How Soon Before Trump Meets The Same Fate As Thanos?

I sure hope they vote because-- according to Quinnipiac polling-- over half the people under 35 would like to see Bernie as president. In 2016, millenials may not have liked Hillary much, but they really hated Trump and he got only 37% of the millennial vote. (Hillary got 55%, significantly down from Obama's 60%.) So is the Trump campaign reaching out to millennials this cycle?

Yesterday, the Washington Post's Allyson Chu took a look at one lame attempt that mostly had people laughing-- at Trump. Trump as Thanos! As the imbecile was railing and lashing out at House Democrats as they unveiled two articles of impeachment against him, tweeting "WITCH HUNT!" and slamming Adam Schiff as "a totally corrupt politician"-- which he isn't-- his campaign posted a 21-second video featuring the dramatic scene from Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame. In it "supervillain Thanos is about to carry out his mission of wiping out half of all life in the universe-- only the clip had been edited. Trump’s face is superimposed on Thanos, and when the character snaps his fingers, a group of Democratic leaders, including Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), are turned to dust. 'House Democrats can push their sham impeachment all they want,' the campaign tweeted. 'President Trump’s re-election is inevitable.'"

The short video instantly triggered a flood of reactions. Many mocked the campaign for portraying Trump as a supervillain who is infamous for being a “genocidal warlord,” and questioned whether the president’s reelection team had even watched the 2019 film, pointing out that the scene comes moments before Thanos realizes the Avengers outsmarted him. The altered clip even prompted a scathing response from Thanos co-creator, comic book writer and artist Jim Starlin.

“After my initial feeling of being violated, seeing that pompous dang fool using my creation to stroke his infantile ego, it finally struck me that the leader of my country and the free world actually enjoys comparing himself to a mass murderer. How sick is that?” Starlin wrote in a post shared to Instagram. “These are sad and strange times we are going through. Fortunately all things, even national nightmares, eventually come to an end.”

Matt Wolking, the campaign’s deputy communications director, hit back at critics for lacking a sense of humor.

“The Trump Campaign is grateful to every bitter, humorless liberal who helped share our post poking fun at Democrats’ pointless impeachment sham,” Wolking told the Washington Post in a text message late Tuesday, encouraging the president’s supporters to subscribe to a texting service for updates on his reelection effort. (Similar instructions are displayed in a graphic on Tuesday’s video.)

In the video, tense instrumental music crescendos as the Trump-Thanos figure, wearing the all-powerful Infinity Gauntlet, prepares to snap his fingers and eliminate half of existence.

“I am inevitable,” Thanos’s gravelly voice can be heard saying. A loud snap rings out, and the video cuts to footage of Democrats announcing the impeachment articles against Trump at a news conference Tuesday.

Pelosi is abruptly cut off when she and other Democratic leaders vanish into a cloud of dark particles, leaving behind an empty lectern.

By early Wednesday, “Thanos” was trending, with roughly 56,000 mentions, and the video had been watched more than 3 million times.

Many viewers were perplexed with the Trump campaign’s decision to highlight that scene.

“Did you watch the movie???” Bloomberg reporter Ryan Teague Beckwith tweeted.

“Y’all didn’t see the end of that movie, did y’all?” another person asked.

The film’s actual events go something like this: Thanos snaps and quickly realizes something is very wrong-- the Infinity Stones needed to power the gauntlet have been stolen by Iron Man. The superhero then utters his famous line, “And I am Iron Man,” and uses the stones to disintegrate Thanos and his army.

Critics rushed to call attention to the pivotal plot point.

Others noted that presenting Trump as a supervillain might not have been the best strategy.

“There’s several levels of fail here,” a Twitter user wrote. “1: You’re comparing Trump to a genocidal warlord. 2: That same warlord killed half the universe, tortured one daughter, and murdered the others. 3: This is the scene where Thanos realizes he’s been tricked and defeated.”

The Thanos video marks the latest instance that an attempt to riff on pop culture has not gone smoothly for Trump, who has previously made references to the hit HBO show Game of Thrones and the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises.

In January, the president was derided after he shared a meme that said, “The wall is coming,” inspired by the Game of Thrones tagline, “Winter is coming.” The words, stylized in the same font used by the show, were written across a picture of a steely eyed Trump looming over what appeared to be a version of the border wall. “Game of Thrones” fans didn’t hesitate to inform the president, who had probably not seen the award-winning show, that the great Wall in Westeros was destroyed during the Season 7 finale.

Several months later, Trump ran into another hurdle when he posted a video featuring music from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. The clip was promptly taken off social media after Warner Bros., the studio behind the movie, made a copyright claim.

On Tuesday, as critics continued to ridicule the Avengers-themed video, some viewers leaned into the portrayal of Trump.

“So Trump is Thanos and the Democrats are the Avengers trying to restore democracy that evil Republicans have nearly destroyed,” one person tweeted. “Glad we’re on the same page.”

Which Crap Centrist Will Represent The Republican Wing Of The Democratic Party In The End-- Definitely One From The B-Team

Last night the ad above started airing in New Hampshire. Bad news for Status Quo Joe, who depending on which poll you're looking at, is coming in first, second or third. The ad calls for the clueless candidate to drop out of the race and directs viewers to Roots Action's BidenFactSquad page which lists various quotes from Biden and his backers illuminating his history on issues such as income inequality, racial injustice, climate change, and criminal justice reform.

Jeff Cohen a co-founder of Roots Action's Action for a Progressive Future said in a statement that they "launched this ad to convey a simple message-- that Democrats would have a hard time defeating Trump with a candidate who belittles young voters and their very real struggles... Poll after poll shows that people under 35 are more progressive and more anti-Trump than older voters. Biden’s dismissive attitude raises the specter of a re-run of the 2016 Democratic defeat, when too many young people did not vote or voted third-party... The absolute wrong way to urge young people-- or any group-- into action is by minimizing the serious obstacles they confront."

Remember, turnout among voters under age 30 increased by almost 50 percent in the 2018 midterm elections (compared to 2014). People ages 18 to 35 will make up more than one-third of the electorate by November 2020. They aren't interested in an old white establishment hack fighting for the status quo ante. Being against Trump is necessary, but voters want more than just that. Poll after poll has shown that Biden has virtually no support among voters under 35, a demographic that heavily favors Bernie.

