"Bloodbath" Is Just A Scarier Way To Say "Wave" Or "Tsunami"-- And Whatever You Want To Call It, Trump Is Bringing One Down On The GOP

 

Congressional Republicans deserve what's headed their way. What's the opposite of pity? That's what I feel for them now. Call me coldhearted but by enabling Trump since 2016, men and women like Cory Gardner, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, Dan Sullivan, Joni Ernst, Kelly Loeffler, Steve Daines, John Cornyn, Shelley Moore Capito, Ben Sasse, Miss McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Martha McSally, David Perdue... the whole rotten bunch of these traitorous swine. And that's just from the Senate. How sweet will it be to see the smiles wiped off the smug faces of the likes of Roger Williams, Donald J Bacon, John Katko, Doug LaMalfa, Chris Jacobs, Crooked Ken Calvert and Michael McCaul. And speaking of the last on that list of Trump lackeys... there's a song for him now:





In his election run-down piece for Vanity Fair yesterday, Peter Hamby looks at how Trump’s self-destructive candidacy could blow up the electoral map. If it does, it isn't because people necessarily give a damn about Biden-- although he seems to be growing on people-- as much as it is how much people have come to loath Trump. nd they loath the enablers as well. Hamby doesn't quite get the difference between a "blue wave," which will probably never happen (at least not in my lifetime) and an anti-red wave, which we saw in 2018 and we are seeing again now. So let him call it a "blue wave" if it makes him happy... Democrats’ massive fundraising, downballot energy, and seniors turning against Trump signal a potential blue-wave election with unexpected flips."

In 2012, one of the worst Blue Dogs in the House, Joe Donnelly, was looking at a sure thing: he was about to lose his newly gerrymandered Indiana seat. He decided that if he was going to lose, he would lose big. He made a Hail Mary pass and ran for the U.S. Senate instead. Very far right Republican primary voters had tossed out forever incumbent Richard Lugar and nominated an off-the-rails neo-fascist Richard Mourdock. Hail Mary indeed-- Donnelly won 1,268,300 (50%) to 1,126,727 (44%). Donnelly was never going to be more than a one-term senator and he tended to vote with the GOP an awful lot, but the Dems won an "impossible," largely because of Obama, who was at the top of the ticket-- and drew 1,152,887. Those people voted for Donnolly-- and so did many Lugar supporters who could not get behind a crackpot neo-fascist, like Mourdock but had no problem voting for Mitt Romney, who won 1,420,543 votes, far more than Mourdock.

Hamby noted that 4 years earlier "Obama’s campaign was gifted an election-night surprise on its way to 365 electoral votes: It won Indiana. The state hadn’t voted for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide, and just four years earlier, George W. Bush crushed John Kerry in Indiana by 21 points. But in the wake of the economic crash, Democrats were surfing a wave, and Obama eked out a narrow 28,391-vote win over John McCain in the Hoosier State. It was a holy-shit moment, both for the national media and Obama high command, neither of which had identified Indiana as a key battleground heading into Election Day. The win didn’t come out of nowhere, exactly: Obama had plowed resources into registering new voters there during his primary fight with Hillary Clinton; the polls were always close; and corners of Indiana shared media markets with the more competitive states of Michigan and Ohio. But the polling was also spotty, and McCain led by a final average of 1.4 points... [T]here’s a lesson in that fluke Indiana win, too, as Democrats head into the final two weeks of an election in which Joe Biden continues to gain strength against a stalled-out Donald Trump: Even as the two campaigns and the political media focus their attention on certain core battleground states, weird things tend to happen at the margins in wave elections, outside the agreed-upon field of view. And 2020 is shaping up to be a wave of seismic proportions. As veteran election handicapper Stuart Rothenberg told me back in 2018, 'The thing about wave elections is that they manifest themselves in places you didn’t think were competitive.'"

Rothenberg is correct and the DCCC may be as surprised as the NRCC when "safe" Republican seats in Texas, California, New York, and Florida that they didn't notice, turn blue. Hamby attributes it in part to "A slew of political fundamentals-- fundraising, explosive early-vote numbers, late-spending decisions, candidate travel, surging downballot Democrats, the Republican rush to confirm a new Supreme Court justice, and the ugly fact that Trump is dueling with Gerald Ford for the title of most unpopular incumbent since World War II-- point to what’s coming. If the polls are correct, the president is about to get schlonged, bigly. 'Trump right now is just so vulnerable to a complete collapse,” said one respected Democratic number-cruncher working with a variety of outside groups. “He is so close to the edge in all of these states, if there is another tick down, it’s a total bloodbath.' Trump only narrowly won the 2016 race, within the margin of error in a handful of swing states. Since then the president’s support among his strongest demographics, including working-class white women, white men, and even white evangelicals, has deteriorated. Every election since 2017, every swing state poll and every fundraising quarter have favored Democrats, with independents and college-educated women rejecting Trump by powerful margins. Trump was already on thin ice. But if there’s a blue wave, it won’t just be because the coalition that powered Democrats in 2018 showed up again in a big way. It’s also that seniors have abandoned Trump for Biden during the coronavirus pandemic, a well-reported phenomenon but one that still seems curiously underplayed in the preelection narrative. By building a coalition of suburbanites, college-educated voters, and seniors-- voters who actually vote-- Biden isn’t just on the cusp of denying Trump a second term. He’s obliterating the voting base that’s undergirded the Republican Party for the last 30 years. 'If you were going to concoct a Molotov cocktail to toss and blow apart a party’s key coalitions, right now the GOP is dealing with it,' said Ohio-based Republican consultant Nick Everhart."

