Daily Kos

In 2004, Republicans won big, and Democrats were left trying to figure out what went wrong.

Then in 2006, Democrats won big, and they decided everything was fine. Republicans merely shrugged it off as the 6-year-itch that bedevils parties that hold the White House in a president's last midterm.

2008, Democrats won big again, and Republicans were left fumbling for excuses, but mainly decided it was Bush's fault and an artifact of Barack Obama's historic campaign.

In 2010, Republicans won big, so they were validated. All was fine! Democrats were left fumbling.

In 2012, Democrats won big, so they decided everything was fine. Demographics and data to the rescue! Republicans decided to rebrand, until they decided fuck that, no rebranding was needed.

And now in 2014, Republicans are validated again in the Democrats' own 6-year-itch election. Democrats are scrambling for answers.  

And I'll tell you what the future looks like:

In 2016, Democrats will win big on the strength of presidential-year turnout. Republicans will realize they really have a shit time winning presidential elections, and maybe they should do something about that!

In 2018, Republicans will win on the strength of off-year Democratic base apathy, and they'll decide everything is okay after all. And it's going to be brutal, because those are the governorships we need for 2020 redistricting. Republicans will then lock up the House for another decade.

Then in 2020, Democrats will win on presidential year turnout, and  ... you get the point.

So in short, we have two separate Americas voting every two years. We have one that is more representative, that includes about 60 percent of voting age adults. Then we have one where we can barely get a third of voting age adults to turn out, and is much whiter and older than the country. And Democrats can win easily with the one, and Republicans can win easily with the other.

And that cycle won't be broken until 1) the Democrats figure out how to inspire their voters to the polls on off years, or 2) Republicans figure out how to appeal to the nation's changing electorate.

And given that each party is validated every two years after a blowout loss, the odds of either happening anytime soon? Bleak.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Jeff Singer Several races remain uncalled as of Thursday. We recently ran through them here and we have updates below for any contests where we have new details. You can check who has won each key race at our race tracker here, and you can also keep an eye on our continuously updated list of uncalled races. (We're relying on CNN's election results page for calls.)

• AZ-02: We'll start with one of the most unpredictable contests left. Republican Martha McSally leads Democratic Rep. Ron Barber by 1,293 votes. If this sounds very familiar there's a good reason: In 2012 McSally led Barber by almost the exact same number of votes, but ended up losing after the remaining ballots were tabulated.

At the moment it's not clear how many ballots are left to be counted: Some sources say 37,000, some say 50,000. Most of the votes are from Barber-friendly Pima County, and the more uncounted ballots there are, the better his chances become.

If we assume the number is 37,000, Barber would need to win the remaining votes by about 4 points. In 2012 Barber carried the late votes and pulled off a narrow victory after being down on Election Night, so this is doable. We'll be keeping a close eye on this one as things become clearer.

Head below the fold for a look at where other uncalled contests stand.

• Today's comic by Ruben Bolling is Christie & Cuomo's guide to Ebola:
  
• Applications for unemployment compensation at 14-year low: For the week ending Nov. 1, seasonally adjusted initial claims for unemployment compensation fell to 278,000, down 10,000 from the previous week. For the comparable week of 2013, initial claims were 341,000. This marks the eighth consecutive week that initial claims were below 300,000.The four-week running average, which flattens volatility in the weekly figures, fell to 279,000, down 2,250 from the previous week. That is the lowest level since May 2000. For the week ending Oct. 18, the total number of Americans collecting claims rose by 77,119 to 2,138,934. For the comparable week in 2013, there were 3,975,825 persons claiming benefits in both the state and federal emergency compensation programs. Republicans refused to renew the federal program last December, which instantly took 1.347 million jobless Americans off the claims rolls.
• Youth vote slightly better than in 2010 at 21.3%: According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, 21.3 percent of people in the 18-29 age group turned out to vote in the midterm elections this year. That's pretty typical for midterms, but better by 1 percent than in 2010. Youth made up 13 percent of the total electorate this year, also up 1 percent. Democratic candidates were favored 54% to 43% by 18- to 29-year-olds.  
• A victory against the odds in Richmond, California:

  At the headquarters for the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) Tuesday night, a man in a superhero mask made to look like the Chevron logo was capering around, handing play money to people and saying, “Vote for me!”

  It might have been a depressing piece of political theater, but given how the election turned out, it wasn’t. By the end of the night, it was clear that the RPA’s entire slate of candidates had won by a landslide—despite Chevron’s funneling at least $3 million into defeating them (about $72 for each registered voter in the city).

