Will Trump Leave Office Peacefully?

Just Beneath The Surface by Nancy Ohanian

LOL!

I know I'm always complaining how Inside-the-Beltway political writers are overly cautious and weeks behind in their prognosticatin'. Well... National Journal's Josh Kraushaar surprised me this week: Prepare For A Biden Landslide. Unless Trump figures out how to steal the election, Kraushaar is probably right on point. His set up was that Trumpanzee's Tulsa rally was a bust-- "empty seats, a canceled outdoor event, and a rambling speech that failed to land many punches against Joe Biden"-- and a "foreboding sign that his once rock-solid base is softening in the run-up to the election. Dealing with the triple threat of a pandemic, frayed race relations, and a battered economy, even some of the president’s supporters are questioning whether he’s up for the job." The latest Fox News poll shows Trump losing by 12 points, "the latest hint that some of the president’s closest allies are starting to lose the faith."

While his support among some rural and evangelical voters is getting shakier, for a president, wrote Kaushaar, "who has relied on a base-first strategy at all costs, hoping to win reelection without courting new voters, even the slightest slippage among rock-solid Republicans is alarming" and he asserts that while the revelations from Bolton’s new book may not matter to Trump’s hardcore base, "there are plenty of softer Republican voters already close to breaking away."

So what does it all mean for the November election? Right now, it looks more likely that Biden will win a landslide victory, picking up states uncontested by Democrats in recent elections, than it is that Trump can mount a miraculous turnaround in just over four months. Even as Trump tries to advance a law-and-order pitch amid growing violence and tumult in the nation’s cities, it’s unlikely to benefit the president because he’s the leader in charge. The chaos candidate is now the chaos president. Biden is the challenger pledging a return to normalcy.

Just look at the swing-state map: Biden is leading in every battleground state, according to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, with the exception of North Carolina where the race is tied. Trump trails by 6 points in the electoral prize of Florida, where the president’s newfound willingness to meet with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro prompted a fierce backlash and quick White House retreat. He’s down 4 points in Arizona, a state that has only voted for a Democratic presidential candidate once since 1964. He’s not close to hitting even 45 percent of the vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin-- the Midwestern states he flipped to win the presidency.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is airing ads in Iowa and Ohio, two states he won by near double-digit margins in 2016, as recent polls show Trump in precarious shape in both states. Public polling even shows Biden within striking distance in Georgia and Texas, two electoral prizes that would normally be safely Republican ... unless a big blue wave hits in November.

Right now, Biden leads Trump by 10 points in the RCP national average, a greater margin than former President Obama’s 7-point landslide victory over John McCain 12 years ago. A best-case Biden scenario would net him 413 electoral votes, which would be more than any presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush’s rout of Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Trump made history in 2016 with his stunning come-from-behind upset against Clinton. He’s at risk of making a different kind of political history unless he’s able to suddenly turn his fortunes around.

Two questions flow out of this newish conventional wisdom:

1- how big powerful will the reverse coattails be,.meaning how many seats will the Republicans lose in Senate, House and legislative races? and

2- what if Trump refuses to acknowledge defeat?

We'll be dealing with the House races over the next few weeks but in terms of the Senate, a "Biden landslide" (a misnomer since Biden has nothing to do with it whatsoever) is likely to yield the Democrats seats in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Montana, North Carolina, Iowa, possibly Kansas, Alaska, Kentucky, South Carolina and one-- or even two-- Georgia seats.



As for the second question... Verdict published a worthwhile post by Neil Buchanan, a legal scholar at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law, yesterday, Trump’s Upcoming Refusal to Leave Office: The Good News. He's optimistic that Trump will lose in November but decided to discuss what he calls the inevitability of a Trump coup attempt, given that "Trump will stop at nothing to hold onto power." He's been worrying that only a handful of national commentators have finally started to say that Trump will refuse to accept losing, "even as most commentators and Democratic politicians were pretending that the election will be fair and that Trump will leave office peacefully."

And it is not as if people have not been warned. More than a year ago, Trump’s former “fixer” Michael Cohen stated plainly that “there will never be a peaceful transition of power” under Trump. Perhaps because Cohen is otherwise such a pathetic character, but more likely because people prefer to deny what they cannot face, that warning was soon forgotten.

