Alan Grayson- A Congressman With Spine, Nerve, Backbone and Cojones

Last Monday we offered to give away a rare, collectible platinum record award for Enya's Paint the Sky with Stars. Today's your last chance to "win" this contest. At noon (PT/3pm on the East Coast), we'll randomly select one person from this who contributed to Alan Grayson's campaign on this page. I worked with Enya while I was at Warner Bros and I found her to be one of the most fascinating artists on the roster-- just as Grayson is the most fascinating Member of Congress. Blue America has been part of the team working to persuade Grayson to give up his Orlando-based House seat to run for the U.S. Senate seat being abandoned by Marco Rubio. Your contribution goes to Grayson's federal account, which can be used interchangeably for a House reelection campaign or for a Senate run.

So far over 320 people have contributed on the Draft Alan Grayson ActBlue page. Keeping another conservative enemy of working families out of the Senate-- whether a Republican or New Dem and Wall Street shill Patrick Murphy (the corrupt Establishment pick)-- is a worthy endeavor and worth the investment... even if you don't win the Enya award!

Grayson considers he supporters as people "with both a head and a heart. You’re something of an idealist," the wrote, "like I am. You want to live in a world of justice, equality, compassion and peace. And you’re willing to lift a finger or two to make that happen."

It’s people like that-- people like you-- who make our campaigns successful. In fact, it’s people like you who make our campaigns possible. If not for you and your support, I’d just have to be another scum-sucking, bottom-dwelling pol on the make, like everyone else.

A couple of years ago, when I was out of Congress and fighting to get back in, nine days before the election, people like you made more than 60,000 volunteer phone calls in a single day-- yes, in a single day-- to Democratic voters in my district, urging them to vote. And I returned to the House in the greatest comeback in the history of the House-- a 43-point swing in just two years. Thanks to people like you.

So here we are, just five months after the last election, and 19 months before the next one. It’s too early to make phone calls. It’s too early to put out yard signs. It’s too early to knock on doors.

But it’s not too early to give.

Q. What is the best way to support our campaign for justice, equality and peace?

A. Make a commitment-- give every month.

We have had more than 116,000 people give to this campaign. I’m grateful to them all. But the ones who have given us the biggest boost are the ones-- several thousand-- who have signed up to contribute to our campaign every month.

Some give as little as a dollar. Most give between $20 and $25 each month. A certain number contribute $50 each month. And a few give $100 each month, knowing that over the course of the whole campaign, that means that they “max out,” reaching the legal limit.

The numbers build up, and they build up fast. During several months last year, monthly contributions comprised around half of our online donations. That’s what made it possible for me to be the only Member of the House who raised most of his campaign funds from small donors. Again. You and I, together, we are establishing a new paradigm for campaign finance.

It just depends on what you can afford, and how much you care. But as everyone knows, it’s a lot easier to give $100 for 24 months than it is to write a check for $2400. Unless you happen to be a Koch Brother.

(I know that you’re not a Koch Brother. They don’t read stuff. They hire people to read stuff for them.)

So here is my “ask”: if you can afford it, please sign up for monthly contributions to our campaign. And please do it today, not next October.

And in return, you get a Congressman with temerity. A Congressman with audacity. A Congressman with spine, nerve, backbone and cojones.

A Congressman with Guts.

Here's where you can give-- once, monthly, a lot or a little... whatever works for you.

Fast track to hell:

The Republican Wing Of The Democratic Party Claims It Still Doesn't Have A Silver Stake Through It's Heart

Even House progressives tell me it's Hoyer's turn to be leader next-- doom!

Adam Green of the PCCC pointed out when Landrieu was handily defeated by some hack GOP nonentity Saturday that the last of the Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party who prevented the public option in the Affordable Care Act-- the others being Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln-- had all been driven from office within 4 years; I think he left out Mark Pryor-- but he also lost his Senate seat last month. Good riddance to all of them. Take a look at the ProgressivePunch lifetime crucial vote scores of the half dozen Democratic Senators who have voted the most frequently against progressive values in the current session:

• Tom Carper (DE)- 72.30
• Claire McCaskill (MO)- 72.13
• Kay Hagan (NC)- 70.67 defeated
• Mark Pryor (AR)- 66.50 defeated
• Mary Landrieu (LA)- 65.42 defeated
• Joe Manchin (WV)- 61.75

They wreck the Democratic Party brand and discourage voters with progressive values from bothering to go to the polls. And there are even more of them in the House-- Wall Street-owned New Dems and Blue Dogs, dwindling but still with enough clout within the party-- thanks to well placed corrupt conservative leaders like Steny Hoyer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Crowley, Steve Israel-- to confuse voters about what it even means to be a Democrat. These are the dozen Democrats in the House who voted most frequently against progressive initiatives and principles in the 2013-14 session, along with their ProgressivePunch crucial vote scores for the current session:

• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)- 26.20 forced to retire
• John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA)- 26.64 defeated
• Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)- 27.68 forced to retire
• Ron Barber (Blue Dog-AZ)- 32.58 defeated
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)- 33.62
• Pete Gallego (Blue Dog-TX)- 34.07 defeated
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)- 36.20
• Bill Owens (New Dem-NY)- 39.47 forced to retire
• Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY)- 40.17
• Nick Rahall (Blue Dog-WV)- 40.61 defeated
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)- 41.67
• Joe Garcia (New Dem-FL)- 44.59 defeated

What does the Democratic Party learn from these defeats? Nothing absolutely, nothing. The corporate whores and Wall Street shills just want to double down on their failed Blue Dog/New Dem approach which is so hated by Democratic grassroots voters-- and so beloved Inside-the-Beltway. I found this clueless piece from one of the Beltway trade publications republished yesterday by the Arizona Daily Star. [Warning, they refer to reactionaries and conservatives as "moderates," a well-worn Beltway trick to mislead readers.]

The Blue Dog Coalition of moderate House Democrats is reaching a turning point in its 20-year history, after losing more than a third of its members by the end of 2014 through retirements and election defeats.

It’s now down to a dozen returning members, less than a quarter of its peak.

Veteran members including Collin C. Peterson of Minnesota, the last original Blue Dog, and Jim Cooper of Tennessee hope to promote a rebound by the group.

“It’s always darkest just before the dawn,” Cooper said.

Blue Dogs have a long history of surviving adversity since they became a caucus with about 20 members in 1995, he said, and he predicted they will regain strength in a tough political environment.

Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University, said the Blue Dogs will be hard-pressed to reclaim the clout they had in 2010, when the group had more than 50 members and won enactment of a top priority: the pay-as-you-go law, which required that spending and tax bills not increase the deficit.

Southern voters have turned against Blue Dogs in part because much of the region’s electorate opposes President Obama and party leaders such as Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Black said. “They are selling a product no one wants to buy.”

But despite recent losses, Cooper said Blue Dogs will have influence in the 114th Congress because of Republican divisions and the ability of Senate Democrats to block partisan bills.

“House Blue Dogs will play a quieter role. It will take a Republican split before we can be clearly decisive in a vote. But there are going to be many Republican splits... There are going to be plenty of opportunities for Blue Dogs to make a key difference on legislation,” Cooper said.

