Worksheet for the 2018 Midterms (Clinton and Obama Endorse)

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39 comments

1. willf August 7, 2018 at 2:00 pm

   Lambert,

   you have both Kara Eastman and Brad Ashford listed as running for Congress from NE-02 (Nebraska’s second congressional district).

   This is incorrect. Ashford was defeated by Kara Eastman in the primary election and is not on the ballot.

   Unless I am mistaken and he is running as an independent — and I cannot find any information to suggest that this is the case — his name should be removed from this list.

   Thank you.
   1. grayslady August 7, 2018 at 2:20 pm

      Same with the Illinois races. The DCCC-sponsored Dems won all the primaries. It is still interesting to see what other choices were available to voters, but maybe the winners names could be in caps or bold.
   2. Lambert Strether Post authorAugust 7, 2018 at 2:26 pm

      All candidates are listed, win, lose, or withdrawn. Although table table can be used to track the horse-race, that’s not its primary purpose. Winners and losers are in the database, and when I have time to rewrite the query that generates the table, and adds the formatting, I will do that. Right now, winners are not marked.
2. flora August 7, 2018 at 2:06 pm

   You write:

   The latter suddenly turned to join the former, and now they are all going in the same direction, like a school of fish! Institutionally, how was this achieved? It’s not like anybody voted on this, or there was a Party Congress, or whatever. In what venue where the decisions made? Using what communications tools?

   Follow the money.
   1. Lambert Strether Post authorAugust 7, 2018 at 2:27 pm

      RIght, but to follow anything I need to understand venues and communications, no? What I’m really asking is how “the party decides.” I don’t think the answer to that is quite so linear. After all, Clinton had all the money in the world, and still lost, right?
      1. flora August 7, 2018 at 3:21 pm

         Clinton certainly had (or appeared to have) all the corporate money in the Dem party. Is this the estab corporate money wing uniting in self-interest against the not-corporate $27 dollar donation wing (if it can be called a wing)? Again, more questions than answers.
         1. flora August 7, 2018 at 8:33 pm

            Adding: maybe another issue related to corporate money is corporate globalism. The Dem estab is Globalist (TPP, TTIP, etc.) and the $27 dollar donation voters aren’t. How could a globalist Dem estab appeal to displaced rust-belt workers, and why would they want to? Much better for the globalists to go after moderate GOP voters they assume are also corporate globalists. (Although Trump’s 2016 GOP primary win and eventual Pres. win should put any such assumption in doubt.)

            Note that not being a Globalist does not make one an Isolationist or anti-trade.
      2. NotTimothyGeithner August 7, 2018 at 8:29 pm

         The by product of small minds and limited options. The collapse of the Democratic Party also represented a failure to create a bench. AOC is a person who should have been identified and pushed to run for local or even state government by a healthy political party.

         In many ways, the Democratic elite are small “c”onservatives. New ideas and such are frightening to them.

         Donna Brazille knocked the Clinton Headquarters staff for not having sex, but the pictures of the Clinton staffers looked like a particularly boring group of College Republicans. Wow, the President listens to Jay-Z. He’s really popular with kids from the suburbs!

         This morning I was reminded that Sam Power apologized for calling Hillary a monster in 2013 probably because it seemed inevitable HRC would be President, but now I see it as a lack of creative thinking where these boring people (they are boring) couldn’t envision an alternative.

         As far as the options, the energy of the political left is not with the Democrats hence why they have to pimp Biden every few months.
      3. The Rev Kev August 7, 2018 at 9:54 pm

         Just had a thought. Clinton had what was it, two billion dollars, right? I wonder if anybody worked out just what percentage actually went to her political campaign as in TV ads, staff, phone calls, coffee, transport, etc. and how much just went.
         1. NotTimothyGeithner August 7, 2018 at 10:27 pm

            HRC use to pay DavidHow much went to MSNBC to be in ads for the choir? What good was an HRC ad during a network dedicated to “Her”?

            As far as her staff, she use to pay Mark Penn. Its reasonable to expect the Clinton campaign would simply light money on fire, but I was always puzzled by the ads on MSNBC. What good were they beyond preaching Hillary was running for President?

