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Would predict right now: US Senate toss-ups

I learned a lesson in 2002, about being in the prediction business: Do not confuse what one desires with what one can most objectively predict.

Since then, being in the Senate prediction, I've compiled a string. That includes 2006 and 2008 (my firm having a helping hand with fifteen of those winning campaigns), when it felt nice to be exactly right about the gains; and off by a digit in the MA Senate '10 special, when it wasn't so fun.

Not to say that streak continues all through '10, but it won't end because I'm being wishful rather than predictive. And besides, I'm off building technology for a dozen statewide campaigns in Brazil, without any ties to any of the Senate campaigns this cycle. The least I can do is light a fire under some fellow Dem hacks out hauling for these under-water campaigns this cycle.

As of today, two months out -- time (but not a lot) -- here are the toss-ups in the Senate and the current prediction (with shallow twitteresque commentary included):

Rossi over Murray.  Probably the poorest run Dem incumbent strategy to date.

Kirk over Giannoulias. Two real tankers. The thinking behind this being that money can more easily prop Kirk's numbers.

Boxer over Fiorina. Have seen a big turnaround here in urgency by Dems; wouldn't bet on Jerry yet though.

Reid over Angle. Still believe Reid's anti-fusillade against Angle needs something to follow, but now over 48 (v impressive).

Rand over Conway. Pitiful polling for an anti-drug message that tar-babied the Dem off on a tangent.

Bluementhal over McMahon. This is closer than you think.

Miller over McAdams. Ditto. Having done a few fishing boat summers out of Sitka.... ah, well, will the DSCC have any money for this?

Vitter over Melancon. Just kidding, its not really on this list.

Boozeman over Lincoln. Ditto. Remember Bill Halter, one of the best-- also the lone Senate race webstrong worked with this cycle.

Wyden over Huffman. Ditto-ditto. But loved how Ron got seriously on the ball with helping Kitz.

Feingold over Johnson. Not a tougher smarter incumbent in the land than Russ. Being outspent and still on top (Obama's visit may change this...).

Ayotte over Hodes. But I wouldn't bet on Ayotte being the 9/14 nominee.

Rubio over et. al. Don't see how Meeks and Crist do anything but split the opposition at this point.

Blunt over Carnahan. A race where Obama's mosquela pet peeve did real damage to a successful Bailout Blunt message.

Burr over Marshall. Its close, yea, but no one in DC believes that the DS will help with money; pity, cause her message rocks.

Buck over Bennet. The Gov race there being a real lol'er, this could prove fluid, but Bennet's incumbent numbers to date are rotten.

Castle over Coons. Quite a rip-down in the GOP primary of the Tea Party by the establishment there in DE.

Coats over Ellsworth. The DC lobbyist benefiting from anti-establishment fever is one seriously F'd up scenario.

Portman over Fisher. Ohio starting to look really really ugly-- Obama will likely come around too for '12 noise, making '10 worse.

Toomey over Sestak. Throwing Spector overboard was a really stupid Prog-Dem primary move-- he knew how to beat a Republican.

Manchin over Raese. Huh, are you surprised to see WV on this list? It will be close.

OK, tally it up.

Comes out to too many Democratic US Senate losses. There are plenty of races up above that will be decided by less than 3 percent come election day-- maybe as many as 11. Looking at the past 2 months and I have three of the above races that have flipped (Boxer, Ried, Rubio) in my odds to now be favored. I'd make the case, in a longer post, that there are eight others above that could flip too.

Let us discuss this with the solemnity it deserves.


Who pays? You do.

There's 13 Democratic-held Senate seats, and about 80 House seats, from which we could see Democrats lose their majority. About how many of those endangered incumbents are laying the truth on the line for all to see?

The problem of course starts with that many of them began this past cycle by voting against the truth, by bailing out the richest of Americans, 100 pennies to the dollar, on their losing bets. That's not the American way, its not capitalism, and all it really can be called is corporate welfare. I have no pity for those Democrats which voted for that when they lose in 2010.

I'm looking out for the truth-tellers, and hope to wishes that they don't get swept up in this calmaty of misplaced pririties by the Democratic majorities.

Here's one (via email):

Oil billionaire David Koch is spending $250,000 on attack ads against me this week. But I'm not the only one. In fact, he is deploying his polluting billions toward this modest goal:

Choosing our next government.

In more than 50 Congressional races across the country, in the next two months, Koch will be spending $45 million. To give you an idea of how much money that is, the total amount of all PAC contributions to all candidates so far is roughly $200 million.

We have to fight back! Please help us fight back, with your contribution.

And much of the money that Koch is using in this attempted leveraged buyout of our Government comes from . . . you and me.

For many years, Koch had a contract to extract oil from federal and Indian lands. In return, Koch was supposed to pay a royalty. A jury found that Koch underpaid the Government by $210 million.