Cooper is just one of four returning Blue Dogs from the South, with Reps. Sanford D. Bishop Jr. and David Scott, both of Georgia, and Henry Cuellar of Texas.

Cuellar and other Blue Dogs predict loose coalitions with Republicans on shared priorities where Republicans hope to deter-- or override-- vetoes by Obama. For example, they envision common ground with the Republicans on tax cuts, giving trade promotion authority to the president, regulatory curbs and energy sweeteners, including approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Peterson predicted that the group will expand its ranks quickly from the freshman class. Among the new recruits are Reps.-elect Gwen Graham of Florida and Brad Ashford of Nebraska, who have already attended meetings, Peterson said.

Membership “ebbs and flows,” Peterson said. He narrowly won re-election and must decide whether to run again in 2016.

Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, a longtime ally of the Blue Dogs, said he and other party leaders will give wide leeway to the coalition’s members to vote their consciences, and will try to help them promote priorities and win re-election.

“They need to bounce back, and they will bounce back,” Hoyer said. “We are going to work at it.”

UPDATE: Let The South Go

Mike Tomasky explains why the South is a lost cause for the Democrats-- and why they should embrace that.

At the congressional level, and from there on down, the Democrats should just forget about the place. They should make no effort, except under extraordinary circumstances, to field competitive candidates. The national committees shouldn’t spend a red cent down there. This means every Senate seat will be Republican, and 80 percent of the House seats will be, too. The Democrats will retain their hold on the majority-black districts, and they’ll occasionally be competitive in a small number of other districts in cities and college towns. But they’re not going win Southern seats (I include here with some sadness my native West Virginia, which was not a Southern state when I was growing up but culturally is one now). And they shouldn’t try.

...Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”

Cohen thinks maybe some economic populism could work, and that could be true in limited circumstances. But I think even that is out the window now. In the old days, drenched in racism as the South was, it was economically populist. Glass and Steagall, those eponymous bank regulators, were both Southern members of Congress. But today, as we learned in Sunday’s Times, state attorneys general, many in the South, are colluding with energy companies to fight federal regulation of energy plants.

It’s lost. It’s gone. A different country. And maybe someday it really should be. I’ll save that for another column. Until that day comes, the Democratic Party shouldn’t bother trying. If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own, which is what Southerners always say they want anyway.

Dead Armadillos? An Analysis Of The 2014 South Dakota Senate Race By Peter Stavrianos

Just so you know, Peter Stavrianos served as Chief of Staff for South Dakota Senators George McGovern, Jim Abourezk and Tom Daschle from 1962-1995. Stavrianos holds a BA and MA in political science from Harvard and UC Berkeley respectively. He's been retired since 2005 but served as an occasional adviser to Rick Weiland's campaign. This is his analysis:

Most Democrats ran hard toward the muddled middle in the 2014 elections. Once there they quickly discovered the truth of the old Texas observation that the only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos.

But in one red state, South Dakota, Rick Weiland ran progressive from wire to wire. He openly channeled Elizabeth Warren. He even said publicly that his campaign was a laboratory for experimentation with ways to deliver the Massachusetts progressive's message with a Midwestern twang.

Middle of the roaders, smarting from criticism their strategy was a colorless pablum that led to double digit defeats, have pointed out that Weiland also lost by double digits. Their claim-- it was just a mid- term election in the 6th year of an unpopular presidency, so all Democrats suffered regardless of their message.

But observers who know South Dakota would beg to differ. The reason is the independent candidacy of former South Dakota Senator Larry Pressler.

Yes, Weiland lost 50-30 to two term former Governor Mike Rounds. But did his progressive, anti-big money politics message really lose by 20%?

Hardly.

In fact it lost by just 2%, an astonishingly close result in a state where the Democratic candidates for Governor and House, on the same ballot as Weiland, lost by 45% and 33% respectively.

This conclusion is not wishful progressive thinking. It is based on a PPP tracking poll completed just two days before the election.

That astonishing survey showed Weiland trailed Rounds by just 2% in a race without Pressler, and was the second choice of the overwhelming majority of Pressler voters.

This was hardly surprising since the independent Pressler ran as a liberal reform candidate, loudly proclaiming he had voted for Obama twice, supported Obamacare, gay marriage, and had marched with Martin Luther King.

In a race without Pressler, Weiland and his message were 30-40% closer to victory than his ballot mate Democratic candidates for Governor and Congress.

Weiland's message was also closer to winning than were the candidacies of big name incumbents in states far friendlier to Democrats than South Dakota.

In Kentucky, for example, where national Democrats spent tens of millions of dollars on a race so timid the previously popular statewide officeholder was not even allowed to say whether or not she had voted for Obama, that unfortunate middle of the roader took her big bankroll, and her timid message, and turned a tight race into a 15% loss.

In South Dakota, by way of contrast, Weiland, an unknown, two time political loser, took an old car, and a new populist message on the road. With less than zero help from his national party he turned a 30% deficit into what would have been a very narrow loss, or conceivably even a win, had independent Pressler not grabbed 17% of his vote.

Rick Weiland and his Take it Back campaign against big money control of both national political parties struck real sparks in South Dakota. The sparks Weiland generated speaking Warrenese in a red state way may have been obscured by the effect of an aging ex- Senators back in the day windmill tilt, but close observers know what really happened in South Dakota in 2014.

If you don't believe it, just watch 2016 and see how many savvy seekers of public office copy Grimes, and how many copy Weiland.

Those numbers, like those from South Dakota in 2014, may surprise you.

"We have a huge problem: People do not think the recovery has affected them" (Democratic pollster Celinda Lake)

"We have a huge problem: People do not think the recovery has affected them, and this is particularly true of blue collar white voters. What is the Democratic economic platform for guaranteeing a chance at prosperity for everyone? Voters can’t articulate it. In the absence of that, you vote for change.

"Our number one imperative for 2016 is to articulate a clear economic vision to get this country going again."

-- Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, to washingtonpost.com's
Greg Sargent, in "What really went wrong for Democrats"

"Obama had a historic opportunity to be the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Instead, he chose to save the rich, and let them eat everyone else. This was a choice, he could have done other things."

-- Ian Welsh, in a post today,
"Could Obama have fixed the economy?"

by Ken

Yesterday, in "A Post About Why Democrats Got Trounced -- Without Once Mentioning Steve Israel," Howie quoted an important chunk from Greg Sargent's post from yesterday morning, "What really went wrong for Democrats," focusing on a problem he's heard much talk about from Democratic pollsters: "the failure of the Democrats’ economic message to win over persuadable voters."

Democratic candidates in many places just got killed among voting groups like blue-collar wh ites and older voters, and indications are that once again it was, as Bill Clinton once put it, the economy, stupid. I think this is important enough to bear repeating, so here's Greg again (with links onsite):

“We have a problem,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who polled on the Kentucky Senate race, told me. “If we’re really going to expand our chances in the Senate and House, we have to appeal to a wider group than we are now.”

