[BartSimpson]

Please post everything to do with the USA's mid-term elections in this topic.

Thank you!

[BartSimpson]

Getting things started it would seem that the Democrat's scorched earth assault on Justice Kavanaugh has backfired on them badly.

In a year when most of their candidates should have coasted to easy victories the backlash against them by Republican and Democrat voters alike is now shaping up to cost them even more seats in Congress, more governor's houses, and more state legislative seats all around the country.

$1:

Republicans are increasingly optimistic about their chances of expanding their narrow Senate majority after the polarizing confirmation battle over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

In the weeks since a series of sexual misconduct allegations were raised against Kavanaugh, the GOP has seen candidates in the Republican strongholds of Texas and Tennessee strengthen their positions, putting possible upset bids by Democrats on hold.

Republicans are increasingly bullish on their chances of gaining a seat in North Dakota, where Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D) has seen Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer pull ahead in polls. They also believe they can defeat Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) in Missouri. Both Democrats voted against Kavanaugh's confirmation.

“If you look at the polling we’ve seen in the last four or five days, it’s become clear that states like North Dakota and Missouri are moving in the Republicans’ direction,” said Matt Mackowiak, a GOP strategist.

“Most importantly, the opportunity that existed for Democrats in Tennessee and Texas looks like it's on the way out,” he said.

In Arizona and Nevada, widely seen as the best pickup opportunities for Democrats, recent polls suggest that the GOP is holding its own.

One poll released Wednesday by Phoenix-based pollster OH Predictive Insights showed Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) trailing Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) by 6 points.

While most other recent polls show Sinema with a narrow lead, the race to succeed retiring Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) appears to be tightening. A Fox News poll conducted around the same time as the OH Predictive Insights survey showed Sinema ahead by 2 points – well within the poll’s 3.5-point margin of error.

In Nevada, an NBC News/Marist poll released earlier this month put Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) ahead of his Democratic challenger, Rep. Jacky Rosen (Nev.), by 2 points. Heller has long been seen as the most vulnerable GOP Senate incumbent.

“I think Senate races are tightening and that’s not a real surprise,” said Doug Thornell, a former deputy political director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). “As you get closer to an election, that typically happens. There’s more information that voters take in and on both sides see enthusiasm grow.”

The GOP’s best chances for picking up seats look to be in North Dakota and Missouri, but the party also sees opportunities in Montana and Indiana, two states Trump won easily in 2016, as well as Florida, another state won by Trump where Republicans have a strong candidate in Gov. Rick Scott.

West Virginia is another pick-up chance, though Sen. Joe Manchin, the only Democrat to vote to confirm Kavanaugh, is holding on strong in polls. The Cook Political Report moved that race into the “Lean Democratic” column last month.

Republicans also see a longshot chance of flipping New Jersey, a deep-blue state that Hillary Clinton carried by 14 points in 2016.

A Stockton University poll released earlier this month showed a statistical dead heat in the race between Sen. Bob Menendez (D) and his Republican challenger Bob Hugin, with the incumbent Democrat carrying only a 2-point lead. Menendez was reprimanded by a Senate ethics panel in April after federal prosecutors dropped corruption charges against him.

Republican officials and operatives argued that the bitter fight over Kavanaugh’s confirmation has boosted their chances. They are hoping that the fight will energize their base in November in a year when Democrats have largely held an edge in voter enthusiasm.

At the same time, they say they are not taking anything for granted, and acknowledge the political winds can change quickly.

In North Dakota, they say it’s still possible Heitkamp could make a late comeback.

“Heidi’s never going to be done for,” one North Dakota Republican operative said. “Part of that is this state is cheap. A little bit of money can have a lot of impact. She’s a fighter, and she’s got nothing left to lose.”

In Missouri, a recent poll from Fox news showed Attorney General Josh Hawley (R) tied at 46 percent with McCaskill. A CNN poll conducted days earlier gave McCaskill a 3-point lead.

In Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R) polling numbers are on the rise. Two recent surveys by Emerson College and CBS News/YouGov showed the conservative firebrand pulling ahead by 5 and 6 points, respectively, over Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas).

In Tennessee, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R) held a 5-point lead in a Fox News poll earlier this month over former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen. Another poll by CBS News/YouGov showed her ahead by 8 points.

In Florida, Sen. Bill Nelson (D) has seen his numbers rebound in recent polls against Scott. Hurricane Michael, which hit the state on Wednesday, has introduced a new uncertainty to that race.

Democrats have expressed optimism that the partisan fight over Kavanaugh will pump up their base.

“I think the pathway to the majority was always going to be difficult for Democrats,” Thornell said. “This is one of the most treacherous Senate maps either party has had in years. But it’s still in play because our incumbents are running strong campaigns, and we have put the GOP on defense in four states.”