The B-Team... as in blecccchhhh

Yesterday Ben White and Daniel Strauss penned a piece for Politico insinuating that Bloomberg might be a factor among young voters, even though most young voters detest him. They refer to him as the new candidate of the young elite and makes the absurd claim that Mayo Pete is battling Biden and Bloomberg for young voters. Once you begin reading, you realize they're just talking about these young voters, overpaid Wall Street coke freaks. They wrote that Mayo Pete, somewhat absurdly, "was quickly locking down a solid lane in the Democratic primary: a young, vibrant, gay, midwestern, war veteran mayor with progressive ideas and plenty of money-- but both feet planted in fiscal prudence. Young Wall Street and tech-entrepreneur types were starting to fall in love-- with his poll numbers and fundraising totals underscoring the Buttigieg boomlet. He was the Parks and Recreation candidate in the Democratic field and an alternative to seventy-somethings Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who are both looking to lock down the hyper-online progressive, anti-Wall Street crowd as well as blue collar workers across the Midwest." That's the "in-case-Biden-self-destructs" line the establishment keep repeating. They're eager to point out that Mayo is a lot younger than Status Quo Joe, "who has lagged in fundraising and hardly taken off in the big-donor crowd the way many expected. Buttigieg was poised to perhaps emerge as the leading moderate alternative to Biden." Biden is 76. But Bloomberg is a year older.

But then a funny thing happened last week: Another 70-something candidate beloved on Wall Street-- billionaire mogul Michael Bloomberg-- made an unexpected splash by suggesting he may still enter the race.

Bloomberg will not steal Buttigieg’s momentum with younger, wealthier Democratic voters and donors, people close to the South Bend mayor say. But the former NYC mayor does give Big Finance, Big Tech and other more corporate-friendly Democrats another progressive prospect as an alternative to Biden, Sanders and Warren.

“My own feeling is that Bloomberg getting in might-- if he stays in — might wind up getting rid of Cory Booker and Kamala Harris and others who haven’t done all that well,” said one of Buttigieg’s biggest New York bundlers. “At the end of this year, I still think it’s going to be Warren and Pete and Biden. And Pete will have plenty of money when it’s time to get into the big spending season and I don’t think Bloomberg will hurt his fundraising at all."

Indeed, multiple Wall Street executives who like Bloomberg suggested in recent days that they see a very narrow path forward for the former mayor. And that could leave Buttigieg hanging around as not-ultraliberal, not inclined to bust up major industries and not as old or potentially shaky as Biden.

And that leaves some young Democrats who work in tech and finance pretty optimistic.

For this group, a strong distaste for Warren and Sanders-- mixed with increasing doubts about the viability of Biden-- are creating the kind of opening to gain even more political and financial support that Buttigieg has been hoping for among key donor groups like Wall Street and the tech industry.

The Buttigieg boomlet in the financial community is enough to seriously annoy die-hard Biden backers on Wall Street who think the only way to stop Warren and Sanders is to double down on the former vice president, who still leads in most national polls despite his dips in some early primary states.

And Buttigieg’s youth, inexperience relative to other Democrats and thin support among the African American community are still giving potential donors pause.

“Look, Pete is definitely the new candidate of the young elite,” said a senior executive and major donor at a big Wall Street bank who backs Biden. “The problem is you can’t win the Democratic nomination without African American support. He doesn’t have any and nobody really knows who he is.”

That sentiment-- that Buttigieg is unknown-- is not borne out by either his rising poll numbers or his large fundraising numbers. Overall, Buttigieg's campaign has raised over $51 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Interviews with nearly a dozen Buttigieg backers in the investment community suggest the South Bend mayor’s mix of progressive stands on social issues and more moderate approaches to taxation, health care and the financial industry more broadly have kicked off a mini-movement among younger investor-types.

Buttigieg checks many of the boxes Wall Street executives are looking for: He’s more moderate on banking and health care than Warren but not too conservative as to turn off progressive voters. And he speaks the Wall Street language, as a Harvard-educated, former McKinsey consultant whose eyes light up at any chance to get technocratic.

Some Buttigieg bundlers say lately, as Biden’s candidacy has faltered, interest for the mayor has increased. “It started to feel like there was a high probability that Biden could falter and then there would be a big opening in the moderate lane,” said a bundler who hosted an event for Buttigieg over the summer but declined to be identified by name to avoid offending the former vice president or other candidates.

“A lot of the other candidates like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris kind of tried to straddle the moderate and progressive lanes and it just hasn’t worked for them. Mayor Pete took the approach of saying, ‘I’m just going to go with what I believe,’” this bundler said.

“The big obstacle really is the African American vote and he’s not proven he can win there yet and that bothers me. And it bothers me that part of that is because he’s gay. If he doesn’t win, fine. But I hope it’s not because he’s gay.”

It’s a sentiment many Buttigieg backers acknowledge: Mayor Pete winning the Democratic nomination is far from a sure thing. And now they face a new wrinkle with Wall Street-favorite Bloomberg possibly entering the race, occupying the lane of a mayor with extensive experience advocating for progressive policy changes.

Other Wall Street donors and bundlers are still holding back, waiting to see if Buttigieg can actually win something, before committing. “There are some people who are impressed with him but they really think he’s the guy in high school with the great future,” said a second Buttigieg Wall Street bundler of his conversations with potential new big donors. “I tell them he’s got a legitimate shot even though it sometimes feels like a crazy thing to tell people.”

Other campaigns are also taking note of Buttigieg’s support from Wall Street and tech donors and using it as a sharp line of attack, arguing that it shows he would lack boldness in reforming big industries and raising taxes on the wealthy to fund big new social programs like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal.

Buttigieg has supported a “Medicare for all who want it” approach. And he’s made the environment a centerpiece of his generational appeal but stopped short of fully embracing the most far-reaching elements of plans like the Green New Deal. Buttigieg praised the approach in a recent interview with Politico but stopped short of backing the enormous tax hikes associated with it. “We’re going to take our time doing our math before you see kind of a detailed tax policy framework from our effort,” he said.

Buttigieg’s ties to Wall Street donors probably won’t translate into the precise policies most financiers want. President Barack Obama, for instance, took plenty of donations from the finance world but still pushed and signed the Dodd-Frank law that so much of Wall Street opposed.

Still, some prominent liberals see the mayor as unacceptably close to the community of Wall Street and banking donors.

“He has more donations from billionaires than any other candidate. There are no surprises here. He made it very clear who he's standing with,” said former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, the co-chair of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. The “corporate types, the oligarchs of this country know that if Sen. Sanders wins he’s going to do the bidding of the 99 percent and not them.”

The latest Quinnipiac poll shows how registered voters nationally, 34 and under are looking at the Democratic primary contenders right now. I don't see Bloomberg, with his reactionary policies and repulsive personality is going to catch up with Yang, let alone with any of the top tier candidates.

• Bernie: 31%
• Elizabeth: 30%
• Mayo Pete: 12%
• Kamala: 6%
• Status Quo Joe: 6%
• Yang: 4%

Yesterday I spoke with exactly one dozen young candidates running for Congress. Not one of them indicated that they consider Mayo Pete a serious contender and not one of them had anything positive to say about him. 29-year old Dary Rezvani, for example, is the progressive Democrat challenging Trump enabler Devin Nunes in California's Central Valley. He told me that "Pete is a dangerous candidate because he is young and well-spoken, much like Obama. I think that the idea of identity politics, especially with millennials, is fading. We have seen so many politicians who just pander in order to get votes that we want someone that we can actually trust. Most of the under 30 crowd that I have spoken to only see him as an opportunist. If there is a candidate that I think actually has a chance of capturing tech and Wall Street it would be Yang."