The exit polls show that candidates like Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, Bruce Braley and Mark Udall lost by anywhere from large to truly massive margins among non-college whites and older voters. That’s also true of the overall national electorate.

"A FAILURE TO CONNECT WITH
THESE VOTERS' ECONOMIC CONCERNS"

Greg advises "treat[ing] these exit polls with a grain of salt," says "the pollsters I spoke to agree that this gets at a fundamental problem Democrats face."

These pollsters argued that this was above all the result of a failure to connect with these voters’ economic concerns. At the root of these concerns, Mellman says, are stagnating wages and the failure of the recovery’s gains to achieve wider, more equitable distribution. Democrats campaigned on a range of economic issues — the minimum wage, pay equity, student loan affordability, expanded pre-kindergarten education — but these didn’t cut through people’s economic anxieties, because they didn’t believe government can successfully address them.

“People are deeply suspicious that government can deliver on these problems,” Mellman says, in a reference to the voter groups that continue to elude Democrats. “And they are not wrong. We’ve been promising that government can be a tool to improve people’s economic situation for decades, and by and large, it hasn’t happened.”

We'll come back to the question of why this should have benefited Republicans so handsomely, since DWT readers undoubtedly know that the one group of people all but guaranteed to be less able to address any of these issues is the Republicans. For now I think it's important to take note of the existence and scope of this economic discontent, especially in an election that we were told wasn't going to be about the economy.


"TWO CHARTS SHOW WHY THE OBAMA
ECONOMY SUCKS" (IAN WELSH)

As it happens, this has been in my head since this brief Tuesday-night post of Ian Welsh's, "Two Charts Show Why the Obama Economy Sucks":

The Employment-Population Ratio (measures the portion of the working age population which is employed, from the BLS):



Median Household Income:



All of the blather about how the unemployment rate has decreased, the stock market is up, and so on, conceals the fact that there are less jobs for ordinary people, and they pay less. Yes, the rich are doing great, but that’s all.

Why are Democrats losing the Senate? I won’t say it’s just this, it’s not. But if the economy was actually good for most people, they probably would be holding it.

IAN REVISITS THE QUESTION: COULD
OBAMA HAVE SAVED THE ECONOMY?

Finding himself swamped with claims that the president couldn't have fixed the economy, and that "wage stagnation has been going on for decades," Ian yesterday revisited a question he has dealt with before, "Could Obama have fixed the economy?" He says that this argument, "to give it more courtesy than it deserves," is "bullshit." He refers us back to an August 2010 post, "What Can Obama Really Do?," but then covers the ground again -- "because," he says, "you will never get good leadership if you keep excusing your leaders for betraying you."

He breaks it down, in recognition of the Republican-controlled House the president had to deal with beginning in 2011, into two parts: first "something that needed Congressional approval," which is to say the botched job of the stimulus, and then "all the things Obama could have done which DID NOT require Congressional approval." The point he keeps coming back to is that "Obama is a right-wing president," a Reaganite, that "he did not fix the economy because he did not want to. Or rather, keeping rich people rich was more important to him."

After going through his case, Ian writes:

History does not grade on a curve “well, we aren’t all chewing on our boots”. Obama had a historic opportunity to be the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Instead, he chose to save the rich, and let them eat everyone else. This was a choice, he could have done other things.

Nor is this a noble failure: he did not try. He did not use the real tools he had at his disposal.

I note, finally, again, because I know most readers will have heard over and over again that Obama saved you from armaggedon, that the US economy cannot be fixed until the wealth, and therefore power, of the very rich is broken. It can not be done. However bad you think it would have been if that had been allowed to happen, this economy will continue to get worse because it was not done.

The Federal Reserve has printed trillions of dollars, and given them to the rich. Imagine another world, where it had printed that money and used it to restructure the economy for prosperity and growth again.

That, my American friends, is the future Obama stole from you. Indeed, as the rest of the developed world would have followed his lead, stole from all of us.

STILL, WHY SHOULD REPUBLICANS OF ALL
PEOPLE HAVE BENEFITED FROM THIS?

The short answer, I guess, especially given the fact that they did, is that they were there. They presented themselves as the alternative to the status quo, without being much more specific than that. As I pointed out Wednesday night, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank noted in his column "For Republicans, the hard part is about to begin" that the very absence of any stated or even implied agenda in the 2014 Republican campaign now creates all sorts of problems for the newly all-Republican-controlled Congress, where differences between (or even among) factions may be as bitter as differences between R's and Dems.

I said we would be returning to Greg Sargent's "What really went wrong for Democrats," and here we are.

It certainly mattered, Greg says, that so many battles were fought in states where the president was already seriously unpopular, "which helped ensure that the Democratic Party owned people’s economic anxieties." This, he says, "fed into the broader Republican strategy of seizing on every crisis that came along to sow doubts about Obama's -- and government's -- competence."

Such themes were sounded by a number of the Democratic pollsters Greg talked to.

• Geoff Garin (who polled the Iowa Senate race): "Republicans were exceptionally successful in nationalizing the election in most places, and on focusing voters' anger and anxiety on Obama. Voters were particularly inclined to punish whoever is running things. Democrats owned the status quo in voters' minds."

• Andrew Maxfield (who polled the Arkansas and Alaska Senate races): "This election -- like 2006 -- was in large part about accountability. It became a referendum on perceived government incompetence. ISIS, Ebola, and the border fit squarely in there but it wasn’t exclusively about competence. It was also about who government is working for economically. Linking specific Democrats to Obama became a catch-all for that broader case."

• Then there's the pollster we heard from at the top of this post. "Voters want to hear a more comprehensive message about how Democrats would move the economy forward," Greg writes. "Pollster Celinda Lake, who polled on multiple races, says the broader failure to articulate this -- from the President on down -- led these voters to opt instead for vague promises of a change in direction."


ALL TRUE, BUT ONE THING WE CAN'T FORGET IS
THE CLIMATE OF TODAY'S POLITICAL "DEBATE"

By which I mean, first, the deformation of all of our political discourse by the carte blanche the Right has won to lie all the time. Couple this with its increased sophistication at cobbling lies and obfuscations, and the electorate's growing divorce from so many aspects of reality, and reality is easily steam-rollered by delusion.

Lying below this -- and around and above it -- is the long-running, bountifully financed right-wing campaign against reality. The point isn't what percentage of individual races all that right-wing moolah has tipped, but the steady and unrelenting toll it has taken on voters' grasp of, or even interest in, reality.

Except of the starkest pocket-book kind. Ironically, Democrats in 2014 have gone a long way toward turning that reality over, free of charge, to the forces of darkness.

#

A Post About Why Democrats Got Trounced-- Without Once Mentioning Steve Israel

With a very few exceptions, it was congressmen from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Wall Street whores who fight alongside the Republicans against working families-- who got the short end of the stick Tuesday. Strong progressives in both Houses tended to win. The very well financed candidate the Koch brothers ran against Jeff Merkley in Oregon only won 37.63% of the vote Tuesday. When Merkley was first elected in 2008, he beat his GOP opponent 49-46%. Why did he do so much better? He summed up how Oregonians saw his record in the Senate like this: "When you fight for a fair shot for everyone-- a chance to work a good job at a living wage and go to college and retire with dignity-- working Americans stand up for you!"

