Nate McMurray is running against Chris Collins in NY-27, a Buffalo-area R+11 district that is carefully gerrymandered to avoid any urban areas. You probably remember Collins, who was Trump’s campaign chair, because he was indicted in August for insider trading and it’s a slam-dunk that he’s going to jail. It looked like he was going to drop out, but there was no way to replace him on the ballot, so the Republicans lived up to their reputation and he stayed on the ticket.
McMurray is just a great candidate. He’s made the journey from community college, to a Fulbright scholarship, to a career in international law that took him to China, all the way back to the small town of Grand Island, where he’s currently the town supervisor. Nate’s campaign began long before Collins was indicted, when the race was basically a write-off. He’s been making good use of the torrent of cash that’s come his way since the news about Collins broke, but long before that he was doing things like driving in a demolition derby, pounding the pavement to meet voters, and running on a solid set of Democratic issues:
MY PLATFORM:
—Medicare for all
—Unions
—Free, reduced tuition
—Agriculture as a nat security issue
—Green energy
—Broadband for all
—Marijuana legalization
—No more wasteful wars
—Human rights, safe immigration
—Smart trade
—Term limits
—Reproductive rights
—Fair tax laws— Nate McMurray for Congress (@Nate_McMurray) July 14, 2018
The polls are all over the place but it’s definitely a tight race. This will be one to watch Tuesday night. (The headline is McMurray’s tagline on Twitter.)
OzarkHillbilly
My kinda guy.
tobie
Good for McMurray for putting up a fight. Sounds like honesty, hard work, and some fortuitous circumstances have made him a serious contender. Anyone who advocates for “safe immigration” has my support. It’s the right thing as well as the courageous thing to say in an R+11 district.
jonas
I would normally be like WTF? How is this even close? But then I remember that it was the same RWNJs in western NY that kept electing bestiality porn enthusiast Carl Paladino, a major Trump fan and possibly one of the most insane political figures in recent NY history. So I totally believe they’d vote for an indicted Republican over a reasonable Democrat.
Barbara
Gerrymandering of federal congressional seats in New York to protect Republicans is yet one more reason to oppose any effort by Andrew Cuomo to strive for national office. He is complicit in the “power sharing” that has kept Democrats from gaining full control of the state legislature, and he has done it to maximize his own power.
foucault swing voter mistermix
@jonas: Yeah, it’s horse cock Carl country. Carl was thrown off of the school board last year for violating confidentiality in a negotiation.
Marcopolo
Thanks for front paging this–I dropped a link the the Mother Jones piece in a thread a couple days ago. I liked his comment about entering the Demo Derby because candidates should show they can take a hit or two.
But no fundraising link? Heck just click on the link to see the cute pop up that runs when you go to his website.
And for folks who just feel like they have to contribute a few more dollars, according to political science data nerds these are the best 10+1–because everyone hates Steve King–US House campaigns you can throw money at right now based on all the info available 48 hours ago.
Now back to putting together my election night tracking spreadsheet.
gogiggs
I’m not sure I understand what agriculture as national security means and I’m strongly against term limits because I don’t want legislators to be focusing on their next job and not accountable to voters, but otherwise, pretty great.
Mary G
In the flood of emails I get for donating to Doug’s funds, Nate’s stand out.
Betty Cracker
Is Collins the idiot who was captured on video conducting insider trading via phone at a Trump White House event? I hope that clip made it into an ad for McMurray.
patroclus
Uh, no thank you to term limits! But I’d vote for him anyway.
Hopes are increasing for the Senate! Kyrsten up 6! Rosen up 3!
VeniceRiley
Nate is begging for canvas volunteers on twitter; so if you know anyone in the district, you know what to do.
schrodingers_cat
@VeniceRiley: Chris Collins’ district?
Aardvark Cheeselog
Somebody needs to explain to Nate why term limits are a dumb, stupid, no-good idea. Unless of course your goal is to increase corruption and decrease the competence of government.
Doug R
@patroclus:
Straight up term limits seems to be a bad idea.
Low dollar caps on anonymous donations, full named disclosure of larger donations, prohibitions of larger donations from foreign nationals and non partisan boundary drawings should help, along with increasing the size of the house so that Wyoming’s seat is no longer the smallest.