            We know from the DNC emails Podesta said he needed to talk to HRC about promising the VP to everyone after she had picked Kaine long before the announcement. I’m wondering what kinds of ad buys she promised. When Obama got to the end, he just randomly ran an infomercial and gave the field staff a fairly decent bonus. With all her money in a slam dunk election, I think the story is more than a campaign of would be Mark Penns.
3. DonCoyote August 7, 2018 at 2:09 pm

   Primary elections in Kansas, Michigan, and Washington today.

   Here’s some local reporting on the AZ-02 race, specifically on Billy Kovacs and AZ Dems doing a bad job on “building the bench”, but with general commentary as well. Here’s the subtitle:

   “Progressive upstarts are the party’s future but they terrify centrist-loving establishment — here and nationally”

   and the first two lines:

   “Billy Kovacs is going to lose.
   Billy Kovacs is the future of the Democratic Party in Southern Arizona.”
   1. Arizona Slim August 7, 2018 at 2:51 pm

      Thanks for posting the local reporting, DonCoyote. I just dropped that link into the Water Cooler (ker-splash!) and was about to do the same here.

      In the interest of full disclosure, I am writing this comment from Mr. Kovacs’ former place of employment. (He used to be the sales manager for this-here coworking space.)

      IMHO, Billy could use some, ahem, professional help with his campaign, and I honestly don’t think that the Arizona Democratic Party can be of much assistance. Too bad that he hasn’t attracted the interest of the Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, or Brand New Congress.
      1. Alex Cox August 8, 2018 at 3:02 pm

         I just read the candidate write-ups in the Tucson Weekly. Kovacs looks like the best of the whole bunch!
   2. Lambert Strether Post authorAugust 7, 2018 at 4:53 pm

      That’s really an excellent link; I’ve added it. Thanks!
   3. Carey August 7, 2018 at 9:42 pm

      I like that last, quoted bit.
4. DonCoyote August 7, 2018 at 2:22 pm

   Joan Didion’s Insider Baseball, written 30 years ago, is still probably my favorite political piece of writing.

   Thank you, Lambert, for going beyond the facile “horserace” and “blue wave” tropes and assembling enough data for us non-insiders to be able to gain some understanding of the game the insiders are playing.

   These are people who speak of the process as an end in itself, connected only nominally, and vestigially, to the electorate and its possible concerns… “Anything that brings the process closer to the people is all to the good,” George Bush declared in his 1987 autobiography, Looking Forward, accepting as given this relatively recent notion that the people and the process need not automatically be on convergent tracks.

   When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.
   1. Lambert Strether Post authorAugust 7, 2018 at 2:29 pm

      > access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals

      In good liberal Democrat fashion!
   2. shinola August 7, 2018 at 4:17 pm

      Thanks for the link DC. Didion’s article still holds up pretty well after 3 decades.
      1. Lambert Strether Post authorAugust 7, 2018 at 4:55 pm

         As it would. 1988, a decade into the neoliberal dispensation, but right before the Clinton blight struck.
5. Tom Doak August 7, 2018 at 2:25 pm

   In my home district, MI-01, the lone Democrat running against an incumbent R opponent failed to be listed on the primary ballot, because he filled out his forms with a P.O. Box listed as his home address, and was disqualified. Now he has to get a certain threshold of write-in votes in the primary just to make the ballot in November. D’oh!

   Oh, he is an ex-Marine, and campaigns partly on health care but does not fully advocate single-payer Medicare for All.

   The Democratic party only let us know a week ago that he needs our support to get onto the ballot … I presume they didn’t want give any possible progressive enough time to mobilize and beat their guy by write-in.
   1. Lambert Strether Post authorAugust 7, 2018 at 2:31 pm

      That’s what I mean when I think about conceptualizing the Democrat Party as a crime syndicate.

      The local gang, the Michigan party, muscled your guy off their corner (the “corner” being the ballot, which is the territory this particular crime syndicate controls).
      1. Samuel Conner August 7, 2018 at 3:54 pm

         I’m pretty old and tired and have not been enthusiastic about the idea of getting involved in the nuts and bolts of the lowest level of D politics (am so ignorant that I don’t even know what it is called). But I’m wondering — given that there is AFAIK a sort of small “d” democratic process in at least some places at some levels — how one would go about asserting “the will of the people” by showing up and taking part with a sufficient number of like-minded people. Is the knowledge of how to do this “artisanal”, so to speak, or is it documented anywhere (bylaws, or something like that — but interpreted to non-specialists).

