Texas A Swing State? Finally!

Tomorrow's a big day in Texas-- runoffs for the primaries. Two congressional races with progressive candidates are up for grabs-- TX-10 (Travis-Harris county corridor) and TX-24 (-- where, respectively, Mike Siegel faces moderate vanity candidate Pritesh Gandhi and Candace Valenzuela (Kenny Marchant's abandoned seat in the suburbs northeast of Ft. Worth and northwest of Dallas) faces moderate Kim Olson. Each of the non-progressives has out-raised the grassroots oriented reformers, although both progressives are financially competitive. Siegel crossed the million dollar mark yesterday!

That those races are tomorrow isn't news. What is, are new widely touted polls yesterday. The one by CBS/YouGov shows the Democrats surging in Texas. CBS reported that "The coronavirus outbreak is reshaping the presidential race in three key Sun Belt states. Joe Biden is now leading President Trump by six points in Florida, and the two are tied in Arizona and competitive in Texas, where Biden is down by just a point to Mr. Trump. Biden has made gains in part because most say their state's efforts to contain the virus are going badly-- and the more concerned voters are about risks from the outbreak, the more likely they are to support Biden. In all three states, most voters say their state reopened too soon, and those who say this feel their state went too fast under pressure from the Trump administration. Most also say the president is doing a bad job handling the outbreak. He may be paying a price for that, at least in the short term."

A much bigger deal was the Dallas Morning News/University of Texas poll showing Trump destroying himself with his handling of the pandemic so badly that Biden now leads him-- in TEXAS!-- by 5 points. That's outside the margin of error. The paper reported that "Biden had 46% support to Trump’s 41%. If the general election were held today, the outcome could depend on the 14% of voters who were undecided or named someone else." Trump is basically hemorrhaging independent voters. Biden is beating him with independents 44-25%. The reason? his disastrous handling of the pandemic. On Saturday Texas reported 8,389 new cases (bringing the total to 259,465 cases-- 8,948 cases per million Texans). Yesterday the state reported 6,091 new cases, so total of 265,556-- 9,158 cases per million Texans.

CNN poll-whisperer Harry Enten reported that the CBS/YouGov. poll shows that Texas is now a swing state. "It's pretty clear looking at the data that Texas is a swing state in the 2020 election. The 2020 campaign could be the first time Democrats captured the Lone Star State in a presidential election since 1976. The CBS News/YouGov poll is not an outlier over the last month. There have been eight polls released publicly since the beginning of June. The result is that Biden and Trump are basically tied, with Biden up by a mere 0.3 points in Texas. Enten doesn't see Biden being able to close the deal in Texas but he does see as many as 6 congressional red to blue flips: TX-10, TX-21, TX-22, TX-23, TX-24, TX-02 and TX-31. That's 7 and he left off TX-25. The chances of a Dem winning in TX-02 (Crenshaw) is remote and I doubt they'll pull it off by beating Carter in TX-31. But the others? Yes. Contribute at the Turning Texas Blue thermometer on the right.

Finally, Democrats have a real chance to flip the Texas state House. They need a pickup of less than 10 seats, and race raters give them a decent shot of doing so. If Democrats did flip the chamber, then they'd have a hand in redistricting for the first time since the beginning of the 2000s.

That's big for state and national politics given that Texas has more House members than any state except California.

The bottom line is Texas is fertile ground for Democrats in 2020. Biden has to decide whether he truly wants to compete. Either way, he has a real shot of winning, and a chance to rewrite the political map for this year and for the generation to come.

This morning, TX-25 candidate Julie Oliver told me that she has "never run a campaign based on what the pollsters or pundits or conventional wisdom said-- because those are the folks that had given up Texas and the people in our district and said it could never happen. But we showed up everywhere and talked to everyone, no matter how 'red' the county, and in the process the huge effort of all of our incredible volunteers turned this district into a national battleground. It won't be the presidential race that will find those folks who are least likely to participate and feel the most left out by our politics. It will be the scrappy state House candidates, the city council races, and the Congressional races running straight uphill against entrenched incumbents that will ensure that we win in November. And then the hard work starts."