Recent polls from CNN and NBC showed Biden with a more-than-20-point lead among voters over the age of 65. Democrats haven’t won that age group since the 2000 election, and seniors became a reliable voting bloc for Republicans during the Obama era. Trump won seniors by nine points over Clinton in 2016. Today Biden is winning seniors in the aging upper Midwest-- Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania-- by healthy margins. In the Sunbelt states-- Georgia, Texas, and Arizona-- Trump is still winning the olds, but his edge has diminished since 2016. Biden, his fellow senior citizen, is chewing into Republican margins. In Florida, where the old vote is crucial, Trump defeated Clinton by 17 points among seniors last time. Today, thanks to COVID-19 and the president’s hapless response to it, Biden is either winning or tied with Trump among Florida seniors, depending on the poll.

“Seniors are a good strength to have because they’re big in terms of expansion,” Biden pollster John Anzalone told me. “The six core battleground states are older than people realize. Certainly people think of Arizona and Florida as having big senior populations, but so does the upper Midwest. Even when you expand into Iowa, you‘re still looking at a lot of senior voters.” The shift among seniors is not just an interesting cross-tab-- it’s a wholesale realignment of the Democratic electorate. It puts Iowa and Ohio firmly back on the electoral map, diminishes Trump’s support everywhere else, and even makes states like Kansas and Missouri-- which have only been lightly polled but have plenty of suburbanites and aging voters-- look like tempting flips for optimists tinkering with the 270toWin map.

In most years the lament on the left is that Republicans vote and Democrats don’t. But Biden and the pandemic have collided to form a coalition of voters who actually return ballots and show up to the polls. “You have the 2018 loss of college-educated and suburban female support that has further eroded, coupled now with a pandemic-driven drop not in just seniors but white seniors across the country, in emerging battleground states like Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona,” Everhart told me. “It’s having a devastating impact on the electoral math. And not just Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida, which were already swing states. This isn’t isolated to the presidential race. It’s tearing apart crucial coalitions and putting races in play from South Carolina to Kansas to Alaska.” Iowa and Ohio, now competitive, were left for dead by Democrats four years ago. The very fact that Texas and Georgia are competitive presidential contests is a huge tell about the state of the race and the mood of the country. Houston’s Harris County has already cast more than 50% of the total number of votes in the 2016 election, and Biden is currently polling better in Texas than Beto O’Rourke was in 2018, when he lost statewide to Ted Cruz by only 2.6 points. There are 38 electoral votes at stake there, second only to California. Unlike other states, because it counts absentee ballots ahead of time, Texas will report its results on election night itself. If Trump loses Texas, he has lost the election. The possibility of Biden winning more than 400 electoral votes is not out of the question.

Michael McCaul and his boss shoveling the bullshit

And in Texas, Biden is being helped by tremendous down-ballot activity. Think about Mike Siegel, Julie Oliver, Sima Ladjevardian, Candace Valenzuela, Gina Ortiz Jones, Lulu Seikaly, Adrienne Bell, Wendy Davis and Sri Kulkarni flipping red seats blue. They won't all, but it's just a matter of how many at this point. That is not a uniquely Texas story wither-- even if we are talking about a Trump-enabled 7,8, even 9 seat flip!

Robert Gibbs, an Obama campaign veteran and former White House press secretary, said the dynamics of the race-- Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus and the contrast in temperament between the two candidates-- “have changed the political map in ways once thought impossible in 2020.” Gibbs told me, “States that weren’t on anyone’s radar just a few months ago are now states Biden may well win, and the electoral impact of those changes are likely to be felt in Senate, House, and important state-level races ahead of redistricting. It’s a potentially disastrous result not just for the president but the entire Republican Party.” Democratic Senate candidates are already running strong in Iowa, Kansas, Texas, Georgia, Alaska, North Carolina, Arizona, and South Carolina, doing the hard work of voter registration and turnout with or without Biden, potentially creating a reverse coattails effect for Democrats at the top of the ticket. That’s on top of the myriad House, state, and local candidates in those states who have been tilling the soil for Democrats going back to the peak #Resistance era of 2017.

Even Missouri, which hasn’t been competitive on a presidential level since 2008, is too close for GOP comfort. Inside Elections just moved that state, and Kansas, from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican,” not exactly what Republican strategists want to see two weeks before an election. Those shifts don’t mean the Biden campaign should suddenly start spending money in St. Louis and Wichita. But they do suggest an election tilting away from Trump, with a new Democratic electorate pollsters haven’t quite prepared for. If Biden is within the margin of error in any of these red states heading into Election Day, he could add to his electoral-vote total in a way that would make Obama’s 2008 campaign jealous. Again: Waves manifest themselves in places you didn’t think were competitive.