Media Matters says that Koch has received $100 million in government contracts in the last ten years alone.

And Koch has paid for his assault on progressive government during the past decade largely with tax-deductible, tax-free foundation money:

  • $120 million from the "David H. Koch Charitable Foundation,"
  • $48 million from the "Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation," and
  • $28 million from the "Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation," Charles Koch controls.

So there you have it. It's the taxpayers who have inadvertently underwritten the Koch assault on social services, a clean environment and good government.

Stop the Koch coup! Please help support our counterattack.

From time to time, we will keep you posted about the Koch scheme to dictate who wins and who loses elections in America. In the meantime, thank you for your support for clean government. And special thanks to the 1000+ supporters who answered the call, and made a contribution to help us fight back.

Truth,

Alan Grayson

Other than Alan Grayson & Russ Feingold, among those 13 and 80, who has told the truth by their words and actions?

Yea, they will lose elections, but we are going to pay.

 

 


Saturday Diary Rescue

Enjoy.

And since it's an understandably quiet holiday weekend in the diaries, here is your bonus food for thought (via DFA's Arshad Hasan):

"I'm the top Congressional target on the left. You may already know that Nancy Pelosi has targeted me for defeat, but did you know Howard Dean has thrown his weight behind my opponent?  His far-left liberal organization, "Democracy for America" raised $22,000 in 24 hours to defeat me and have bragged about it to media outlets. They're using this as an example of how much liberals like Dean want to see me defeated." - Michele Bachmann

And how.  Help make it happen.

 


It's the Democracy, Stupid?

One of the most offensive tendencies of beleaguered establishmentarians faced with the utter collapse of their precious conventional wisdom is to bemoan—or to rethink, they might protest—this brilliant representative democracy bequeathed to us by the Founders in unabashedly elitist tones. To be sure, this line of thinking often bears the appearance of innocuous experimental thoughts but bespeaks, at best, fecklessness but more likely are signs of intellectual depravity. As a liberal—affected by what may be called trademark self-flagellation—I am wont to focus on this insidious tic when it is found on the left. Conservatives and reactionaries craving for the relative warmth of authoritarianism is, to me, rather unsurprising and therefore barely worth noting. What can we expect from “small-government” folk with a nary a peep to say about the warrantless surveillance of American citizens or the stupid morality of strictly-enforced marijuana prohibition?

I can think of at least three prominent liberals that gave voice to this dangerous nonsense recently—the first of whom is quite brilliant: Woody Allen (Manhattan, Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors—I mean, c’mon!); Tom Friedman, the unfortunate suck-up; and Joe Klein in Time magazine just today.

I had been minding my own business, reading Time’s mild-mannered attempt to explain what has come to be regarded as Barack Obama’s stunning failure as president when the title “How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?” on the right side of the screen seemed to lunge at me. (Who knew the unlikely symbiosis of ganja and righteous indignation could be that kickass?)

If you asked me, what's the most disappointing thing Barack Obama has done as President? I'd say, He appointed a "blue-ribbon" commission to study the federal deficit. I mean, how boring and worthy and worthless! Such commissions are an instant admission of defeat: We lack the political will to deal with (insert long-term crisis here), so we're appointing a blue-ribbon commission to study it. The process is inevitable, especially in these days of rising partisan contentiousness. A consensus won't be reached on the really tough issues. A high-minded, peripheral idea or two may emerge — frosting on a soap bubble — and then evaporate ... or worse, actually be implemented, as was the 9/11 commission's foolishly redundant suggestion of a Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI), plopped atop the CIA and military spook agencies. No doubt yet another commission will eventually be appointed to study abolishing the DNI.

Let’s rest here for a second. While this represents a digression from our main point here, Joe Klein’s treatment of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform as some sort of passing joke requires special attention and derision. Rather than being a source of amusement, this commission is a sinister assembly co-chaired by former senator Al Simpson (who’s more like the comically evil Creed Bratton than Homer’s dad as far as I’m concerned) and includes the likes of Paul Ryan, the House Republicans’ resident budget wonk. (Yes, there’s only one—and even he demonstrates how carelessly that encomium is bestowed these days.)


The Enthusiasm Gap Quantified

Public Policy Polling sums it up nicely:

This year isn't getting away from the Democrats because voters are moving toward the Republicans en masse. But the enthusiasm gap is turning races that would otherwise be lean Democratic into toss ups, turning toss ups into leaning Republican, and turning leaning Republican into solid Republican.

In terms of specifics, PPP examined ten races across the country and found that if the expected 2010 turnout matched the 2008 electorate then these races would either be solid Democratic, leaning Democratic or competitive. For example, Elaine Marshall running for Senate in North Carolina would have a small lead instead of trailing. Indeed, Senate races in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Missouri would be competitive.