[BartSimpson]

More bad news for the Democrats:

$1:

A new poll from Washington (state)’s eighth congressional district shows Republican Dino Rossi raking a commanding lead over Democrat Kim Schrier in the wake of Democrats’ failed smear attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The poll, published Wednesday, shows Rossi with a commanding 10-point lead in the battleground district in his race against Schrier to replace retiring Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA) in one of the districts that could determine the fate of the majority of the House of Representatives.

At 49 percent, Rossi leads Schrier’s 39 percent, well outside the poll’s five percent margin of error. The survey of 400 eligible voters was conducted from Oct. 4 to Oct. 9 by Crosscut/Elway.

In a piece on the poll, Crosscut’s David Kroman wrote that this was unmistakably due to the Democrats’ mishandling of the Kavanaugh confirmation.

“Rossi, a former state senator and real-estate investor, saw an especially large bump last weekend, claiming a 24-point advantage among voters surveyed in the hours and days immediately after the U.S. Senate’s vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh,” Kroman wrote. “Those respondents made up nearly a third of the total voters surveyed.”

The fact that Republican Rossi is so far ahead of Democrat Schrier in this district is nothing short of an amazing development for Republicans. Just a few weeks ago, Rossi trailed Schrier by a single percentage point–45 percent to 46 percent–in a New York Times/Siena College survey in September

[Tricks]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

More bad news for the Democrats:

$1:

A new poll from Washington (state)’s eighth congressional district shows Republican Dino Rossi raking a commanding lead over Democrat Kim Schrier in the wake of Democrats’ failed smear attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The poll, published Wednesday, shows Rossi with a commanding 10-point lead in the battleground district in his race against Schrier to replace retiring Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA) in one of the districts that could determine the fate of the majority of the House of Representatives.

At 49 percent, Rossi leads Schrier’s 39 percent, well outside the poll’s five percent margin of error. The survey of 400 eligible voters was conducted from Oct. 4 to Oct. 9 by Crosscut/Elway.

In a piece on the poll, Crosscut’s David Kroman wrote that this was unmistakably due to the Democrats’ mishandling of the Kavanaugh confirmation.

“Rossi, a former state senator and real-estate investor, saw an especially large bump last weekend, claiming a 24-point advantage among voters surveyed in the hours and days immediately after the U.S. Senate’s vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh,” Kroman wrote. “Those respondents made up nearly a third of the total voters surveyed.”

The fact that Republican Rossi is so far ahead of Democrat Schrier in this district is nothing short of an amazing development for Republicans. Just a few weeks ago, Rossi trailed Schrier by a single percentage point–45 percent to 46 percent–in a New York Times/Siena College survey in September

https://www.breitbart.com/big-governmen ... ck-to-gop/

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

$1:

Republicans are increasingly optimistic about their chances of expanding their narrow Senate majority after the polarizing confirmation battle over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/410 ... e-majority

[xerxes]

I'm not going to post too much in this thread because since 2016, the world doesn't make sense anymore.

That said, the signs do look good for a blue wave come Nov. 6. I hope it happens, but anything is possible now.

[Thanos]

Yeah, I'm avoiding all the polling this time around. Even the respectable ones like 538 got fooled so badly in 2016 that they simply can't be relied on this time around. Whatever happens will happen and unfortunately, as the dominant trend is still pointing towards the badly negative, I expect the worst to repeat itself. When it comes down to it all the anger on the center-left is real but it's just as likely that half the m-f'ers don't bother to vote because it's too inconvenient to give a damn, or whatever excuse they've concocted not to participate, while at the same time all the right-wing extremists will show up in droves.

The electorate is now quite literally the last check on the Trump regime now that SCOTUS has been lost for at least a generation to hardcore corporatism, financial sector scheming, and general spittle-flecked right-wing extremism. If the American voter doesn't care enough to stop him from permanently disgracing their country and everything it used to stand for then why the hell am I letting myself get so worked up, depressed, and genuinely horrified over it?

[martin14]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

cost them even more seats in Congress, more governor's houses, and more state legislative seats all around the country.

Keeping the Senate should be relatively easy, maybe even pick up a seat or two.

The House will be much more difficult.

We'll see.

[BartSimpson]

Both the liberal Washington Post and the even-more-liberal Chicago Tribune are now turning on the Democrats.

Interesting.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opin ... story.html

$1:

Democrats aren't being honest. Voters will take note.

The Washington Post's Dan Balz nailed it in his recent analysis of the Democratic Party, which included the summary “They have no unifying leader and no clear message.” Balz wrote: “The best that congressional Democrats have recently come up with in terms of messaging was their ‘A Better Deal’ program — a package of old and new ideas that captured the imaginations of few voters.”

