The Challenge of the 2014 Elections

Take a look at this graphic.

It's from a brilliant analysis of exactly what the Democrats need to do in order to win the 2014 elections. Sasha Issenberg illustrates the numbers and demographics behind presidential year elections and mid term elections, boiling it down to a simple question: Can the Democrats mobilize the "unreliable" voters to succeed in the 2014 election? If they can, they hold the Senate and part of me is thinking that all the hysteria right now over SHELLACKING PART TWO is simply a fear tactic to mobilize the troops.

Another interesting part of the article is this.

Add it all up, and the Democrats’ midterm conundrum comes to look like an actuarial one. “If twenty years ago, you said the midterm electorate is older, I would have said, ‘Yahoo! Glad to hear it,’ ” says Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “But now the Roosevelt seniors are dead and the Reagan seniors are voting.” Increasingly, those older voters are backing the same side: In 2000, Al Gore won the youngest and eldest bands of the electorate by slight margins; in 2012, the over-50 vote broke for Mitt Romney by 12 points. 

There are also simply more of those older voters overall. Since Obama’s first appearance on a presidential ballot, the population of Americans over the age of 55 has increased by nearly 13 million. By 2022, it will have increased by another nine million. People tend to grow more conservative as they age, but as a cohort, Generation X—whose oldest members will soon reach their fifties—is appreciably more conservative than the Millennials who follow them. “When the Millennials are fifty-five, they’re going to vote more Democratic,” Lake says, not exactly cautioning patience. “That’s thirty years away.”

This ties in to what I have been saying about how much the electorate is going to change over the next 20-30 years. Imagine what will happen when we have "Obama seniors" and the Reagan seniors are gone.

Democrats and Republicans Are The Same?

U.S. Senate Democrats pulling all-nighter on climate change

Uh...really?

Heed His Warning

It's easy after the last election for Democrats to feel confident. The president only dropped two states from 2008. Gains were seen in both the House and Senate (netting 8 seats in the former and 2 in the latter). The GOP hasn't gotten above 300 electoral votes since 1988 with the Democrats winning 4 of the last 6 presidential elections.

And, as the absentee ballots are counted, we see that the president got 65.3 million votes so his lower totals than 2008 weren't as low as originally thought (Mitt Romney is now at 60.7 so he did get 1 million more votes than McCain in 2008).

But, as Rahm Emanuel notes in this piece, we can't rest on our laurels.

We cannot expect Republicans to cede the economic argument so readily, or to fall so far short on campaign mechanics, the next time around. So, instead of resting on false assurances of underlying demographic advantages, the Democratic Party must follow through on our No. 1 priority, which the president set when he took office and reemphasized throughout this campaign: It is time to come home and rebuild America.

Right. This is no time for end zone dances. We have to deliver.  What's a key way we do that?

If we want to build a future in which the middle class can succeed, we must continue the push for reform that the president began with Race to the Top, bringing responsibility and accountability to our teachers and principals. 

Honestly, it starts with education and that means high stakes testing for every subject across the board, especially social studies. Many on the Right take the view that Democrats coddle those in the education system. Clearly, they have not read the fact sheet on Race to the Top. If they did, they would see that the president and many of his supporters (including me) wholeheartedly support this endeavor.

If the students that are in school now receive a higher quality education, they are going to be a very strong backbone of this country in the next decade. Take some time to look through the fact sheet listed above and see how these changes have to made to our education system in order for our economy to improve.

For the Democrats, this should be one of the main policies to vigorously pursue in the president's second term. This is one of a few key policies that is going to help win election after election. 

Yeah...No...Not Really

If I had a buck for every time I heard a conservative whine to me in the last couple of years about how "the president and the Democrats haven't passed a budget in a thousand days," I'd be a millionaire (and I'd still be a Democrat with all my money:)). The problem with this ripe of piece of poo (like most of the other things they say) is that they aren't really telling the whole story and (as usual) are being childishly dishonest.

To begin with, budget resolutions aren't binding. They're simply parameters for the House Appropriations Committee to use when they actually pass their various bills and spend money. Their actions are what ultimately execute the budget and guess what? They've been doing it all along even with all the acrimony that's been taking place since the GOP took back the House.

More importantly, when the Senate passed the Budget Control Act last summer that resolved the debt limit battle, they passed an actual binding bill that set binding appropriations caps for this fiscal year and the next and instituted a mechanism to contain spending on domestic discretionary programs — education, research, community health programs and the like — through the next decade. This would be why Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won't bring the president's budget to the floor of the Senate: it's redundant.

So, the next time you hear some ass hat foaming at the mouth about how the Democrats haven't passed a budget in a thousand days, point out these two facts to them.

And remind them that the Republicans did the same thing 1998, 2004, and 2006.

Bill channels Markadelphia

On any normal day, I'm the one that usually channels my inner Maher and riffs off of it. A couple of weeks back, though, I think it was the reverse.

During his final New Rule on November 5, 2010, Maher lamented the Stewart-Colbert rally and, at several points during the commentary, he sounded just like me.

You see, Republicans keep staking out position that is further and further right and then demand that the Democrats meet them in the middle. Which is now not the middle anymore.

Sound familiar? It should because I've been saying it for years now. In a non Bizzaro world, I am center left. In a world that has been consumed by the right wing blogsphere and the likes of pathological ideologues like Thomas Sowell, I am condemned as a communist.

Of course, it's not entirely their fault.

And the biggest mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake; that the left is just as cruel and violent as the right; that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism.

Until more people stand up and call the Right for what it is now, we will continue to have this distorted view of reality. Unfortunately, this is going to either require large quantities of cash or for people not care about cash and actually think. The latter is going to be a tough row to hoe.

The simple fact is that these people have convinced millions of American citizens that donating money to rich people is a good thing. And protecting the wealth of rich people against the Big Bad Wolf (government) is the very definition of freedom. Talk about useful idiots....

Here's the full clip:

Martin Luther King spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn't say, "Remember, folks, those sheriffs with with the fire hoses and the German Shepherds, they had a point too!" No. He said, "I have a dream. They have a nightmare."

Indeed. Make no mistake about it. It IS a nightmare. Like Bill, I'm through pretending.