Is An Intergenerational Coalition The Key To Social And Economic Progress In America?

A couple of days ago, Huffington Post published an interesting essay by Michael Hobbes, America’s Defining Divide Isn’t Left vs Right. It’s Old vs. Young, that offers an alternative frame with which to look at American elections. "Voters over retirement age," he predicted, "will continue to dominate U.S. politics until at least 2060." As a group, millennial voters (woke millennial voters)-- even more than voters of color or of class-- were responsible for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's earth-shattering win against establishment mainstay Joe Crowley in a vibrant and changing Bronx/Queens congressional district. That, however, may be a glaring exception to an old political rule. "The U.S. electorate," wrote Hobbes, "is the oldest it’s ever been and will keep getting older for at least four more decades. Researchers call it the 'demographic transition.' Americans over 65 are now the fastest-growing age group in the country. The U.S. Census projects that by 2035, the population past retirement age will outnumber the population under 18 for the first time in history. While younger, more diverse generations have captured the media narrative about U.S. politics, its defining feature in the future may be its oldest participants."

“As much as diversity is growing in the U.S., the baby boomer generation still has a lot of financial power, political power and consumer power,” said William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “There’s a lot of focus in the media on the younger generations, but in fact, the younger population is growing more slowly than seniors.”

America’s current demographic makeup, Frey said, is unprecedented. Due to rising longevity, falling birth rates and the sheer number of baby boomers (currently between 55 and 73 years old), today’s older Americans have held onto power longer than any previous generation. In 1950, as the boom began, just 8 percent of Americans were over 65; the United States had more people under 25 than over 45. By 2010, when the boomers began to retire, those numbers had flipped and the share of the population over retirement age had increased by 50 percent.

Their power goes beyond raw numbers. Older Americans are more likely to vote than millennials and Gen Xers, particularly in midterm and primary elections. They are three times more likely to donate to political campaigns. Plus, they are clustered in rural and sparsely populated states, giving them disproportionately large Senate and Electoral College representation. This partly explains why the average member of Congress is now 58.6 years old, roughly a decade older than they were in 1981 and two decades older than the population at large.

Without a dramatic increase in immigration or a sudden doubling of the birth rate, this is likely to be a permanent shift. The elderly population will continue to grow until at least 2026⁠. By 2050, demographers expect the number of Americans over 65 to roughly triple and the number of Americans in their 20s to decline.

This trend has profound implications for every American institution, but perhaps none more so than politics itself. Older voters have unique characteristics and specific interests that transcend the Democratic-Republican divide. From their economic circumstances to their demographic makeup, the concerns of older voters are only going to become more prominent as the baby boom generation enters retirement.

This creates a paradox for the candidates vying for the presidential nomination in 2020 and beyond. Though the most high-profile policy ideas-- subsidized childcare, paid leave, universal health care-- address the concerns of younger generations, the election itself may be determined by voters unlikely to reap their benefits and wary of paying their costs.

“To a great extent, older voters are still setting the agenda,” said Andrea Campbell, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist. “They’re incredibly important to both parties’ coalitions. Politicians remain reluctant to run afoul of older voters.”

And it’s likely to stay that way for a very long time.

I recollect that when I was studying civics in high school and political science in college, both in the 1960s, older voters were firmly in the Democratic Party camp. Much of that had to do with FDR, the New Deal and Social Security. That allegiance seem to have largely dissipated with time. Hobbes wrote that now older voters tend to skew Republican and that both parties will try to win a greater proportion of them "by appealing to the circumstances and anxieties that set them apart from younger generations." How? In short, economics and race.

Long before Alan Grayson (D-FL) ever imagined running for Congress, he wrote a brilliant masters thesis on gerontology and helped found the non-profit Alliance for Aging Research, serving as an officer for over 20 years. There are virtually no issues he deals with that he doesn't look at through a prism that includes retirees. I asked him how progressives are going to deal with an aging population being asked to pay for programs that Republicans paint as radical, impractical and unrelated to their own lives. He didn't hesitate for a moment: "By expanding Social Security benefits, which haven’t increased in 40+ years, and by extending Medicare to cover all healthcare needs, including eyes, ears and teeth. That’s social justice for seniors, and demonstrates the commitment to younger people that they’ll get the same consideration when it’s their turn."

Ro Khanna (D-CA) took a slightly different approach in answering the same question. He told me we have to root a progressive agenda "in the context of American history and American culture. We must present a compelling vision for the change we need to prepare for a 21st century economy, but in language that appeals to America’s sense of inventing the future and imbued with a deep patriotism about America’s role in the world. Progressive policies have to be seen as common sense solutions to maintain American leadership and to maintain a cohesive body politic."

Older voters have strikingly different wealth and income profiles than younger voters. Four out of five older families own homes, compared to just one in four younger families. Most own stocks and a large plurality are business owners. Nearly 1 in 9 older households are millionaires and, according to a 2015 study, are the only age group in America whose net worth has increased since 1989.

Politically speaking, this means older households have a profoundly different narrative of the U.S. economy than every other cohort. Gen Xers and millennials, who have seen their incomes stagnate and their living costs explode, are gravitating toward candidates who prioritize issues like student debt and income inequality. Older voters, by contrast, will be more likely to vote for candidates who promise to boost the stock market, lower taxes and push up property values.

The widening gap between the economic realities of older and younger voters could become an even more prominent feature of American politics. According to a 2018 study, the poorest Americans die an estimated 12.7 years earlier than the wealthiest Americans. This means that, over time, as the rich retire and the poor pass away, the government will be spending an increasing percentage of its Social Security and Medicare resources on its wealthiest population.

In the midst of increasing strain on government programs, America will have to make hard choices about taxation and distribution. According to Campbell, this will create a paradox between what the country needs and what its dominant voter group will accept.

Older Americans, she said, will need better and cheaper government services. Their stances on policy and their dominance of the electorate, however, will increase pressure to raise taxes on everyone but themselves-- i.e. the young and the poor.

“If you ask seniors if we should preserve Social Security and Medicare for their grandchildren, they say yes,” Campbell said. “But their presence in the electorate might prevent that.”

The largest gap between older and younger voters is on the issue of race. Nearly 80 percent of Americans over 65 are white, compared to 52 percent of Americans between 6 and 21. In a 2017 survey, 1 in 5 older respondents said they would oppose a member of their family marrying someone of another race, compared to just 1 in 20 millennial respondents.

This explains much of America’s present political situation and previews what it will look like in the future. Surveys consistently find that the racial concerns and anxieties of older generations veer significantly from those held by younger Americans. From the existence of prejudice against whites to the necessity of affirmative action, older voters score higher on measures of racial resentment and are more likely to be persuaded by explicit appeals to whiteness.

