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    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    Confidential memo from Obama pollster predicts 'crushing Dem losses' if blacks not en

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    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    Black Vote Seen as Last Hope for Democrats to Hold Senate

    By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG OCT. 18, 2014



    The Democratic leader of the Georgia House, Stacey Abrams, second from left, denounced as “voter suppression” the failure to process 40,000 new applications. Credit John Locher/Associated Press

    WASHINGTON — The confidential memo from a former pollster for President Obama contained a blunt warning for Democrats. Written this month with an eye toward Election Day, it predicted “crushing Democratic losses across the country” if the party did not do more to get black voters to the polls.
    “African-American surge voters came out in force in 2008 and 2012, but they are not well positioned to do so again in 2014,” Cornell Belcher, the pollster, wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 1. “In fact, over half aren’t even sure when the midterm elections are taking place.”
    Mr. Belcher’s assessment points to an urgent imperative for Democrats: To keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate, as many are predicting, they need black voters in at least four key states. Yet the one politician guaranteed to generate enthusiasm among African Americans is the same man many Democratic candidates

    Related Coverage




    Now, Democrats are deploying other prominent black elected officials and other surrogates, buttressed by sophisticated voter targeting efforts, to stoke black turnout. At the White House, the president is waging an under-the-radar campaign, recording video advertisements, radio interviews and telephone calls specifically targeting his loyal African-American base.

    OPEN Document

    Document: A Democratic Pollster’s Memo on African-American Voters

    “Anybody who looks at the data realizes that if the black vote, and the brown vote, doesn’t turn out, we can’t win. It’s just that simple,” said Representative Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, referring to African-American and Latino voters. “If we don’t turn out, we cannot hold the Senate.”
    African-Americans could help swing elections in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and possibly Arkansas, a New York Times analysis of voter data shows, but only if they turn out at higher-than-forecast rates. They will also be important in Kentucky, where Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic Senate candidate, refuses to say if she voted for President Obama — a stance that black leaders including Ms. Fudge fear will depress turnout.

    Republicans, who are expanding outreach to African-Americans in states like North Carolina and Georgia, have their own aggressive get-out-the-vote effort, mindful of the success of the Obama campaign, which turned out voters in record numbers.
    Black voters made history in 2012, exit polling and census data show, when they turned out at a rate higher than whites to help re-elect Mr. Obama. But fewer voters go to polls in midterm elections. In 2010, a disastrous year for Democrats, blacks voted at a rate lower than whites, creating a “turnout gap.”
    The numbers are significant. Although more than 1.1 million black Georgians went to the polls in 2012, only about 741,000 voted in 2010. In North Carolina, Democrats say there are nearly one million black registered voters who did not vote in 2010.
    Mr. Belcher declined to discuss for whom he had written the memo, saying it was private, but the document was circulated by the Democratic National Committee. In the memo, he also argued that the turnout gap, more than any Republican Tea Party wave, was responsible for Democrats’ 2010 defeats. So the challenge for Democrats is to get midterm voters to the polls at presidential election-year rates.

    “If you tell me in Georgia that, on the closing of the polls, the electorate is 32 percent African-American, I’m going to tell you we have probably elected a Democratic senator,” he said. “That’s not theory. It’s basic math.”


