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You are here: Home / Archives for Past Elections / Election 2012

Election 2012

Midnight special

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I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the special election in PA-18. It’s a very red district, R +11 Cook PVI. If there’s a huge Democratic wave in 2018 and the Dems in 40 seats, how many R +11 seats would I expect the Dems to win? Maybe one or two (Dems currently hold one R +12 seat and nothing else beyond a R +5). But this race is a little more interesting than I thought. Here’s a couple things:

(1) Conor Lamb, the Democratic candidate, has deep roots in the area and seems to be a very good candidate.
(2) There are actually more Democrats in the district than Republicans.
(3) The previous Republican representative, whose resignation set up this election, resigned because he offered to pay for his mistress to have an abortion, despite being very “pro-life”, and this could cause a bit of a backlash.

In House and Senate specials so far, Dems are running about 8 points above the Cook PVI, and about the same number ahead in the average of all 70 special elections (including state legislature elections). This is an absurdly high number. It would translate into a 16 point win in November, which is completely without precedent in modern political history, and a pick-up of something like 80 seats. (I don’t think this will happen.)

So PA-18 may be winnable. Also, Republicans are pouring lots of money into the district and Lamb is not asking for outside groups to help him because he wants to emphasize the local nature of his campaign. I think money here is well spent. I raised our goal here to 5K.

Goal Thermometer

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Make Sure to Save the Date!

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Oy vey…

 

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The value of a ground game

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4Chan, Reddit and large rallies are good at building group solidarity and raising money as well as a mob.  So far they are not a substitute for a boring, grind it out ground game.

North Carolina has some interesting data on early voting:

 

Registered Democrats continue to lead in the accepted ballots numbers, and are over-performing their 2012 same-day comparison numbers, at 129 percent of where they were in accepted ballots on the same day from four years ago. Registered unaffiliated voters are 128 percent of their same-day accepted ballots, and registered Republicans are 66 percent of where they were four years ago on the same day. Overall, the total returned and accepted mail-in ballots are at 96 percent of where they were on the same day in 2012.

Registered Democrats are running about 30% higher than they did in 2012.  Registered Republicans are running about 30% lower.  If we were seeing equivalent ground games, the Republicans are missing one vote for every vote that has been returned.

Time to keep on grinding away as a superior GOTV organization is worth a point or two in.  And if you are in a non-swingable state, work down ballot as this data suggests that the downballot Republicans in North Carolina are not hitting their early voting marks either.

Update 1: A very good friend of the blog argued via e-mail that the independent/non-affiliated surge is very likely to be embarrassed Republicans and thus there is not a Democratic advantage.  I can see that to some degree.  However if we assume that every vote above last cycle’s non-affiliated vote is effectively an embarrassed Republican vote the combined Republican vote would be about 3% more than the current Democratic registered vote or in horse race turns the Republican adjust lead is 51% to 48% for the adjusted two party vote.  In 2012 backing out the incremental embarrassed Republican vote, the Republicans had 58% to 42% two party vote edge.

 

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Obamacare is a job killer

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Finally, the evidence is in.  Obamacare is significantly hurting a segment of the US economy.

From Bloomberg:

Early evidence suggests that the Affordable Care Act is working — at least in one important respect, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Analysts Nicole Dussault, Maxim Pinkovskiy, and Basit Zafar state that the primary purpose of this law “is not to protect our health per se, but to protect our finances.” And they’ve found a big difference between indebtedness trends in states that embraced the Medicaid expansion versus the ones that did not…

U.S. counties that had a particularly high uninsured rate prior to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act have seen the per capita collection balance fall if their state embraced the Medicaid expansion. If not, the collection balance continued to climb:

Will someone think of the debt collectors… Ohh the humanity.

 

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Good news everybody: ACA cost edition

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So under budget and on projection for the target uninsured rate even with Chief Justice Roberts enabling sociopaths and assholes to stop Medicaid Expansion in 20 states.

Not bad at all….

UPDATE 1: The next time there is a massive social program passing Congress with uncertain costs, we need to put in mechanisms to take advantage of success instead of safeguards against massive cost overruns. The ACA has triggers where if the total federal cost of the advanced premium tax credit and the cost sharing reduction subsidies were more than .504% of GDP, future year individual shares would increase and the thresholds for federal subsidies would decline.
There were no mechanisms in place to say if subsidies were significant below budget that either subsidies for currently qualified individuals would get richer so their out of pocket premium expense would decline OR more people would become eligible for subsidies.

This is just a note to self to find again in 20 years.

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Good news everybody

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Just some more good news:

and the good news will probably continue for the first quarter of 2016:

So in 3 years, all of the data sources suggest that we’ve cut the uninsured rate in half and slowed the cost curve. There are another couple percentage points of easy gains once the rest of the Confederacy and the everyone between the Mississippi’s left bank and the Columbia’s south bank expand Medicaid.

Then we’ll actually need to take another whack to get the last 5% of the population covered AND get better coverage for 25% to 30% of the currently covered population.

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Time to Show the Chair the Door?

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Which is the more competent chair? I think it’s the one on the left:

dnc chair copy

The NYT has the latest on the ongoing kerfluffle between DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other party members over the number of debates:

R.T. Rybak, the former mayor of Minneapolis and a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, on Thursday accused the party’s leader, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of making “flat-out not true” statements about another top party officer, questioned her political skills and said he had “serious questions” about her suitability for the job.

The broadside from Mr. Rybak, which came in an interview late Thursday afternoon, followed weeks of internal party dissension over the number and timing of the presidential debates it has scheduled, capped by an acrimonious public dispute over whether Ms. Wasserman Schultz had punitively barred a Democratic vice chairwoman, Tulsi Gabbard, from the first debate, held on Tuesday in Las Vegas.

The comments from Mr. Rybak, who was interested in replacing Ms. Wasserman Schultz in 2013 and who was the favored choice of some of President Obama’s aides, were notable in part because he is not known as a public complainer. But by the evening’s end, most of the other party officers issued statements strongly supporting Ms. Wasserman Schultz and calling for an end to the public rancor.

A lot of Democrats seem to dislike DWS and blame her for the party’s lousy showing in midterm elections. I don’t — I blame the idiot voters who can’t get excited about politics unless there’s the grand reality show drama of a presidential election to make them all tingly. It’s not DWS’s fault that these short-sighted mopes stay home and allow their city councils, school boards and state legislatures to be taken over by local Sarah Palin knock-offs.

That said, DWS is annoyingly chummy with the wingnut delegation from South Florida — to the point where it’s reasonable to wonder if she’d like to see them replaced with Democrats — and hasn’t exactly distinguished herself in her current gig. At the very least, a competent chair should be able to keep a lid on infighting such as the type the NYT is covering.

Regarding the number of debates, what do you think? DWS is accused of limiting it to six to stack the deck for HRC, and maybe that’s true; I honestly don’t know. But do we really need a gazillion debates? If no one can pick Martin O’Malley out of a line-up after #6, I’m not sure further debates would help.

Absent an even more public and open revolt, it seems unlikely the party will get rid of DWS just as an important election is heating up. But maybe President Hillary or President Bernie can appoint her as HUD Secretary or something so she’ll go away and someone more effective can take on the role. Not sure who that would be, but the chair pictured at left above might be a good candidate.

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