US Politics, October 2018: next week will be even longer

People are self-organizing and they will seek to maximize their chances of survival in what ever way seems most likely to succeed. In a tiny group, they are easily preyed upon at every turn as they travel through strange territory. Banding together around a common goal and seeking safety in numbers is a very obvious and intelligent strategy.

https://i.imgur.com/3ZWWMC2.png

The fundraising numbers are so good for Democrats — and so bad for Republicans — that it’s hard to know quite what to make of them. From a modeling standpoint, we’re extrapolating from years in which fundraising was relatively even, or from when one party had a modest edge, into an environment where Democrats suddenly have a 2-1 advantage in fundraising in competitive races. Moreover, this edge comes despite the fact that a large number of these competitive races feature Republican incumbents (incumbents usually have an easier time raising money than challengers) and that most of them are in red terrain.

If Democrats beat their projections on Nov. 6 — say, they win 63 House seats, equalling the number that Republicans won in 2010, an unlikely-but-not-impossible scenario — we may look back on these fundraising numbers as the canary in the coal mine. That data, plus Democrats’ very strong performances in special elections, could look like tangible signs of a Democratic turnout surge that pollsters and pundits perhaps won’t have paid enough attention to. Right now, in fact, the polls are not showing a Democratic turnout advantage. Instead, based on a comparison of likely-voter and registered-voter polls, they’re projecting roughly equal turnout between the parties, with Republicans’ demographic advantages (older, whiter voters typically vote at higher rates in the midterms) counteracting Democrats’ seemingly higher enthusiasm. If turnout among Democratic-leaning groups actually outpaces turnout among Republican-leaning ones, Democrats will beat their polls and our projections.

It’s just as easy to imagine the error running the other way, however. Maybe — precisely because fundraising has become easier and candidates are winning contributions from out-of-state and out-of-district donors — fundraising is no longer as meaningful an indicator of candidates’ grassroots appeal or organizational strength. Maybe the demographics of the Republican coalition have changed such that they’ll no longer raise as much money but will still get plenty of votes. Or maybe the GOP can make up for their lack of individual fundraising with more money from outside groups. If that’s the case, our model could overestimate Democrats’ chances.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-the-democrats-unprecedented-fundraising-edge-is-scary-for-republicans-and-for-our-model/

meanwhile, at the NYT

https://i.imgur.com/Bngz2Oj.png

On fundraising, we have an interesting case here in Knoxville -- a state house race in a rare genuine swing district. It's the third time in a row the same Democratic and Republican candidates have faced off. The first time, the Democrat was the incumbent, and the Republican beat her by about 80 votes. The second time, he beat her by 150 votes. She just outraised him in the 3rd quarter by $70k to $46k, and she's cumulatively outraised him for the year to date. If that translates into even a small increase in Democratic turnout, she will probably win. We'll see.

See, that's what puzzles me about that FiveThirtyEight story. Is Silver's theory that people are willing to donate money to candidates, but then don't show up to vote? That seems weird to me. It seems logical that someone willing to give money to a political candidate would also be willing - even eager - to show up and vote for them. Even if they're donating to a candidate in another part of the country, that should indicate a willingness to vote for that candidate's party locally, yes?

Even if they're donating to a candidate in another part of the country, that should indicate a willingness to vote for that candidate's party locally, yes?

Sure, but if you're donating money to a House candidate in contested district but not able to vote in that district AND the race you can vote in is not a contested race, then the predictive value of your donation for the contested race is nil.

Well, outside of how much a big war chest can help a candidate, which seems difficult to really pin down?

oh cool, they played "Sympathy For The Devil" as entry music for the Montana rally, what a nice wholesome song

Is Silver's theory that people are willing to donate money to candidates, but then don't show up to vote?

i think the general thrust of his piece is that the fundraising situation is very unusual this year, and while that would seem to point to a democratic advantage - it's better to have more money than less! - the models that 538 and others have developed aren't really sure of how to incorporate it. then he points to a number of ways that the fundraising advantage in some districts could be overblown, including the possibility that some local candidates are benefiting from out-of-state donations that don't really reflect the strength of the candidate in the district itself.

if you're nervous about fundraising's role in the 538 predictions (and you otherwise believe the 538 approach), switch to "lite" (polls-only).

or mail your ballot and go to bed for 3 weeks

Mailed mine in a week ago, I live in Pelosi's district, etc. etc. Really I'm mostly wondering about the local city propositions.

mailed mine in a few days ago. wish i lived could vote in a swing district/state!