Democratic turnout was pitiful in Florida last week. The top of the Democratic ticket was a conservative Republican who morphed into a moderate Republican, then an independent, then a conservative Democrat. The Party tried selling Democratic voters the most inauthentic political Svengali the state had ever seen. So tens of thousands stayed home. But not in FL-09, Alan Grayson's district. Early vote and vote by mail turnout was massive-- and Grayson won by over 10 points. "When Democrats stand for something," he reminded fellow Democrats Wednesday, "Democrats win."

This morning, the Washington Post's Greg Sargent, who has one of the sharper minds among Beltway pundits, reported that top Democratic operatives say their party's real problem, not just Tuesday but going forward, is with older and blue collar voters. Ironic, huh? The party of the working class and the party that passed Social Security and Medicare and defends both has a problem with what should be its core constituency? Tuesday 22% of voters were 65 years or older. 57% of them voted for Republicans, only 41% for Democrats.

The most common explanation we’re hearing for the GOP sweep of a dozen Senate races last night is that an already-treacherous map for Democrats was made a lot worse by the failure of core Dem voter groups to show up.

But multiple Democratic pollsters involved in these races identify another problem: The failure of the Democrats’ economic message to win over persuadable voters, ones outside the ascendant Democratic coalition, in the numbers needed to offset the structural disadvantages Democratic incumbents and candidates faced. These pollsters describe this as a serious problem afflicting the Democratic Party that must be addressed heading into 2016.

No question, the map/turnout problem was daunting. But some evidence suggests that in some places, Democrats actually did push up turnout among core groups from 2010 levels. Democrats appear to have performed pretty well among these voters. But this wasn’t a 2012 electorate, and there just weren’t enough of them. Which leads to the related problem that John Judis points out: Democrats underperformed so badly among older voters and blue collar whites that it became impossible to make up that lost ground. This wasn’t just a turnout problem; it was a persuasion problem, too.

“We have a problem,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who polled on the Kentucky Senate race, told me. “If we’re really going to expand our chances in the Senate and House, we have to appeal to a wider group than we are now.”

The exit polls show that candidates like Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, Bruce Braley and Mark Udall lost by anywhere from large to truly massive margins among non-college whites and older voters. That’s also true of the overall national electorate. You should treat these exit polls with a grain of salt, but the pollsters I spoke to agree that this gets at a fundamental problem Democrats face.

These pollsters argued that this was above all the result of a failure to connect with these voters’ economic concerns. At the root of these concerns, Mellman says, are stagnating wages and the failure of the recovery’s gains to achieve wider, more equitable distribution. Democrats campaigned on a range of economic issues--— the minimum wage, pay equity, student loan affordability, expanded pre-kindergarten education-- but these didn’t cut through people’s economic anxieties, because they didn’t believe government can successfully address them.

“People are deeply suspicious that government can deliver on these problems,” Mellman says, in a reference to the voter groups that continue to elude Democrats. “And they are not wrong. We’ve been promising that government can be a tool to improve people’s economic situation for decades, and by and large, it hasn’t happened.”

Obamacare was a halfway measure that gave the Republicans plenty of ammunition to attack it for good reasons (rather than for the reasons they really oppose it). Democrats who really wanted to stand up for working families wanted to expand Medicare-- pure and simple... and popular (although not among big campaign donors and lobbyists).

Same situation with Wall Street reform. Too many New Dems and other Wall Street whores in the Democratic Party worked with lobbyists and Republicans to weaken Dodd Frank and make it less effective-- and at a time when the Obama Administration decided to not hold the banksters accountable for their criminal behavior. Democrats who stand with working families knew that the reform measures didn't go far enough and, like Obamacare, Dodd Frank gave the GOP plenty of ammo to use against the Democrats and against reform without them having to expose the real reasons they oppose reform. In her NY Times column this morning, Margot Sanger-Katz pointed out that voters in states where Obamacare has been most effective-- where uninsured rates have plummeted most-- Republicans ran extremely well. "Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia," she wrote, "states that saw substantial drops in the proportion of their residents without insurance-- all elected Republican Senate candidates who oppose the Affordable Care Act. Control of the West Virginia state House of Delegates flipped from Democrats to Republicans. And Arkansas elected Republican supermajorities to both houses of its legislature along with a Republican governor, a situation that could imperil the Medicaid expansion that helped more than 200,000 of its poorest residents get health insurance."

LOLGOP had a perceptive look at the challenge for Democrats this morning at EclectaBlog:

Democrats also need to get Republicans back on the side of defending tax breaks for the rich and the big banks. This is easy-- at least for someone like me who doesn’t need to court millionaire donors. Democrats should back a new Glass-Steagall bill that restores the protections that kept us out of a crisis for 60 years. Also, Democrats need to demand a real end to trickle-down economics by demanding the end of tax breaks on investment income for the wealthy. Billionaires shouldn’t pay lower and lower tax rate for opening a mailbox than a nurse does for working 60 hours a week. While tax increases on the rich led to the best job growth of the last two centuries, cutting the capital gains tax preceded the Dot Com bust and then the greatest housing crisis in our history.

And with the money we’d save by taxing the rich like normal human beings, Democrats need to start fighting for universal free higher education. The richest country in the world can afford to give everyone a college or vocational education.

Bingo! In his review, Why The Democratic Party Acts The Way It Does, of professional centrist Al From's new book, The New Democrats and the Return to Power, Matt Stoller makes the crucial point that it's all about policy, not personalities.

Everything is put on the table, except the main course-- policy. Did the Democrats run the government well? Are the lives of voters better? Are you as a political party credible when you say you’ll do something?

This question is never asked, because Democratic elites--  ensconced in the law firms, foundations, banks, and media executive suites where the real decisions are made-- basically agree with each other about organizing governance around the needs of high technology and high finance. The only time the question even comes up now is in an inverted corroded form, when a liberal activist gnashes his or her teeth and wonders-- why can’t Democrats run elections around populist themes and policies? This is still the wrong question, because it assumes the wrong causality. Parties don’t poll for good ideas, run races on them, and then govern. They have ideas, poll to find out how to sell those ideas, and run races and recruit candidates based on the polling. It’s ideas first, then the sales pitch. If the sales pitch is bad, it’s often the best of what can be made of an unpopular stew of ideas.

Still, you’d think that someone somewhere would have populist ideas. And a few-- like Zephyr Teachout and Elizabeth Warren-- do. But why does every other candidate not? I don’t actually know, but a book just came out that might answer this question. The theory in this book is simple. The current generation of Democratic policymakers were organized and put in power by people that don’t think that a renewed populist agenda centered on antagonism towards centralized economic power is a good idea.

This election night survey from Hart Research for the AFL-CIO of 11 Senate battle ground states indicates that even if elites and DC pundits aren't concerned about issues, voters were:

• This election was about the economy: Asked to choose one or two priorities from a broad list, economic issues such as “the economy and jobs (42),” “Healthcare” (29), “Social Security” (18), and “Government spending and the deficit” trumped “Terrorism and national security” (17) and Taxes (11).