“Racial attitudes matter far more than economic evaluations,” said Duke University political scientist Ashley Jardina. “The attitudes that people have about racial groups, including their own, matter for how they make sense of politics. Older voters are more likely to adopt a white racial identity, which means that racial and cultural resentments may remain more salient than other issues.”

It’s also worth noting, she said, that older voters are unlikely to change their beliefs over time. While voters preferences do indeed evolve, this process is slow and complex. Despite America’s rapidly changing attitudes toward the LGBTQ community, for example, only one in three older Americans support gay marriage, a relatively modest rise from one in five in 2000. Other research indicates that when voters’ beliefs do change with age, they tilt toward defending the status quo.

“Social change primarily happens because generations of people die,” Jardina said. It may sound appealing to think that younger generations could convince their parents and grandparents to be more progressive over time, but white millennials are remarkably similar to older whites in their racial attitudes and anxieties. Without huge increases in cross-cultural interactions, Jardina said, “we shouldn’t expect a major change in the attitudes that older voters have about race and politics.”

Frey, who is 71, gave a much more optimistic take on the political future of his generation. On both racial and economic appeals, he was convinced that baby boomers will turn out to be more flexible than the cohorts that preceded them.

“We’re in unpredictable political times,” he said. “The baby boom generation is the most educated ever to reach old age. They lived through the civil rights movement and put more women into the workforce than any previous generation. If anyone can adjust to changing times, it’s them.”

In Congress, Tom Suozzi (D-NY) represents the Long Island North Shore district that stretches across Suffolk, Nassau and Queens counties. Earlier in his career, in 1993, at 31 he was elected mayor of his hometown Glen Cove, where he served for 8 years. “When you are young, you don’t know what you can’t do,” Tom told me yesterday, "you think you can accomplish anything. You don't worry about butting your head up against concrete walls, immovable barriers. So you get things done. I cleaned up polluted sites, fought with some unsavory characters and won, built buildings in time and on budget." Tom did things that were considered crazy to even try-- but in the exuberance of youth, he tried... and succeeded. Now he represents a district that was designed for older people. "There's a youth drain," he told me. "We have the best school systems in the country-- our schools routinely mop up when it comes to national competitions-- and then the kids move away." When they move back, they're much older. NY-03 has lots of retirees of the kind Hobbes was writing. Suozzi is an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. When I asked him about how he can have a dialogue with the older voters who hold a disproportionate amount of political power on Long Island he was adamant that it can't be an appeal to selfishness but about what was the right thing to do-- even what is the right thing to do beyond the interests of their own grandchildren. "We have to appeal to their better angels," he told me. "People want to do the right thing for the country, for the world. We have to lay out the case and show them why it's the right thing so that they can embrace it with enthusiasm. Whenever people try and dissuade me about what’s possible and what’s not, I try and remember what it felt like to be a swashbuckling idealist before I got beaten up in some tough political battles. That inspires me to push forward. Bobby Kennedy put is this way 'This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.'"

Millennials Got Even With Trump In 2018-- Just Wait For 2020

Ron Brownstein, reporting for CNN, offered the GOP a ton of bad news yesterday. Young voters were out in force last month-- and whether they like Democrats or not-- they punished the GOP severely, primarily for Trump. 2020, a presidential election year, will be worse-- or, depending on your perspective-- better.

In California, for example, young voters helped flip 7 of the Republicans' 14 House seats. Of the 7 left, Democrats will be aiming to take out Doug LaMalfa, Tom McClintock, Paul Cook, Devin Nunes, Ken Calvert and Duncan Hunter (whose trial-- he and his wife face 60 criminal counts-- begins early next September). In Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped 5 red seats and next cycle they'll be looking at Brian Fitzpatrick and Scott Perry as being the most vulnerable of the remaining 9 Republicans. In New Jersey a 7 (D) to 5 (R) delegation is now 11 (D) to 1 (R); Chris Smith will have all guns trained on his Monmouth, Ocean and Mercer counties district. In Texas, Democrats only flipped two districts but they came close enough in 8 to have Will Hurd, Kenny Marchant, Michael McCaul, Pete Olson, John Carter, Roger Williams, Chip Roy, Van Taylor, Ron Wright and Dan Crenshaw on the target list for 2020. In New York, Lee Zeldin, Peter King, Elise Stefanik, Tom Reed, John Katko and Chris Collins-- the only Republicans left in the 27-person delegation-- are all on the danger list.

Other GOP incumbents who look like they should get ready for major assaults include Don Young (AK), David Schweikert (AZ), Debbie Lesko (AZ), French Hill (AR), Scott Tipton (CO), Ross Spano (FL), Vern Buchanan (FL), Brian Mast, Rob Woodall (GA), Mike Bost (IL), Rodney Davis (IL), Jackie Walorski (IN), Susan Brooks (IN), Steve King (IA), Steve Watkins (KS), Andy Barr (KY), Jack Bergman (MI), Fred Upton (MI), Tim Walberg (MI), Jim Hagedorn (MN), Peter Stauber (MN), Ann Wagner (MO), Greg Gianforte (MT), Don Bacon (NE), George Holding (NC), Mark Walker (NC), Richard Hudson (NC), Mark Harris (NC), Ted Budd (NC), Steve Chabot (OH), Troy Balderson (OH), David Joyce (OH), Anthony Gonzalez (OH), Joe Wilson (SC), Rob Wittman (VA), Denver Riggleman (VA), Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA), Bryn Steil (WI) and Glenn Grothman (WI).

Brownstein thinks the pain millennials dealt out to the GOP in November "may be only the overture to an even greater political risk for the GOP in 2020. Both historical voting patterns and underlying demographic trends suggest that the biggest difference in the electorate between this election and the next one is that relatively younger voters will cast a greater share of the votes in the presidential year-- perhaps a much larger share. Even with much higher than usual turnout among young voters this year, voters 45 and below are likely to increase their proportion of the total vote from just under three-in-ten this year to something closer to four-in-ten by 2020, historical trends suggest."

If the Democrats are smart enough to nominate candidates who appeal to younger voters, like Bernie, instead of another status quo nothing like Biden, the damage to the GOP could be enough to take out another the Republican Senate majority and flip another couple dozen red House seats. "Several states with Democratic campaigns that particularly targeted young people," wrote Brownstein, "saw bigger increases, according to previously unpublished Catalist data. In Arizona, the share of the vote cast by those under 45 spiked from 21% in 2014 to 29% this year; in Georgia, the numbers jumped from 29% to 36%; Texas increased from 26% to 33%.

"They will certainly be a larger percent of voters than they were in 2018 given presidential versus midterm trends," says Yair Ghitza, the chief scientist at Catalist, a leading Democratic voter targeting and election modeling firm. "The question is to what extent the [higher] engagement we saw in 2018 will continue and be better than in 2016 and other presidential years."