         I’m so ignorant I don’t even know what language to use.

         Perhaps a useful project for subversive-minded activists willing to work within the D infrastructure would be to create manuals of procedure for how to accomplish what AOC accomplished, at US legislative district and lower levels, for each State in the Union.
         1. Lambert Strether Post authorAugust 7, 2018 at 4:59 pm

            That link to AZ Don Coyote provided gives excellent insights.

            I could be wrong, but I think Indivisible is about pressuring the electeds from the outside, not the inside.

            The precinct captain’s guide to political victory (Amazon, sorry) is said to be good, but I think that’s more about canvassing than it is about the cut and thrust of committee work.

            Readers? This might be a good topic for a post.
   2. saneperson August 8, 2018 at 1:57 am

      Thanks Lambert for the analysis.
      Democracy in the US is, especially at the federal level, a winner-take-all process in which parties are active without a constitutional mandate. This minimalistic model had advantages until about 1950: greater institutional complexity was a handicap given the great distances and the limitations of print media. And it was unnecessary given the arguable cultural homogeneity.
      Accountability and decision-making issues are resolved at the ballot-box in this model. In the major parties the Party Chair role is ceremonial and apolitical to the extent that the Chair is not responsible for policy formulation and serves ultimately at the mercy of the party’s senior office holder, who is the party’s biggest winner in the winner-take-all model.
      Constitutional flaws, for example the electoral college’s anti-democratic potential as well as a lack of effective self-reform in the system, have contributed along with growing technological and cultural complexity to a transformation of major American parties into apolitical branding campaigns. The low-point in this devolution was HRC’s run for the presidency on the Democratic ticket in 2016.
      The solution is a parliamentary system with proprtional representation in which a constitution sets an electoral threshhold (5-8%) for parliamentary participation.
6. Wandering Mind August 7, 2018 at 3:18 pm

   A little info on NH1.

   I’ve attended quite a few candidate forums and individual candidate appearances for this race. Maura Sullivan and Chris Pappas are “affordable” health insurance/access to health care types and will refuse to budge when directly confronted with the question of whether they support single payer Medicare for all. All of the other candidates support it when asked.

   In addition to the persons listed, a former staffer of the current NH-01 congressperson got in the race not too long ago. Her name is Naomi Andrews. Paul Cardinal and William Martin have also joined this race.

   Mark MacKenzie came out in favor of a job guaranty at the last candidate forum.

   Maura Sullivan and Chris Pappas have together raised more than $1.5. Levi Sanders and one other candidate brought that up at the last candidate forum.

   Both NH U.S. Senators have endorsed Pappas, Shaheen doing so today.
7. Lambert Strether Post authorAugust 7, 2018 at 5:01 pm

   One other thing this data suggests, though it may not show: The Democrats are not concentrating o pivot districts that voted for Obama and then flipped to Trump.
   1. sleepy August 7, 2018 at 5:54 pm

      Some of the last working class strongholds for dems were in the Upper Midwest–dozens of counties that had voted dem for president for over 30 years and then switched to Trump. These folks are lifelong dems, voting for Dukakis when California went for Bush. They could be won back if the dems would get off their high horse about Trump and Russia and just campaign on ONE guaranteed thing like free college, $15/hr wage, medicare for all, and so forth. Wouldn’t have to be all of them–just one clear offer of making the voters’ lives a little better.

      That shouldn’t be hard. Just get rid of the rhetoric about some “process”–like improving job skills and educational levels–that will magically improve your life 5 years down the road. Things need to be addressed–and could be–at a more immediate level.
8. clarky90 August 7, 2018 at 5:42 pm

   President Trump Meets with Inner City Pastors

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HQh0AD7Ros&t=2s

   There is a swing away from the Democrats by minority voters.

   Here is a glimpse of what is afoot.