    Representative Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio said black voter turnout was essential. Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times But it is in no way easy. Sasha Issenberg, whose 2012 book, “The Victory Lab,” explored the science of winning campaigns, said increasing turnout “is doable.” But it is very expensive and time-consuming; on average, he said, a well-trained volunteer must have 14 contacts with prospective voters to produce one new vote.
    Mr. Issenberg said his rough calculation showed that in Georgia alone, such an effort would cost $30 million. A national effort, he said, would be “resource-intensive on a scale that we’ve never seen executed in a midterm election.”
    Republicans are skeptical. “What the Democrats were able to pull off with African-American turnout in places like Ohio in 2012 was truly amazing,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “Accomplishing the same goal without the African-American president on the ballot at the top of the ticket is a totally different endeavor.”
    Still, Democrats are trying. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has poured $60 million this year into its Bannock Street Project, a data-driven effort to target potential voters, then make sure they vote.
    In North Carolina, where Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat, is fighting to retain her seat, party field operatives have deputized more than 150 “captains” — the owners of black barbershops, hair salons and other small businesses — to help register voters. Nearly 30,000 African-Americans have registered since January.
    In Georgia, where blacks make up 30 percent of registered voters, Democrats identified 600,000 unregistered black voters. The New Georgia Project, an officially nonpartisan effort founded by the Democratic leader of the State House, Stacey Abrams, has helped register about 120,000 voters. But the effort is under attack from the Republican secretary of state, who has not yet processed 40,000 of the applications — a move Ms. Abrams denounced as “voter suppression.”
    In Louisiana, where Senator Mary L. Landrieu appears headed for a runoff in a three-candidate race, Democrats worked to enlist more than 600 black and religious leaders to help with voter registration. On Sunday, Ms. Fudge and her caucus members will visit black churches there, beginning a bus tour of six Senate battleground states. They will promote early voting, which begins in Louisiana on Tuesday.


    The latest news, analysis and election results for the 2014 midterm campaign.

    Recent Comments

    SB

    9 hours ago It is almost humorous to think about Republican outreach to black voters in Georgia. The current voter suppression efforts have been fairly...
    Mark Stone

    9 hours ago The black demographic is not monolithic. Alas, being of the conservative persuasion, my (black) neighbors and I feel hopelessly in despair...
    Steve the Commoner

    10 hours ago So may Americans such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King suffered for all Americans to have the right to vote. And yet today so few...

    On the campaign trail, Ms. Fudge said, she can defend the president in a way Ms. Landrieu and other Democrats cannot. “I look at it this way,” she said. “I have a better opportunity to convince a black voter to vote than they do.”
    Big-name surrogates are also stepping in. Former President Bill Clinton, hugely popular with black voters, is in Arkansas this weekend, with stops in his birthplace, Hope, and the heavily African-American cities of Pine Bluff and West Memphis. He goes to Baton Rouge, La., on Monday.

    The lack of awareness that Mr. Belcher’s memo noted also set off alarm at the White House. A senior official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, said the White House was “concerned that some of the campaigns are not focused enough on the importance of turning out presidential-year voters, including African-Americans.”
    Mr. Obama is acutely aware of his kinship with black voters, this official said, and eager to help Democrats however he can. Last week, he taped interviews with three black radio hosts — Steve Harvey, Yolanda Adams and Rickey Smiley — and he sounded like a pitchman for voting.
    “I’ll bet there are a whole bunch of folks listening to your show who may not even know that there’s an election going on,” the president told Mr. Smiley. “I need everybody to go vote. The election’s on Nov. 4. You can go to a website, Iwillvote.com, to find out what your polling place is.”
    But sophisticated targeting, church visits, high-profile surrogates and even direct appeals by the president may go only so far, some Democrats said, when candidates are running away from a politician black voters adore. Ms. Grimes is but one example.
    In Louisiana, Ms. Landrieu ran an ad calling the president’s policies “simply wrong when it comes to oil and gas production.” In Georgia, Michelle Nunn, the Democratic Senate nominee, has refused to say if she would have voted for the Affordable Care Act — Mr. Obama’s signature domestic initiative.
    Continue reading the main story Write A Comment On the campaign trail, black leaders like Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, are offering a very different message.
    They embrace the health care law — “I will never run away from the Affordable Care Act,” Mr. Cummings said — and often invoke voting rights and the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black man shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., as a way to mobilize black voters. And they defend the president.
    “People understand that you have to walk a thin line,” Mr. Cummings said, describing Democratic candidates’ dilemma. “But African-Americans do not want you denying any affiliation with the president, because they love this president. He is like a son to them.”
    Correction: October 19, 2014
    An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified the Democratic leader of the Georgia House. The leader, Stacey Abrams, is second from the left, not at the left. (The man at the left is Cristóbal Alex.)

    Amy Chozick contributed reporting.

    A version of this article appears in print on October 19, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Black Vote Seen as Last Hope for Democrats to Hold Senate. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/us...erms.html?_r=0
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  4. #4
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    dirty dirty dirty bird.....