The Democratic Party isn't even a discernible coalition anymore. It is a cluster of angry subgroups: the Black Lives Matter movement, the tiresome Hollywood hypocrites and most recently the hecklers and the creepy stalkers we saw on Capitol Hill during the Brett Kavanaugh nomination hearings, whose boasts of their training and effectiveness have turned them into something of a gentrified Antifa. This is what a vacuum of leadership looks like, and the leftist debris being sucked up isn't appealing.

Of course, the Democrats and their media allies are defensive about being called out. They are trying to derail the growing mainstream opinion that the mob tactics everyone has witnessed over the past few weeks could make Democrats vulnerable to being likened to, well, a mob. And worse, they are trying to suggest that the very idea of such a characterization is mere Republican slander. Ahem, if it looks like a mob, shouts like a mob and storms around like a mob, well, it could be a mob.

Anyway, along with their dishonest defensiveness and pre-emptive strikes against Republicans, the Democrats are also engaged in a pathetic round of post-defeat self-pity. Multiple Democrats have come forward to say their problem is that they are just too good, too nice, too sincere and too righteous to do battle with evil Republicans, as if the Democrats' smears, taunts, untruths and ambushes follow noble rules and rise from their innate goodness. Please. To say the least, the Democrats are not operating from an honest place, and many voters will notice.

Perhaps President Barack Obama started this self-righteous pity party when, according to his former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, Obama asked soon after Donald Trump won the 2016 election: “What if we were wrong? Maybe we pushed too far. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” More pointedly, as Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times this year, “the president made it clear that what he meant was: What if we were wrong in being so right? What if we were too good for these people?” She was spot on. Obama and his team in the White House thought they were just too good to be effective. So here we are.

Between the ragged groups, the dishonest defensiveness and the self-pity, the Democrats are painting a compelling picture for why voters should look elsewhere. That's not to say Democrats won't win the House or reap the benefits of a correction in governors' races, but those victories won't be because they are running an appealing campaign or offering any leadership or direction. Democrats haven't learned anything from the Kavanaugh experience, and that doesn't speak well for how they will govern when they share more power with Republicans.

[llama66]

I hope my cat will win all the seats

[BartSimpson]

llama66 llama66:

I hope my cat will win all the seats

I do, too.

[xerxes]

Meanwhile, in Republican cheating:

$1:

ATLANTA — Marsha Appling-Nunez was showing the college students she teaches how to check online if they’re registered to vote when she made a troubling discovery. Despite being an active Georgia voter who had cast ballots in recent elections, she was no longer registered.

“I was kind of shocked,” said Appling-Nunez, who moved from one Atlanta suburb to another in May and believed she had successfully changed her address on the voter rolls.

“I’ve always voted. I try to not miss any elections, including local ones,” Appling-Nunez said.

She tried re-registering, but with about one month left before a November election that will decide a governor’s race and some competitive U.S. House races, Appling-Nunez’s application is one of over 53,000 sitting on hold with Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office. And unlike Appling-Nunez, many people on that list — which is predominantly black, according to an analysis by The Associated Press — may not even know their voter registration has been held up.

Tuesday is Georgia’s deadline to register and be eligible to vote in the November General Election.

Kemp, who’s also the Republican candidate for governor, is in charge of elections and voter registration in Georgia.

His Democratic opponent, former state Rep. Stacey Abrams, and voting rights advocacy groups charge that Kemp is systematically using his office to suppress votes and tilt the election, and that his policies disproportionately affect black and minority voters.

Kemp denies it vehemently.

But through a process that Kemp calls voter roll maintenance and his opponents call voter roll purges, Kemp’s office has cancelled over 1.4 million voter registrations since 2012. Nearly 670,000 registrations were cancelled in 2017 alone.

In a recent television appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” Abrams called Kemp “a remarkable architect of voter suppression.” That’s become a rallying cry for Democrats in the governor’s race, which recent public polling shows in a statistical dead heat.

Kemp, meanwhile, says Abrams and allied liberal activists are twisting his record of guarding Georgia elections against voter fraud.

His campaign spokesman Ryan Mahoney said in a statement that because of Kemp, “it has never been easier to vote in our state” and pointed to a new online voter registration system and a student engagement program implemented under his tenure.

“Kemp is fighting to protect the integrity of our elections and ensure that only legal citizens cast a ballot,” Mahoney said.

Two main policies overseen by Kemp have drawn criticism and legal challenges: Georgia’s “exact match” registration verification process and the mass cancellation of inactive voter registrations.

