Thread: Say It Ain't So, Tingles! MSNBC's Matthews Says Dems Could Lose 10 Senate Seats In Th

Actually, It Looks Like The Republicans Could Win BIG This Fall



(49 comments)

By Brian Carey
July 23, 2014

The latest polling data about the midterm races doesn’t give Republicans a lot of reason for optimism, unless it’s viewed in the light of historical context.
The last time that Republicans won big during a midterm election was… well, during the last midterm election, in 2010. The GOP made unprecedented gains in the House and broke the filibuster-proof supermajority that the Democrats enjoyed in the Senate.
Republicans would have done even better if they didn’t nominate a bunch of crappy Senate candidates in 2010.
However, at this point in 2010, things weren’t looking so rosy for the GOP. Over at The Weekly Standard, Jay Cost shares some interesting data about where summertime public polling stood during that election cycle:

At this point in 2010, Marco Rubio was trailing Charlie Crist. Rob Portman was in a tie in his battle against Lee Fisher in Ohio. Both won comfortably. Meanwhile, Wisconsin was just popping up on the radar as a pickup for the GOP, and everybody thought Delaware was in the bag. Furthermore, at this point the Cook Political Report also listed Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire as Republican toss-ups, though the GOP won them all comfortably. On the House side, few people saw the magnitude of the GOP victory at this point in the cycle.

Cost isn’t alone. Over at the National Journal, Josh Kraushaar is bold enough to put “The Odds of a GOP Wave are Increasing” right in the headline.
More encouragement for Republicans: Just a day before the Alex Sink/David Jolly special election last March, the Public Policy Polling survey showed Democrat Alex Sink ahead by 3%. The end result: Jolly by almost 2%.
The fact of the matter is that polling data is soft for the GOP now because it should be. That’s just a fact of life that we’ll have to accept. The political gravity, especially as reflected in polling, favors Democrats.
On election day, however, the important poll often reveals a much more favorable result.

http://downtrend.com/brian-carey/act...edium=facebook

Even MSNBC thinks top Dem is delusional: We’ll take back the House!

July 27, 2014 by Cheryl Carpenter Klimek 56 Comments

U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., thinks the Democrats will win back the House in November.
Even MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki was openly skeptical during Saturday’s “Up” interview when the minority whip declared Democrats will do well in the midterm elections, despite conventional wisdom which suggests otherwise.
Citing good candidates and better fundraising, Hoyer said the Democrats have a strong shot at winning.
“My experience over the last three or four years is that Republicans have a penchant for self-destruction,” he said. “They have a penchant for doing things the American public shakes their head at.”
Hoyer said the Republicans shut down the government and people thought that was “dumb.”
Apparently, he’s not listening to his own comments.

Watch Hoyer’s interview here:



http://www.bizpacreview.com/2014/07/...e-house-134538

So Who Do Most Americans Want In Charge of Congress? Poll Says GOP

Posted on Monday, August 4th, 2014 at 8:04 pm.
by: Suzanne Reisig Olden



I’m betting that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid aren’t happy with this poll! An NBC/WSJ/Marist poll, conducted July 28-31, shows that a majority of registered voters want a Republican majority in both the House and Senate. The poll was quite eye opening.
The first question asked was whether the respondents thought Congress had been productive and to what degree. 50% said they thought Congress had been very unproductive, with only 3% saying Congress had been very productive. Of the 50% who said unproductive said that it was partially the Republican House, they wanted it to keep its GOP majority.
Next, they were asked if they wanted the majority in the House stay Republican, or become Democrat. 43% said they wanted Republicans in the majority, 41% wanted Democrats in the majority, and 16% unsure. When asked about the Senate, 43% wanted the GOP to take the majority, 41% wanted Democrats to keep the majority, and 15% unsure.
Now before you think they asked only Republicans, think again. 26% of respondents were softy Democrats, 19% were strong Democrats, while 24% were soft Republicans and 18% strong Republicans. More Democrats want change than Republicans.
Predictably, Democrats are in a panic, which probably explains their fundraising focus on impending, and imagined, impeachment. We all hope it’s impending, but no one has brought it up in Congress.
Nothing is certain and it’s still a long way, in election days, until November. But that poll sure looks good!!

http://www.conservativeinfidel.com/u...poll-says-gop/

Actually, It Looks Like The Republicans Could Win BIG This Fall

Soros is working overtime on voter fraud to make sure they don't.

http://www.alipac.us/f9/soros-networ...groups-307131/

Just couldn't resist.