Silver's article didn't really address Republican dark money money though, as a twitter response noted

Democrats maybe out fundraising Republicans. But the billionaire outside dark money at least matches what Democrats have to spend. So it means more of a ground game for Democrats, b/c Republicans have the help over the air with phony ads from Sheldon Addleson & Koch Brothers.

Early voting is the best, felt like a relief to get it done

yeah we got our ballots yesterday, I love vote-by-mail

no way, going to vote is the best (unless the lines are terrible)

it’s pretty much the only time that, however misguidedly, i feel a little pride in my country

have gone to vote in person at the precinct, felt good about it, but nothing beats absentee voting imo

on the other hand I don't like to solidify my opinions and mail the ballot in too early, a lot of the exposition of issues doesn't really feel final until fairly late in the campaigns, especially in California where citizens are expected to be legislators through the referendum process

troll army and Twitter insider

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/us/politics/saudi-image-campaign-twitter.html

This is such a scandal: McKinsey identified prominent online critics of Saudi govt policies and sent their names to the government in a report. Govt arrested one, arrested the brothers of another (who was living abroad) https://t.co/18GzbRfRgD pic.twitter.com/Ijw6Jt4vNi

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) October 20, 2018

more Bolton's bidding than Putin's, wouldn't you say?

Russia has condemned US plans to withdraw from a Cold War-era nuclear weapons treaty and threatened to retaliate for a "very dangerous step".

On Saturday, President Trump said he intended to "terminate" the three-decade-old 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.

He said Russia had been "violating it for many years".

The deal banned ground-launched medium-range missiles, with a range of between 500 and 5,500km (310-3,400 miles).

In the last five decades the US and Russia have signed a range of joint agreements to limit and reduce their substantial nuclear arsenals.

Abandoning the INF - negotiated by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 - would mark a significant setback for arms control, analysts say.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45931231

So sick of this piece of shit playing dice with people's peace of mind according to the whims of his diseased mind. Just launch all the fuckers and put us out of our misery already.

where's the tax returns?

mourning!

The New York Times reports:

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a government-wide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times. The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times.

this morning's news recap, for people who think trump is not so bad because he "hasn't been that effective, domestically"

- US is unilaterally pulling out of the INF treaty so that we can start a new nuclear arms race (one of trump's favorite television shows that could use a reboot). the best case scenario is that he'll decide to "resolve" the crisis he created by negotiating a new treaty from scratch. not to be too Cassandra-y but nuclear weapons have advanced in recent years, in very scary ways - they are more accurate and can more efficiently penetrate the ground, which means that fewer bombs can create far more destruction than ever before - so escalating a nuclear race at this point is like dr strangelove in real life.

- the "caravan" of george soros-funded criminals that is trying to breach the US border in time to commit voter fraud in the mid-terms has crossed into mexico. yesterday they were held up at the border, where mexico law enforcement in riot gear fired tear gas at them. by the way they're actually families with small children that are choosing to do this because it is better than their situation in Honduras. hundreds of these migrants ended up wading across the suchiate river into mexico, and now they're continuing their journey to the US, this time with a police escort. if they reach the US, trump says he'll shut down the border and "we're calling up the military — not the Guard."

- "WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into."

bad enough by any measure

I’m only just realizing the massive scale of this caravan as they march north into Mexico. It’s several thousand people. Just look. pic.twitter.com/aRuoLNYTZg

— Kate Linthicum (@katelinthicum) October 21, 2018

And I'd had such a good morning too.

reminder 1,000,000,000 that anyone who voted for 2scoops is a dipshit or an asshole (if not both) ~

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ct-trump-gop-tax-cut-claim-20181020-story.html?

holy shit. Good news:

Andrew Gillum leads DeSantis 54-42, says a new CNN poll. This would be a politics-changing result in FL.