The fact that terminally nervous Democrats, still spooked by 2016 and clinging to their rubber sheets, are going public with their optimism is remarkable enough. But Republicans, too, have begun ringing alarm bells, after coddling Trump for four years despite his obvious political baggage. Texas senator Cruz said the GOP could be facing a “bloodbath of Watergate proportions.” Nebraska senator Ben Sasse was caught on tape last week telling supporters that “we are staring down the barrel of a blue tsunami,” putting the blame directly on Trump. There’s a reason Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party’s most canny strategist, is trying to jam through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court before the election: He reads the public polls like we do and sees polls that we don’t. Cruz reads the polls in Texas, where his Senate colleague John Cornyn might lose. And Sasse reads the polls in Nebraska, where Biden could win the Omaha-area Second Congressional District’s single electoral vote [and drive worthless Trump ass-licker Donald Bacon out of his congressional seat].

Even in Kansas, private polling also tells the story of Trump’s demise. In Kansas’s Third Congressional District, a suburban district on the Kansas side of Kansas City that was a toss-up House seat in 2018, Biden is currently leading Trump by a 55-40 margin, according to internal polling provided to Vanity Fair by a Democratic strategist working on the race. Clinton won the district by a single point in 2016. The same internal poll showed Biden’s net “Favorable” rating at 55%, with his “Very Favorable” rating growing 10 points between June and October, from 27% to 37%. Trump’s “Very Favorable” rating has been stalled at between 28-32% over the same time period. In other words, Biden is kicking the shit out of Trump in eastern Kansas. If that’s happening in Olathe, it’s unlikely Trump is faring much better outside Atlanta, Des Moines, Charlotte, or Houston.

That’s precisely why the National Republican Congressional Committee yanked its spending from the Houston media market a month ago, abandoning its House candidates in Harris County, maybe the biggest early tell that red states were slipping away from the GOP. At this stage in a campaign, the flow of money tells you a lot about where things are going. Biden and Democratic Senate campaigns have more money than God. Biden and his outside groups are even outspending Trump allies two to one in the Florida panhandle, which is basically Alabama but with better bars. Biden entered the final month of the race with $432 million to spend, meaning that he’s carpet-bombing every corner of every swing state with TV, digital, and radio ads and direct mail pieces. Black churches across America will have gassed-up buses to the polls sitting in their parking lots the next two Sundays. Trump, in comparison, only had $251 million in the bank. In his case it seems the campaign is running on fumes, which is why Trump has canceled his ad buys in competitive states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa in recent weeks. The president even took precious time off the campaign trail last weekend to raise money in person in Orange County, which doesn’t signal anything positive about his cash flow or the investment sensibilities of the lip-filler crowd in Newport Beach. Meanwhile, Republican outside groups are funneling cash to red states to help prop up their Senate candidates in Alaska, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, Arizona-- and yes, even Kansas.

In a “blue tsunami” scenario, one or several of those red states could end up blue, like Indiana in 2008, on the electoral college map. But if that happens-- and it’s still an enormous “if”-- it will happen because the national political environment aligned with downballot Democrats already doing work in red states. Biden is narrowly running behind Democratic Senate nominees in South Carolina, Alaska, Kansas, and Arizona, and he’s narrowly running ahead of them in Georgia, Texas, Iowa, and North Carolina. “Biden supporters in red states are hopeful,” said Amanda Loveday, a Democratic strategist in South Carolina working for Biden’s super PAC, Unite the Country. “He has given us a reason to be excited by building momentum in these unlikely states. The benefit of having a candidate that is motivating is that they also galvanize voters for downballot races. In 2020 all the candidates are intertwined. In these red states where Senate and congressional candidates are exceeding expectations, they are being helped by Biden being on top of the ticket, but also Biden is being helped by their campaigns as well.”

Like in neighboring North Carolina and Georgia, South Carolina Democrats are benefiting from demographic trends: The state is becoming younger and more suburban. Biden, though, cruised in South Carolina’s Democratic primary back in February by defying an assumption in the media that Democrats could only win by activating younger voters and progressives. That was the lesson of Obama’s victories, and the lesson of Clinton’s failure in 2016. Instead Biden won the nomination by weaving together a coalition of people who reliably vote: older Black voters and college-educated suburbanites. With the election only two weeks away, Biden needs voters of color and young people too. But he’s expanded his base in a way that would have seemed unthinkable back during the Democratic primaries, when his opponents said he couldn’t excite the kinds of voters Democrats need to beat Trump. It turns out, with a helping hand from a self-destructing president, Biden did just that. They just weren’t the voters we were all thinking about at the time. It’s another reminder that campaigns are unpredictable, having an inconvenient way of defying expertise and savvy. If Biden sails into Election Day with a 10-point national lead and America’s most dependable voters at his back, Republicans might need to invent a new synonym for “bloodbath.” Maybe Sasse will come up with one, but only in private, of course.