Sunday, November 4, 2018

CLARICE FELDMAN - BLUE WAVE or RED TSUNAMI

Tuesday Will Tell: Blue Wave or Red Tsunami?



The polls are swinging wildly and voter enthusiasm seems higher than usual for midterms in recent memory or maybe ever.
Vice President Mike Pence predicts the Republicans will hold both houses and I tend to agree with him. In fact, I have a months-old dinner bet riding on his prediction coming to pass.
It’s not only that, freed of some of the more restrictive regulations and with tax cuts, the economy is booming and unemployment low, it’s a psychological thing. People are more optimistic and bullish than they were when Obama was president. I read this to mean they are willing to give the president’s party credit for their gains and want them to continue.
Rasmussen weighs in on the situation with a word of caution for those predicting a blue wave. 
Democrats hold just a three-point lead on the latest Rasmussen Reports Generic Congressional Ballot which has a +/- 2 margin of error. Look for our final Generic Ballot Monday morning.
Just as in 2016, Democrats are more outspoken about how they’re going to vote in the upcoming elections than Republicans and unaffiliated voters are. Is it possible that another silent red wave is coming?
It’s true that the major media is uniformly opposed to Trump and his party, but as Rasmussen also notes, they have less sway on voters than they would hope:
The majority of voters believe the media is more interested in creating controversies about candidates than in reporting where they stand on the issues. Voters also think the media is trying to help Democrats in the upcoming elections which helps explain why Democratic voters are much bigger fans of election news coverage than others are.
[snip]
At week’s end, Trump’s job approval stands at 51% in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.
Most voters now commend the president for his economic leadership but are less impressed by his performance when it comes to foreign affairs.  That’s also potentially good news for Republicans facing an election in which voters say Trump and the economy are the big issues.
Meanwhile, economic and consumer confidence continue to climb further into record territory.
[snip]
Forty-three percent (43%) of all voters say the country is headed in the right direction.  This finding was in the mid- to upper 20s most weeks during Obama’s last year in the White House.
And why shouldn’t consumer confidence be up?
Monster Jobs Report
250,000 Jobs
32,000 manufacturing
30,000 construction
5,000 mining
24,800 transportation & warehousing
But wages soaring 3.1% says it all -- look at that chart
Congratulations America
With incredible vigor, the President has flown around the country in support of his party’s candidates at rallies everywhere, drawing large crowds who wait for hours in line to get into the venues. These are not carried on most major channels and are barely reported, but it’s hard for me to find a better measure of support and enthusiasm.
Of course, for congressional races, local issues traditionally are more significant, but it is in that case that polls tend to be weakest. District-wide polling seems to me to always be suspect as there is not enough of it done because of the cost to form much of a basis for analysis.
My friend “Porchlight” watches polling carefully with a jaundiced eye and notes one such example:
Porchlight:
Polls are garbage. Look at this:
• GA-6 OCT 28-NOV 1 Siena College/New York Times 261RV
McBath DEM 46%
Handel GOP 41%
McBath+5
261 registered voters the week before the election, are you kidding me?
NYT/Siena again. 75% of House prognostication is based on the work of a single polling firm. Meanwhile prognosticators ignore hard early voting data.
Hell of a slender limb, folks.
Expect a lot of "what if the Reps hold the House?" stories in the next couple of days.
Citing Richard Baris, she posts other interesting reports, including this one:
One more. Here are new Trump approval numbers for the 18-44 age group in a certain House district:
Strongly approve
28.21%
Somewhat approve
28.21%
Somewhat disapprove
5.13%
Strongly disapprove
25.64%
Unsure
12.82%
Would you guess... CA-48?
Rohrabacher looking good in a must-win district.
The Kavanaugh accusations -- designed to appeal to women voters -- missed the mark except for the most blinkered:
When asked, “Do you think Democrats were genuinely concerned about Dr. Christine Ford and her allegations towards Judge Kavanaugh, or were they just using the allegation for political purposes in order to block Kavanaugh’s nomination?” about 55 percent of all U.S. voters say the Democrats were “just using the allegations” to stop Kavanaugh from getting on the Supreme Court.
About 55 percent of American women and 56 percent of men say the same, that Democrats were using the Kavanaugh allegations for political purposes. A minority of 45 percent of voters say the Democrats were “genuinely concerned” about Blasey Ford.