    Hagan Put Judge Up for Federal Appointment As Judge Ruled on Husband’s Million-Dollar Lawsuit
    Just a week after Sen. Kay Hagan (D., N.C.) recommended a North Carolina judge to President Barack Obama for a seat in the U.S. District Court, the judge ruled in...
    freebeacon.com

    Hagan Put Judge Up for Federal Appointment As Judge Ruled on Husband’s Million-Dollar Lawsuit

    Claimed she was unaware of connection



    Kay Hagan / AP

    BY: Brent Scher
    October 20, 2014 2:00 pm

    Just a week after Sen. Kay Hagan (D., N.C.) recommended a North Carolina judge to President Barack Obama for a seat in the U.S. District Court, the judge ruled in favor of a company partially owned by Hagan’s husband.
    The senator’s husband, Charles T. “Chip” Hagan, was a managing member of Hydrodyne Industries LLC when it sued a regional water authority for drawing water out of a river that had one of its hydroelectric dams built on. The lawsuit sought millions of dollars in damages and was carried out by Chip Hagan’s legal firm.
    Superior Court Judge Calvin E. Murphy ruled the case in favor of Hydrodyne, setting the table for the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority to pay millions in damages to companies including Hydrodyne.
    Murphy’s ruling was made on Oct. 23, 2009, just nine days after Sen. Hagan sent his name to Obama to be nominated for a lifetime seat on the U.S. District Court for Western North Carolina.
    Hagan withdrew her recommendation to Obama after North Carolina’s News and Record contacted her office about the apparent conflict of interest, telling the paper that she “was not aware that Judge Murphy was hearing a case in which my husband had an interest.”
    “To avoid any appearance of favoritism from my office, I am asking the White House to withdraw Judge Murphy’s name from consideration for U.S. District Court Judge for North Carolina’s western district,” Hagan said in a statement at the time.
    The water authority appealed the ruling due to the connections between Hagan and Murphy.
    During the appeal, Murphy testified that he was in Hagan’s Greensboro office for an interview with the senator just two days before he heard the final hearings for the case in question.
    Murphy maintained, however, that he remained unaware of any connection between the Hagans and the case.
    “At no point was it brought to my attention that Sen. Hagan’s husband had an interest in the suit or that his law firm had an interest in the case,” Murphy testified.
    The Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority was not convinced that Hagan and Murphy were both oblivious to each other’s connections to the case.
    “It was clear to me that we weren’t getting an unbiased opinion, based on politics,” said the water authority’s executive director John Kime.
    Each personal financial disclosure form for Sen. Hagan since she joined the senate includes her husband’s stake in Hydrodyne. From 2007 to 2010, Chip Hagan’s assets in the company were worth up to $250,000. The two most recent disclosures show that he now has assets of up to $100,000 in the company.
    Chip Hagan was also directly involved in the case.
    He submitted an affidavit in the case as the “manager and authorized representative of Hydrodyne.” The affidavit was used in the case as verification from a manager with “personal knowledge” of the company that the amount of electricity produced was tied to the amount of water flowing in the river.
    He was also present in the courtroom, sitting behind lawyers from his firm with a briefcase bearing a visible logo of the United States Senate, according to News and Record reports.
    Sen. Hagan argued that Murphy was unaware of her husband’s involvement in the case because his name only appeared on his own affidavit. However, his name and contact information were on nearly every document included in the case file due to his position as founding partner of the law firm that represented Hydrodyne.
    Multiple appeals were filed due to the judge’s relationship with the Hagans, but the water authority eventually reached a settlement with the plants earlier this year for $2.35 million. Hagan was the manager of the partnership that owned Hydrodyne at the time of the settlement.
    Murphy remains a judge in the Superior Court, ruling on complex business cases.
    Hagan has been criticized in recent weeks for using her position both as a North Carolina state senator and in the U.S. Congress to financially benefit members of her family.
    Hagan’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
    This entry was posted in Politics and tagged 2014 Election, Kay Hagan. Bookmark the permalink.

    http://freebeacon.com/politics/hagan...ollar-lawsuit/


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