Mike Siegel is getting ready for tomorrow. It took a minute out of his last minute Get Out the Vote activities to tell me that "We are fired up in Texas. And these numbers show how critical the July 14 runoff is. Texas 10 is eminently winnable, thanks to nearly three heard of hard work by our broad, progressive coalition. We win Tuesday, we are in the drivers seat, not only to send one of the worst Republicans in Congress to an early retirement-- but to elect a true progressive for the seat that unites the communities of Houston and Austin."

Ever see a Texas electoral map without the color red? Get used to it 

Only Trump Could Lose An Election In The Midst Of A National Emergency To A Candidate As Inert A Biden

Harry Enten, writing for CNN, has been widely quoted over the weekend saying that a new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows "Biden clearly ahead" of the Orange Menace-- double digits, 53% to 43% among registered voters. He added that in context things are even better for Biden and that "Biden's in one of the best positions for any challenger since scientific polling began in the 1930s."

There were more than 40 national public polls taken at least partially in the month of May that asked about the Biden-Trump matchup. Biden led in every single one of them. He's the first challenger to be ahead of the incumbent in every May poll since Jimmy Carter did so in 1976. Carter, of course, won the 1976 election. Biden's the only challenger to have the advantage in every May poll over an elected incumbent in the polling era.

Biden remains the lone challenger to be up in the average of polls in every single month of the election year. His average lead in a monthly average of polls has never dipped below 4 points and has usually been above it.

Biden hasn't trailed Trump this entire year in a single telephone poll in which at least some voters were reached via their cell phones-- historically the most accurate. The ABC News/Washington Post poll is the latest example of these polls. In fact, Biden's never been behind in any of these polls since at least January 2019. No other challenger has come close to that mark.

Indeed, the stability of Biden's edge has been what is most impressive. The May polls had Biden up by 6 points on average. That is right where the average of polls taken since the beginning of this year has been. It's where the average of polls conducted since the beginning of 2019 has been as well.

If we limit ourselves to just the telephone polls that call cell phones, Biden's edge might even be slightly larger. This month those polls have Biden up 7 points on average. Estimating Biden's advantage from state polls of this type shows a similar lead for Biden.

A look at the fundamentals shows why Trump continues to trail. Simply put, he remains unpopular.

His net approval rating (approval - disapproval) in the ABC News/Washington Post poll was -8 points. That's very close to the average of polls, which has it at about -10 points. At no point during the past three years has Trump ever had a positive net approval rating.

The only other two presidents to have a net approval rating this low at this point in the campaign were Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. Both of them lost reelection.

Imagine how absolutely loathed Trump is with these statistics for one of the most pathetic and useless candidates ever nominated by a major party in that same era! And Enten raises the possibility that even after many anti-Biden ads have been run and even with the pandemic dominating the news, it just may be possible that "nothing will move the electorate substantially in Trump's direction."

There are other reasons-- besides just Trump's awful job approval ratings-- for Trump's inability to catch up with such a nothing like Biden. For one thing, Trump's personal attributes, are weighing him down. About six in 10 registered voters don’t see Trump as honest and trustworthy (35%), don’t think he understands the problems of average Americans (38%) and don’t think he has the personality and temperament for the job (38%)... Trump’s difficulties on personal attributes are well-established and mostly stable. Biden generally does better-- but, at the same time, not particularly well. Fewer than half rate him as honest and trustworthy (48 percent, vs. 35 percent for Trump) or say he understands the problems of people like them (45 percent, vs. 38 percent for Trump). Only 46% say that Trump has the mental sharpness for the job. Somehow, 51% of voters have persuaded themselves that Biden does!