Despite the establishment media and Hollywood’s “Believe Women” campaign, the vast majority of American voters -- including 84 percent of women and 85 percent of men -- say when it comes to sexual harassment allegations, the standards of the legal due process should be applied. Only 15 percent of voters say the legal due process should be “relaxed.”
Blexit -- a movement by black voters to leave the Democratic Party -- has grown, and this, too, spells bad news for the Democrats, who depends on a balkanized base of suburban women, Hispanics and blacks to carry them to the finish line. The latest Rasmussen account I can find shows black approval for Trump is now up to 40%, which has to be sounding alarm bells for the DNC. 
Nor can the Democrats rely on Hispanic voters
Confidence that African Americans, Asians and Hispanics have in their personal finances improving over the next four years should be enough to help GOP leaders retain control of Congress in the midterm elections and reelect President Trump, according to a new survey. 
While generally not fans of the president, the three key groups have a good feeling about their future and that should temper their concerns at the polls, said the survey from Zogby Analytics.
So who’s peddling the Blue Wave scenario?
I tend to agree with Roger Kimball that it is those who cannot believe they lost in 2016: 
If only the Democrats sweep the midterm elections, they say to themselves, then we can put this awful anomaly, this hideous wrinkle in the order of the universe, behind us.
Some such sentiment, I believe, was behind all the talk of a coming “blue wave” last spring and into the summer. I never believed that there would be such a cerulean tsunami, especially one that would sweep Democrats into control of the Senate. The House? Maybe. But even that seems to me to be increasingly doubtful.
Adamant anti-Trump and NeverTrump commentators have circulated and then taken solace from the Blue Wave meme not because they are especially credulous, but because the election of Donald Trump offended their sense of existential propriety. The unforgivable datum is that Donald Trump, as I have said many times, was elected without their permission and indeed over their strenuous objections. That is the intolerable insult they cannot abide. It was an event that not only should not have happened but could not have happened. Hence the widespread access of denial, followed by anger, that greeted the advent of this great anomaly.
The midterms seem to offer a chance to set the universe back on its proper track.[snip] I do not of course know what is going to happen next Tuesday. But if, as seems to me increasingly likely, the Republicans hold the House, the anti-Trump and NeverTrump fraternity will be dealt a cruel blow. Not only will they have lost, not only will their confident predications have been in vain, but their entire sense of the way the world works will have been further undermined. The thing that was impossible, that could not have happened, will have turned out to be not an inexplicable singularity but a corroboration of a new dispensation -- a dispensation, moreover, that has no place for them.
While we cannot know how early voters voted, the number of Republicans voting early has shot up and shows a remarkable Republican advantage
That blue wave we kept hearing about is being overcome by a crimson tsunami, at least according to early voting tallies as Republicans prove to be more motivated than Democrats.
NBC News reported that more people showed up to early voting, outpacing the 2014 midterms by leaps and bounds with a whopping 24,024,621 million ballots having already been counted.
For comparison, 2014 only had 12,938,596 counted by this time, putting 2018 at nearly double.
To be sure, both parties have been turned out in great number, but according to NBC, the Republicans are currently up with a two-point lead:
As of Wednesday, 43 percent of early voters are Republican and 41 percent are Democrats. At this point in 2016, 43 percent of early voters were Democrats and 40 percent were Republicans.
At this point in 2014, though, 44 percent were Republican and 40 percent were Democrats.
From closer to home, we have this:
With so many races so close, it won't take much to tip a contest one way or another.  But the early voting by Republicans will probably force Democrats to walk back their predictions of a sweep and to tone down expectations of a "blue wave."
(It will also negate the advantage of late-breaking “surprise” bombshells.)
I hope I’m right. I want to win my dinner bet. If I don’t it will be something to watch the battle for the speaker’s seat between Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional Black Caucus (with its fair share of a dogs breakfast of racists, anti-Semites, lovers of communist dictators, corruptocrats and dopes), which thinks it’s their turn at the gavel.
Help me -- and the country -- go and vote for Republicans and keep the Trump America humming.