Marcopolo
This is a really good read.
“BLOWING SMOKE”: SORRY, PUNDITS, BUT YOU HAVE NO CLUE WHAT WILL HAPPEN ON TUESDAY
Dave
@Barbara: Everytime Cuomo is on the ballot I spend my time looking for any justification to vote against him. He’s my one exception to straight ticket voting but then I look at who the GOP runs and pull the lever for him.
I will always vote against him in the primary
Aleta
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/are-police-targeting-get-out-the-vote-efforts-in-georgia
Drunkenhausfrau
Just got an email from his campaign asking for $25 pizza money for his volunteers. Gave it.
Gelfling 545
@Betty Cracker: Yup. That would be Collins. A useful idiot for rich Republicans.
Ohio Mom
@gogiggs: What everyone else has already said about term limits. But I can definitely see agricultural as a national security issue.
If you can’t feed yourselves, well look what a tizzy people in England are in. They are stockpiling food because they are afraid of shortages should Brexit actually happen.
Myself, I question the wisdom of having almost all of the world’s Vitamin C manufactured in China. It’s a food preservative. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples of vulnerabilities in food production.
Uncle Cosmo
@Marcopolo: Excellent article.
When I taught a community-college evening section of Stat 101 I’d use elections to illustrate why we take samples by asking the class, What is the population of interest – the universe – here?
Everyone old enough to vote? Nope. Everyone eligible to register to vote? Uh-uh. Everyone actually registered to vote? Bzzt. Who says they’re absolutely sure to vote? Wrong.
If we are polling to get a handle (before the fact) on the results of a particular election for a specific office (or ballot question/referendum/initiative), the only people we care about are those who are registered (or, in same-day-registration states, will register) to vote in this election who will vote (plus, in early-voting states, have voted) in that particular contest.
You’re absolutely sure you’re going to vote – & before you gt to the polls you get a call saying your dad has been rushed to the hospital. Or you get rushed to the ER. Or you’re involved in an auto accident. Or your water line has broken. Or, or, or… Why should the pollster care about how you might have voted? You didn’t. You don’t matter.
Or you get into the voting booth & you look at Initiative 256 (collect the entire set of 999) & say, Geez, I dunno anything about this shit – & leave it blank. Why should the pollster care about how you might have voted if you’d been (or felt yourself to be) informed enough to vote for or against? You didn’t. You don’t matter.
And I would point out to them that there is no way to know precisely which voters will be in the population of interest until the election is over – & that’s only if no one leaves that race blank. The best we can do, before the fact, is to survey a random sample of voters, guess at which of them is likely to vote based upon demographics & other factors (i.e., develop a “turnout model”), & weight the survey results accordingly.
And that doesn’t even factor in lost or destroyed ballots, hanging Chads (& Jeremies), incompetent election officials, ballot-box-stuffing, or rodent-fornicature alla Putinesca… Yet we sample – because it’s the best we can manage.
(Edited to trash trailing bytes.)
Frankensteinbeck
I think ‘fair tax laws’ is a fantastic slogan for raising taxes on the rich, which Democrats definitely want to do but Republicans usually have a rhetorical edge with.
lgerard
@Frankensteinbeck:
I
I like the phrase Enhanced Taxation
Lyrebird
Thanks for all you do.
Am so behind at my new job, and I haven’t finished mailing all of my Delgado postcards, so tons of reasons to feel like crap. I’m in a neighboring district in NY so there’s a chance that what I mail today will get there in time.
But first I gotta catch up on work…
Gelfling 545
Got a brilliant email from McMurray’s team just now.
“Donate $10 for coffee
Donate $25 for pizza
Donate $50 for pens & clipboards
Donate $100 for gas
Donate another amount!
We know it sounds funny to talk about pizza and coffee, but the last 4 days of this campaign are no laughing matter.”
They coaxed a few more dollars out of me.
Miss Bianca
@gogiggs: It means we should be growing more of our food American. Basically.
TenguPhule
@gogiggs:
It means that if some foreign country blockades your ports you don’t risk starving to death because all or most of your food is imported from other countries.