President Obama's New Poll Numbers Eerily Similar To Bush's Before 2006 Wipeout

Matt Vespa | Aug 06, 2014



The recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll surely doesn’t bode well for the Obama administration, which promised hope and change on a platter back in 2008. Seventy-one percent of Americans feels that the country is going in the wrong direction. President Obama’s job approval has dropped to 40 percent–and only 42 percent approve of how he’s handling the economy. Approval on foreign policy, an area where this administration polled somewhat strongly, fell to 36 percent among Americans.
Regarding the economy, Carol Lee of the Wall Street Journal said earlier this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “there’s a total disconnect” between reality and rhetoric on Obama’s economic agenda:



CAROL LEE, WSJ: If you look at what the president is saying, his messages publicly, there's a total disconnect between, clearly, what the American public feels and what he is saying is going on in the economy. On Friday he came out and said things are getting better. And clearly, people don't feel that way. The president was campaigning -- raising money in California -- a few weeks ago and he was saying people feel better than they did five years ago. And some of the folks who were interviewed, who participated in this poll explicitly said that they don't feel better than they did five years ago, and so I think what the White House has to contend with is how you match the president's rhetoric and how he's approaching the public on this issue with more what you're seeing in this poll, which is that people are not feeling good about the future -- the 79% of people who think their kids' future is not going to be better than their own. But where there is a connection shouldn't make any supporter of the president hopeful as the 2014 midterms approach since these numbers are eerily similar to Bush's in 2006 (via Roll Call/ Stu Rothenberg):

The new survey, conducted July 30-August 3, showed Obama’s approval at 40 percent, with 54 percent disapproving of his performance. Since Bush’s late July 2006 job ratings stood at 39 percent approve/56 percent disapprove, the new Obama numbers bear an even more uncomfortably close resemblance to Bush’s.
…
As I noted in the column, foreign policy has become a significant problem for the president — and therefore for his party — in the midterms.
The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found Obama’s job performance on foreign policy as a weak 36 percent approve/60 percent disapprove — by far his worst numbers in that area.
…
While Congress — and Republicans in Congress — remain unpopular, the bad news for the president in the survey continues to raise the possibility the midterms will be more “about” President Obama than about anyone or anything else.


http://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattves...campaign=nl_pm

Democrats will get less than half the vote while the republicans and libertarians split the other half. The Democrats will still win.

PAPER: NO HOPE TO TAKE BACK HOUSE...

Cruz: Americans have reason for optimism...

'Conservatives Winning'...




Franken challenger: Dem-controlled Senate land of '10,000 excuses'...


http://drudgereport.com/

The Federalist Papers

Do you think Americans will fall for this?



Democrats’ 2014 Campaign Strategy Revealed; Will Americans Fall For It?
So staring at an absolute debacle at the polls this fall, the Democrats are grasping...
thefederalistpapers.org

Democrats’ 2014 Campaign Strategy Revealed; Will Americans Fall For It?

By Steve Straub On August 12, 2014 · 144 Comments · In US



What’s disturbing about this, and what people should be offended by, is that the Democrat party thinks Americans are stupid…

Via Allen B. West:

So staring at an absolute debacle at the polls this fall, the Democrats are grasping at anything to help their failing cause of progressive socialism. Thanks to some analysis by Politico, we have some insight into their battle plan: sound like conservatives! What a clever disguise.
As Politico reports, “It’s one thing for Democrats running in red parts of the country to sound like Republicans on the campaign trail. It’s another when Democrats running in purple or even blue territory try to do so. Yet that’s what’s happening in race after race this season. Faced with a treacherous political environment, many Democrats are trotting out campaign ads that call for balanced budgets, tax cuts and other more traditionally GOP positions. Some of them are running in congressional districts that just two years ago broke sharply for President Barack Obama.”
Maybe Democrats — let’s call them what they are, progressive socialists — are actually realizing it doesn’t work. It’s finally hitting home for Americans and no amount of spin will save these deceivers from a presumed fate — unless they can morph into something else. And they better, because according to recent polling, Barack Obama is very unpopular – along with his “policies.”
Hysteria about voter ID, income inequality, and the war on women ain’t making it this time. The only remaining course of action for progressive socialists is to become shape shifters!
Politico says, “whether the Democrats running … can survive what party strategists acknowledge is a deteriorating national political environment will largely hinge on how well they can appeal to more conservative voters. “It’s a different kind of electorate,” said Ben Tulchin, a San Francisco-based Democratic pollster. “If you’re running in a competitive district as a Democrat in a nonpresidential year, you want to strike a more moderate tone.”
Now that makes me laugh. The minimization of Blue Dog (moderate, conservative) Democrats has been clearly evident, just ask Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tx) who had the entire Congressional Hispanic Caucus dogpile him because of his criticism of Obama on illegal immigration — and siding with the GOP. You can ask Rep. John Barrow (D-Ga) if he’ll ever see a Committee leadership position — not as long as Pelosi the Liberal Progressive runs the House Democrat machine – after he led the way to eliminate the health insurance subsidy available to members of Congress
However, what I find disturbing — and Americans in general should find offensive — is that the Democrat party thinks you’re just stupid enough to fall for this charade.

Will Americans fall for this?

http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/u...ns-fall-for-it

2014: More Than a Backlash From 2008

A Commentary By Sean Trende
in Political Commentary

Related Articles

• The Final Nail in the Democrats' Coffin By Lawrence Kudlow
• The Final Days By Susan Estrich
• Midterm Morsels: Senate and Governor Ratings Changes and Observations By Larry J. Sabato

Thursday, August 14, 2014

The 2014 Senate elections are not shaping up to be particularly favorable for the Democrats. While there are still scenarios where they could walk away breaking even, or even gaining a seat or two, those scenarios are pretty far-fetched. Current predictions vary somewhat, but seem to center around Republicans picking up somewhere between five and seven seats, with the overall range of possibilities a bit wider.
The nonpartisan explanations for this state of affairs have centered around three different factors: the president is unpopular, the president’s party always loses seats in midterm elections, and the Democrats overperformed in 2008, setting them up for a rough year in 2014 (you can see Bill Schneider making all three arguments here). In this article, I’ll briefly discuss all three explanations, and then add a fourth.
Very little needs to be said about the first factor: The relationship between presidential approval and electoral outcomes has been thoroughly explored, and I have little to add. Likewise, the tendency of the president’s party to fare poorly in midterm elections is so well-known as to require only an asterisk here: While the president’s party has lost House seats in all but two post-World War II midterm elections (1998 and 2002), it has gained or broken even in Senate seats in five (1962, 1970, 1982, 1998, and 2002). That’s somewhere between a third and a quarter of the postwar midterms, so our rule here is not really as “real” as it is for House elections.
Evaluating the third factor is a bit dicier. There are doubtless examples of elections where the president’s party is so overextended from earlier wins that losses became almost inevitable: The large Democratic gains in 1986 were certainly a function of the huge Republican gains in 1980. Likewise, in 1958 the Democrats were able to gain 13 seats — the most seats won by a party since universal direct election of Senators began in 1914 — because Republicans had gained two seats in 1952, 12 seats in 1946, and four seats in 1940.
But we also have countervailing examples — including two of fairly recent vintage. In 2012, Democrats managed to gain two seats, their gain of six seats in 2006 (on top of gaining four seats in 2000) notwithstanding. Republicans beat the odds when they captured six seats in 2010 (not counting Scott Brown’s special election win), despite the fact that Republicans hadn’t suffered a net loss of seats with that Senate class since 1986. Big pickups for the parties in 1934, 1938, 1946, 1948, 1958, and 1986 were followed by relatively quiet elections six years later.
If we look at all Senate elections since 1914, it turns out that there actually is an inverse relationship between the number of seats that a party gains (or loses) and how that party fared in the elections six years earlier. The effect is just shy of full statistical significance (p =.06), but more importantly, it is small (b =-.28). If we confine ourselves to elections in the post-War period, the effect remains small (b =-.186), but is not significant (p =.297). If you look at the two prior election cycles, you get a stronger effect (b =-.37, p =.002), but even then, we would only expect Democrats to lose two seats this cycle based upon previous outcomes.
That actually sounds about right for this cycle. Let’s look at this a different way. Table 1 shows the 14 Senate races that are generally considered to be competitive this cycle: Two Republican seats and 12 Democratic seats. I’ve also shown the Democratic vote share in these seats in 2008, 2002, and 1996 (all figures are of the two-party vote, i.e., with third parties excluded):
Table 1: Democratic share of two-party vote in previous Senate contests of states with competitive 2014 races