In my Verdict column earlier this month, I imagined what would happen if a news reporter were to take my warnings seriously and try to get Republican politicians to affirm on the record that they would stand up to any attempt by Trump to defy the will of the voters. What would those Republicans say, given that they could never admit that they would abet him when it came time to stealing the election?

My prediction was that those politicians would feign outrage, denouncing the reporter for even asking such a question. We soon, however, saw an unexpected test run, when an enterprising reporter (Grace Panetta of Business Insider) asked a long line of Republican U.S. senators to comment on Trump’s gassing of protesters on his way to defiling a Bible as part of a political stunt near the White House.

It turned out that these senators could not even be bothered to answer the question at all, much less muster the energy necessary to fake a bit of righteous outrage. Most of the Republicans ignored the reporter entirely or claimed not to know what had happened.

This suggests that, if asked a hypothetical question of the sort that I imagined regarding a Trump coup, Republican senators would simply stare blankly and walk away. If they cannot even be roused to say something when the President of the United States abuses his powers to violently stop citizens from exercising their First Amendment rights, why would they say anything to warn Trump not to shred the rest of the Constitution?

Our Institutions Are Only as Strong as the People Who Inhabit Them

One possible answer to my question about how the American political system would respond to Trump’s refusal to accept losing is to treat that system as a disembodied machine that was perfected and handed to us by the nation’s founders. Trump will not succeed, the argument goes, because “our institutions” will not allow him to do so.

...What we know is that Trump is willing to fire prosecutors, to mobilize military troops, to abuse the courts, and to claim that everything that has happened to him is corrupt. He simply will not go, and his coup will not begin and end on Inauguration Day.

Indeed, one of the things that Trump and his supporters have been doing for years now is to coopt the word “coup” as a preemptive move, to drain it of all meaning. Indeed, they now use that word to describe any situation in which Trump is opposed via legal means. The Mueller report was supposedly an attempted coup, Trump’s impeachment was similarly an attempted coup, and pretty much everything else is a plot to take away Trump’s “landslide” victory in 2016. “Coup,” in their mind, means “Trump not being President anymore.”

So Trump has already degraded the language by using against his enemies the very word that best describes what he is doing. And no matter how much wishful thinking Kaplan wants to engage in, Trump will spend every day trying to convince people that he is the rightful winner of the election, which will involve efforts never to get to the point where “everyone knows” that Trump lost and must leave when his term ends.

This can only be prevented if the people who work inside our institutions are actually willing to do what their roles demand of them. Trump, for his part, will do what is necessary to convince people that Biden lost.

In other words, no one is saying that Trump will say something like this: “I lost, but I refuse to accept losing. I’m not leaving.” It will be: “I didn’t lose, no matter what the evil press and the deep-state conspiracy says. Massive voter fraud! The courts are corrupt. Second Amendment people need to stop this coup!!” The idea is not to get people to defy the rule of law directly but to get enough of them to be confused about what the law requires that they do not even know who won. “I didn’t lose, I won,” Trump will shout. “The radical socialist Democrats are the ones who hate our beautiful Constitution.”

The Only Way to Stop It Is to Be Honest About It

As I also noted in my column earlier this month, there might not be any point in saying out loud what Trump is going to do, because there might be nothing that we can do in any case. If Trump is going to be abetted by his partisans, and given that he is willing to stop at nothing, maybe there is truly nothing to be done.

If that were true, then we would now be living in what we might as well call a “dead democracy walking.” We might not realize it yet, but our constitutional system might already have been fatally wounded and is simply in the process of bleeding to death. Not dead yet, but irreversibly doomed nonetheless.

As depressing as that is, it might be true. The only way for it not to be true, however, is for people to see clearly what is at stake. For the reasons that I noted above, many people (most definitely including Democratic politicians) have shied away from saying that Trump’s existential threat to the American experiment includes the possibility of an outright refusal to leave office peacefully.

Because I saw no reason to think that politicians, pundits, or reporters would be willing to speak this truth out loud, I concluded that we would be doomed by what amounts to a timing problem. That is, by the time that people were finally confronted with evidence that they could no longer deny, it would be too late to stop the worst from happening.

