Rebecca Traister: Pundits Haven't Been Able To Keep Up

Two rich hereditary Donnies from Queens-- both hate Bernie

Let's call this Part II of this morning's post on Sydney Ember's dishonest, biased journalism. Because, well... there is Donny Deutsch and other like him, self-appointed pundits. Unlike Ember, most of them don't pretend to be reporters, just a rodeo clowns. And, alas, MSNBC turned into what it has turned into. As Rebecca Traister opined for New York Magazine yesterday, our political pundits aren't able to keep up and are "totally ill-equipped for the historic task ahead of them."

She noted that "Beyond their representational expansion, many of the candidates are offering up compelling, progressive policy ideas: pushing the party into fights for single-payer health care, subsidized child care, free college, a Green New Deal, a stronger commitment to reproductive justice and a push for more humane immigration policies. But we’re also getting our first real taste of the punditry that will frame this next year and a half, and so far, it is the opposite of fresh, diverse, or forward-thinking. Rather, the analysis coughed up by some of the nation’s loudest and most prominent talking heads sounds familiar and stale. The dispiriting truth is that many of those tasked with interpreting our politics are-- in addition to being extremely freaked out by the race they’re covering-- totally ill-equipped for the historic task ahead of them." It's a different problem than the Times' problem of foisting a monstrosity like Ember on us as though she were a professional reporter instead of Satin's spawn.

Where many Americans have seen the emergence of compelling and charismatic candidates who don’t look like those who’ve preceded them (but do look more like the country they want to lead), some prominent pundits seem to be looking at a field of people they simply can’t recognize as presidential. Where many hear Democratic politicians arguing vigorously on behalf of more justice and access to resources for people who have historically been kept at the margins of power, some prominent columnists are hearing a scary call to destabilization and chaos, imagining themselves on the outside of politics they’ve long assumed should be centered around them.

Altogether, what’s emerging is a view of a presidential commentariat that-- in terms of both ideas and diversity-- is embarrassingly outpaced by the candidates, many of whom appear smarter, more thoughtful, and to have a nimbler grasp of American history and structural inequities than the television journalists being paid to cover them.

The day after the first pair of debates, Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough declared them “a disaster for the Democratic Party,” and hoped that no one had been watching (in fact, they had been watching; ratings were startlingly robust). Scarborough particularly bemoaned candidates’ opinions on immigration-- namely that crossing the border should be reclassified as a federal misdemeanor, not a crime; and that immigrants should be entitled to health care-- chiding that these ideas “may make Democrats feel really good about themselves,” but would lose them the election. This week, Scarborough went on a Twitter tear, venting against “woke Democrats” and their drive left, later deleting his thread.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson asserted that the Democratic candidates resemble “a gaggle of graduate students.” At the debates, all of them, he conceded, “seemed articulate and intelligent … None, however, seemed ‘presidential.’” At the New York Times, Never Trump conservative Bret Stephens was worse, arguing that if Democrats continue to do things like speak Spanish and argue for universal health care, they’ll not only “lose the elections,” they’ll “deserve it,” and suggesting that the candidates’ fights on behalf of immigrants, workers, the uninsured, and the economically struggling shows that Democrats are more invested “in them instead of us,” a formulation in which “us” seems clearly to stand for the white and the well-off, and “them” is … everyone else.

In particular, Stephens criticized Kamala Harris’s “scurrilous attack” on Joe Biden during the second debate, in which she confronted the former vice-president over his praise for segregationists he’d boasted of working alongside in his Senate career and pointed out that the very busing measures he’d sided with Republicans to oppose had been what enabled her to attend an integrated elementary school. Stephens compared Harris critically to Barack Obama, writing of the former president’s ability to “[make] you feel comfortable no matter the color of your skin,” and argued that Harris, by contrast, made “white Americans feel racially on trial.”