The Golden State Won’t Glitter for Republicans

In California, the GOP is on life support, and stands to get routed in the midterms.
November 2, 2018
California
Politics and law


California’s Republican Party was once a force to be feared, not only in the state, but across the country. Nowadays, it’s at most a mild irritant and sometimes a convenient whipping boy for the Democratic progressives, who run the state almost entirely. Nothing is working much for the GOP this year. The Republican gubernatorial candidate, John Cox, has little charisma, no discernible local roots, and no compelling message. He sneaked into the runoff election because too many Democrats vied for the job. He’ll be thrashed by Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, likely by a wide margin. As governor, Newsom will probably preside over a legislative super-majority that will marginalize the Republicans even further.
The Senate race is no bargain, either, for conservatives and even moderates. The choice is between octogenarian incumbent Senator Dianne Feinstein and Kevin De Leon, leader of the state senate and proxy for ultra-green mega-donor Tom Steyer. Worse yet, at least for the national GOP, California would see as many as six or seven California congressional seats flip to the Democrats. Most are in traditional Republican strongholds like Orange and San Diego counties, where longtime voter-registration trends are transforming the electorate. In Orange County, for example, party registration levels are now about equal; in 2004, the GOP held a 14 percent edge.
California’s one-party shift happened quickly. As recently as a decade ago, a nominal Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, sat in the governor’s mansion, and Republicans in the legislature retained some influence. The roots of the Republican collapse lie largely in demographics. The GOP base—made up mostly of white, middle-class voters—is shrinking. In the last decade, California’s white population declined by more than 700,000 people, while the Hispanic population surged by more than 2 million, and Asians by 1 million. At the same time, according to IRS figures, those leaving the state tended to be working-class and middle-class families, with the biggest net losses among the prime child-bearing cohort, those between 35 and 44 years of age—a natural Republican constituency.
To win in today’s California, you must appeal to non-whites. In 2012, the California electorate was about half non-Hispanic white; by 2030, that ratio will drop closer to 40 percent. Some Republicans, particularly Asians in Orange County, have made breakthroughs and dominate local offices. But when it comes to national issues, Asians, despite their relative wealth and opposition to affirmative action in college admissions, remain reliable members of the Democrats’ “rainbow” coalition of aggrieved racial minorities. In 1998, the percentage of Asians nationwide identifying with Democrats was 53 percent; today, it’s 65 percent.
Economic changes have also worked to progressives’ advantage. California’s growth engine, once dispersed across the state, has become concentrated in the ultra-liberal Bay Area. As more conservative-leaning industries such as energy, manufacturing, and suburban homebuilding have faltered, media, software, and medical services, all tending to lean Left, have expanded. This shift has also tilted the power of money in the state decisively, with Democrats regularly outspending their GOP opponents across the state. In the state’s critical House races, the ratio is greater than two-to-one. An economy increasingly bifurcated between a sizeable high-wage population and an ever-expanding cadre of low-paid service workers works brilliantly to the advantage of the ruling regime. If the tech giants continue earning capital gains to keep the state fiscally viable, Sacramento can offer more subsidies, and other inducements, to the permanently poor.
But not all the woes of the California GOP stem from inexorable outside forces. The party has been misguided in continuing to focus on issues like taxes and crime that voters don’t find as compelling as they did 20 years ago. There are, however, real concerns about the economy, particularly as it affects millennials and the generation following them, who are finding homeownership, or even landing a job with decent pay, a challenge. According to one 2017 survey, every age group in California thought that the next generation would do worse, though people in their late forties and older—with children and grandchildren—were most pessimistic. Yet neither Cox nor any other Republican has made a strong, coherent  case against the state’s lurch toward feudalism.