• These Daily Kos community posts were the most shared on Facebook November 5:
  

  Small Victories: Denton, Texas #NoFracking Passes, by LieparDestin

  Democrats Have Their Schlitz Beer Reckoning, by Phoebe Loosinhouse

• In NC, picking up all the campaign signs is the law.
• Are you a jerk at work?

  The study is called “Pushing in the Dark: Causes and Consequences of Limited Self-Awareness for Interpersonal Assertiveness.” The synopsis quotes Daniel Ames, professor of management at Columbia Business School and co-author of the new study: “Finding the middle ground between being pushy and being a pushover is a basic challenge in social life and the workplace. We’ve now found that the challenge is compounded by the fact that people often don’t know how others see their assertiveness. In the language of Goldilocks, many people are serving up porridge that others see as too hot or too cold, but they mistakenly think the temperature comes across as just right—that their assertiveness is seen as appropriate. To our surprise, we also found that many people whose porridge was actually seen as just right mistakenly thought their porridge came off as too hot. That is, they were asserting themselves appropriately in the eyes of others, but they incorrectly thought they were pushing too hard.”

• AC/DC's Rudd faces 10-year sentence in murder-for-hire attempt:

  Drummer Phil Rudd of Australian rock band AC/DC whose hits include "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" was accused Thursday of trying to arrange two killings as well as possession of drugs.

• Harvard secretly photographed 2,000 students to study their attendance:

  Harvard University has revealed that it secretly photographed some 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls last spring as part of a study of classroom attendance, an admission that prompted criticism from faculty and students who said the research was an invasion of privacy.

  The clandestine experiment, disclosed publicly for the first time at a faculty meeting Tuesday night, came to light about a year-and-a-half after revelations that administrators had secretly searched thousands of Harvard e-mail accounts

• EU plans for supergrid is good news for renewables: The upgraded electricity grid, to be completed by 2018, will mean protection against blackouts for the 28-member EU nations and less need for them to import energy across state boundaries. That's good news for renewables, which have been making major inroads in several EU nations.
• Team Blackness discussed Artie Lange's slavery sex fantasies, a Florida man who was jailed for feeding the homeless, Harvard University's anal sex class, and a look at some of our newly elected Republican officials. Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS
• On today's Kagro in the Morning show: are voters confused, or just Gimmetarians? What's next for ACA? Let's speculate! With Armando! Rosalyn MacGregor shares research that says we're more sharply divided politically than racially. Learning from WA's background check win.

Hahaha, check out the headline on this Republican National Committee press release:

Hillary's Policies Were On The Ballot

Nice try, guys, but even if we assume that Hillary Clinton's policies are the same as, or at least largely similar to, President Obama's policies, there's a little problem: Neither Hillary Clinton nor President Obama were on any ballots. Moreover, to the extent that actual policy questions were literally on the ballot on Tuesday, voters overwhelmingly preferred the more progressive position. Even in states that elected Republicans, voters approved ballot measures that raised the minimum wage and guaranteed paid sick leave and rejected measures that would have restricted reproductive choice.

Nonetheless, the GOP thinks they can parlay their low-turnout 2014 victory into a 2016 win:

After A Historic Rebuke In Yesterday's Midterms, The Obama-Clinton Policies Will Be On The Ballot Again In 2016

Perhaps, but Republicans had better hope not, because (a) when those policy questions were on the ballot on 2014, they passed and (b) when President Obama himself was on the ballot in 2008 and 2012, he won. The real story about 2016 is that in 2016, more people will vote than voted in 2014. And when more people vote, it's not a good thing for the GOP. So yes, Hillary might be on the ballot. And so might policies that she supports. And both will win.

Serious Republican logic at work:
With a Republican Congress, nothing was ever going to happen on immigration beyond "build 100 foot fence and moat and sharks and lasers and landmines," so not sure what Boehner is even talking about. He's had years to act on the issue and has refused. NOW, with even bigger Republican majorities, that's supposed to change?

If the president acts unilaterally, then by definition some measure of immigration reform will happen. It may not be comprehensive and perfect and everything everyone wishes for, but that won't happen with Republicans in charge anyway.

Oh, what do Republicans think they'll throw at him that they haven't already? They set out to destroy him, systematically and overtly, from day one. President Barack Obama has sat there like an idiot (or saint, depending on your point of view) taking the abuse in hopes of fulfilling his lifelong dream of being "a uniter" and "the adult in the room," and America has punished his party accordingly. So what exactly do Republicans think they can "burn" Obama with? A lot of extra screaming on Fox News and Breitbart, to add to the already existing cacophony of screaming?

Or are they talking impeachment? Because if so, bring it on. Seriously. Bring it on. Let the Republican governing philosophy continue to be, a generation after the last Democratic president, nothing more than "impeachment."  