TenguPhule
@Ohio Mom:
What, Florida and California’s citrus interest groups dropped the ball on this?
The Moar You Know
Pet peeve: we have term limits. They are called elections.
When politicians – and more so, the media, talk about term limits they mean this: effective Dems get one, two terms max, Republicans get lifetime appointments.
Pains me to see good Dems get roped into supporting this shit.
TenguPhule
@The Moar You Know: To be fair, many voters are stupid and if he can bamboozle enough of those stupid people to vote for him, the whole issue can be dealt with in the traditional Congressional manner of dealing with annoying topics we have no intention of actually trying to accomplish.
Set up a committee to investigate it, give them no budget and have no meetings about it.
lgerard
Jacob Wohl too stupid to register jacobwohl.com
hilarity ensues
Jr
@Ohio Mom: citric acid production is what berthed the US pharmaceutical industry (Merck and Pfizer, basically).
TenguPhule
Nigerian army posts Trump video to justify shooting protesters
Words from the biggest platform in the world have consequences.
Mandalay
@Uncle Cosmo: Yep. Everything you said.
Here is one especially damning set of numbers from the article:
Polls are better than nothing, and they may even accurately predict how people who respond to the pollster’s phone call are going to vote. But that leaves an awful lot of wiggle room.
TenguPhule
Manchin you stupid shit, now you learn being stupid and disloyal to core Democratic values has consequences.
TenguPhule
Uh oh.
The Moar You Know
@lgerard: OF COURSE HE IS.
The guy with the prayer “Lord, make my enemies ridiculous” is getting ALL that answered this election cycle.
chris
@TenguPhule: This too.
Guess who
The Dakota Kid
Hearing talk here in ND that the Senate race is close in internal polling. WSJ piece on the race said it’s reporters we’re hearing the same.
Don’t listen to the “experts.” The Senate is still in play for Dems. GOTV!
chopper
@TenguPhule:
man, this last week. this fucker’s gonna toss more red meat than a seasick tiger
Mandalay
@chris: Heh. From your link…
chopper
@TenguPhule:
so, what do the US military’s rules of engagement say when someone throws a rifle at you?
chris
@Mandalay:
The Moar You Know
@Mandalay: I was a social psych major, which consisted of a lot of stats, survey and poll design. I could not have submitted work with response numbers like this. I actually have never seen any of the major polling firms response rates before, and what this tells me is that they’d be a lot more accurate by simply stating “we have no idea who is up, down, winning or losing.”
Response rates: .015% and .009% respectively. That cannot be predictive of anything. CANNOT.
tobie
@Mandalay: Gawd, this sounds like my experience phone banking. Who answers their phone to begin with? And who waits to see if there is a real person there after a robodialer delay? That said, I picked up a call id’d as spam this week, and it ended up being a Rasmussen poll on Presidential approval and immigration. I’m a sucker for answering but was glad to give the Orange Turd failing marks.
catclub
@The Moar You Know:
It can be predictive of response rates.
L85NJGT
@Miss Bianca:
I think the context is farm subsidies for smaller, less efficient, northeastern farms trying to compete with southern and mid-western growers.
L85NJGT
@chris:
Dusting off all the hits from the Eighties. Do they have someone like Luntz testing this stuff, or are they going with whatever sets Trump off at any given hour??
The Moar You Know
@catclub: lolz yes, it certainly is that. It is also predictive of this: polls with those kinds of response rates are utterly worthless.
Spanky
@catclub:
Not from a sample of two it can’t.
Spanky
Oh noes! I broke the blog!
Testing, testing …
Yutsano
@Spanky: “Give me a ping Vasily. One ping only please.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
First a confession. I’m watching old episodes of Hell’s Kitchen on Amazon. Yesterday I watched season 10 and in one episode, there was a swearing in ceremony for new citizens. The competitors had to cook meals for them. Everyone was very touched by the event.
It occurred to me that Trump has changed the atmosphere so a show might not do that now because immigrants aren’t welcome.
Frankensteinbeck
@chopper:
‘Not shoot’ because they have been trained to Hell and back that would be a war crime. Now, if only someone would train law enforcement like that.
trollhattan
@Mandalay: @chris:
Bolsonaro is Brazil’s answer to Duterte and I expect the body count to exceed that in the Philippines significantly and soon. His bloodlust would be comical if it didn’t involve actual blood.