According to records obtained from Kemp’s office through a public records request, Appling-Nunez’s application —like many of the 53,000 registrations on hold with Kemp’s office — was flagged because it ran afoul of the state’s “exact match” verification process.

Under the policy, information on voter applications must precisely match information on file with the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. Election officials can place non-matching applications on hold.

An application could be held because of an entry error or a dropped hyphen in a last name, for example.

Appling-Nunez says she never saw any notice from Kemp’s office indicating a problem with her application.

An analysis of the records obtained by The Associated Press reveals racial disparity in the process. Georgia’s population is approximately 32 percent black, according to the U.S. Census, but the list of voter registrations on hold with Kemp’s office is nearly 70 percent black.

Kemp’s office blamed that disparity on the New Georgia Project, a voter registration group founded by Abrams in 2013.

Kemp accuses the organization of being sloppy in registering voters, and says they submitted inadequate forms for a batch of applicants that was predominantly black. His office has said the New Georgia Project used primarily paper forms and “did not adequately train canvassers to ensure legible, complete forms ....”

His office says “the law applies equally across all demographics,” but these numbers became skewed by “the higher usage of one method of registration among one particular demographic group.”

Voters whose applications are frozen in “pending” status have 26 months to fix any issues before their application is canceled, and can still cast a provisional ballot.

But critics say the system has a high error rate and decry the racial disparity that it produces.

“We’ve shown that this process disproportionately prevents minority applicants from getting on the voter registration rolls,” Julie Houk, special counsel for the Washington based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in an interview. With that in mind, she called it “kind of astounding” that Georgia legislators wrote it into state law in 2017.

Houk’s group wrote to Kemp in July threatening legal action if “exact match” wasn’t ended.

Kemp’s aggressive maintenance of the voter list has also garnered the threat of legal action.

His office says that they simply “conduct regular list maintenance of the voter rolls to ensure election integrity” as required by federal and state law. “All of the affected records were inactive as a result of returned mail, National Change of Address, and ‘no contact’ list maintenance procedures,” it said.

Kemp dismissed and derided the legal threat targeting the “exact match” policy, issuing a statement saying that with Election Day coming up, “it’s high time for another frivolous lawsuit from liberal activist groups.”

His office said that since January 2014, elections officials have processed over 6.4 million voter registrations and less than 1 percent remain in pending status.

State Rep. Barry Fleming, who authored the state law enabling “exact match,” said in a statement that it’s authorized under federal law, and courts have upheld a similar law in Florida.

But Appling-Nunez said it’s important for every Georgian’s vote, including hers, to be counted in November.

“If you don’t like what’s happening you either have to vote to change it or get out there and change it yourself,” she said. “A life of politics is not for me so I have to support those who are fighting the good fight.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/voting-rights-become-a-flashpoint-in-georgia-governors-race/2018/10/09/86b41c4e-cbd1-11e8-ad0a-0e01efba3cc1_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c304a6cf1e72&wpisrc=nl_daily202&wpmm=1

And in Indiana:

$1:

A team of database experts, statisticians, lawyers and investigators working with the Palast Investigative Fund discovered — and Indiana now admits — that these thousands of voters were cancelled in violation of a June 2018 federal court order that barred the state from using the notorious Interstate Crosscheck purge list sent to state officials by Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas.

The court order stemmed from a suit by the NAACP and League of Woman Voters against a 2017 Indiana law ordering counties to remove voters if they appear on Kobach’s list which purports to identify voters who have left the state. The NAACP and League cited the Palast team’s evidence in our 2016 Rolling Stone article showing that Crosscheck is overwhelmingly wrong in identifying voters who have moved — and extremely racist in operation.

Altogether, Indiana cancelled the registrations of a mind-boggling 469,000 voters, the majority using suspect methods.

https://www.gregpalast.com/indiana-caught-illegally-purging-20000-voters-are-you-one/

[llama66]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

llama66 llama66:

I hope my cat will win all the seats

I do, too.

Good. She's ruthless and insane. You don't want to be a threat to her.

[martin14]

xerxes xerxes:

Meanwhile, in Republican cheating:

I see, computers have already been programmed with the evil Republican subroutine.

Excellent.

[Freakinoldguy]

llama66 llama66:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

llama66 llama66:

I hope my cat will win all the seats

I do, too.

Good. She's ruthless and insane. You don't want to be a threat to her.

With that attitude it kind of reminds me of someone else who was running for Office recently and lost. So, how does she take defeat?

[llama66]

Freakinoldguy Freakinoldguy:

With that attitude it kind of reminds me of someone else who was running for Office recently and lost. So, how does she take defeat?

Barfs on all things you love. Hildebeast has nothing on my little fur-terrorist.