Gillum's lead is far higher than any other poll we've seen, so outlier warning. Still, DeSantis has led in no poll since August primary. https://t.co/pzMEQdIQb6

— Taniel (@Taniel) October 21, 2018

an outlier, I suppose, but a nice way to begin early voting tomorrorw

the state and local elections in the east bay area (CA) are some of the nastiest weirdest things I've seen ever. the amount of money flowing to an assembly race between two democrats, one ostensibly more centrist than the other, has so much money in it, and so many misleading and crazy mailers and ads going around, I don't know what to think. Similarly the CA state superindent of schools race seems to be funded completely by weird dark money PACs. One of the candidates is someone my wife went to school with. He's ostensibly a Democrat but is getting slammed as being tied to Devos; meanwhile people supporting him are sending out mailers saying he'll fight the Trump/Devos adgenda, yet, the mailer was paid for by someone behind Charter schools. Charter school backers are also the ones flowing tons of money into that assembly race. It's bizarre. On stated policies none of these people are even very far apart.

The more that is at stake in an election, the more lies will be told in an effort to win. I think I will call this Aimless' Law.

Yeah, those superintendent commercials have been running constantly. Very odd. More background:

Edsource:

But scratch deeper, and differences emerge. On one issue expected to go before the Legislature next year, Tuck opposes letting districts reject a charter school it decides could have a negative financial impact on a district. Thurmond reframes the question in a way that charter defenders find problematic at best: He would condition opening a new charter school on compensating a district for the financial loss of revenue.

LA Times:

Thurmond ... worked for 20 years as a social worker and nonprofit manager, often in schools, trying to help the kind of at-risk student he once was. He entered politics and served on the Richmond City Council and the local school board before moving to the Legislature.

Tuck put aside a promising start in finance and a tech start-up to turn to education. In 2002, he was brought in to lead Green Dot Public Schools, a rare unionized charter group. Then, for six years, Tuck was chief executive of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, which was set up to turn around a group of low-performing schools. The Partnership schools made progress under Tuck, although they could not catch up to state averages.

we have SB 51: the California politics thread if you're interested

oh cool, they played "Sympathy For The Devil" as entry music for the Montana rally, what a nice wholesome song

Trump shouted "Who killed the kennedys?", but after all, it was Ted Cruz's dad and me

please allow me to introduce myself, i'm a man of inherited wealth and zero taste

I thought the Trumps had been asked or told not to use the Stones music among requests for the same from other bands.

what a devastating breach of social decorum

What him living and breathing? Yeah I'd say so.

JUst heard that a lot of bands were asking what should be a prestigious usage under normal circumstances to avoid it cos they didn't want the association.

that gives the rolling stones a good reason to email all their fans and tell them that trump sucks. probably wouldn't make much of a difference, but it might reach a more trump-loving demographic than taylor swift

In other words, the Trump-Bolton synthesis does not embrace the positive realist principles of prudence and restraint. It favors a major and costly expansions of military capabilities coupled with a more bellicose and belligerent approach to international relations. It envisions a fortress America, but one committed to international power projection. In broad terms, there are two possible outcomes of this approach. Perhaps the United States succeeds in making the rest of the world much more dependent on military tools of statecraft, and thus creates a more conflictual international system in which the great powers need to divert ever-increasing resources towards military capabilities. Or maybe the rest of the world tells the United States to piss off, leaving Washington increasingly isolated and, in relative terms, facing a growing gap when it coms to non-military instruments of power and influence.

None of these outcomes are good for the Americans. Old-style conservatives thought that their antipathy toward international entanglements would allow the United States to keep its defense budgets low, and prevent a garrison state. The Trump-Bolton synthesis turns this on its head. Indeed, when it comes to enhancing American military security, the Trump-Bolton synthesis relies on magical thinking. It’s not just that neither of these worlds are particularly good for national security or liberty. It’s also that the Trump administration wants the United States to be a military powerhouse while cutting taxes. As I’ve argued before, postwar American military power depended not simply on large military budgets, but in massive investments in infrastructure and human capital. The Trump administration wants to starve those investments and shift them in ways that maximize the ability of private interests—such as the for-profit education sector, private security contractors, construction firms, and the financial sector—to extract rents.