All of which brings us to my reasons for being at least a tiny bit optimistic about what might yet happen in this country. It turns out that people might be waking up now, which might give us a fighting chance to prepare to stop Trump before it is too late.

For one thing, I have been happy to learn that mine has not been the only voice warning about Trump’s unwillingness to accept losing. I have never been a fan of the pundit Bill Maher (for a variety of reasons), so I did not realize until someone told me recently that Maher has been sounding similar alarms about Trump for some time.

Moreover, at least some of my fellow academics have been working on these issues (much more effectively than I have, if I am to be honest). For example, the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas at Amherst College has now published a book-length inquiry into these questions, the title of which poses the key question: Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020.

...Here is a particularly helpful (if chilling) sample of his commentary:

[I]f we do fall into an electoral crisis and we start seeing the kinds of challenges to the results that we saw back in year 2000, during Bush v. Gore, then we could really see a meltdown because our contemporary political climate is so polarized. That’s what led me to start asking, what types of federal laws do we have in place? What kind of constitutional procedures do we have in place to right the ship?

And what I found is that they just don’t exist.

Professor Douglas points out that there are ways for the Electoral College to become a point of contention-- not (only) in the sense that it allows a person to become President with a minority of the votes (as in 2000 and 2016) but in the even more disturbing situation where state-level Republicans try to defy their own states’ voters by refusing to certify Joe Biden’s electors.

This could, in turn, throw the race into the U.S. House of Representatives, in which another anti-democratic feature of the Constitution would (even though Democrats are in the majority) allow Republicans to make Trump President again. (Hint: Every state gets one vote, not every member of the House.)

That all sounds pretty bad, and it is. Professor Douglas does, however, offer one concrete reason for hope-- and one that has caused me to rethink how I imagine the end of this year playing out. His Vox interview ends this way:

The only real way to avoid this is to make sure we don’t enter into this scenario, and the best way to do that is to ensure that he loses decisively in November. That’s the best guarantee. That’s the best way that we can secure the future of a healthy constitutional democracy.

...The Douglas hypothesis, however, points out that the nightmare scenario has a lot of moving parts, and larger voting margins make it more difficult for Trump and the Republicans to manipulate enough of those moving parts to pull off a coup. If, say, Florida’s voters choose Biden by 0.4 percentage points, it will be relatively easy for the Sunshine State’s Republicans to convince judges and others (as well as themselves) that the state need not certify Biden electors. But if they are willing to steal the election for Trump even if he loses by, say, 55-45, then we are already doomed. There is reason to believe that we are not there yet.

In the end, then, the decentralized nature of the U.S. system of voting makes it very, very important that Trump and the Republicans have as few avenues as possible to steal the election. That it is necessary to say to Democrats, “You can’t just win, you have to win big,” is a sad commentary on where we are today, but it is true nonetheless.

Perhaps the biggest reason, however, that I am feeling some sense of optimism that we might emerge from 2020 intact-- though surely battered and bruised as a nation-- brings us back to my comments above about the importance of all of us collectively emerging from the state of denial in which we have been living. Democrats need to stop politely refusing to call Trump out on his election-stealing intentions.

And lo and behold, Joe Biden himself has finally said it out loud. Less than two weeks ago, Biden appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and was as blunt as possible: “It’s my greatest concern, my single greatest concern. This president is going to try to steal this election.”

Biden also said this: “I am absolutely convinced [the military] will escort him from the White House with great dispatch” if Trump refuses to leave. Although that is the naïve framing that I described above (everything being in place on January 20, with Trump clutching the door frame of the Oval Office as he is dragged out), it is nonetheless notable that Biden was willing even to talk about something so seemingly extreme.

After all, Joe Biden might be the very embodiment of what has come to be known as “defensive crouch liberalism,” which is the habit of mind by which centrist Democrats lack the courage of whatever convictions that they claim to have, choosing instead not to fight and to preemptively compromise with their opponents (and then to give away even more during negotiations).

Al Gore was a gentleman who stepped aside in 2000 even though he had both facts and law on his side, all in the name of preserving the republic. No matter what one thinks of Gore’s choice, the only way to preserve the republic now is to fight. And with Joe Biden already sounding the alarm in early June, no one else has any reason to pretend not to see what Trump is up to from here on.