   Also it is an entertaining 30 minutes of viewing
   1. Lambert Strether Post authorAugust 8, 2018 at 2:10 am

      I doubt this very much; I would need to see more than a video of “pastors” (ugh).
   2. Heraclitus August 8, 2018 at 9:21 pm

      On NPR today, a Democratic analyst said that if the bet was that African American voters would break for Trump, ‘I’d take that bet (against it).’
9. sleepy August 7, 2018 at 5:43 pm

   The dem pundits are all in for an O’Connor win in OH-12 as justification for going after the “moderate” republican suburban vote.
10. Tony of CA August 7, 2018 at 7:08 pm

    I have a simple question: Why vote? Both parties are largely control by the same donors. It strikes me as a waste of energy. When someone such a Sanders comes around who actually slightly challenges the status quo, the powers to be actively collude to disenfranchise the movement.
    1. flora August 7, 2018 at 7:39 pm

       “I have a simple question: Why vote?”

       Simple answer: It’s the only thing we have that scares them. Why else would they spend so much effort trying to suppress the vote, or not fighting voter suppression? And who knows, some candidates you vote for might win.
       1. Tony of CA August 7, 2018 at 11:20 pm

          I don’t think it actually scares them. It’s more important for them to keep the showing going. By voting, we are actively buying into the political theatre. It’s a sham. Really democracy simply can’t coexist in a Capitalistic system.
11. Altandmain August 7, 2018 at 8:46 pm

    Hard question, but how much is an Obama or Clinton endorsement really worth?

    They are not going to be very appealing to swing voters, independents, etc. They have limited to appeal to getting young people and supporters of Bernie Sanders to vote.

    Seems like they are most useful for just motivating Establishment Democratic voters.

    Second, the Democrat Party really is split. As you can see, Obama, Clinton, and the DCCC’s endorsements overlap in only a single case (again, CA-50) with “insurgent” backers like Justice Democrats (JD) and Our Revolution (OR). Negative confirmation: Obama did not endorse Ocasio-Cortez (“Party Unity is for Rubes“). Her district is a safe Democrat seat (unless Crowley, running as a straw on the Working Families line, somehow takes it away from her), so perhaps that doesn’t matter: Positive confirmation: Obama and Clinton didn’t endorse Bryce in WI-01, although — because? — Sanders did, even though the DCCC did, and the seat used to be Paul Ryan’s![1]

    It has been split between those who got rich by neoliberalism (the 10%er base) and the rest of us.

    That’s the really brutal reality.
    1. NotTimothyGeithner August 7, 2018 at 9:47 pm

       Probably none.

       My sense is the importance of the Oprah endorsement of Obama wasn’t the endorsement as much as the spectacle and crowds. 10,000 people at a campaign event in New Hampshire is huge. At that point, Obama didn’t have to face the usual primary audience much like HRC where candidates do get fairly difficult questions in comparison to the msm garbage questions cookie recipes.

       Yellow dog types who might vote for AOC over say Crowley on their own might be swayed, but I suspect “DNC” letter head would have the same effect.
    2. Lambert Strether Post authorAugust 7, 2018 at 11:34 pm

       > how much is an Obama or Clinton endorsement really worth?

       It’s a signal about where to send money.
12. cm August 8, 2018 at 1:39 am

    I’m ashamed to admit that I blew it. I’m in WA-03, and Washington state voters had a fantastic opportumity to raise a ruckus.

    Senator Cantwell (D-WA) is up for election this year, and she will win. Instead of voting for her in the primary, everyone should have voted for Joey Gibson, Republican fascist. It would have been hilarious to see the Washington State Republican Party have to decide to support this idiot (or not).

    This may be a template — in a major one-party state, I propose that the voters support the most idiotic candidate on the opposing side (I assume D/R are the only meaningful choices), to inflict maximum pain on the opposing party.

    Regardless of your opinion on D/R, the only way this improves is if both parties are forced to “step up their game” — my ballot was filled with completely mediocre choices.
    1. edmondo August 8, 2018 at 11:54 am

       … I propose that the voters support the most idiotic candidate on the opposing side

       Ask Hillary how this worked out for her in 2016. Ask America too.

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