1:15 PM PT: Reminder, even in Tuesday's heavy-GOP electorate, voters were pro-immigration reform by a 57-39 margin according to exit polls. So Obama will get "burned" by taking the uber-majority position, while Republicans will benefit from standing firm for the fringe?

This just in: The organization created to fight "voter fraud" and which organized to defend against "voter fraud" on election day found no voter fraud.

A week before Election Day, the “voter integrity” group True the Vote released a new smart phone app to empower its army of citizen detectives to report suspected incidents of voter fraud and intimidation across the country, in the hopes of creating, as True the Vote’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht put in an interview on Monday, “an archive that will finally pull the curtain back on the myth that there is no voter fraud.”

But it seems that the evidence of massive voter fraud that Engelbrecht hoped to expose failed to materialize. In the week that the app was available, users recorded only 18 incidents of election irregularities, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with True the Vote’s policy priorities.

Even those 18 "irregularities" were thin, ranging from malfunctioning voting machines (which is not "voter fraud") to a Texas voter complaining a black person was standing too close to them (again, thin evidence of "fraud"). So the entire nationwide enterprise was a total bust. (Not, of course, that that will dampen the group's conviction that "voter fraud" is all around them. No sir, this just proves that the "voter fraud" has Klingon cloaking technology.)

Keep the names True the Vote and Catherine Engelbrecht in mind. Englebrecht made a name for herself with a purely fraudulent and overtly racial claim that "The New Black Panthers" were coming to conduct Texas "voter fraud," a bit of race-baiting so successful that new Texas Gov.-elect Greg Abbott raided the voter registration group Engelbrecht claimed was in on the scheme. The group's supposed fight against "voter fraud," in other words, was from the start based on fabricated claims about black voters specifically, which should give you a gigantic clue about why their preferred "solutions" to fraud all revolve around making it more expensive and time-consuming for poor or minority voters to cast votes at all.

This election skewed Republican, white, and old. But it didn't skew anti-Obamacare, not by a long shot. Check out the results of exit polling.
Yep, even with this big Republican electorate, just 49 percent thought ACA "went too far," while 46 percent say it either didn't go far enough, or was about right. It's going to take a lot of reflection and a lot of post-mortem-ing to figure out everything that went into Tuesday's election. But if Republicans decide that it was all about their mandate to repeal Obamacare and make that their focus for the next two years, they'll clearly be overreaching.

But that's a trap we want them to walk into. Provided, that is, that President Obama and Senate Democrats take Jed's advice, and fight them on it. That means no compromising on any single Obamacare issue they introduce. No Democratic votes on any part of repeal. A presidential veto of everything. Democrats need to trust the fact that they've got opinion on their side, and reinforce that by acting like it.

Mitch McConnell swore all through this campaign season that he wanted to repeal Obamacare, "root and branch." Pretty much everyone, except the tea party base McConnell was relying on to get out and vote for him, have known since the Supreme Court upheld the law in June, 2012 that this was not a realistic goal. Not once people actually started getting their health insurance through it. So the plan they'll have to settle on is to nibble away at it piece by piece through the reconciliation process. Here's what that probably means, according to the discussions Jonathon Cohn has had with experts and lobbyists: going after the things that are arcane or not terribly popular; the mandates; the medical device tax; the advisory board; and risk corridors.

As far as the individual mandate goes, that's an absolute non-starter. See this, the president in Wednesday's post-election press conference.

It should also be a non-starter for the insurance industry, which benefits tremendously from the captive market they now claim. Bottom line though, is that it would be difficult to hold the law together without it, it will be vetoed, and there aren't enough Republicans to override that veto.

For the rest of their options for repeal, head below the fold.

Based on the response to President Obama's post-election press conference by the right-wing chatter machine, it appears conservatives think that their victories in Tuesday's low-turnout midterm elections means that President Obama should step aside and hand the White House keys over to Mitt Romney. For example:

Fox News host Sean Hannity asserted that Obama was demonstrating "breathtaking arrogance" during his press conference.

Breathtaking arrogance? Come on, Hannity. It's been six years. You need better code words than that. Other Fox personalities were equally irate, but used different language, such as:
And:
Okay, both of those folks are more creative than Sean Hannity (at least relatively speaking), but they are equally wrong. The reality is that President Obama won the past two elections with a greater percentage of the vote than the winner received in 9 of the previous 15 presidential elections. I know these guys think the fact that Mitch McConnell won reelection by double digits in a red state means Obama should step aside, but the point the president was making yesterday was that he was elected too, by the entire country, and the mere fact that the GOP prevailed in a midterm election doesn't change that.