If anything, outside of supporting a repeal of the latest gas tax—opposed by the party’s onetime business base—the Republicans offer no program capable of winning over middle-class Californians. And even the gas-tax repeal looks destined to fail. In some contested congressional districts, the Republicans seem outgunned and outthought. My own Orange County district, now represented by Republican Mimi Walters, is likely to flip; Walters’s Democratic opponent, Katie Porter, appears to be outspending her two-to-one. Though the area is Republican-leaning, I see many more Porter ads, both on television and on the Internet, and have been visited twice by her canvassers, but not once by anyone for Walters. Porter hopes to make headway by linking Walters to President Trump’s anti-immigration positions, a critical factor in a district now just 55 percent white, with large Asian and Hispanic voting blocs. Walters epitomizes the Republican delusion that somehow Orange County belongs to them. It doesn’t. Instead of giving voters any compelling reason to vote for her, Walters has relied on the timeworn device of labeling Porter as a free-spending liberal. Even if Walters and some of her GOP congressional compatriots slip through this cycle, their days in office are numbered.
On its current trajectory, California seems doomed to become a permanent one-party state, where oligarchs and their allies in the progressive clerisy—media, universities, bureaucracies—rule without effective opposition. Chapman University political scientist Fred Smoller, an expert on local politics and a lifelong Democrat, suggests that this would be bad for everyone, including liberals. “We really have to have two parties,” Smoller suggests, “or the Democrats will give everything to the unions.”
Some hopeful signs of pushback exist, not from Republicans, but from independent candidates running as problem-solving pragmatists. Independent voters already outnumber Republican voters. This is not a return to Reaganism, but rather, an effort to provide an alternative to the progressives, without being burdened by what former GOP congressman Tom Campbell calls the party’s “toxic label.”
A centrist could appeal precisely to the diverse middle-class voters who care about the state’s failing education system, its precarious long-term fiscal condition, and its flagging economic growth. Independent candidates this year include charter school advocate and registered Democrat Marshall Tuck, running for superintendent of education, and tech executive Steve Poizner, a registered Republican seeking to become insurance commissioner. Both, unlike Cox, have a chance to win. Money is a key difference here. Tuck, fighting against a teachers’ union satrap, Tony Thurmond, has stayed financially competitive, in part due to contributions from wealthy donors like Eli Broad and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Poizner, himself a billionaire, has outspent his Democratic opponent.
Inevitably, the progressives will overreach. Already, Measure 10, to expand rent control, looks headed to a surprisingly decisive defeat at the hands of a broad range of small property owners and real estate interests. Future efforts to impose an expensive single-payer health-care system, or to overturn Proposition 13 (limiting property taxes), might alienate suburban families and high-income taxpayers. A downturn in the tech economy, which has been fattening state coffers, could make frugality popular again.
In the interim, California will remain hostile territory for conservatives, particularly considering that Trump is very unpopular in the state, and given the electorate’s broad support—enforced by shrill, univocal media coverage—for the climate-change agenda. But many views associated with the Right—fiscal prudence, charter schools, and reviving economic growth beyond the tech sector—could be packaged to appeal to the minorities and millennials now fueling the progressive tide. Local control over zoning and land use, which has support from about 70 percent of the electorate, according to a new USC Dornsife poll, could energize voters seeking to avoid the state’s ever-more intrusive planning regime. Independents could also win over parts of the state—notably the interior, home to one in three Californians—by opposing the fashionable progressive lunacy imposed by the Bay Area-dominated political class. There’s already opposition among Latinos, especially inland, to some of the most punitive state measures that boost energy and home prices.
The time may come when candidates with the GOP label score on these issues. For now, though, Californians concerned about the state’s direction look mostly in vain for likeminded politicians who stand any chance of winning at the polls.

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