On our side, I guess we have the EQ going for us. The EQ? The Extremist Quotient. If it weren't for the fact that the Christian Reconstructionist Sharron Angle is the GOP nominee in Nevada, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would be trailing by double digits instead of leading by a point or two. That's an EQ of some 12-15 points. Or take the Alaska Senate race. If Murkowski had won the GOP nomination, she would have led in the polls by 25 points. Now that the Tea Party extremist Joe Miller is the GOP nominee, he leads Scott McAdams by just six for an EQ of 19 points.


A Political Ad in Sweden Causes a Stir and a Rift

Swedes will head to the polls on September 19 to elect an new Riksdag. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, leader of the governing four party coalition Alliance for Sweden, and his right-wing Moderate Party is facing a tough election battle against the opposing Red-Greens coalition led by Mona Sahlin, leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. Recent polling shows the current government leading narrowly, vying to become only the second centre-right government to win re-election. The Alliance for Sweden came to power in September 2006 after winning a seven-seat majority in the 349-seat Riksdag, Sweden's parliament. It is only the third right of centre government in Sweden since 1936.

Approximately 4 percent of the population of Sweden is Muslim but it is growing rapidly. In numbers that translates to 300,000 out of a total population of 9.2 million. Muslim migrants to Sweden hail from all over the Islamic world but predominately come from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Palestine. There are also large number of Somalis and Eritreans as well as a sizable pocket of Sri Lankan Muslim refugees.

The rise in Islamic immigration, however, has led to an unprecedented rise in crime in the country in particular against women. The number of rapes in Sweden has tripled in just twenty years with 85 percent of assailants being Muslims. On New Year's Eve in 2004, two Swedish girls were attacked and beaten by four Somali immigrants, a story that made worldwide news for the brutality of the attacks. In 2007, another Somali man slashed a woman at a discotheque as he yelled out that Swedish women were whores. Perhaps these are isolated incidents but the nature of the attacks left a deep impact on Sweden.

Earlier this year, racial tensions boiled over leading to two nights of rioting in the Rinkeby and Tensta suburbs of Stockhölm. In Malmö, Sweden's third largest city, perhaps 15 percent of the population is now Islamic. And over the past few years, Malmö has become the epicenter for anti-Semitic violence in Europe that has forced many in the once 800 strong members of one Scandinavia's oldest Jewish communities to leave.


Krugman on The Economic Narrative

Paul Krugman tackles the problem of the economic narrative today:

The way the right wants to tell the story — and, I’m afraid, the way it will play in November — is that the Obama team went all out for Keynesian policies, and they failed. So back to supply-side economics!

The point, of course, is that that is not at all what happened. A straight Keynesian analysis implied the need for a much bigger program, more oriented toward spending, than the administration proposed. And people like me said that at the time — we’re not talking about hindsight.

You can argue that nothing bigger and better was politically feasible; we’ll never know about that. But what we do know is that (1) senior administration officials, even in internal arguments, claimed that half-measures were the right thing to do, based on … well, invented doctrines that certainly weren’t basic Keynesian. And (2), the administration has never said that it had to make do with an underpowered plan; on the contrary, to this day it maintains that what it did was just right. And this just feeds the false narrative.

As Ronald Brownstein noted in the National Journal back in April, the Republicans' narrative about Obama's economic agenda has been straightforward and unrelenting. Brownstein writes "in their telling, Obama is transforming the United States into a sclerotic European social-welfare state; forcing the strained middle class to fund both a "crony capitalism" of bailouts for the powerful (the charge McConnell leveled against the financial bill) and handouts for the poor (through health care reform); and impeding recovery by smothering the economy beneath stultifying federal spending, taxes, and regulation."

The GOP's distorting narrative has been so successful that there are even those on the left who believe that the Troubled Asset Relief Program was some sort of optional exercise, a safety net for Wall Street. There are certainly valid criticisms to be made of the TARP, which is a George Bush/Hank Paulson policy to begin with, but the necessity of preventing a collapse of the banks should be quite clear to everyone. The TARP provided the necessary liquidity to keep the credit markets afloat when the danger was very really of a wider systemic collapse. In December 2009, the Oversight Panel headed by Elizabeth Warren concluded:

There is broad consensus that the TARP was an important part of a broader government strategy that stabilized the U.S. financial system by renewing the flow of credit and averting a more acute crisis. Although the government’s response to the crisis was at first haphazard and uncertain, it eventually proved decisive enough to stop the panic and restore market confidence.

More recently, I covered the Blinder Zandi Report which detailed what would have happened had we not acted. The report, authored by Mark Zandi, Moody's chief economist and a former adviser to both the McCain and Obama campaigns, and Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist who has served as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, offers the first comprehensive estimate of our full response to the crisis: Absent the TARP and the fiscal stimulus, "GDP in 2010 would be about 6 ½ percent lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8 ½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation." The TARP worked; the fiscal stimulus worked but should have been $1.3 trillion in size with fewer tax cuts and more actual investment spending.