Of course, newspaper columnists-- especially conservative ones like Stephens-- are going to columnize, and increasingly, they do so in company that is slightly more diverse, ideologically and in other ways, than it was even a few short years ago. But Stephens’s troubling assertion that a black person’s description of her experience of discrimination is tantamount to a prosecution of white people found a broader foothold in television commentary. During post-debate coverage, MSNBC host Chris Matthews-- who is still tasked with interviewing presidential candidates, despite having been revealed to have joked before a 2016 interview with Hillary Clinton about putting a “Bill Cosby pill” in her water-- was questioning Harris about the stories she’d told about friends not being allowed to play with her because she was black. Prefacing his question about race with the assertion that he did not “like the word ‘race,’” Matthews asked her, “How did you come out of that and not have hate toward white people generally?” Matthews was surely trying to side with Harris in some way, but did so by framing her challenge of segregationist policies, rooted in her personal experience, as logically akin to a hatred of white people-- precisely the specter of punitive racial resentment that Stephens had been trying to rouse.

Cable news analysis hit another low when Donny Deutsch, an advertising and branding executive who for years had his own CNBC show and was recently hired by MSNBC to host a weekly political talk show, said of Elizabeth Warren, whom he has predicted will lose 48 states should she become the nominee: “I think she’s delightful, I think she’s wonderful, I’m a big fan, I just don’t think she has what it takes to beat this president the same way... an idealized version of Joe Biden [does].” When challenged by MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, Deutsch got defensive: “I am understanding Donald Trump, the way he connects with this country, and the strength he exudes. We need to exude a stronger strength.” Deutsch exuded his own stronger strength by affirming that he is “a guy who’s done this for 30 years and watched human behavior.”

In this, if nothing else, Deutsch was correct: He has been doling out weird gender essentialism for eons. In his 2005 book Often Wrong, Never in Doubt, Deutsch wrote, “I cannot remember a time in my career when I was not having either a flirtation with a woman in the office, or a friendship, a fantasy, or all of the above. I am at my best when women are there to energize and excite me.” More recently, he told Nicolle Wallace of Joe Biden: “I love him onstage next to Trump. I love his height. I love that he threatened to get into a fistfight with Trump.” Back in 2008, Deutsch loved vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin in a different way, as a “new feminist ideal:” “I want her watching my kids … I want her laying in bed next to me,” Deutsch said at the time, arguing that “women want to be her, men want to mate with her.”

The problem here is not simply that Matthews and Deutsch still have their high-paid media jobs, despite lengthy records of mediocre analysis, grotesque speech about women, and relative cluelessness about race. It’s that their jobs are crucial to how the story of the presidential race will be told to the millions of people who watch them.

This is the suffocatingly grim reality: Even after the peeling off of a layer of the political media’s most prominent interlocutors during #MeToo-- including Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Bill O’Reilly and Matt Lauer-- television coverage of the 2020 election is still being led by men who have sketchy histories around gender and power. Even after a midterm season in which women-- many of them women of color, some of them very progressive-- won elections in historic numbers; even in the midst of a presidential crisis during which poor, black, brown, and immigrant communities have been made more vulnerable than ever, and have been brought closer to the center-- finally-- of left political engagement and activism; even given all of this, so many of the voices interpreting the events around us still belong to the guys who’ve been clumsily telling us what to think about politics for ages.

Of course, it’s the swiftness of the political current that is making so many long-entrenched pundits so uncomfortable. They feel left behind and are convinced that the electorate reflects their own perspectives-- as Donny Deutsch said last week to O’Donnell, “I guarantee you 90 percent of our audience agrees with me.” These analysts feel that a Democratic Party that’s moving left is ditching not just them, but their platonic ideal of a Democratic voter--concocted in the same spirit that Deutsch may imagine an “idealized version of Joe Biden”: a white centrist they are sure not only represents the average American, but the Democratic base. But in all of their hand-wringing, they seem not to have noticed that, in fact, assumptions about a safe center are crumbling in the hands of a new generation of political leaders willing to make a stirring case for radical ideas.

Support for the Green New Deal, a policy proposal which was treated as a joke not just by Republicans but by many in the Democratic Party and the press upon its inception, appears to have risen precipitously; a majority of voters support Medicare for All (even as many don’t totally understand what it entails). The majority of Americans support the kind of wealth tax that Elizabeth Warren is proposing, even as some economists criticize it as unrealistic. In fact, in this period during which mainstream political analysts talk so much about the perils of Democrats getting ever more progressive, a study released by the University of North Carolina last month showed American support for left-wing policy to be at a 60-year high, suggesting that perhaps the prescription being offered by these men-- which if I’m piecing it all together correctly would be a moderate show of masculine prowess and deficit-wary conservatism that makes white people feel good about themselves-- might be the very thing that has kept many voters from investing energetically in the Democratic Party until now. And the thing they fear most-- these women and nonwhite guys with their angry voices and memories of being discriminated against who are not tall enough to debate Trump-- may be what galvanizes the party.