How will the United States maintain, say, the educational achievement, scientific investment, and transportation infrastructure necessary to undergird a robust national defense? “Something something tax cuts something something the power of the market something something privatization.” In other words, it can’t and it won’t.

It's cheering to see Trump's support on the 538 poll aggregator the equal highest since March 2017.

As y'all know I'm not a fellow carried away on clouds of enthusiasm, but Andrew Gillum wiped the floor with a nervous, giggling, smirking Ron DeSantis during their CNN debate, which ended a few minutes ago. I had a couple friends FB messaging me wondering, "Damn, can he run for governor in Illinois?"

This was masterful:

Democrat Andrew Gillum’s closing statement: “We want better… I'm asking you all for the only thing in life that my mother ever told me to ask for and that’s a chance. I want to be your governor. Let's bring it home.” #FLGovDebate https://t.co/2k8aILDzDU pic.twitter.com/LAqQimLDjE

— CNN (@CNN) October 22, 2018

Fun little update on the Roger Stone front:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/special-counsel-examines-conflicting-accounts-as-scrutiny-of-roger-stone-and-wikileaks-deepens/2018/10/21/db9ab1c2-bde5-11e8-be70-52bd11fe18af_story.html

It's not so much interesting in terms of a 'here is the answer' as it is watching three people -- Stone, Randy Credico and, indirectly, Jerome Corsi -- dodge and weave around to trying to explain all their bombast, and happily blaming others. Which itself shows the pressure they're facing. That said, unspoken in all this -- he's not mentioned by name here, I think -- is Manafort. This article draws on what's being said to a grand jury, but now that Manafort's spilling, whatever he's yet said has so far not openly factored in. Anyway, it grinds on.

Stone with the profile view This Facial Expression there

In truth, the most formidable obstacle to responsive government in the U.S. is — and always has been — the disproportionate power that economic elites wield over its political system. Influencing elections and legislative processes requires investments of time, money, and attention. Wealthy individuals and corporations can easily shoulder such expenses; ordinary voters can’t. This simple reality — that economic power is easily converted into the political variety — is an inherent constraint on popular sovereignty in all (capitalist) democracies. But it’s a constraint that can be more or less restrictive, depending on how unequally wealth is distributed, how easily large masses of ordinary people can organize politically, and how effectively outsize political spending is regulated or socially stigmatized. More concretely, policymaking tends to be more responsive to popular concerns in nations with strong labor unions, as such institutions help secure workers a larger share of economic growth, while also enabling working-class voters to collectivize the costs of political engagement.

In the contemporary United States, however, unions are on the verge of extinction; the richest 0.1 percent of the population commands as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and legal restrictions on political spending are effectively nonexistent. The Koch Network plans to spend $400 million electing its preferred Congress this November; corporate America is poised to spend upwards of $2 billion lobbying it next year. Given these conditions, one wouldn’t be expect policymaking to reflect popular preferences, no matter the social makeup of the nation’s two political parties.

After all, the last time organized labor was this weak and wealth, this concentrated, it was the Gilded Age. And that era was plagued by governance so unresponsive to public needs, the average height and life expectancy of ordinary Americans declined during it, even as their nation grew immensely wealthier. It is true that Democratic and Republican voters were bitterly divided and socially isolated in this period. But few would cite a dearth of “cross-pressured” voters as the principal reason why the federal government did not provide more relief to the unemployed during the Panic of 1893; or immiserated small farmers with deflationationary monetary policies throughout the late 19th century; or routinely massacred striking workers. The disparate economic power — and political organization — of corporate elites and ordinary workers is a much more intuitive explanation for the government’s failures in that period. It remains so in ours.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/polarization-tribalism-the-conservative-movement-gop-threat-to-democracy.html

Thanks for that.

who in dis bitch has voted already?