I'm not sure if the Obama Administration is salvageable to be quite honest. The President and his team may win re-election or they may not depending on the caliber of the GOP opposition and how unemployment tracks between now and 2012. There's not much we can do about the former but there is still much that the Administration can do about the latter.

The GOP has since 1960 demonstrated a tendency to nominate a conservative as their standard bearer after an electoral loss. Thus a Nixon loss in 1960 begot Goldwater in 1964, a Ford loss in 1976 lead to Reagan in 1980, and Dole loss in 1996 brought Bush in 2000. I'm pretty confident that whoever the GOP nominee is 2012, it is going to be someone to the right of John McCain. Still that leaves a lot of ground to cover and dozens of shades of insanity with which to contend. There is a big difference between Mitch Daniels and Sarah Palin, between John Thune and Rick Santorum, between Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee, between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. And while Mitch Daniels may be the sanest of the bunch, he's still quite to the right of John McCain.

Nonetheless, as of now and noting that in politics 26 months is an eternity, I think Mitch Daniels represents probably the toughest challenge for Obama among the potential 2012 Republican nominees. But I don't think that Mitch Daniels can win the GOP nomination as things stand now.

The other moving part on Obama's re-election prospects are how the Administration handles the economy and in particular the vexing issue of unemployment. In this regard, I would like to see the following personnel changes in the Administration: Laura Tyson replacing Lawrence Summers as Director of the White House National Economic Council, Austan Goolsbee taking over for the departing Christina Romer as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Jon Corzine taking over as Secretary of the Treasury for the hapless Timothy Geithner and John Podesta returning to White House as Chief of Staff. I'd also find a role for Joseph Stiglitz, Simon Johnson and Dean Baker. It should go without saying that Elizabeth Warren needs to be named as the head of new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. 

I'll nip in the bud the push back on Corzine as Treasury Secretary: if you want to reign in Wall Street, you'll need someone who knows the major players intimately and who can make some of the more obtuse, like say Dan Loeb and Jamie Dimon, understand that it is in Wall Street's best interest to return to the pre-Reagan regulatory environment. That's going to be a hard sell because these titans of capital now seen themselves as political gatekeepers to a degree that we have not seen since the days of J.P. Morgan a full century ago.


Carly Fiorina vs Barbara Boxer Debate: Live Coverage and Analysis

Moraga, California is the scene the first U.S. Senate debate between Carly Fiorina and Barbara Boxer. The one hour debate begins at 7 PM Pacific and will be aired live in every media market in California and nationally on C-SPAN.

The stakes are high, according to the two most recent public polls, Senator Boxer is either winning by five points or losing by five points.

The focus tonight should be on jobs. In fact, it would make sense for the debate to only focus on jobs and leave everything else for other debates. California is in a serious jobs crisis. Today's July numbers, showed that 12 of the 17 metro areas with unemployment over 15% are in California. The metro area with highest unemployment is in California, scoring over 30%. When it comes to voting this fall, Californians especially need to know where the candidates stand on jobs.

Tune in via KTVU or C-SPAN.

NOTE: A quick follow-up on the Barbara Boxer money-bomb that Jerome pushed. Not only did Boxer's campaign clear their goal of 10,000 donations today, but they're currently at 11,152 contributions.


Joseph Stiglitz: 'Trickle Up Economics' to Blame for Crisis

Why Joseph Stiglitz isn't in the Administration is beyond me. In this lecture given at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia in late July, Dr. Stiglitz puts the blame squarely for our economic meltdow squarely where it needs to be placed: on Ronald Reagan and his free market and low taxation policies that have redistributed wealth upwards. He argues that "trickle up economics" created the credit bubble that triggered the recent financial crisis. "There was a party going on, and nobody wanted to be a party-pooper," says Stiglitz.

Since 1976, 58 percent of all income gains have accrued to the top one percent of US households. Meanwhile, 25 percent of American workers earn a wage that puts them at or below the poverty level. If the redistribution upwards since 1981 had not taken place, if the average American family in the bottom 90 percent were today getting the same share of the nation's income as the average bottom 90 percent family received in 1973 when income distribution was much more egalitarian, this average family would now be taking home in income over $10,000 more per year. The wealth of the top tenth has come by impoverishing the bottom 90 percent. That's the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

Joseph Stiglitz was chief economist at the World Bank until January 2000. Before that, he was the chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. He is currently a finance and economics professor at Columbia University. He is the author of Globalization and Its Discontents and The Roaring Nineties. The full hour long lecture plus a 30 minute Q&A session is available at Fora TV.


Midweek Diary Rescue

After a brief hiatus, the diary rescue returns rested, and ready for the midterm ballyhoo.  And speaking of the midterms...