Source: Dave Leip
What stands out is that, with respect to these particular seats, the Democratic vote shares are actually relatively stable. Alaska, Arkansas, and Montana are the only seats where the Democratic vote share has really fluctuated wildly over the past three elections for this class of senators. In the quite good Republican year of 2002, Democrats won half of these seats, and came close in another three (all three of which fell in 2008). In other words, the seats that are competitive this year are typically competitive.
When you look at it this way, Alaska stands out as the only seat Democrats are defending that is clearly the result of a fluke outcome from 2008. You can make a case for Minnesota, but it is a Purple state with a Blue cast, and that seat is really only on the outskirts of competitiveness right now. Stronger cases can be made for the Democratic wins in North Carolina and Louisiana — both of which probably depended on unusual youth and African-American turnout and the late break toward Democrats — but Democrats had been competitive in races for both of these seats for several cycles. Without splitting hairs too much, I think we can say that the Democrats’ vulnerabilities this cycle are in part a function of their successes in the 2008 elections, but it is a small factor.
To get a better sense of what is going on here, we need to look at a fourth factor: call it “ideological drift.” Table 2 shows these 14 seats, but instead focuses on the partisan index of the state. This measurement subtracts the Democratic or Republican two-party vote share in a state from the Democratic or Republican vote share nationally, allowing us to control for national effects (this is similar to Cook PVI, except that it looks at one presidential year, rather than two).
Table 2: Democratic partisan index in competitive 2014 states, 1996-2012





Source: Dave Leip
We’re comparing the 2012 elections with the 1996 elections here — the Obama reelection with the Clinton reelection. Much attention has been paid to the leftward swing of certain states — Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia come to mind. This is reflected in the chart: We see moves leftward vis-à-vis 1996 in Alaska, North Carolina, and especially Colorado.
The countervailing rightward movements in other states, however, have received little attention. But they play a crucial role in understanding this election. Sixteen years ago, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and West Virginia were substantially more Democratic than they are today.
Recall too that partisan indices only look at how vote shares for one candidate have moved, so these shifts probably convey an impression that the shifts were smaller than they actually are. The 19-point shift in West Virginia represents a movement from a Democrat winning, for example, 54% of the vote in West Virginia to winning 35% of the vote. So the net swing is the double the shift in partisan index — in this case an astonishing 38 points.
If we look at the three races where the Democrats are in the most trouble — West Virginia, South Dakota, and Montana — the playing field has worsened for them substantially since 1996. West Virginia has moved wildly, while South Dakota and Montana have moved from the outskirts of Purple state status to true Red state status.
Likewise, the two most threatened Democratic incumbents, Mary Landrieu in Louisiana and Mark Pryor in Arkansas, also hail from states that have swung strongly toward Republicans in the past two decades. The swing is probably even more pronounced in midterm elections, since they will not be able to count on replicating the surge in African-American voting their states enjoyed in 2008 and 2012. Finally, if Kentucky still had the same partisan orientation that it had in 1996, Mitch McConnell would probably be in very, very deep trouble.
Again, there are countervailing trends that help Democrats. But when we look at the summary numbers at the bottom of Table 2, this batch of states has moved from being a group with a midpoint that is roughly at the center of the country as a whole to one with a distinct Republican tilt.
So if we are trying to understand what is happening in 2014, we should definitely start with the president’s approval rating, before moving on to the fact that the president’s party tends to lose seats in midterm elections. We should look at the fact that 2008 was a good Democratic year, but it is also very important to keep in mind that there are demographic shifts that work against Democrats, and that they play a very substantial role in the party’s precarious position this cycle.

Sean Trende is the senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics and a senior columnist for the Crystal Ball . He is the author of The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs and Who Will Take It , and co-author of the Almanac of American Politics 2014 . Follow Sean on Twitter @SeanTrende.

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Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports. Comments about this content should be directed to the author.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/publ...lash_from_2008