A rising participation level could threaten Republicans at a moment when younger voters, who have consistently expressed preponderant opposition to President Donald Trump in polls, provided Democrats their largest margins in decades during last month's election.

"Voters under 45 moved decisively and overwhelmingly toward Democrats, and I don't know how you take it as anything other than a total rebuke of Trump and what's he done," says Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann, who has extensively studied younger voters.

Despite Democrats' emphatic gains among younger voters, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, author of The Selfie Vote, a book on the Millennial Generation, says the GOP shows no signs of grappling with the shift. "Even though the election, especially on the House side, was not good for Republicans there has not been an appetite for a course correction or a change in approach," she says. "So it would surprise me if there was a concerted effort to try win over more young voters between now and the 2020 election."

In the 2014 midterm, around 20% of voters between 18 and 29 cast ballots. This year it was 31%. We're going to see that number grow substantially on 2020. "Heightened turnout in 2020," wrote Brownstein, "would raise the price for the losses Republicans suffered among younger voters this year. In the exit polls, Democrats carried fully 67% of voters aged 18-29 in House elections. That represented their best performance among adults under 30 in any House election since at least 1986; it even exceeded their modern high points of around three-fifths in the 2006 midterm election and the 2008 and 2012 presidential years, when former President Barack Obama was on the ballot. Just two years ago, House Democrats carried a much less imposing 56% of these voters in the 2016 election, exit polls found. Similarly, exit polls this year found House Democrats captured 58% among voters aged 30-44. That's also the highest share of the vote Democrats have won in that age group since 1986. House Democrats had lost those voters, who might be described as early middle-aged, as recently as 2010 and had not carried more than 52% of them in any of the three elections since."

These results were remarkably consistent across regional lines. Democrats carried voters aged 18-29 in all 22 Senate races in which an exit poll was conducted, except for Indiana, where the two candidates tied. Many of their margins among these youngest voters were enormous. In the US Senate race in Texas, Democrat Beto O'Rourke, despite losing the race, carried 71% of voters younger than 30, the exit polls found. Gavin Newsom won 69% of voters younger than 30 in winning the California governor's race, and Stacey Abrams carried just under two-thirds of them in her losing Georgia gubernatorial bid.

...But while the GOP's difficulties with the Millennial Generation predate Trump, there seems little doubt that he has compounded them. From the outset, many millennials viewed Trump's belligerent language on race and immigration, and his belittling comments about women, as an explicit counterrevolution against the ideal of a more inclusive and tolerant America that most of them say they support. In a summer 2016 ABC/Washington Post survey, two thirds of voters under 40 said they considered Trump biased against women and minorities.

But doubts about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton blocked the full expression of those doubts: while Trump in 2016 carried almost exactly the same share of voters under 30 as GOP nominee Mitt Romney did in 2012 (just over one-third), Clinton fell a crucial five percentage points below Obama's showing, as many young people scattered to the minor party alternatives. Voters 30-44 split even more closely, with Clinton carrying just 51 percent of them in the exit poll. (Catalist's vote modeling produced generally similar results for both groups in 2016.)

In this election, Trump faced a withering verdict from younger voters. In the exit polls, 66% of voters aged 18-29 and 62% of those aged 30-44 said they disapproved of his performance in office. In each group, just over half said they strongly disapproved of Trump's performance, significantly more than the share of older voters (just over two-fifths) who said they were so strongly disenchanted with him.

"The disapproval of Trump, and the views of him as being a racist and sexist that we saw [among young people] in 2016, was somewhat muted by not loving Hillary Clinton," said Baumann. "But it just got amplified after him being in power for two years. One of my theories coming out of 2016 was that Republicans by embracing Trump were at risk of losing a generation of voters, and it sure seems like that is coming to the fore now."

...Trump is still committing the GOP to a strategy of squeezing more advantage from groups that are shrinking. All of the major data sources on the electorate's composition-- from the Census Bureau to the exit polls to Catalist-- agree that the share of the vote cast by Trump's core group of whites without a college education has been declining by about two percentage points over each four-year presidential cycle. With turnout among minorities and college-educated whites surging, Catalist's preliminary analysis found those working-class whites, while still the electorate's largest single group, dropped fully five points as a share of the vote this year, compared to the last mid-term in 2014.

One thing no political strategy can reverse is the tide of generational replacement. As not only the World War II and Silent Generations, but also more baby boomers pass out of the electorate, the share of the eligible voting pool comprised of Generation X, millennials and Post-millennials is inexorably rising. The States of Change project forecasts those three generations-- which are much more racially diverse and college-educated than the generations they are replacing-- will continue growing to about two-thirds of eligible voters by 2024 and nearly three-fourths by 2028. More voters mean more consequences if Republicans can't soften the recoil from the party that younger voters displayed last month. "It's...a clear and present danger to any Republican policy maker who expects their name will be on a ballot after 2020," says Anderson. "Donald Trump will run for reelection in 2020, and I am out of the business of saying he can't pull this off. But if you are a more conventional Republican...who has ambitions of being in political office for more than the next two years you ought to be gravely concerned about this."

This desperate and pathetic GOP/Fox News perspective worked out very badly for Republican candidates up and down the ballot:

Finally... The Youth Vote Was Real This Time

Mike Siegel didn't win his nearly impossible race in TX-10, a district with an R+9 PVI where Obama lost by 20 points to Romney and Trump beat Hillary 52.3% to 43.2%. The Republican incumbent, Michael McCaul is rich, powerful and very entrenched. The DCCC ignored the race but Mike ran a classic grassroots campaign that held McCaul down to 50.9%, his weakest showing since first being elected in 2004. Last cycle the Democrat received 38.4% and the cycle before that 34.1% even in the Democratic wave elections of 2006 and 2008, one Democrat got 40.4% and the next 43.1%. In other words, Siegel did better against McCaul than anyone else ever had. He raised $437,883 compared to McCaul's $1,618,946. There was no significant outside spending to bolster either candidate. So what happened to bring Siegel's vote so much higher than any previous Democratic campaign there?

He's an exceptionally good candidate. He put together an exceptionally good team. Blatant and bigoted voter suppression none county-- something he fought and won-- brought him local and national exposure. All good. And Trump, of course. But what that enough to jump from 38.4% to 46.9% in 2 years?

At the end of October, I caught up with Mike as he was driving from one small town to another in the middle of the sprawling district. He gave me an in-depth look at early voting in the district. I wasn't surprised that women were voting significantly more than men-- 52-48%-- but there were two things that did surprise me. One was that Travis County (Austin) had registered 94.5% of all eligible voters, which is the highest number I've ever heard in my life. On election day, the county wound up give Mike a gargantuan D+43 advantage. And the other point was that millennials have been voting at unprecedented rates. Democrats are always waiting for younger voters to come through-- but they rarely do. Mike's anecdotal and local statistical data was backed up by Harvard's Fall 2018 National Youth Poll. The poll looked for engagement for voters between 18 and 29 years old and found them to be "significantly more likely to vote in the upcoming midterm elections compared to 2010 and 2014. Overall, 40 percent report that they would 'definitely vote' in the midterms, with 54% of Democrats, 43% of Republicans and 24% of Independents considered likely voters."