Things could still go very badly, as I will argue in the second and final part of this series tomorrow. But seeing Biden and the Democrats at long last stop pretending that this is business as usual should give us some reason to imagine that all hope is not lost. For now, I welcome even that highly contingent good news.

Is There A Technological Fix To The Republican Party's Decline?

Every media outlet in the country is spending at least part of the weekend asking how the GOP is going to rebuild out of the pile of smoldering rubble their extremist policies have wrought. This is a problem nationally and a problem in almost every state in the Union-- not counting the Mormon states and most of the old slave-holding states where the GOP's reliance on ignorance, fear and bigotry makes for a winning combination. From the Denver Post:

Colorado Republicans, sifting through the ashes of three disastrous election cycles, are in the midst of a vigorous debate over how to win again in a state where their future looks bleak.

...Insiders say big defeats Tuesday at the presidential, Senate and House levels could play out two ways: an invigorating period of rebuilding and new ideas or a divisive fight over the party's direction that could debilitate it for years.

Either would be fueled by a sense that, despite an unfavorable national headwind, the 2008 election in Colorado was nonetheless badly mishandled and that the party over the past four years has squandered significant advantages in voter registrations, outmaneuvered by Democrats at nearly every turn.

"Our county parties are no stronger, our voter registration numbers have decreased. We had our most anemic performance in absentee and early voting vis-à-vis the Democrats that we've had in 10 years," said one party strategist, who asked not to be named in order to speak more freely about the state GOP's problems.

"From just a pure party organizational standpoint, we failed. That's what's giving people pause to say, 'Are we headed in the right direction for 2010?" the strategist said.

Several influential Republicans, who asked not to be named, singled out state party chairman Dick Wadhams for criticism after he devoted much of his time to the U.S. Senate race rather than state legislative or other down-ticket contests.

The most extremist part of the coalition-- which is also the most aggressive and the loudest-- is determined to blame mainstream conservatives and advance the cause of the neo-fascists who have wrecked the GOP and driven moderate, normal Americans away from the party in ever increasing numbers. But they are dead wrong, their extremist candidates suffering the greatest losses at the polls.

The congressional rump settled on scapegoating two hacks, Roy Blunt and Adam Putnam and dumping them from what passes for a leadership team. They replaced Blunt with one of the most far right extremists in the party, Virginia psycho Eric Cantor. Since first being elected in 2000 to a district in the middle of the state carefully gerrymandered to be as white and reactionary as possible, Cantor has amassed one of the most extreme right-wing voting records of anyone in Congress, one of the 10 most lunatic fringe across the whole panoply of issues. Basically, Cantor is at the bottom of the barrel on every single issue Congress has dealt with in the last 8 years. His ascension to the #2 spot signals that the congressional rump of the party-- if not the party itself-- has decided to tack hard right-- very hard right.

Interestingly on Fox News today Cantor blamed Tuesday's disaster-- which included humiliating defeats for scores of far right kooks following his model of over-the-cliff extremism, from incumbents like Marilyn Musgrave (CO) and Virgil Goode (VA) to Tom Feeney (FL), Tim Walberg (MI), Thelma Drake (VA), and Bill Sali (ID), to dozens of crushed right-wing new recruits like Darren White (NM), Jay Love (AL), Andy Harris (MD), Sydney Hay (AZ), Kirk Schuring (OH), Wayne Parker (AL), Tom Manion (PA), etc-- on the GOP's inability to grasp the technological advances that have been carefully cultivated by forward-looking Democratic leaders from Howard Dean, Donna Edwards, Brad Miller, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to net savvy candidates like Larry Kissell, Tom Perriello, Eric Massa, Jim Himes, Darcy Burner, Martin Heinrich, and Jeff Merkley.