The disconnect between the candidates and how the candidates are being received by many in the political media also tells us something about how politics, even presidential politics, remains much more susceptible to speedy alteration than institutional journalism.

After all, 11 years ago, when Deutsch was on television holding forth on Sarah Palin’s maternal hotness, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-- who’s not running for president but is clearly one of the transformational figures who’s bugging the hell out of many of these same men (Deutsch has predicted that she is “going to hand the presidency back to Donald Trump”; Stephens described her form of democratic socialism as “political hemlock”) was a college freshman. Elizabeth Warren was a law professor; Kamala Harris was the district attorney of San Francisco; Julián Castro was a former San Antonio city council member who’d lost his first campaign for mayor and was about to embark on his second. If you’d told many of the men covering 2020 that these would be the energetic leaders of a Democratic Party in 2019, they might have laughed. But they would have done their laughing on television or in newspapers because many of them … were doing the same, or similar, jobs as they are today.

We’re regularly told-- sometimes by these very same guys!-- that powerful white men are frightened, under attack by a mob of politically correct bullies who lack nuance. Yet in reality, these men’s own missteps-- joking about slipping a roofie to a presidential candidate, bragging about flirting with women at work, having lied about their own journalism careers, as current MSNBC anchor Brian Williams did-- have not resulted in permanent expulsion from their jobs. In fact, many of these men have been paid handsomely to continue telling their authoritative version of the story of American politics, over a period of decades during which those politics have been transformed, ideologically and representationally.

The absolute security and steadiness of their powerful perches has meant that many of these pundits have never been truly forced to think seriously about how they’ve benefited from racial and gendered bias, how colleagues and subjects who are smarter and more talented than they are don’t have their reach, their pulpits, their platforms.

And in this small but serious way, some of these pundits do reflect one angle of what’s been happening in the primary field: the front-runner status of Joe Biden, a man who has flamed out of two previous presidential primary campaigns-- one in which he was caught plagiarizing, one in which he spoke in affably racist terms about his competitor, Barack Obama, then won less than one percent of the Iowa caucus vote-- yet has nonetheless continued to wield political power, and to lead this year’s presidential pack in terms of fundraising, polling, and press coverage.

Biden, like many of the most prominent men covering him, was born into a world in which every system was set up to help him build and preserve his own power, even-- in fact by definition-- at the expense of others. These guys are on some level unprepared for a universe in which others, people whose childhoods were shaped by the busing policies they were creating, might one day stand up and challenge them; in which a woman whose family once teetered on the brink of home foreclosure might fight them tooth and nail on bankruptcy reform, or in which they would be forced to reckon with a debate stage filled with those who felt it important to speak Spanish.

These pundits may turn out to be right that these dynamics will make some voters feel as uncomfortable as they are being made to feel, and that those voters will ultimately prefer people who, like Trump, call back to a more comfortingly hierarchical past.

But the argument that many of the presidential candidates they’re covering are forcefully advancing is something I’ve rarely heard as clearly from potential front-runners before: that this comfortable path backward, even in service of electing a Democrat, is unacceptable and a reflection of the very inequities that have left the nation broken and perilous for so many. They are insisting on a different, faster, smarter, lefter turn toward the future.

If only our pundits could catch up to them in class.

Is There Really THAT Much Wrong With Biden?

Norman Solomon wrote a friendly open letter to Status Quo Joe yesterday, published by Common Dreams: Why an "Apology Tour" Is Needed. Addressing Biden directly, he wrote that "News outlets are reporting that you’re determined to prevent your campaign from turning into an 'apology tour' this summer. But your only other option is a campaign of denial-- sinking deeper into a quagmire of unsustainable pretense. After your flip-flop late last week that finally renounced your 40 years of support for the Hyde Amendment’s discriminatory limits on reproductive rights for low-income women, the New York Times reported that your campaign’s 'larger concern' has been 'the implications of Mr. Biden spending too much time reversing or expressing remorse for his past policy stances.' Those implications are easy to understand. Your 'past policy stances' have done so much harm-- to so many people for so long-- that if you start 'expressing remorse,' there might be no end in sight... The days are past when vast numbers of Democrats won’t notice that you’re uttering platitudes about the middle class and being touted as 'Lunch Bucket Joe' after serving the interests of corporate giants as Wall Street Joe. And a whole lot of people will really care as they learn about your political backstory of not-so-subtle appeals to racism on such matters as busing for school desegregation and the draconian 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration... What might an apology tour look like? Here are five recommendations for acknowledging key realities and expressing remorse:

• Teaming up with segregationist senators to oppose busing for school desegregation: “I’m sorry I joined forces with bigots.”
• Treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hearings: “I deeply regret that I ended up showing more concern for the sensibilities of Republican colleagues than respecting Ms. Hill’s rights.”
• Leading role-- while pandering to racism on the Senate floor-- in passage of the 1994 crime bill: “I was wrong, and I wince while watching video of my Senate floor speech.”
• Career-long services to corporate elites with avid mutual support that continued during the launch of this campaign: “I apologize for catering to credit card companies and other huge corporations.”
• Powerfully supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “I hate to think of how many people have suffered and died because of the Iraq war that I helped bring about as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

Now... forget Status Quo Joe-- for now or forever; up to you. You may recall that I was pissed off Tuesday about how the establishment is trying to reset the 2020 narrative to exclude Bernie. I was surprised that so few people picked up on Bloomberg's naked attempt to stick a shiv into the progressive champion. But then I saws the new essay by Matt Taibbi that makes mincemeat of Bloomberg and the billionaires' arguments. He states the Bloomberg attempt to paint Bernie as now "at the fringes of plausibility" and fretting that he could 'fail to reach the delegate threshold' in Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina.

This is absurd, and the absurdity isn’t confined to coverage of Bernie Sanders. It’s early, and stupid, to be making pronouncements about any candidate’s viability.

It was silly back in December when a spate of pundits suddenly decided to run “worries abound” stories about Elizabeth Warren whose campaign months later is doing, surprise surprise, just fine.

It was absurd for New York magazine to run “Joe Biden May Be Less Electable Than He Looks” stories in April as he jumped to a big lead in the polls.

And it was ridiculous for the Washington Post to run four different stories in the span of a few winter days earlier this year about Sanders being a “one-hit wonder” whose moment had “come… and gone” and who was “no big deal the second time around.”

These stories are not based on anything. They’re space-filling guesses usually grounded in some grumbling personal complaint the outlet or pundit in question has about whatever politician they’re trashing

. It’s an annoying and condescending kind of campaign reportage. What makes it particularly ridiculous is that a lot of the people doing it were part of an epic face plant on the horse race front four years ago.

The across-the-board failed prognostications of last election season were a thing to behold. They constituted one of the larger industry-wide failures in a journalism business that has seen a few of them since the Iraq fiasco. Literally every major news outlet called the 2016 election wrong.

The most inexcusable mistakes involved the complete dismissal of Donald Trump’s chances at the nomination at a time when he was either leading the Republican field or in clear contention.

This is similar to what’s going on now with Sanders, who is sitting firmly in second place nationally, at about 17%, as Bloomberg is wondering if he’s “finished.” But what happened with Trump in 2016 was even more bizarre.

Bernstein should know. Four summers ago, when Trump was surging, he penned a piece under a headline, “No, Trump can’t win.” He meant the nomination, insisting (emphasis mine):

Everything we know about presidential nominations screams that Donald Trump has no chance of winning the Republicans’ nod.

Nate Silver, too, placed Trump’s chances of winning the nomination (the nomination, not the general!) at “2 percent.” This was under the headline, “Donald Trump’s Six Stages of Doom.”

FiveThirtyEight wrote multiple articles in 2015 insisting it was a near-mathematical impossibility for Trump to be the nominee. They claimed Trump would play “in the NBA Finals” or cameo in another Home Alone movie with Macaulay Culkin (they really wrote that) before winning the nomination.

Countless pundits made the same mistake. Dana Milbank in the Washington Post wrote:

“I’m so certain Trump won’t win the nomination that I’ll eat my words if he does. Literally: The day Trump clinches the nomination, I will eat the page on which this column is printed in Sunday’s Post.”