I doubt spiking COVID-cases are helping Trump (and the GOP) in swing states. The numbers look worse and worse outside the early states-- New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts-- which are all seeing significant improvements right now, however tenuous. But in most of the states Trump is counting on for his reelection, the pandemic is headed in the opposite direction, despite fudged statistics in some of those states-- Florida for sure and possibly probably in Texas and Georgia. The cases per million continue a growth pattern that points to increased deaths by autumn-- as well as more ultra-serious problems in the economy. 15 swing or swingy states Trump is counting on (according to his own campaign) with their cases per million as of this afternoon:

• Nebraska- 7,416 cases per million
• Iowa- 6,243
• Pennsylvania- 5,994
• Michigan- 5,761
• Virginia- 5,319
• Georgia- 4,511
• Minnesota- 4,470
• New Mexico- 3,720
• New Hampshire- 3,446
• Wisconsin- 3,185
• Ohio- 3,082
• Arizona- 2,765
• North Carolina- 2,821
• Florida- 2,646 (Florida reports far fewer cases for political reasons)
• Texas- 2,277

As conservative and former Republican George Will wrote in his column today: "The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear 'magically,' as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting. In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration."

Trump On Kasich: "Digusting"

According to Harry Enten Trump is adored by the Republican base and their adoration is increasing. His job approval rating among Republicans is 85%. Trump, in fact, has a higher approval rating among Republicans than Obama did among Democrats just before the 2012 New Hampshire primary. "That's probably "why there aren't any potential challengers being named who really have too much of a future in the Republican Party. The biggest name is Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Kasich could potentially make some hay in New Hampshire, though there's no reason right now to think he could actually threaten Trump's chance at the nomination. He only won his home state in 2016 primary season and struggled to win many votes outside of college-educated moderate voters in the northern part of the country."

That said, CNBC reported yesterday that Kasich is reaching out the big GOP donors to see if they'd be open to funding a primary against Trump. CNBC reported that "Republican megadonors have indicated to his top political lieutenants that they are willing to back him over Trump under certain circumstances... In private discussions with Kasich's top political lieutenants, GOP megadonors have said they would support a Kasich presidential campaign depending on whether Republicans can hold congressional majorities this fall and how close federal investigations get to Trump."

[T]he same Kasich allies who have met with some of the most influential donors in the country have suggested to the governor that there are two scenarios in which he should challenge Trump in a primary.

First, would come after a potential 2018 congressional midterm wave that gives Democrats majorities in the House and the Senate. With that, Republican voters could potentially move toward a candidate like Kasich, who is considered more of a centrist in the GOP. Such a loss in the midterms could also signal to GOP donors that there's a need for drastic change at the top.

Trump's approval rating stands at just lower than 42 percent, according to a polling average calculated by nonpartisan website Real Clear Politics.

The other scenario pitched to Kasich would ride on the political implications of the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. The probe is looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential election and whether the president obstructed justice in the investigation.

If the investigation makes its way into the Oval Office, Kasich's friends have said, it may be an opportunity for the governor to run as either a Republican or an independent.

This latest development comes as buzz continues to build around another potential Kasich run for the White House. In March, he said "all of my options are on the table" for 2020, according to Politico.

The Ohio governor is also hitting states that are critical to winning presidential primaries. During his visit to New Hampshire earlier this month, he said in an interview with the New York Times that he considers himself a "hybrid" Republican and more people are approaching him since his loss in 2016.

"I have people of all shapes, sizes, philosophies and party preferences that approach me. But what does that mean? I don't know. I'm on television, so all the sudden they want to talk to me. Television moves everybody up, right?" he told the Times.

Charlie Black, a former advisor to Kasich's 2016 presidential campaign, told CNBC that he thinks the scenarios are part of an ongoing discussion and warned that his old boss would not stand a chance against Trump in a primary within the current political climate.

"Trump presently has about an 85 percent job approval among primary voters. Unless that dropped dramatically, no one can compete with him for the nomination," Black said. "He would have to be under 50 before I would advise anyone to run."

For donors, a blue wave in the upcoming elections could be a sign that the leadership of the GOP has to change starting at the top-- particularly after investing millions of dollars in an electoral effort that many political strategists say could be a wash for Republicans.

The House is where the GOP is running into the biggest hurdles, with incumbents struggling to raise money and their districts turning in the favor of Democrats.