Jeffro
Fascinating: big-donor “dark money” tends to make R and D staffers alike over-estimate how conservative their constituents are.
Well, all of this plus the fact that conservatives squawk and whine all out of proportion to their actual issues/grievances. AND they know how to ‘work the refs’. But still…yet ANOTHER good reason to get big money out of politics: it corrupts Congress’ own perception of the people it’s supposed to represent.
Uncle Cosmo
@The Moar You Know: If the polling biggies can’t figure out how to increase response rate, they might as rename their trade organiation NostraDumbass Unanimous, & throw themselves off the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (ok, ok, they can do the Golden Gate if they’re west of the Rockies). And that motherfucking putsch-poller Rasmussen goes first!
(You know how you do it? Everyone who completes a survey gets entered into a drawing for, geez I dunno, $10,000 ought to do it. I don’t even think you’d have to make any special provisions for protecting their anonymity. And for every fuckwad who makes up his responses just to fuck with the poll, 9 people will answer honestly – because when they win the big payday they want to feel they won it honestly…)
chopper
@Frankensteinbeck:
see, i would just catch the rifle out of the air because hey, free rifle.
Uncle Cosmo
@tobie: If it was Crasmussen, odds are they threw out your response the minute you hung up. His MO is to operate as a rip-roarin’ Rethuglican putsch-poller months out & then slowly, slowly creep up on reality as the election gets close (ETA: claiming that the reason for the “course correction” is “refinement of the turnout model” or equivalent horse-hockey) so as to preserve enough credibility to run the same goddamn scam the next time. Borderline dishonest IMHO.
tobie
@Uncle Cosmo: Yup…my one experience with the House of Ras is that they were push-polling with questions like, “Do you think illegal immigrants should receive federal and state aid?” I answered yes on this and on every issue I knew would raise Republican hackles. Actually, my answers were honest except for my party ID, which I said was “moderately conservative Republican.” Phone polls are so passé.
Steeplejack (phone)
@The Moar You Know:
Question: Did you pass your stats classes? Because those response rates are actually 1.5% and 0.9%.
Uncle Cosmo
@Yutsano: Watch out, he’s pulling a Crazy Ivanka!
TenguPhule
@Frankensteinbeck:
Except 8 years of the Bush regime and gods only know what happened in the last 2 years to erode Military ethics makes this less certain then you might believe.
We saw how quickly things fell apart in Iraq and Afghanistan, troops literally having to work with allies who kept fucking child sex slaves in their offices.
Troops are going to be pressured to commit war crimes or face a world of hurt as their superiors throw them under the bus and wreck their careers. And the rate of conviction for war crimes in the US military offers far better odds for the soldiers personally then risking professional blackballing by the ranking officers of this shitshow.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
We’re going to build a fair society, and we’re going to make the rich pay for it.
Ohio Mom
@TenguPhule: However the Vitamin C substance that is put into vitamin supplements and various processed foods (such as bread, cured meats, and much, much more) is manufactured, I’d have to google. It’s obviously a lot more complicated than squeezing a bunch of citrus fruits.
Ninety percent of the world’s Vitamin C is manufactured in China. That is a lot of food preservative. If we grow our own food but can’t preserve a lot of it easily, it might be the same result as not having grown it at all.
Like it or not, as a society we are very dependent on processed and preserved food. There are very few Alice Waters among us.
TenguPhule
@Ohio Mom:
IIRC most of the foods preserved that way are sweet foods or vegetable products. Stuff that you want to retard oxidization on.
For spoilage avoidance, the traditional method is salts and/or sugar.
Roger Moore
@TenguPhule:
This is correct. It’s also not that hard to make vitamin C. The Chinese have taken over the industry because they’ve done the typical trick of cutting prices to drive the competition out of business, but we could put it back in production fairly quickly if/when the Chinese decided to cut us off. The main feedstock for vitamin C production is glucose, and it’s not as if they can cut us off from that. Also, there are other preservatives (e.g. benzoic acid) one can use for the kinds of food where vitamin C is popular.