And you know what? There's nothing wrong with president reminding Republicans, the media, and the country of that fact, because while Republicans had a good election day on Tuesday, that doesn't make the votes that were cast in 2008 or 2012 irrelevant. President Obama is still the president and if Republicans want to put Mitt Romney in the Oval Office, they're going to have to wait until November, 2016.

An op-ed from House Speaker John Boehner and soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Wall Street Journal outlines their plans for crippling government what they call helping the "struggling middle-class Americans who are clearly frustrated by an increasing lack of opportunity, the stagnation of wages, and a government that seems incapable of performing even basic tasks." That includes taking on Obamacare, of course.

They begin with the totally false premise that, "Health costs […] continue to rise under a hopelessly flawed law that Americans have never supported." Never mind that the rise in healthcare costs has slowed dramatically in the last several years, in part because of the law. And never mind that the law—even in Tuesdays' Republican electorate—gets more support than the idea of repealing the law. It's been a good 14 years since Republicans abandoned the reality-based world, and it's been working for them. So they're sticking with it. And how they say they'll start on the dismantling of Obamacare is this:

[…] a proposal to restore the traditional 40-hour definition of full-time employment, removing an arbitrary and destructive government barrier to more hours and better pay created by the Affordable Care Act of 2010.

Right now, full-time employment is 30 hours/week for the purposes of the law. Republicans say that is forcing—forcing—poor beleaguered employers to cut workers' hours to below 30 hours to save them from the exorbitant costs of having to provide health insurance. And raising that threshold is going to restore those employees' hours how exactly? Now employers would be able to make workers put in a 39.5-hour work week without shelling out for health insurance. Which is, of course, the whole point for McConnell and Boehner. Hint, American worker: They're not looking out for your paycheck. Or your health insurance.

Problem one for Boehner and McConnell is getting their respective caucuses to go along with any Obamacare plan. Boehner's been at it for almost four years with no success, and McConnell's got at least three would-be presidents—Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida—to wrangle. Problem two for the "reformers" is the $83 billion hit to the deficit over the next ten years the CBO says this provision would cost. (Here's another hint: They don't really care about the deficit.)

Here's problem three for them, provided that the proposal actually gets to the respective floors, put succinctly, by Henry Aaron at the Brookings Institute: "If you break it, you own it. […] They're going to have responsibility for anything that goes wrong." That is, if Democrats refuse to play along and don't provide any votes to pass it.

Republicans handled their losses in 2008 and 2012 by going all-out confrontational, showing their base that they'd be fighting hard for the things they believed in despite the electoral shellacking they suffered.

Democrats handled their victories by begging Republicans to work with them, and they handled their losses by begging Republicans to work with them. And how'd that turn out?

There are likely a thousand reasons for the Dems' poor mid-term turnout, but chief among them has to be the sense that Democrats simply won't go to the mat for the things they believe in. Heck, they're afraid to say they believe in things even when they're popular, like immigration or the public option or whatever.

Well, here's a chance. Here's McConnell, flexing his muscles, threatening Obama over an issue in which Republicans are in the minority. Obama can do the thing he always does, which is beg for compromise that will never come. Or, he can decide he'll go out with a bang, helping paint Republicans as the fringe degenerates that they are as we head into 2016.

It's clear the former has done Obama little good. Sure, he got reelected, but without him at the top of the ticket Democrats have lost over 50 House seats, and now the Senate is back in GOP hands. They treat him like shit, don't even consider him American. As Obama's approval ratings prove, no one gives him any credit for being "the adult in the room."

So now, finally, with nothing left to lose, and with a legacy needing to be set, what will Obama do? Try to work with the GOP Congress and get absolutely nothing for the next two years? Or set the foundation for a Democratic counterattack by painting the GOP as what they are—enemies of progress and the average American?

This is encouraging:

"Before the end of the year, we're going to take whatever lawful actions that I can take," Obama told reporters at the White House [...]

"I think it's fair to say that I've shown a lot of patience and tried to work on a bipartisan basis as much as possible and will keep doing so," Obama said. "I've consistently said that it is my profound preference and interest to see Congress act on a comprehensive immigration reform bill."

"What we can't do is just keep on waiting," he added. "There's a cost for waiting."

Strip away the diplomatic language, and he's saying "pass the comprehensive immigration reform bill the Senate previously passed, or I'm going ahead with executive orders."

This is encouraging, but no one celebrate just yet. Obama has done the "Lucy and the Football" thing many times before. But this is the approach Obama needs to take. It's time for a real fight. Let the Republicans lose their heads over this. Let's encourage their hysteria. Give people a stark contrast, between the side that wants to govern and improve people's lives, and whatever the hell it is shrill Republicans are doing on the other side.

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill

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