This morning I talked with Mike again. I'm hoping he runs again, of course and when I asked him about the youth vote, I heard a lot of optimism. "The vote confirmed what we were feeling on the ground," he told me, "that this seat is winnable, and that we have large pockets of potential Democratic voters who are waiting to be engaged in the political process. My team is sitting down to analyze what we did well and what opportunities we left on the table. The 10th District will remain in its current form for one more election in 2020, before the map is redrawn again. Even though Tom Delay and Karl Rove worked to draw this District to be 60% Republican, we think it could flip Democrat if we continue to build on our gains this year."

A follow-up memo, released Wednesday, from John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard's Institute of Politics, confirmed that young voters did indeed turn out-- bigly!

He referenced a study from Tufts University that found that "approximately 31 percent of youth (ages 18-29) turned out to vote in the 2018 midterms, an extraordinary increase over the CIRCLE estimate in 2014 and the highest rate of turnout in at least 25 years. In 2014, IOP estimates that approximately 10.8 million young Americans voted (Democrats preferred 54%-43%), compared to 14.7 million in 2018 (Democrats preferred 67%-32%). The actual number of Republican votes cast by those under 30 remained stable from 2014 to 2018, while nearly all of the nearly 4 million increase in turnout came from those supporting Democrats.

Voters under 30 (estimated share of 13% of electorate) were credited by NBC News analysts as one of the key groups that led to a Democratic takeover of the House, along with African Americans (estimated share of 11%), Hispanic/Latino Americans (share 11%), and those with no religious preference (17%).  Exit polls have indicated that voters under 30 preferred Democrats by a +31 margin, tracking closely with our final IOP poll conducted after the Kavanaugh hearings that indicated a Democratic preference of +34.  For example, if the proportion of young voters on Tuesday mirrored traditional midterm youth turnout, districts such as TX-32 (incumbent House Rules Chair Rep. Pete Sessions lost by -6) and GA-06 (Newt Gingrich’s former seat, won with 2,145 vote margin by Democrat Lucy McBath) would likely not have flipped from Republican to Democratic control.

According to analysis of exit polls, young voters also played a critical role in Democrats winning the Senate seat in Nevada, and made the Texas Senate race more competitive than polls predicted (RCP average Cruz +6.8, Cruz was winning by 2.62 points with 97% of ballots counted). Exceeding the national youth margin for Democrats (from +31 to +37, likely because of young Hispanic voters), propelled Jacky Rosen to victory in Nevada over incumbent Dean Heller.

...In Texas, voters under 30 preferred O’Rourke to Cruz, 71 percent to 29 percent (+42), and among those between 30 and 44, the margin was cut to only +4, 51 percent to 47 percent; Cruz won the over 45 vote by +16.  Compared to the national electorate, O’Rourke overperformed with voters under 30, but underperformed with those between 30 and 39. If his margin of support among 30 to 39 year olds better reflected the national electorate-- he would have won the election. Estimates are they he would have needed a margin of 20 points or less with voters in their 30s.

In Florida, voters under 30 preferred Gillum to DeSantis, 62 percent to 36 percent (+26), and among those between 30 and 44, it was 61 percent to 33 (+28) percent for Gillum; DeSantis won the over 45 vote by +9.

In the Georgia race for Governor, Kemp led with both men and women (+6 for men and +1 for women); however, among voters under 30, Abrams led by +27, by +16 among 30-to-44 year olds, and lost those over 45 by +19.

While we will not have a final tally of votes cast for several weeks, Edison Research has estimated as many as 113 million may have voted, and the United States Election Project has estimated a national turnout of 111.5 million which makes this the first midterm election that will surpass the 100 million vote mark. The Election Project projects a national turnout rate of 47.3 percent which equals the 1970 rate and trails the modern record of 48.7 percent from 1966.  We are confident that the increased turnout rate among young Americans under 30 matched, and likely surpassed older age groups-- and will set modern records once tallies are finalized.

A generation that has consistently told us in polling that they have more fear than hope about the future seem prepared to further engage in politics and policy (look for a more progressive domestic agenda and heightened demand for gun violence prevention legislation).  We fully expect that they will play a significant role in shaping our country's future through their commitment to service and renewed interest in politics.

On a national basis, young voters overwhelming preferred Democrats over Republicans in 2018. Both CNN’s and CBS’ exit poll analysis indicated a preference of 67 percent to 32 percent (+35) for Democrats; in Fox’s analysis the margin was 59 percent to 32 percent (+27).  In 2014, the Democratic advantage was +11 and in the 2016 presidential, the Democratic advantage was +19.

Age now accounts for one of the most significant divides in America; 35 percent of the electorate was estimated to be younger than 45 years old and they preferred Democrats, 61 to 36 percent (+25); among those 45 and older, Republicans were preferred by one percentage point.

Women preferred Democrats +19, men preferred Republicans by +4.  Among white voters, Republicans were preferred by +10, while Blacks (+81), Hispanics (+41), and Asians (+54) preferred Democrats. College graduates preferred Democrats by +13, while those without a college degree split evenly. White men preferred Republicans by +21, white women split evenly, 49 to 49 percent.

With Democratic preference at 67 percent in exit polls, this is a marked improvement over the 55 percent of the vote that Hillary Clinton received according to 2016 exit polls and the 54 percent that Democrats received in the 2014 midterms.

...Based on analysis of Early and Absentee voting patterns by Democratic data firm TargetSmart, it was found that the share of voters under 30 who voted early increased by a higher percentage than any other age group in the electorate, from 5.39 percent in 2014 to 8.67 percent in 2018.  This is a difference of more than 2.1 million additional votes.

...Based on analysis of Early and Absentee voting patterns by Democratic data firm TargetSmart, it was found that the share of voters under 30 who voted early increased by a higher percentage than any other age group in the electorate, from 5.39 percent in 2014 to 8.67 percent in 2018.  This is a difference of more than 2.1 million additional votes.

NextGen America published a list of 41 “youth-dense precincts” across the country to monitor over the course of Election Day. More than 50 percent of all registered voters in each of these “Youth Vote Indicator Precincts” were between the ages of 18 and 35. In 40 precincts that have comparable data from 2014, it was found that turnout increased on average from 24 percent to 45 percent. Turnout increased in 93 percent of the 40 precincts-- and in some cases, turnout eclipsed 60 percent, including in CA-49’s UC-San Diego precinct, FL-05’s Tallahassee/Florida A&M precinct, NH-02’s Hanover/Dartmouth College precinct, and PA-07’s East Stroudsburg University precinct.