My friend Pete Quily has put together an exhaustive and fascinating comparison between how the Obama and McCain campaigns used the Internet. It's like comparing a supersonic jet to a horse and buggy. Pete "examined the differences between the 2 candidates' web presences via different categories of search engine results and checking out their presence and popularity on some of the many popular social media websites as of November 4, 2008." His research found that Obama has 3,032% more hits on Facebook than McCain did and 4 times more followers-- with huge momentum for Obama in the last two weeks before the election. On Facebook Obama had nearly 4 times the number of friends as McCain, and 269% more search results for his name-- as well as nearly 150,000 comments (compared to none at all for McCain).

The McCain campaign never seemed to get a handle on Twitter at all:

Obama cranked out 10 times more tweets than McCain, had 2254% more followers, and 1,029% more search results. McCain’s last tweet was October 24th! So clueless that he didn’t send a vote today tweet on election day!

Obama's campaign and supporters also used YouTube and Flickr to great advantage:

Barack Obama had nearly twice as many search results for his name as John McCain, and more than 5 times as many videos posted. Obama had 117k subscribers and 25k friends and strangely enough John McCain had no friends or subscribers. Zero. Or at least none displayed. Wonder why? Maybe’s his campaign doesn’t know how to use Youtube or maybe they’re semi antisocial about social networking? Or there might be too many people posting negative videos and comments? Not sure.

Flickr has 5 times more search results for Obama than for McCain. Obama has 50,000 photos up on his Flickr page. McCain didn't have a profile at all. Pete's findings help explain why McCain lost and why the Republicans are in the Dark Ages, not in this case in terms of their policies, but in how they communicate to voters. Overall, Obama had nearly 6,000% more pages on his main website than John McCain did on his-- 1,820,000 vs 30,700.

Overall Barack Obama’s campaign has a larger, more comprehensive presence, more followers or subscribers on the social media websites and more interaction with those followers and much greater results in search engines. This is in spite of John McCain being a big political celebrity FAR longer than Obama was. McCain was first elected to congress in 1982, and even before McCain ran in 2008, other than George Bush, McCain was probably the best known, most interviewed, and most written about Republican politician. . That’s why I laughed when I saw McCain’s celebrity ad about Obama, look at how many mention’s John McCain has in the Internet Movie Database, like Bill Clinton, he was jealous because he was no longer the biggest political celebrity in Washington.

Outside of Illinois, Barack Obama was largely unknown until he gave his famous keynote speech at the democratic convention in 2004. So 26 years of exposure vs 4 years and yet Obama still massively dominated the online landscape.

Obama’s website one of the best designed websites I’ve seen in 15 years online, far better designed then John McCain’s, plus Obama’s has more features, more option and more content and is far more sophisticated than John McCain’s. Senator Obama hired Blue State Digital to run his online campaign, here’s their case study on it. Obama’s online community simply crushes McCain's in volume, features, sophistication, and participation. Take a few moments and look at both sites and you’ll see the huge gap. Obama even created an online rapid response team to counter the lies thrown at him, called fight the smears. Brilliant move, cheaper than responding with TV ads.

You think Eric Cantor is going to be able to change this around? Oh, not Eric alone-- I mean with the help of his allies Lynn Westmoreland, Mean Jean Schmidt, and Steve King, three faces of the "new" Republican Party? Or deranged, unhinged, and utterly ineffectual far right bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Bob Owens, Erick Erickson, K-Lo, Ben Domenech, and Charles Johnson? (Watch them try.) But... as P.J. O'Rourke warned, rather shrilly, this morning, they blew it.


UPDATE: NOW THE DEMOCRATS, ON THE OTHER HAND...

Democrats have been part of the development of the Internet while Republicans are stuck with dead-end and repulsive media like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.

As a result, when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern. His e-mail message to supporters on Tuesday night included the line, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” The incoming administration is already open for business on the Web at Change.gov, a digital gateway for the transition.

Karl Rove Predicts That McCain Gets Buried In A Massive Landslide-- Dixville Notch & Hart's Location, NH Agree

In a couple of hours we'll be posting the DWT predictions for House and Senate seats. I was trying to figure out how to work in a prediction for Obama swamping McCain. And then I noticed that Karl Rove already did. I think he's being a little conservative but he's awarding Obama 338 electoral votes to McCain's 200. Obama gets Ohio, Virginia, Nevada and Florida and McCain gets North Carolina, Missouri, North Dakota and Indiana. Rove gives Montana to McCain and I'm not so sure of that one; I'm still feeling that Ron Paul will throw it to the good guys.