To Milbank’s credit, he actually ended up eating that paper.

In the New York Times, Nate Cohn said Trump has “just about no shot” of winning the nomination, adding-- in an observation that was an odious subtext to a lot of these wrongly certain predictions-- that it is “the party elites who traditionally decide nomination contests.”

Silver four years ago correctly noted that “fringe or factional” candidates like Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann tended to fall back to the pack under “heightened scrutiny.”

This did actually happen in that race. Trump slipped in the polls and briefly lost his frontrunner status in the fall of 2015. But the beneficiary of his slide was another non-politician, Ben Carson.

Again, pundits were right that Trump on the surface was a preposterous bet to win the nomination, given that 57 percent of Republicans disapproved of him in the summer of 2015.

But he won anyway, not so much because Republican voters learned to love Trump, but because they couldn’t shake the belief that the other choices were worse. Voters were ready to try anything that was different. On the trail they frequently said things like, “Why not?” and “We have to try something.”

The huge, underreported story of 2016 was the utter failure of the Republican Party Brahmins to be competitive in their own primary. Big-dollar donors poured $150 million into the campaign of Jeb Bush, only to end up with three whole delegates. People simply would not respond to the usual cues.

The failure of all that cash, institutional muscle and media clout to reel voters back to any “traditional” Republican-- to the latest Bush, McCain or Romney-- was evidence of a massive crack in the political establishment.

Trump’s thin Electoral College win against Hillary Clinton was a similar story. One of the most amazing stats from Election Day was that around one in six of Trump’s voters in November 2016 actively disapproved of him. This allowed him to enter the White House with a ridiculously low 38 percent approval rating.

What predictions can you possibly make in a political environment so saturated with ambivalence and pessimism that a person with a 38 percent approval rating can win the presidency? The answer should be none, or nothing obvious.

2016 was an indication that voters had traveled so far off the reservation that any choices they made going forward were likely to be hard to predict.

Pundits however didn’t go back and recalibrate after 2016. A common explanation for Trump’s rise was that he was a “black swan” event. As Vanity Fair noted, this was a concept developed by risk analyst Nassim Taleb to describe “incredibly rare, hard-to-predict events, like the 9/11 attacks.” Trump, it was argued, was someone whose uniqueness defied models, which meant the Great Pundit Whiff of 2016 deserved a mulligan.

But Taleb himself dismissed the idea of Trump as a “black swan” event. When asked why pundits got the last election so wrong, he had a hilarious answer:

“Basically the mainstream media is presumptuous club for people with 1) a lack of understanding of complex systems, 2) a fear of diverging from the norm, 3) zero independent thought.”

This is why people should be careful about any horse race pronouncements about any candidate going into 2020.

Taleb is right: the press is a club full of presumptuous conformists who regularly ignore data they don’t like or understand, and they don’t understand a lot-- beginning with the recent decline in their own influence.

A lot of these “read-the-tea-leaves” pieces-- whether about Warren, Sanders, Trump, Biden or anyone else-- represent a yearning for the old days when a handful of op-ed writers really did have influence over who rose and fell in the polls.

Those days are long gone. Voters today not only ignore pundit pronouncements, they often seem motivated to vote just to spite them.

Editorialists don’t understand that when they write things like, “X candidate can’t win because elites won’t allow it,” that will tend to make people in the current environment vote for that person, not against him or her.

This is why Taleb makes a lot of sense when he says:

“The main surprise event is that the New York Times is now so impotent and weak that it can no longer control America. The Media is gone. Social media are much harder to fully control.”

Not only are news audiences sensitive to the fact that we suck even at our own degraded horse race form of guessing-game politics coverage, they see us as a conflicted part of the power structure whose opinions about candidate viability should probably be ignored on principle.

They realize we can make numbers say pretty much anything. They know if we wanted to, for instance, we could argue that centrist candidates are less electable, while the Bernies and Warrens of the world might be more so, as political economist Thomas Piketty recently did in a new study.

After the disaster of 2016, the 2020 election race represented an opportunity for the press to win back some credibility. The fastest way would have been to go back to the basics, just telling voters what candidates stand for, what their records are, etc.

Not only is this easier, it might result in people hating us less. But we refuse to do it. Sometimes it seems like we’re trying to be disliked.