• Raising wages is good for workers and the economy:  68% of voters said that “raising wages and salaries is good because it improves people's standard of living and boosts the economy by putting money in people's pockets.” Voters supported “raising the federal minimum wage to ten dollars and ten cents per hour” by 62-34%.

• Congress and the president must invest in key economic priorities: The electorate’s economic focus is underscored by the answer to this question: “Which one of the following do you think should be the higher priority for the president and Congress right now–(A) reducing taxes on businesses and individuals or (B) investing in key priorities like education, healthcare, and job creation?” “Investing in key priorities” (67%) dominated “Reducing taxes.” (29%)

• The 2014 electorate remains deeply pessimistic about Republicans in Congress and whether they can fix the economy: Asked “Do you think that Republicans in Congress have a clear plan for strengthening the economy and creating jobs?,” only 29% of the electorate said yes, while 62% said no.

• The electorate is struggling economically: 54% say their income is falling behind the cost of living while only 8% say that there income is going up faster than cost of living.  33% say their income is staying about even with the cost of living.

• Voters “feel that corporations had too much influence over this year’s elections” (62%): whereas only 5% said corporate influence was “too little.”

Along the same lines, 55% strongly agree with the statement that “politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties do too much to support Wall Street financial interests and not enough to help average Americans, while 25% somewhat agree, and only 13% disagree (only 4% strongly).

• Empowered union members supported working family candidates: While the non-union electorate voted 6% more for Republicans than Democrats, union voters preferred Democrats by 26%. That difference continued over key demographic groups: while non-union seniors (65+) voted 21% more for Republicans than Democrats, union seniors voted Democratic by a margin of 35%. Similarly, Republicans won non-union white women's votes by 25%, and union member white women voted for Democrats by that same margin-- 25%. Non-union voters who make less than $50,000 per year voted for Democrats 1% more than Republicans, while their union counterparts voted for Democrats 35% more than Republicans.


• Corporations should pay their fair share of taxes: 66% supported using tax revenue from closing corporate loopholes to reduce the budget deficit and make public investments while only 22% were in favor of reducing tax rates on corporations.

That’s consistent with the finding that 73% of voters support “increasing taxes on the profits that American corporations make overseas, to ensure they pay as much on foreign profits as they do on profits made in the United States,” while only 21% oppose such a plan.

• More funding is needed for public schools and higher education: “Increasing funding for public schools from preschool through college was supported 75-21%,” while “raising taxes on the wealthy and large corporations to fund priorities like education, job training, and deficit reduction” was ahead 62-32%.

• No fast-track authority for NAFTA style trade agreements: By 49% to 36% voters oppose having Congress give the president fast-track authority for a new Pacific trade agreement.

• Social Security benefits should be increased rather than cut: Increasing Social Security benefits, paid for by having high-income people pay Social Security taxes on all of their wages was supported 61-30%, whereas raising the Social Security retirement age won only 27% support, with 66% opposed.

• Along similar lines, voters are opposed 76-18% to the idea of raising the age at which seniors are eligible for Medicare and oppose “Cutting the Medicaid health program” by a similarly overwhelming margin of 76-17.

Hillary Clinton is not the answer and not part of the solution. But Democratic politicians (and partisans) look to her as the only personality who can save them from the big bad Republicans, many of whose economic "solutions" aren't much different from her DLC perspective. Is there a solution? Yes, right here; it's up to us.

A Very Bad Cycle For The Republican Wing Of The Democratic Party

No surprise that McConnell won. And not a surprise that that was the very first race called last night. The Democrats had a weak, inauthentic, poll-driven candidate who didn't inspire anyone who didn't already hate McConnell or who wanted a family friend of Bill and Hill to win or just a generic woman in office. McConnell won by a bigger margin than most pundits were predicting-- 754,777 (55.7%) to 557,652 (41.2%). But all those millions of dollars spent on her race were hardly a waste. As of the October 15 FEC reporting deadline, Alison Grimes had raised $17,487,650 and McConnell had been forced to raise $27,956,687 to defend his seat. As far as independent expenditures, the DSCC spent $2,240,122 and the Senate Majority PAC spent another $5,590,112. Various unions and Democratic-allied groups spent another couple million plus.

Not only did the robust campaign keep McConnell in Kentucky, he kept all his millions in Kentucky as well, unable to help Republican candidates like Terri Lynn Land (MI) and Scott Brown (NH).

Independent spending by right-wing organizations in Kentucky were massive. Millions of dollars that would have gone to help other Republicans were channeled into defending McConnell. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $1,569,620, including $403,500 just last week. The NRA spent $1,585,811 and a couple of McConnell-controlled super pacs, Kentuckians for Strong Leadership and Kentucky Opportunity Coalition spent over $14,000,000. Right-wing outside groups spent $16,809,299 savaging Grimes and another $5,122,096 trying to make McConnell look vaguely human. All that money would have been spent in Iowa, North Carolina, Michigan, Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico, Georgia, New Hampshire, Virginia and across the country bolstering Republicans.

One trend that was interesting last night is that clear, strong progressives like Jeff Merkley (OR), Tom Udall (NM), Brian Schatz (HI) and Al Franken (MN)-- who had massive right-wing money thrown at them-- won, while conservative Democrats like Mark Warner, Mary Landrieu, Mark Udall, and Kay Hagan stumbled and the most conservative Democrat of all, Mark Pryor, lost badly. In the House, conservative Democrats-- Blue Dogs and New Dems-- lost everywhere, even in Democratic districts. Almost all of Israel's Red-to-Blue recruits lost, as did many of his Frontline incumbents. This is what Steve Israel did to the House Democrats, first among incumbents (along with the PVIs):

• AZ-02- McSally leads Barber 50.01 to 49.99% (74.74% counted)- R+3
• CA07- Ose beat Bera 51.37 to 48.63%- even PVI
• CA-16- Tacherra beat Costa 50.53 to 49.47%- D+7
• CA-52- DeMaio beat Peters 50.26 to 49.74%- D+2
• FL-26- Curbelo beat Garcia 51.50 to 48.50%- R+1
• GA-12- Allen beat Barrow 54.78 to 45.22%- R+9
• IL-10- Dold beat Schneider 51.80 to 48.20%- D+8
• IL-12- Bost beat Enyart 52.68 to 41.64%- even PVI
• NV-04- Hardy leads Horsford 48.53 to 45.75 (99.78% counted)- D+4
• NH-01- Guinta leads Shea-Porter 51.32 to 48.68% (87.61% counted)- R+1
• NY-01- Zeldin beat Bishop 54.8 to 45.2%- R+2
• NY-24- Katko beat Maffei 59.90 to 40.10%- D+5
• TX-23- Hurd leads Gallego 49.79 to 47.67 (99.7% counted)- R+3
• WV-03- Jenkins beat Rahall 55.33 to 44.67%- R+14

As for Israel's Red to Blue recruits... ugly, very ugly:

• AR-01- Crawford beat McPherson 63.54- 32.11%- R+14
• AR-02- Hill beat Hays 51.91- 43.62%- R+8
• AR-04- Westerman beat Witt 53.67- 42.67%- R+15
• CA-10- Denham beat Eggman 56.38- 43.62%- R+1
• CA-21- Valadao beat Renteria 59.26- 40.74%- D+2
• CA-25- Israel screwed up the jungle primary, leaving no Democrat in the race- R+3
• CO-06- Coffman leads Romanoff 52.88- 42.26% (78.46 counted)- D+1
• FL-13- Israel's bungling gave Jolly a 75.25% win- R+1
• IL-13- Davis beat Callis 58.75- 41.25%- even PVI
• IN-02- Walorski beat Bock 58.93- 38.31%- R+6
• IA-01- Blum beat Murphy 51.23- 48.77%- D+5
• IA-03- Young beat Appel 52.90- 42.33%- even PVI
• IA-04- King beat Mowrer 61.73- 38.27- R+5
• ME-02- Poliquin is leading Cain 46.72- 42.60% (60.33% counted)- D+2
• MI-01- Benishek beat Cannon 52.07- 45.35%- R+5
• MI-07- Walberg beat Byrnes 53.46- 41.16%- R+3
• MI-08- Bishop beat Schertzing 54.79- 41.86%- R+2
• MI-11- Trott beat McKenzie 56.06- 40.83%- R+4
• MT-AL- Zinke beat Lewis 55.49- 40.36%- R+7
• NV-03- Heck beat Bilbray 60.76- 36.12%- even PVI
• NJ-02- LoBiondo beat Hughes 61.82- 36.93%- D+1
• NJ-03- MacArthur beat Belgard 54.66- 43.63%- R+1
• NM-02- Pearce beat Lara 64.46- 35.54%- R+5
• NY-11- Grimm beat Recchia 55.35- 42.13%- R+2
• NY-19- Gibson beat Eldridge 64.99- 35.01%- D+1
• NY-21- Stefanik beat Woolf 55.17- 33.55%- even PVI
• NY-23- Reed beat Robertson 62.55- 37.45%- R+3
• NC-02- Ellmers beat Aiken 58.85- 41.15%- R+10
• ND-AL- Cramer beat Sinner 55.61- 38.54%- R+10
• OH-06- Johnson beat Garrison 58.34- 38.50%- R+8
• PA-06- Costello beat Trivedi 56.23- 43.77%- R+2
• PA-08- Fitzpatrick beat Strouse 61.91- 38.09%- R+1
• VA-02- Rigell beat Patrick 48.90- 41.10%- R+2
• VA-10- Comstock beat Foust 56.56- 40.40%- R+2
• WV-01- McKinely beat Gainer 63.98- 36.02%- R+14
• WV-02- Mooney beat Casey 47.06- 43.91- R+11

So, every single PVI neutral district with the exception of Israel's own (which, honor among thieves, the NRCC doesn't contest) and that of fellow Wall Street whore Sean Patrick Maloney (NY-18, which was extremely close) is now in the hands of the Republicans. The Blue Dogs were effectively wiped out and this was a very bad cycle for the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. More analysis for the rest of the week.

Why Did The Democrats Do So Badly Last Night? It Goes Beyond Gerrymandering And Obama's Poor Ratings

DSCC Executive Director Guy Cecil will reap big rewards for his incredible string of abject failures yesterday

Guy Cecil, is the Executive Director of the DSCC. He wants to run the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. He-- and Harry Reid-- just cost the Democrats Tim Johnson's South Dakota Senate seat. Cecil recruited reactionary Blue Dog Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, who South Dakota voters had rejected in 2010. They decided Herseth Sandlin's pleasant Beltway conservatism was exactly what South Dakota needed. They chased Johnson's son, Brendan, out of the race and handed the Democratic nomination to Herseth Sandlin, who was well aware she could never win a Democratic primary battle. But-- and it was a big but-- when Brendan Johnson bowed out, another progressive jumped in. Enter Rick Weiland. Herseth Sandlin stomped off and disappeared and Cecil flipped out. He and Reid decided to get even and refused to back Weiland, even after South Dakota Democrats rallied around him and made him their nominee. They closed the financial faucets and undercut him to a dull, lazy Beltway media, declaring South Dakota unwinnable. Cecil and Reid worked all cycle to make it unwinnable. Chatter is the Cecil, who just presided over the Senate catastrophe that Patty Murray completely avoided in 2012, will have a big position in the Hillary campaign. Makes perfect sense.

Right after the catastrophic 2010 midterms-- aka- The Great Blue Dog Apocalypse-- I worked with half a dozen congressional offices putting together an indictment of the corruption inherent in the way the DCCC does business. You should read it, if you haven't. It's all about the revolving door between the DCCC campaign operatives who get so many millions of dollars grassroots Democrats are suckered into contributing to the DCCC with all those annoying e-mails and the consulting companies they work for and own. At the time, I wasn't aware of Amy Sullivan's epic 2005 article for the Washington Weekly, Fire the Consultants-- Why Do Democrats Promote Campaign Advisors Who Lose Races? Sullivan focused in on the DSCC and I focused on the DCCC but the same disease afflicts both party committees. (Note: I don't care what diseases afflict the Republicans; I just hope whatever it is hurts them as badly as the Democrats are hurt by their consultant problems.)

I urge you to read the Sullivan piece in its entirety. Much of it is about Joe Hansen, a revolving door DSCC operative who is a partner in a very lucrative Beltway consulting firm. They get rich whether Democrats win or lose. Sullivan explains just how it works, although his own case, working for the DSCC and his own firm simultaneously, isn't the way its done anymore. The crooks are in one cycle and then back at their own firms the next and then back at the committee the next.

How does Hansen defend his performance and the seeming conflict between his roles as DSCC representative and private consultant? Not very aggressively. After I made numerous attempts over two weeks to get an interview with Hansen, he replied with a one-paragraph email, in which he listed the three victorious senatorial and three winning gubernatorial races that his company had worked on this fall, and concluded, redundantly, "Our firm has an unmatched record of success that no other firm can match." The email came from Hansen's DSCC account.

It's important to understand that even for experienced politicians--mayors, governors, representatives--a Senate run can be an intimidating challenge. It involves courting an entirely new world of donors by proving to Washington fundraisers and party leaders that you are a serious contender. Jeremy Wright, who served as the political director for Oregon Senate candidate Bill Bradbury's race in the spring and early summer of 2002, says that candidates are almost required to run two parallel campaigns, "one to get voters to vote for you and the other to get D.C. money by putting together the right consultants to show you're for real." For Democratic candidates in the few targeted races every cycle that are actually competitive, winning without the financial support of the DSCC (or its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) is nearly impossible. While the candidates are grateful for the infusion of cash in the form of committee-sponsored polling, fliers, and commercials, the money comes with strings.

