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Showing posts with label Alabama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alabama. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Why Doug Jones Won

CNN has a great piece up on how exactly Doug Jones won the Alabama senate seat last night. Essentially, it's this: when Democrats turn out to vote, they win. It's just that simple.

Jones was a great candidate who ran as an unapologetic liberal. When the Dems don't half ass and moderate it, they can win...even in deep red Alabama. No doubt, Moore was a terrible candidate but that was only one of many factors. Democrats will now be fully energized and we can expect to see more quality candidates running even in districts where previous beliefs have said they would not win.

Like my co-blogger, I thought Moore would win merely on the abortion issue alone. I was quite happy last night to be wrong. It's safe to say now that there is a lot of energy on the ground now for Democrats given last night's results and the results last November in Virginia and New Jersey. If this carries into next year, Trump is fucked. One or both houses will be taken back and he will be impeached and thrown out of office (if it doesn't happen sooner).

Jones stands an excellent chance of holding on to his seat when it comes up again in 2020. Since the GOP seems to now be fully engaged in a civil war, who knows what kind of candidate they will put up? It will also be a presidential year so more Democrats will turn out.

Oh yeah, one more thing. The polls were accurate. Jones won within the margin of error.

Monday, December 11, 2017

Polls Are Usually Accurate

Conservatives hate polls. It's probably because they are fact based numbers and we all know that facts have a liberal bias. Conservatives don't want to face reality and want to play in the emotional end of the pool, chucking all logic right out the window.

Take the 2016 presidential election. Conservatives think that all the polls were wrong and Trump beat all those smug elites who talk about facts and stuff. The problem is that the polls were quite accurate. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by around 3%. Trump won all the states he was supposed to win by the margins that were detailed in the polls and he picked off three (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) that were within the margin of error. Sure, the projections were wrong but not the polls. The final projection by Nate Silver gave Trump a 30% chance of victory. That's just a little bit less than 1 in 3 which is how it all played out.

So, because I'm someone who looks at polls and recognizes their scientific accuracy, I say that Roy Moore is going to win the Alabama senate race tomorrow. He's been up in the last several polls of likely voters (the only type of poll that matters) and is in a state that just doesn't have enough Democrats. He's also running against an unapologetic Democrat who supports abortion rights and gun control. Moore is running in a special election which means that the turnout demographic is going to be older and whiter. That means more conservative.

As I have said for many years here at Zombie Politics, conservatives are very tribal and want to beat liberals. They don't care who wins, even it's a monster like Roy Moore. If a member of the Nazi party from the 1930s ran against Jones, conservatives would be goose stepping their way to vote for the guy.

Since it's clear that conservatives have lost all capacity for rational thought, all efforts should be focused on getting out more voters and burying these psychotics at the polls. The headline for Wednesday morning.

Republicans elect accused child molester. 

Monday, November 27, 2017

What The Results of the Alabama Special Election Will Tell Us

The results of the Alabama special election are going to be the most definitive statement on the state of the GOP in 2017. I’m speaking more of the base here than of the national leaders who have largely rejected Moore.

If Moore loses, it will show that there are still plenty of decent people left in the GOP, especially in Alabama. It will means there is hope for conservatives in terms of being more reasoned voters.

If Moore wins, then it will fully illustrate what I have been saying for years: conservatives hate liberals with all of their hearts and souls and they are completely inconsolable. Further, Moore’s victory will show where the real problem lies in terms of partisan politics. It’s with the right, not the left. So, it will be end of the “both sides are bad” argument.

Moore’s victory will show that the conservatives would rather vote for an accused pedophile who was banned from a mall then vote for a liberal. They will show themselves to be so far gone in terms of emotions about liberals that it’s going to be impossible to bring them back.

They will then head into 2018 with a child molester in the Senate.

Friday, November 08, 2013

Business Wins

Tuesday's election saw GOP establishment candidate Bradley Byrne beat Tea Party fave Dean Young in Alabama's 1st Congressional District. In what clearly is a sign for the ugly war that will be waged over the next year in the GOP, the business community has clearly had enough of the psychosis and adolescent behavior of the Tea Party and like minded people.

CNN has another story on this as does Politico. This would be why I'm not too worried about the mistakes made by the president and the Democrats in terms of the ACA. We don't have to beat the conservatives. They are beating themselves.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Reality Meets Fantasy

This Thanksgiving, Jerry Danford doesn't have a lot to be thankful for and it's due to Alabama's new immigration policy.

“People are not informed about what it takes to do these special crops. Now a lot of people aren’t interested. The lawmakers that passed this law, they didn't come out here and interview people. If they had done their homework, they would have realized,” he says.

Spoken like a true socialist who wants to the skirt the law and not have to deal with the consequences. Except....

Danford is a lifelong Republican. He admits he did once vote for a Democrat for governor. But in every other race, at every level, he’s always been for the GOP. When I ask if he’s ever voted a Democrat into the White House he scoffs, making a face that says “you have to be kidding.” He voted for Alabama’s current governor, Robert Bentley, a Republican. But he now says he regrets that decision.

“It was an honest mistake,” Danford says, “but, you know, I feel bad over it.”

Danford, like many folks in business in Alabama, are now seeing what happens when lawmakers don't think about immigration and simply act with dogmatic impunity: it hurts the economy. Of course, Republican lawmakers in the state say it will actually help the state's unemployment record. So far, it's having the opposite effect.

“The people that you could get locally, they wouldn't -- regardless of what you offered them, within reason -- they wouldn't put in the long hours. It'd take probably three (of them) to do what two of the immigrant workers do,” he says.“They'd want to be on break all the time, going to the bathroom, going to get a drink, or, you know, something. They just don't have the initiative to work, just plain and simple,” Danford says.

That's a pretty sad statement considering I thought that folks from this part of the country, being the fine and upstanding conservatives that they are, knew how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get to work. Ah, these must be the small portion of stinkin' liberals who leech off the government. So what does Danford want?

“I would like for these lawmakers to go out and get me a pool of labor,” he says.

Millions of dollars are on the line, not just for the farmers but for everyone in the supply chain. When Danford planted watermelons last year, he estimates he paid a trucking company close to $10 million to transport them. A new forecast from the University of Alabama estimates the law will cost the state economy at least $40 million in lost revenue overall.

This whole debacle is a great example of how reality has smacked fantasy in the face hard with a shovel. The people who take a hard line position on this have to realize that thumping your chest and screaming, "It's illegal so fuck 'em" solves absolutely nothing. We have to look at this from the point of view that human capital means a better economy. Danford needs a pool of labor which means we need to embrace the people that are already here, legalize their status and make it easier for talent at all levels to immigrate to this country.

In other words, have some fucking common sense. I used to think that money would trump theology at all times on the right. Now, with the party moving more to the right, it's simply not the case. Meanwhile, our sole superpower status continues to erode...keep it up, folks. Your dreams of "less" government may soon come true!