Dixville Notch, New Hampshire has 75 residents and 21 registered voters. They just voted at midnight-- and the winner is... Barack Obama, a huge break with tradition for an overwhelmingly Republican bastion. The last Democrat to win there was Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Obama took 15 votes, McCain 6 and Nader 0. Jeanne Shaheen also won. And the other hamlet that votes at midnight, Hart's Location, population 42, also gave Obama a win-- 17-10.

DownWithTyranny Congressional Contest-- You Can Win $200 If You've Been Paying Attention

Delusional Republican hacks-- with an eye on a disastrous takeover of a prostrate GOP by the far right extremists who have embraced Palin-- are busy persuading each other that if only McCain hadn't be on the ticket... Meanwhile, data-based analysts are coming to the conclusion that Palin has done McCain far more harm than good-- even beyond causing massive desertions by 3-digit IQ Republicans and by scores of usually reliable Republican newspaper editorial boards.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Sunday indicates that McCain's running mate is growing less popular among voters and may be costing the Republican presidential nominee a few crucial percentage points in the race for the White House.

Fifty-seven percent of likely voters questioned in the poll say that Palin does not have the personal qualities a president should have. That's up eight points since September. Fifty-three percent say that she does not agree with them on important issues. That's also higher than in September.

Over 50 newspapers that backed Bush in 2004, have backed Obama this year, many of them blaming either Palin or McCain's judgment in picking Palin as either THE key reason or a key reason. Yesterday the biggest newspaper in Tucson, the Arizona Daily Star only hinted at Palin as part of the reason they've decided to abandon McCain for Obama:

[Obama] demonstrates leadership by surrounding himself with smart people who will strengthen his administration. For vice president Obama chose Joseph Biden, a U.S. senator with 35 years of experience, a foreign policy expert qualified to be president.

As of Friday, Editor and Publisher was calling the newspaper endorsement war a landslide.

Newspaper editors and high ranking Republicans took a look at Palin and ran to Obama. Unless all the reputable polls are as wrong as the crazy wingnuts and brain-dead extremists insist they are-- or unless the GOP steals the election again-- it's time to stick a fork in McCain. But what about the GOP firewall in Congress? Today's NY Times says they're scrambling to save as many seats as they can in the wake of what looks like a landslide for Obama. On the Senate side there's an all-out effort to save Norm Coleman (latest polling shows Franken winning by 4%), Chambliss, Wicker, Sununu (hopeless), Dole and Smith (also hopeless).

Sensing an extraordinary opportunity to expand their numbers in both the House and Senate, Democrats were spending freely on television advertising across the campaign map. Senate Democrats were active in nine states where Republicans are running for re-election; House Democrats, meanwhile, bought advertising in 63 districts, twice the number of districts where Republicans bought advertisements and helped candidates.

The Times goes on and on with who they think is winning Senate and House seats. They read the same stuff you do. Tell you what... I'll send out two $100 checks-- to whoever can come closest to naming all the new members of the Senate and whoever can name all the new members of the House. Send in your e-mail by midnight (PT) tonight to downwithtyranny@gmail.com. One e-mail for the Senate contest and one e-mail for the House contest.


UPDATE: TOM PERRIELLO SURGES

VA-05 might be seeing the first big upset of the election. Polls close there tomorrow at 7pm (EST) and it's looking like Tom Perriello has the momentum he needs to go all the way! A new SUSA poll shows his race against the bigoted and corrupt Virgil Goode in a statistical tie! And maybe those late Mark Warner radio ads are kicking in too.

How Badly Will McCain's Collapse Hurt Down Ballot Republicans?