Officially, no favoritism exists. "We don't push one consultant over another," a DSCC spokeswoman told me. "It's more of an informational thing, telling candidates about good people who do a lot of Senate races." But Democrats who have worked on targeted races describe a reality in which they are strongly encouraged-- often with the reminder that precious funds hang in the balance-- to select recommended consultants. "The campaign was pretty paranoid about making sure the DSCC was backing us," explains one veteran of an unsuccessful 2002 Senate race. "We needed the cash. So of course, we were going to go with the consultants they recommended."

No one was in a better position to take advantage of this power relationship than Hansen. As the first man-on-the-ground, his contact with budding campaigns was early and often. "That person has a very large advantage in being able to shape the team," one of Hansen's consulting competitors told me. "You bond with the candidate from the get-go at a pretty stressful time when they're deciding whether to run and how to do it." Another Democrat who has worked with Hansen complains, "Joe is a pretty egregious example of a guy who is sent out as the official representative to help candidates plot their campaign plan, and then when he gets to direct mail, says, 'Oh, by the way, let me switch hats for a second-- I happen to do direct mail.'"

The situation puts candidates-- who are loath to alienate the campaign committee whose financial assistance they desperately need-- in a tricky spot. Even when working with experienced consultants, candidates need to retain some ability to disagree with a proposed idea or strategy. That's hard enough when the consultant is recommended by the party committee. But when the consultant actually is the party committee, the candidate's discretion stays sealed in a tight box. "It was an interesting dynamic, I'll say that," Wright says. "When Joe signed us up, he was on staff for the DSCC. We'd work on DS[CC] stuff during the day, and then he'd take us out to dinner and put on his consultant hat."

This Peters Principle effect of Democratic operatives rising--or muscling their way--up to the level of their incompetence, happens for a simple reason: The consultants are filling a vacuum. After all, someone has to formulate the message that a candidate can use to win the voters' support. Conservatives have spent 30 years and billions of dollars on think tanks and other organizations to develop a set of interlinked policies and language that individual Republican candidates and campaigns can adopt in plug-and-play fashion. Liberals are far behind in this message development game. Indeed, most Democratic elected officials have been running recently on warmed-up leftovers from the Clinton brain trust, ideas which were once innovative but are now far from fresh. With little else to go on, consultants-- many of whom came to prominence during the Clinton years-- have clung to old ideas and strategies like security blankets. "Democratic consultants are being asked to fill a role they're not suited to," says Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democratic Network, "to come up with ideas and electoral strategy in addition to media strategy."

Rosenberg hints at a second Democratic deficit: The party has no truly brilliant strategists in positions of power. Such talent is always rare in both parties and tends to come out of the political hinterlands, often as part of a winning presidential campaign team. Jimmy Carter's 1976 campaign was waged by a crew of Georgia political operatives with the help of unconventional pollster Pat Caddell. Four years later, Reagan defeated Carter by relying on a California-based gang of professionals. James Carville and Paul Begala were largely unknown before they took Bill Clinton to the White House. And outside the South, the team of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Mark McKinnon weren't much less obscure when they put together the strategy for George W. Bush's winning 2000 campaign.

Republicans have proven much more adept than Democrats at giving their best talent a national stage. While Democrats have permitted a Washington consultancy class to become comfortably entrenched, Republicans have effectively begun to pension off their own establishment. "The D.C. consultants for the GOP have their list of clients, but they're definitely on the outside looking in," Chuck Todd told me. "The Bush people have been very careful to give them work…but they're not in the inner circle." In 2004, seasoned Washington media strategist Alex Castellanos paid the bills with a handful of safe congressional races and a few unsuccessful primary challengers. Meanwhile, nearly every tight Senate race (North Carolina, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Florida) was handled by a Tampa-based firm, The Victory Group.

Republicans, of course, don't have any natural monopoly on strategic talent--they just give their best young strategists chances to run the biggest national races. In all likelihood, there is another Karl Rove or James Carville out in the Democratic hinterlands, who ought to be playing essential roles in the most important races. It might be David Axelrod in Chicago, who developed the media strategy for the then-unknown Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) primary campaign; West Coast strategists Paul Goodwin and Amy Simon, who helped Democrats regain the legislature in Washington state; or even unconventional D.C.-based consultants like Anna Bennett, the pollster who engineered Melissa Bean's upset of veteran Rep. Phil Crane (R-Ill.) in November. But any new talent will likely remain on the national margins-- running races for Congress and judgeships-- until someone breaks up the consultant oligarchy.

The electoral system takes care of dead weight when it comes to politicians. The proof is in the political wreckage evident after yet another year of Democratic defeats at the polls. Dick Gephardt--after 10 years at the helm of the Democratic minority in the House--has decided to go back home to Missouri. John Kerry is returning to the Senate instead of stretching out his legs in the Oval Office. The consultants, however, live on. After pocketing a $5-million paycheck following the election, Shrum is back from a vacation in Tuscany and now advising Sen. Jon Corzine's (D-N.J.) gubernatorial race. Mellman, whose advice helped sink Democrats for two consecutive campaign cycles, continues to line up clients. As for Hansen, his connection to Daschle may not help him now that the South Dakotan has vacated the Democratic leader's office. But don't cry for Joe Hansen--he's the consultant for incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

And, as I've pointed out before, other profit-for-staff-driven Democratic-allied organizations-- EMILY's List is the worst-- are just as bad as the DCCC and DSCC... if not worse. Although almost every Democratic woman candidate is petrified to speak publicly about EMILY's List's shenanigans, I've heard from candidate after candidate the same exact details for years. When EMILY's List "suggests" that the candidates they raise money for hire The New Media, Inc., not everyone is aware that that firm's president, Tierney Hunt, is the wife of EMILY's List Campaigns Director Jonathan Parker. The money EMILY's List demands cannot be spent on something useful-- like a field operation-- but must be wasted on a lame Beltway firm which is going to personally enrich an EMILY's List executive. It's how EMILY's List killed the campaigns this year of Alex Sink, Wendy Greuel, Eloise Reyes and several other women they led down the garden path. Several despairing candidates have said to me that they are forced to sit on the phone all day begging for money and that all the money winds up in the pockets of utterly worthless consultants they are forced to hire. And then they lose. We all lose, except the executives at EMILY's List and the crooked consultants they are enriching-- like Parker's wife.

Ted Cruz Has Plans For A Republican-Controlled Congress

Do fascists now control the Senate GOP? Curtis Haas and Ted Cruz

Former Colorado congressman and virulent racist Tom Tancredo wrote on some fringy, far right website that if the GOP captures the Senate today the GOP leadership should move immediately to impeach President Obama. So? Who cares what a crackpot like Tancredo, a private citizen with absolutely no mainstream credibility, has to say? How about if someone just as unhinged was saying the same kind of stuff but from inside the U.S. Senate? Did you watch House of Cards? If so, do you recall the "Tea Party bullhorn," a far right, obstructionist and neo-fascist senator named Curtis Haas? He was modeled on... real-lfe far right, obstructionist and neo-fascist senator Ted Cruz... from Texas.

So with many of today's crucial Senate races polling within the margin of error-- Quinnipiac has Braley and Ernst in a 47-47% dead heat in Iowa, for example-- that even the biggest optimists in the country are coming to grips with the fact that the Republicans could take over the U.S. Senate, which will give them-- thanks to Steve Israel's grotesque incompetence and corruption-- control over both Houses of Congress.

