.18 | R toss up | Likely D | Leans D | D favored | Toss up | |||
| 49 | FL-22 | Ron Klein | 9.34 | 3.76 | -27.49 | -22.41 | 37.68 | 36.98 | 25.34 | 4.04 | R toss up | Safe D | Likely D | D favored | Toss up | |
| 57 | NY-25 | Dan Maffei | 12.94 | -1.57 | -80.78 | -45.65 | 34.37 | 34.29 | 28.34 | 13.12 | R toss up | Likely D | Likely D | Safe D | Likely D | |
| 60 | GA-8 | Jim Marshall | 14.49 | 1.10 | -51.10 | -56.66 | -13.36 | R toss up | Likely D | Likely D | Safe D | Likely D | ||||
| 63 | IL-8 | Melissa Bean | Tie | 21.44 | 6.89 | 3.40 | -14.86 | 12.88 | R toss up | Safe D | Likely D | Safe D | Leans D | |||
| 66 | PA-4 | Jason Altmire | R+9 | 11.72 | 3.86 | -27.18 | -29.11 | -10.45 | R toss up | Likely D | Likely D | Leans D | Leans D |