It isn't even clear if it'll be a landslide or not and Republicans are already picking over the bones trying to figure out who to blame. There are still dozens of congressional seats hanging in the balance and the GOP is still looking like they have a chance-- albeit a slight chance-- to save seats for far right extremists like Vern Buchanan (FL-13), Brian Bilbray (CA-50), Sam Graves (R-MO), Thelma Drake (VA-02), John Culberson (TX-07)... maybe even Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21) and Dean Heller (NV-02). And then there's the anticipation of the one sure victory they know they will have when right-wing extremist Tom Rooney beats moderate Republican Tom Mahoney (FL-16) and the GOP has something to celebrate. But instead of savoring the end of Tim Mahoney-- something that should bring both Democrats and Republicans together on-- they're gnashing their teeth over that Governor of Alaska's sinking poll ratings and the ugly tensions over her inside the campaign. The lobbyists who run the Double Talk Express seem to have decided that she will be the star of the post mortem: "Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image-- even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline. "

A majority of likely voters in a new Washington Post-ABC News national poll now have unfavorable views of the Alaska governor, most still doubt her presidential qualifications and there is an even split on whether she "gets it," a perception that had been a key component of her initial appeal.

Palin's addition to the GOP ticket initially helped McCain narrow the gap with Obama on the question of which presidential hopeful "better understands the problems of people like you," but at 18 percentage points, the Democrat's margin on that question is now as big as it has been all fall. Nor has Palin attracted female voters to McCain, as his campaign had hoped.

Bill Kristol rarely gets anything right-- and never on any of the big stuff-- but in today's neo-fascist propaganda sheet, the Weekly Standard, he hits the nail on the head: McCain's going to lose. What he doesn't say is that it was the fact that his always bad judgment was exposed to the American people through the cynical Palin pick and that that was the decisive blow against his candidacy. The only lines worth reading in this week's Weekly Standard:

It's always darkest before it goes totally black... Well, with 10 days to go before the election, it's getting pretty dark out there.

Kristol, neo-Con loon 'til the end and beyond denounces the Republicans who have been abandoning McCain's sinking ship as rats. He may be right but one of the worst of the rats, Kenneth Adelman, defends himself today at, of all places, HuffPo:

McCain's tempera- ment -- leading him to bizarre behavior during the week the economic crisis broke-- and his judgment-- leading him to Wasilla -- depressed me into thinking that "our guy" would be a(nother) lousy conservative president. Been there, done that.

One of the hateful Republican extremists on the fringes of the far right, who basically admits what most right-wing loons believe-- that he would rather see America on its knees, its working families starving and desperate, than see Obama succeed as president-- ripped into Adelman on a Republican hate site:

...it is ironic that Ken Adelman-- the man who assured us Iraq would be a "cakewalk"-- would criticize Bush's competency. Second, if Adelman values conservative philosophy above all else, shouldn't he consider a "competent" liberal be the worst possible combination?  After all, an incompetent liberal might not be able to pass liberal legislation-- but a competent liberal would use his intellect and ability to pass tax hikes, create more departments, nationalize more industries, etc.

So while McCain desperately tries to win solid red states like Indiana, Ohio and Montana, where he's behind, and even Arizona, where observers say McCain's own state would slip away if Obama would schedule just one rally in Phoenix, the Obama campaign has its eyes on areas where Democrats haven't tread in far too long. He is the culmination of Howard Dean's 50 state strategy.

By every metric, Barack Obama's presidential campaign appears headed for the upper deck. Polls (both national and state-by-state), organization, money, and momentum are all running strongly in Obama's favor. At this point, one wonders whether Obama's winning margin could be greater than Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton's 5.6-point win over President George H.W. Bush in 1992, more than Bush's 7.7-point win over Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988, or more than Clinton's 8.5-point win over Sen. Bob Dole in 1996. Even higher on the landslide roster is California Gov. Ronald Reagan's 9.7-point victory over President Carter in 1980 and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's 10.9-point win over Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

For many professional politicians on the right the only question worth talking about between now and election night is how badly McCain's toxic coattails will hurt the Republican Party and how many rightists' careers will be destroyed. The GOP has completely written off incumbents like Don Young (AK), Tom Feeney (FL), Randy Kuhl (NY), Tim Walberg (MI) as well as "up-and-comers" like Darren White (NM), Leonard Lance (NJ), and Tom McClintock (CA). And they now view races to retain the seats of Robin Hayes (NC), Ric Keller (FL), Marilyn Musgrave (CO), Joe Knollenberg (MI), Chris Shays (CT), Mark Kirk (IL), Jon Porter (NV), Dave Reichert (WA), Steve Chabot (OH), and Michele Bachmann (MN) as a waste of time and resources. Instead the battleground has moved to saving incumbents once thought untouchable-- like Dana Rohrabacher (CA), John Shadegg (AZ), Virgil Goode (VA), Scott Garrett (NJ), Michael McCaul (TX), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL), Bill Sali (ID), Frank Wolf (VA), and Lee Terry (NE).