...If Kasich, who won only his home state during the 2016 GOP primaries, chooses to run in 2020, he's going to need the cash that he struggled to cobble together the last time he ran for president.

While he had a formidable fundraising operation, Kasich's 2016 presidential campaign committee ended up with $176,000 on hand, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. At the same time, his campaign raised $18 million, while the pro-Kasich super PAC, New Day for America, brought in $15 million.

The PAC is still active and has $281,000 on hand, according to financial disclosure reports. Even though the group hasn't received many contributions this year, it raked in donations that went up to $100,000 in 2017.

No love lost between these two guys:

Trump Deserves No Loyalty-- Quite The Opposite

Michael Gerson, Bush's chief speech-write and a self-described "pro-life conservative," got it right at the Washington Post yesterday, when he described his elation at the defeat of Roy Moore and the election of Doug Jones in Alabama. "Trump and his admirers," he wrote, "are not just putting forth an agenda; they are littering the civic arena with deception and cruelty. They are discrediting even the good causes they claim to care about. They are condemning the country to durable social division. In Trump’s GOP, loyalty requires corruption. So loyalty itself must be reconceived."

What would weaken the grip of Trump on the GOP? Obviously not moral considerations. The president has crossed line after line of decency and ethics with only scattered Republican bleats of protest. Most of the party remains in complicit silence. The few elected officials who have broken with Trump have become targets of the conservative media complex-- savaged as an example to the others.

This is the sad logic of Republican politics today: The only way that elected Republicans will abandon Trump is if they see it as in their self-interest. And the only way they will believe it is in their self-interest is to watch a considerable number of their fellow Republicans lose.

It is necessary to look these facts full in the face. In the end, the restoration of the Republican Party will require Republicans to lose elections. It will require Republican voters-- as in Alabama and (to some extent) Virginia-- to sit out, write in or even vote Democratic in races involving pro-Trump Republicans. It may require Republicans to lose control of the House (now very plausible) and to lose control of the Senate (still unlikely). It will certainly require Trump to lose control of the presidency. In the near term, this is what victory for Republicans will look like: strategic defeat. Recovery will be found only on the other side of loss.

Even if moral arguments do not suffice, the political ones are compelling. Trump and his allies are solidifying the support of rural, blue-collar and evangelical Christian whites at the expense of alienating minorities, women, suburbanites and the young. This is a foolish bargain, destroying the moral and political standing of the Republican Party, which seems complicit in its own decline. It falls to Republican voters to end this complicity.

...In GOP losses such as the Alabama Senate race, it is not rogue Republican voters (or non-voters) who are at fault. It is the blind ideologues who gave them an impossible choice. Similarly, if Republicans lose the House, the Senate, the presidency and (for a time) the country-- and incur some policy losses in the process-- Trump’s Republican opponents will not be to blame. It would be Trump and his supporters, who turned the Republican Party into a sleazy, derelict fun house, unsafe for children, women and minorities.

A healthy, responsible, appealing GOP can be built only on the ruins of this one.

Such political disloyalty to the president is now the substance of true loyalty to the Republican Party-- and reason enough to welcome Sen. Jones with cheerful relief.

Sounds like he's no fan of Steve Bannon, but before we get to Bannon, let's take a little detour over to Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight and the mathematics that show an anti-Trump/anti-GOP wave forming. The Alabama debacle for the GOP wasn't just because of what a terrible candidate Moore was, but "part of a larger pattern we’ve seen in special elections so far this year, one in which Democrats have greatly outperformed expectations." He wrote that the Democratic margin in the 70 special elections for state and federal legislative seats in 2017 has been 12 percentage points better, on average, than the partisan lean in each race. "Democrats are doing better in all types of districts with all types of candidates. You don’t see this type of consistent outperformance unless there’s an overriding pro-Democratic national factor.

And to be clear, although there have been more special elections on the state level, the pro-Democratic environment is quite clear if you look only at federal special elections. There have been seven special U.S. House and U.S. Senate elections so far this year. The Democrats have outperformed the partisan lean in all of them... [T]he average Democrat has outperformed the baseline by 16 percentage points. The shift in the margin is all that matters here-- in predicting a wave election-- not who wins or loses.