Although the Republican senators and candidates have by and large campaigned as "bipartisan" and mainstream, the party will be in thrall to the demented ideological extremism of Ted Cruz, in the same way that the House of Cards Republicans were effectively controlled by Curtis Haas. Sunday evening Sebastian Payne and Robert Costa, interviewed Cruz for the Washington Post. They reported that "Cruz made it clear he would push hard for a Republican-led Senate to be as conservative and confron­tational as the Republican-led House."

Piggybacking on what House leaders have done, Cruz said the first order of business should be a series of hearings on President Obama, “looking at the abuse of power, the executive abuse, the regulatory abuse, the lawlessness that sadly has pervaded this administration.”

Cruz also would like the Senate to be as aggressive in trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act as the House, which has voted more than 50 times to get rid of the law.

Republicans should “pursue every means possible to repeal Obamacare,” Cruz said, including forcing a vote through parliamentary procedures that would get around a possible filibuster by Democrats. If that leads to a veto by Obama, Cruz said, Republicans should then vote on provisions of the health law “one at a time.”

And when asked whether he would back Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky for Republican leader, Cruz would not pledge his support-- an indication that there are limits to how much of a partner he’s willing to be.

At the heart of Cruz’s shift from the insular approach that defined his first year in office is a belief that he can use his popularity with conservatives to expand his influence in the Senate and improve his standing as he considers a 2016 presidential campaign.

Cruz’s desire to turn his party further right in the coming months is one of the challenges already facing McConnell should Republicans regain the Senate, with tea party leaders inside and outside the Capitol spoiling for a number of hard-line moves.

“Senator Cruz has been rather quiet over the past few months,” said Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for Trent Lott when the Mississippian was the Senate Republican leader. “That time seems to be coming to an end. I understand why he’s eager to go after Obamacare. But the reality is that it’ll take 60 votes to repeal it and Republicans will have nowhere near that amount. If Obamacare remains the focus, he will certainly get the base jazzed up about what he’s doing, but he won’t get rid of the law.”

Cruz has gained some traction in terms of shaping the contours of what a Republican Senate would do, in part because McConnell and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) have not offered their own definitive vision of what a Republican-led Congress would look like.

Two weeks ago, Cruz wrote an opinion piece in USA Today laying out 10 conservative priorities he thinks Republicans should pursue, including moving toward a flat tax and drawing a hard line on illegal immigrants. In the interview here, Cruz reiterated some of those points, such as approving the Keystone XL pipeline.

...Cruz should be able to count on a handful of new friends, if not allies, when the Senate convenes next year. In recent weeks, he has campaigned for Senate contenders who beat Cruz-admiring insurgents in Republican primaries, from businessman David Perdue in Georgia and state Sen. Joni Ernst in Iowa to Sullivan and Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas’s embattled incumbent.

If she wins, Ernst is poised to be a powerful player in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, the first nominating contest in the 2016 race for the GOP presidential nomination. Perdue, who has weak ties to his red state’s GOP base, could hew close to Cruz on some votes to keep conservatives in Georgia at bay. Sullivan, for similar reasons, could do the same.

Right wing sociopaths are going to back Cruz and vote for his candidates. Can he be stopped by "normal" voters today-- ones who aren't brainwashed by Fox and Hate Talk Radio? Yes, if independent voters in Iowa, Colorado, Maine, South Dakota and Alaska, break strong for Bruce Braley, Mark Udall, Shenna Bellows, Rick Weiland and Mark Begich, Cruz will be back in his sandbox howling at the moon for the next two years.

Gaius' Quick Senate Scorecard for 2014 Races

-by Gaius Publius

As we move to election day, I'd like to offer the following as a quick scorecard, a list of Senate races to watch.

In the following table, the first seven races (bolded) are those marked "competitive" by the New York Times in an interesting interactive write-up. The second group (Roman font) lists races I'm interested in, for a variety of reasons. In some, the Republican is likely to win (for example, McConnell, Collins, Capito). In others, the Democrat is given at least a chance (Pryor, Landrieu). The Weiland race you've likely read about; he has an interesting but uphill path, to be sure.

In the last race listed (italicized), Amanda Curtis, the Democrat trying to take Max Baucus' Montana seat, is widely expected to lose. In every other race, the ones not listed, the incumbent party is expected by the Times to hold the seat.

Column 1 shows the name of the incumbent or the candidate of the former incumbent's party; columns 2 and 3, her/his state and party; column 4, her/his challengers.

2014 Senate Scorecard — Races to Watch

Begich	AK	D	Dan Sullivan
Udall	CO	D	Cory Gardner
Perdue*	GA	R	Michelle Nunn	*No inc.
Braley*	IA	D	Joni Ernst, Butzier	*No inc.
Roberts	KS	R	Orman (I)
Hagan	NC	D	Thom Tillis
Shaheen	NH	D	Scott Brown
Pryor	AR	D	Tom Cotton
McConnell	KY	R	Grimes
Landrieu	LA	D	Bill Cassidy
Collins	ME	R	Shenna Bellows
Weiland*	SD	D	Rounds, Pressler	*No inc.
Tennant*	WV	D	Capito	*No inc.
Curtis*	MT	D*	Steve Daines	*No inc; should flip

As I said, in all other races, the incumbent is expected to hold serve. This and a box of popcorn are all you need to enjoy the unfolding show.

Outcomes

The current Senate is composed of:

53 Democrats
2 Independents (Sanders and King)
45 Republicans

One of those Independents is reliably progressive (Sanders); the other is a "centrist" (King) and thus a man to watch. With the expected Democratic loss in Montana, the count becomes 52 Democrats, 2 Independents and 46 Republicans. If all Republicans lose in the "competitive" races bolded above, the lead grows to 53 Democrats, 3 Independents, 44 Republicans. (Note those three Independents.) At that point control of the Senate comes down to the second group of races.

Two things to keep in minds as you keep score. First, if the eventual composition (after run-offs) is 49 Democrats, 3 Independents and 48 Republicans, will the two non-Sanders Independents shop their wares to both parties — seek the best "deal" in committee chairs, appointments and other gifts and favors — in exchange for supporting that party's bid for the majority? If that occurs, by the way, I'd be willing to bet they "shop themselves" as a set, a new Gang of Two. (If so, I'd also bet that this exact phrase is widely used in the press. But you read it here first, folks.)

Second, if the Democrats do lose the Senate, it will be interesting to armchair-quarterback the mid-race support decisions. For example, what if the result is the above-mentioned 49(D)–3(I)–48(R) — better than it could have been — with Weiland losing? In that case, a Weiland win would have given them 50 and control of the Gang of Two. Could Harry Reid's early determination to back the deeply corporate, conservative Herseth-Sandlin, and his equal determination to withhold support from Weiland, mean he losses himself the Senate? If so, it would add some credence to this analysis.

We'll see. There's a lot of ball to play before second-guessing can start, but at least we're in the fourth quarter. Time for that popcorn.