Prognosticators Have Never Learned How To Rate Races In A Wave Election-- And Pollsters Can't Get Their Models Straight

Polls are all based on "likely voters." A campaign manager I was talking to last week was in a rush because he was still dragging homeless people onto buses to feed them sandwiches, etc and get them to the early voting stations. Over a thousand. Likely voters? Not a chance. Early voting shows "unexpected" upturns for women voters, black voters, Latino voters and millennials voters. How many extra seats is that worth to the Democrats beyond what the pollsters and prognosticators predicted? 10? 20? 30?

Last week Time Magazine warned them: Youth Voter Turnout in the Midterm Elections Could Be Historic, According to a New Poll. "Young voters could turn out to vote at record-breaking levels in the midterm elections next month, according to a new poll. The poll, released Monday by the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, found 40% of 18 to 29-year-olds say they will 'definitely vote' in the midterm elections on Nov. 6. Youth voter turnout has historically been dismal in midterm elections, which tend to draw fewer voters overall than presidential election years. The highest rate of youth voter turnout in past midterm elections was 21% in both 1986 and 1994, according to the Harvard report... In the 2014 midterm elections, 19.9% of adults under 30 voted-- 'the lowest rate of youth turnout recorded in the past 40 years.' In the 2016 presidential election, 46.1% of adults under 30 voted-- an increase from 2012, but still the lowest turnout rate of any age group."

In this year’s poll, a larger percentage of young Democrats (54%) than young Republicans (43%) indicated they were likely to vote.. Overall, 66% of respondents supported Democrats taking back control of Congress, compared to 32% for Republican control.

So how's that working out today? We don't know yet, but what we do know is that millennials turned out big in early voting. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that early voting is pointing to a "Youth Wave."

Youth turnout rates in the midterm early vote are up by 125 percent compared to 2014, according to Catalist, a voter database servicing progressive organizations-- an eye-popping and historically high figure, say strategists on both the left and the right.

Young Americans ages 18 to 29 who say they are definitely voting tilt leftward, according to polls. But the data also shows young Republicans are bubbling with enthusiasm headed into tomorrow.

...2020 implications: Among young people polled, 59 percent said they would “never” vote for President Trump vs. 11 percent who said they'd be “sure to” vote for him.

... GOP pollster Chris Wilson, the CEO of WPA Intelligence, told us he thought it was a “bit too much” to call the turnout “historic.” But he said the electorate is looking younger “than both the 2016 and 2014 general elections. “Voters under 25 are outpacing their vote share from both the 2016 and 2014 general. Proportionately it’s not enough to make a huge difference, but it’s more,” Wilson said.

Nine months after 17 students were killed in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Della Volpe's firm, SocialSphere, found that school shootings are the most worrisome issue to young Americans.

Surge in activism = a surge in voting: Tom Bonier, a Democratic  strategist and head of the firm Targetsmart, told us that skeptics initially cast doubt on the firm's findings that the “share of youth registrants nationwide increased by 2.16 percent” after the Parkland shooting in February.  A September memo showed that turnout among young people increased by an average of 4 percent in the 2018 primaries vs. 2014 primaries-- and doubled in some battleground states compared to 2014. Per Bonier, “Pennsylvania . . . has seen youth voter registration surge by 10 points after [Parkland]. Youth voters make up nearly 60 percent of all new Pennsylvania registrants.”

The mass shooting generation is showing up: We spoke with Jackie Corin, co-founder of March for Our Lives, who voted for the first time last week. Corin, along with a handful of her peers, has been traveling the country, meeting with lawmakers and mass shooting survivors, speaking on college campuses and visiting communities to build what the group calls a “youth infrastructure” to carry over into 2020. 

• Civic engagement is cool: “Activism is becoming more of a normalized activity for teenagers-- they are seeing their friends get involved with campaigns and issues and it’s spreading like wildfire,” Corin added.
• Twitter working against Trump?: Corin also credited the spike in awareness and engagement to Trump's Twitter habits. “The president uses Twitter as main source of communication and that’s something that young people see every single day-- they’re always on Twitter and Instagram so they're more engaged about what's going on.”
• Real progress: Since the Parkland shooting that killed 17, over 60 state laws have been passed tightening gun control. “The constant mass shootings are large motivators … it’s what has activated thousands and thousands of people across this country,” Corin said.

We still don't know if the shift pollsters are seeing in early voting will be reflected at the ballot box.

So far today, it very much looks like it is. Meanwhile, everyone agrees that the likeliest of likely voters are seniors, particularly retirees. It's undeniable that they vote more than any other age group and that in recent decades that have been more prone to vote Republican. That party preference seems to have flipped on its head this cycle. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that campaign donors "who identify their occupation as 'retired' gave 52% of the $326 million they contributed through Oct. 17 to Democrats, compared with 48% to Republicans according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That is a reversal of their split four years ago-- and it’s a record amount of midterm money from retirees. This is the first midterms since the group began keeping donor industry data in 1990 in which retirees favor Democrats over Republicans. That year, retirees gave 76% of their $15 million in contributions to Republicans and 24% to Democrats. As social security and Medicare have become hot-button political issues, retiree donors have steadily crept toward Democrats, the center’s data show. By 2002, the GOP advantage among retiree donors had declined to 63% versus 36%. Eight years later, the split was 55%-44%."

The Kids Are Alright

That video came out on Thursday. Nice, huh? After you watch it, be sure to take a look at the one at the bottom of the post. Over the weekend a Remington Research poll of likely Missouri voters showed an exact 47-47% tie between Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill and Republican Josh Hawley. Two polls of likely voters in Tennessee, one from Targoz Market Research and one from East Tennessee State University show the Senate race exactly tied in that state as well, 44-44% and 48-48%. Note the 18-34 age bracket that breaks decisively for Bredesen. It isn't really breaking for the conservative Bredesen. It isn't even really breaking for the Democrats generically. It's breaking against Trump and his GOP enablers.

Nate Silver gives Bredesen a 1 in 5 chance to win (18.8%). His model is more optimistic about McCaskill and awards her a 5 in 8 shot (63.5%). None of these models are taking into account an a-historic spike in millennial voting. You always hear that and it never comes to a hill of beans? Maybe... but 3,000 early votes came out of UW Parkside (WI-01) this week that no models took into account. Those were votes for Tammy Baldwin, Tony Evers and Randy Bryce. I'm hearing that in Austin, Texas, millennial early votes are already the highest in history-- five times higher than in 2014. Millennial early voters were also five times higher in Nevada, four times higher in Georgia, three times higher in Arizona... We'll see, right? And you know what else we'll see? If this comes to pass in 2 days-- because this sure ain't in anyone's polling or forecasting models-- and this could be the blow to domestic fascism we're all praying for.