The average swing in special federal elections has forecast midterm results fairly well since the 1994 cycle. We can see this below by looking at the average swing in special federal elections preceding each midterm cycle versus the national House vote in that midterm.

The cycle that looks most like this one is 2006, when Democrats gained 30 seats and control of the House from the Republicans thanks to a hefty win in the popular vote across all House races. In 2018, they need 24 seats to win back control of the lower chamber. The difference between the average swing in special federal elections and the margin of the national vote for the House has averaged just 3 percentage points since 1994. It has never differed by more than 7 points. So even if Democrats do 7 points worse in the national House vote than the average swing so far suggests, they’d still win the national House vote by 9 points, which would likely mean that they reclaim a House majority next year.

Enten is overly cautious-- drastically so, to the point of silliness. That's why these DC prognosticators are always-- always-- months behind the curveball. The discussion is way beyond if the Democrats will win back the House and now way into by how many dozens of seats and whether or not that can win back the Senate as well. Of course things could change between now and election day, but the overwhelming likelihood is that they will change for the better-- for Democrats and worse for Republicans. Trump, McConnell and Ryan will continue their roles of albatrosses around the necks of Republican incumbents and candidates and... then there's Steve Bannon, the GOP's very own Mr. Destructo. The AP's Jonathan Lemire reputed that Bannon is "catching blame from fellow Republicans for coughing up a safe Senate seat in deep-red Alabama and foisting damaging political advice" on Señor Trumpanzee. Better yet-- for Democrats-- "Bannon is showing no signs of abandoning his guerrilla war against the GOP establishment."

when Moore lost on Tuesday, handing the Democrats control of their first Senate seat in Alabama in a generation, Republicans turned on Bannon. The Breitbart News head already had made scores of enemies for declaring a siege on his own party.

"This is a brutal reminder that candidate quality matters regardless of where you are running," said Steven Law, head of the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC for Republicans aligned with GOP leadership. "Not only did Steve Bannon cost us a critical Senate seat in one of the most Republican states in the country, but he also dragged the president of the United States into his fiasco."

Bannon's team vowed that its revolution would continue, insisting that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should be the one to take the blame.

Bannon's allies dismissed the Alabama loss as little more than a temporary setback that would soon be forgotten. They expect that the Republicans cheering Moore's loss will simply enrage Trump's most loyal supporters nationwide, who already suspected some Republican leaders were trying to undermine the president's agenda.

"They're stomping on the very base they need to turn out for their candidates in the general election in 2018," said Andy Surabian, a senior adviser to the Bannon-backed Great America PAC. He contended that "the average Republican voter across the country is pointing their finger at Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment."

Bannon's team blamed McConnell for abandoning Moore, though it was a somewhat incongruous argument after Bannon warned McConnell to stay out of Alabama when Moore won the GOP primary. On his Sirius XM radio show Wednesday, Bannon credited Democrats with "out-hustling" the GOP on the ground in Alabama-- praise that doubled as a swipe at the lack of Senate Republican campaign committee field staff on the ground in the state.

...Bannon's group indicated they would forge forward with plans to challenge the GOP establishment in Senate races in as many as 10 states, including Arizona, Nevada and Tennessee, though one adviser suggested that a greater effort may be made on recruiting and screening candidates.

But in the hours after the stunning defeat, many Republicans reveled in Bannon's failure.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina argued that Bannon should have called off his guns and simply backed Trump's first choice.

"When it comes to Alabama politics Steve Bannon should have followed President @realDonaldTrump lead in supporting Luther Strange," Graham tweeted. "Trump's instincts on the Alabama race proved to be correct."

And Rep. Peter King, R-NY, declared that Bannon looked "like some disheveled drunk who wandered onto the political stage."

"This is not the type of person we need in politics," said King said. "(Bannon) sort of parades himself out there with his weird alt-right views that he has, and to me it's demeaning the whole government and political process. And last night's election was a manifestation of the revulsion by the American people."

Active Shooter and all the art of this post is by Nancy Ohanian