On the Senate side, they've written off New Mexico, Virginia, Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, and North Carolina entirely and are hoping for miracles to save their incumbents in Mississippi, Minnesota, and Oregon. Their last stand against a filibuster-proof Senate is taking place in Kentucky, Georgia, Maine, Texas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

Back to McCain for a second: it looks like the new battleground state is Georgia, where Obama has just pulled ahead. Bob Barr, a former conservative Republican Georgia congressman says it isn't so much that Obama is winning; it's just that McCain is losing.

If you're looking to help: one stop shopping-- for our nation's future.

Republicans Looking Forward To Senate And House Elections... In 2010

These 5 Democrats could make all the difference

Unlike delusional and barely rational GOP propaganda tool Hugh Hewitt, realistic Republican strategists are already structuring a world view around a President Obama and significantly strengthened Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. The Democrats are back in the range of as many as 4 dozen House districts in every part of the country including deep red bastions (many gerrymandered to create safe Republican seats) in Idaho, Ohio, Texas, Arizona, and Alaska.

Take California, for example. The GOP jihad to take back "Dirty Dick" Pombo's old seat with a pathetic clone of the rejected and corrupt former congressman, has completely fizzled. This leaves the close-to-bankrupt California Republican Party playing defense in four red districts two in the north and two in the south, each considered "safe" until recently:

CA-03 (R+7)- Bill Durston vs Rep. Dan Lungren
CA-04 (R+11)- Charlie Brown vs Tom McClintock
CA-26 (R+4)- Russ Warner vs Rep. David Dreier
CA-46 (R+6)- Debbie Cook vs Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.

But for Republicans looking to contain the damage, even those who are writing off McCain as a hopeless case and factoring in dozens of GOP House seats, the real fear is the Senate, where Democrats are poised to win a filibuster-proof majority. Voting for any Senate Republican in November means voting for more obstruction, deadlock and tying Obama's hands when it comes to making the kinds of change that has so galvanized American voters. The first races the GOP gave up on were Republican open seats in Virginia and New Mexico. Colorado, another open red seat also appears lost to them. The two incumbents almost certain to lose are Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) and John Sununu (R-NH). That's halfway to the 10 they need. Polls have shown indicted and senile Ted Stevens losing in Alaska to Mark Begich and brand new polls are now showing Al Franken beating Norm Coleman in Minnesota, Jeff Merkley beating Gordon Smith in Oregon, and good shots for Democrats in Georgia and Kentucky. Georgia's Saxby Chambliss had finally put his rubber stamp support for Bush's-- and McCain's-- unpopular immigration amnesty behind him when he went and voted for the Wall Street bailout, which has local Republicans vowing to stay home and just skip this election season altogether. One of the two Mississippi seats (Roger Wicker's) is vulnerable and Rick Noriega, Andrew Rice and Tom Allen have been picking up steam in Texas, Oklahoma and Maine. If all that breaks for the Democrats, they could wind up with 65 seats-- 64 if they kick Lieberwhore out of the caucus.

65 is unlikely but 60... well, it looks more doable by the day.

Republicans have been bracing for big losses, but it wasn’t until the past few days that they have started to privately sound the alarms that the bottom could fall out on Election Day.

GOP Senate candidates are getting pounded by the same waves of public discontent over the economy and Bush that could sink McCain, and it shows in polls from coast to coast.

Republicans fully expect to lose Virginia and New Mexico. They think there is a pretty strong chance that they also lose Colorado, Alaska, New Hampshire, Oregon and North Carolina.

...Several Republican strategists close to the White House said there is increasing fear among party leaders about a bloodbath. But they added that they hope to keep losses to as few as five or six seats, rather than the nine that Democrats would need to gain to reach the magic number of 60 seats.

You want to see Senate Republicans reduced to the impotence they have earned? Visit the threshold to a filibuster proof majority.