Ignore The Beltway Committees And The Fools Who Take Them Seriously; They're Always Wrong

I'd love to know who hired PPP to poll the dozen House districts they polled this week. Notice that in some districts they polled the incumbent Republican against some crap Republican-lite conservaDem the DCCC is pushing-- Ann Kirkpatrick, Jason Crow, Angie Craig, Chrissy Houlahan-- even though there are competitive progressives in the races. Example: of course the DCCC honchos (who probably commissioned the poll) are excited about a rotgut loser like carpetbagger Ann Kirkpatrick from Northern Arizona, but Democrats in the South Arizona district are laughing at her opportunism and aren't especially likely to nominate her to run against Martha McSally. Jason Crow may be a wet dream for Ben Gay Lujan but Democrats who don't exist inside the Beltway are at least as likely to nominate progressive Levi Tillerman than the manufactured Crow. And so on and so on. On the other hand, though Doug Applegate is way ahead of the rich establishment candidates the DCCC prefers to run against Issa-- yes, the DCCC only lives to lose; it's the only thing they know how to do-- instead of polling Applegate, the polled "generic Dem." It's the only contest where the Democrat has an absolute majority but I'm sure the DCCC was afraid if they had Applegate's name in there with those numbers, it would have killed the imaginary chances for Ira Lechner grandfather clock cleaner Mike Levin which would have made right-wing Dem and DCCC stooge Kyle Layman cry.

Anyway, enjoy the chart; the establishment conservatives aren't doing that great against the Republicans, are they? Abby Finkenauer is ahead of Rod Blumin IA-01, but she's a progressive. New Dem endorsees (Republican wing of the Democratic Party) Chrissy Houlahan and Angie Craig are losing and Kirkpatrick only manages to tie McSally (in a district Hillary beat Trumpanzee in 49.6% to 44.7%). Anyway, with those polls in mind, let's turn to the Beltway pundits who're usually better at explain what happened than in predicting what will happen: Cook. They just changed some House ratings for the midterms, all but one downgrades for the Republicanos. The one that isn't a GOP downgrade is just a rote thing they do about an open seat, in this case Sinema's AZ-09, which has a PVI of D+4, was won by Obama both times (with 51%) and where Hillary stomped on Señor Trumpanzee 54.7% to 38.4%. Not even the DCCC could lose this one, but Cook moved it from solid Dem to likely Dem. Whatever.

The 3 most serious downgrades are all from lean Republican to Toss Up. Cook is so conservative in their prognosticating that "lean Republican" usually means the Democrat will win unless the DCCC screws up royally by winning the nomination for a fake Democrat and turning off grassroots voters, something they do very frequently. The 3 in this category are AZ-02, where they are trying to shove piece-of-crap-candidate Ann Kirkpatrick down voters' throats; CA-48, where they are trying to shove an even worse piece-of-crap-candidate, Hans Keirstead, down voters throats; and IA-01 where they seem content to let moderately progressive Abby Finkenauer have the nomination. David Wasserman wrote up all the ratings changes. When he writes crap like "For example, Democrats are rightfully excited about former federal prosecutor Jay Hulings, he means establishment Democrats in DC, not actual Democrats; he may never have met one, I'm not sure. Hulings was endorsed by the Blue Dogs and the New Dems and the DCCC is pushing him on... people like Wasserman. He's strictly Republican wing of the Democratic Party manufactured as a candidate in the DCCC factory for a district that is 71% Latino-- and, of course, they are eager for him to beat the progressive Latino, Rick Treviño, who's running on the Bernie issues grassroots Dems love and DC Dems fear and loath. So take everything he writes with a grain of salt, like when he calls the very right-wing shit bag Kirkpatrick, an especially stinky New Dem "an unabashed progressive" who is planning to trick voters regarding the carpetbagger label because she can play up how she has two grandchildren who were recently born prematurely. Wasserman makes the point that McSally's vote Trumpcare in the moderate district repeal "may endanger her independent reputation and put her back in jeopardy."

AZ-02- [T]he Democratic frontrunner is former 1st CD Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who moved from Northern Arizona to Tucson following her losing challenge to McCain in 2016.