On November 6th at 10am, students in high schools and colleges across the country will walk out of class and march to the polls to cheer each other on as those eligible cast their votes. By bringing together young people across communities, issues, and organizations, we will ensure young people show up to the polls in record numbers and send a bold message to politicians and the country that young people are unified in our demand for change. Even if students aren’t old enough to vote, they are still encouraged to lead and participate in the walkout to help make our message heard.

Our Final Week's Get Out The Vote Ads In Heartland Districts The DCCC Is Ignoring

We asked Blue America members and DWT readers to vote on which districts they wanted us to add our new Get Out the Vote ads with the song Matthew Grimm wrote for us. So, right now, besides the ads running in WI-01 and NE-02, districts where Randy Bryce and Kara Eastman are running, we are also running ads in KS-04 (above) and IA-04 (below), where James Thompson and J.D. Scholten are campaigning with every ounce of energy they can muster.

These ads aren't really meant to try to persuade anyone to vote one way or the other. Basically, by using careful social media targetting, they are meant to urge local millennials who are already persuaded by the issues Randy, Kara, James and J.D. are running on, to get out and vote on Tuesday. These are all "red districts" with extraordinary Democratic challengers who are progressive stalwarts and where the DCCC refuses to help. I think most political junkies now understand that the corrupt conservative DCCC staffers would rather see a Republican reelected than see a progressive win a seat. If enough millennials do turn out to vote next week, we can thwart Trump, his GOP enablers and a DCCC hierarchy seeking to turn the Democratic Party even more in the direction of corporate corruption. Want to help put up another ad for another candidate? Here's the page for our independent expenditure committee.

If millennials vote Tuesday, it's game over for the GOP. And early voting patterns indicate that they will-- and in a very big way. Yesterday a town clerk in Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin had a panic attack because over 1,700 absentee ballots-- primarily from University of Wisconsin Parkside students who "no one" expected to vote-- were dropped on her desk. Were any of these 1,700 voters polled? No. Do any of them have land-lines? No. Do any of them favor Medicare-For-All, legalized pot, free state colleges, Job Guarantee, student debt forgiveness? You bet they do-- and that's all part of Randy Bryce's platform.

The latest early voting numbers from Georgia and Texas for 18-29 year-olds is up a staggering 500% over 2014! You read that right... 500%. If that continues, no Republican seat is safe-- not anywhere, not even gerrymandered monstrosities, drawn to keep Republicans in power. Not even in R+11 districts like Steve King's.

One Week To Go-- Democratic Lead Continues To Grow

Over the weekend, Mike Siegel gave me an in-depth look at early voting in the stretch of Texas between Austin and Houston (TX-10), the district he's running in. I wasn't surprised that women were voting significantly more than men-- 52-48%-- but there were two things that did surprise me. One was that Travis County (Austin) had registered 94.5% of all eligible voters, which is the highest number I've ever heard in my life. The other was that millennials have been voting at unprecedented rates. Democrats are always waiting for younger voters to come through-- but they rarely do. Mike's anecdotal and local statistical data is backed up by Harvard's Fall 2018 National Youth Poll. The poll looked for engagement for voters between 18 and 29 years old and found them to be "significantly more likely to vote in the upcoming midterm elections compared to 2010 and 2014. Overall, 40 percent report that they will 'definitely vote' in the midterms, with 54 percent of Democrats, 43 percent of Republicans and 24 percent of Independents considered likely voters."

Trump's approval rating among this cohort is a jaw-dropping 26% 18-29 year old voters have largely made up their minds about the 2020 election already:

• will never vote for Trump- 59%
• unlikely- 9%
• possible- 9%
• good chance- 8%
• sure to vote for Trump- 11%

Getting this cohort of voters out to the polls can be crucial to any Democratic candidate. Even Democratic candidates running in very red districts -- like TX-10-- could win if these if these voters participate a week from today. Among likely voters, Democrats are preferred to control Congress by 34 percentage points, 66 to 32 percent.

It's worth mentioning that likely voters in this cohort favor Bernie's platform by big numbers:

• Medicare-for-All- 67%
• Job Guarantee- 63%
• free state colleges- 62%
• election of 40% of corporate boards by employees- 53%

The Harvard pollsters also found that among likely voters under 30, another Bernie platform item has plurality support, though not a majority yet. Building a militant and powerful labor movement in the U.S. rooted in the multi-racial working class: 47% support, 23% oppose, 28% don't know.

Nearly three-in-five (59%) of likely voters say that they will have more fear if the Republicans maintain control of the House after the midterms, with 19% saying they will have more hope. 20% said it would not make a difference, either way.

Yesterday the Public Religion Research Institute released their fall poll as well-- more bad news for the GOP. Asked who they would vote for if the election was today, 57% said the Democrat (up from 44% last month) and 39% said the Republican (up from 35% in September. When asked which issue was MOST important in determining who they would vote for, these were the choices offered and the choices selected:

• The cost of health care- 21%
• The economy- 16%
• The growing gap between rich and poor- 13%
• Immigration- 13%
• Gun policy- 8%
• National security- 8%

• Racial inequality- 7%
• Abortion- 4%
• LGBT issues- 1%

I've been contending-- as has Trump-- that the biggest "issue" on the ballot next week will be Trump himself. That's more bad news for the Republicans. 19% strongly approve, 22% somewhat approve, 16% somewhat disapprove and 42% strongly disapprove. He's like to be an albatross around the necks of GOP candidates next Tuesday. The generic ballot is far worse for the GOP in the brand new L.A. Times poll, where the Democrats are ahead by a startling 17 points. Reuters reported that an analysis of election-prediction data by three major political handicappers-- Cook Political Report, Inside Elections and the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics-- showed that while Republican ratings had improved since early September in seven of 65 competitive races, Democrats had gained in 48 races.

With dozens of House races nationally neck and neck, Democratic Party strategists and candidates said the enthusiasm gap remained on their side.

“If you’re like most people here and you’re getting screwed, falling farther and farther behind, then I think they’re going to vote for us,” Kelly said at a restaurant near his Belleville, Illinois, office.

Like many Democrats running in Trump Country, Kelly has largely avoided mentioning the president during the campaign, instead focusing on kitchen-table issues like wage stagnation.

Even in districts where Trump only narrowly won, some Republicans are trying to capitalize on an energized conservative base.

In New York’s 19th Congressional District, a sprawling, largely rural area, polls show Republican incumbent John Faso effectively tied with Democrat Antonio Delgado in one of the country’s most expensive House races. Like Bost and Chabot, Faso lags his opponent in fundraising, although millions in outside spending have helped the Republicans close the gap in each district.

The district voted for Trump in 2016 after supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012, suggesting Faso could prevail if Trump’s base turns out to vote.

Like other Democrats, Delgado has hammered Faso for stating he wants to protect patients, despite his vote to repeal the healthcare law, accusing the Republican of “unfathomable” hypocrisy.