Kirkpatrick is running as an unabashed progressive defender of the ACA and has the support of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly. She'll also seek to deflect the carpetbagger label by talking about moving to Tucson to care for her family based there, including two grandchildren who were recently born prematurely months after the 2016 election. It also helps that she's advertised in Tucson in all of her congressional races.

Kirkpatrick won't have a free ride in the primary: 2016 nominee Matt Heinz is probably her most serious competition, but former Assistant Army Secretary Mary Matiella, former state Rep. Bruce Wheeler and hotel manager Billy Kovacs are running too. However, Giffords's endorsement of Kirkpatrick will be difficult for others to overcome. If Democrats are to take back the House, this is a must-win race.

CA-48- Rohrabacher's profile as a surfing, pro-marijuana conservative has played well in this part of Orange County since 1988. But as this coastal district's demographics have changed, Rohrabacher has taken a different turn: his recent sympathetic comments towards Russia and strange interactions with Julian Assange and internet conspiracy theorist Chuck Johnson could amount to self-sabotage in a district President Trump narrowly lost.

Democrats in DC are thrilled with Hans Keirstead, a stem cell and cancer researcher who founded a biotech company that was sold for $126 million. Keirstead will talk about helping spinal cord injury victims recover function and the need to cut through FDA red tape. He's not just new to politics, he's new to the country: he grew up in Canada, still speaks with a Canadian accent and only became a U.S. citizen in 2008.

Keirstead is confident he can get past real estate businessman Harley Rouda in the primary and peel off Rohrabacher's corporate support, but his political skills are still unproven to say the least. Rohrabacher allies insist voters aren't focused on Russia and appreciate his "independent streak," but Democrats can also make the case that 30 years in Congress is too long. This is one of Democrats' best takeover opportunities in California.

I can't do it... this guy is such a DCCC tool and so clueless that I can't put his crap on my blog. If you want more of the DCCC perspective just go to the page. He's like a stenographer with ZERO value add. Didn't even mention Laura Oatman, the progressive woman in the race, probably because he doesn't know she exists because the DCCC didn't spoon-feed him any info on her. Keirstead and Rouda with both endorsed by the New Dems... what more does anyone need to know? What drivel!

Decision Desk HQ changed its 2018 forecast model yesterday, recognizing that ole Bob Dylan aphorism about Mr. Jones. "Up until now," they admit without a trace of embarrassment or irony, "our forecast of the 2018 House midterms has been pretty grim for Democrats. It has noted a 7-8 percentage point Democratic advantage in the generic ballot and calculated a 32% chance of Democrats winning control of the House majority. It has come to that conclusion via a mix of national polls, district-level predictions, and simulations designed to parameterize the error in our measurement." Their new computer model gives the Democrats not a 32% chance of taking over the House but a 46% chance. If you click on the link above you'll get their very wonky numerical analysis, which is somewhat interesting and worth reading. It certainly beats taking stenography from the DCCC. I'll end with their recap:

Our initial reporting on the 2018 midterm race emphasized the seat share estimates produced by a linear model. Reporting also favored the probabilities produced by a simulated range of possibilities that had been adjusted to match that model, rather than allowing it to speak for itself. We’ve done away with that adjustment now. As a result, the probability that Democrats win back the House in 2018 has increased from 32% to 45%, a very meaningful difference. We are also choosing to emphasize reporting the median and mode (most likely outcome) of these simulations rather than the strict estimate of the aforementioned linear model-- again, 215 seats now instead of 208.

We think that the changes more accurately reflect the distributional dynamics at play in the 2018 House midterms: notably, the 5-6x greater number of possibly vulnerable Republicans than possibly vulnerable Democrats.

Before our change, we were saying “Our best guess of the Democratic Party’s share of House seats after the 2018 midterms, according to a simple model, is 208 seats. A simulation, which accounts for the chance that we are wrong, adjusted to match that model says they have a 32% chance of winning 218 or more seats.”

Now we’re saying “Our best guess of the Democratic Party’s share of House seats after the 2018 midterms is around 215 seats. Strictly speaking, they are favored in 208 seats, but when we account for the higher number of Lean Republican districts than Democratic districts, Democrats get a slight boost and they win a House majority about 45% of the time.”

We think the latter makes more sense.

But don't worry, by spring they'll be predicting 225 House seats for the Democrats. 230 by the middle of next summer. And by the time the leaves start falling, they'll see the wave forming.