by Cliston Brown | Sep 20, 2014 | Election Analysis
The Wide World of Politics Blog Election Ratings reports two changes this week.
First, developments in the Kansas Senate race have led me to move this race from “Leans Republican” to “Leans Independent.” The recent ruling of the Kansas Supreme Court that Democrat Chad Taylor may, in fact, withdraw his name from the ballot is clearly beneficial to independent candidate Greg Orman, and one-on-one polling pitting Orman against incumbent GOP Senator Pat Roberts shows a clear Orman lead. This blog now sees Orman as a slight favorite, though it remains to be seen if the professional help Roberts has recently begun to receive from GOP HQ in Washington will help him right his sinking ship.
This rating change now puts the Republicans at 50 seats—1 shy of a majority—and the Democrats at 48 seats, with two independents, Orman and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), positioned to determine the Senate majority. King currently caucuses with Democrats.
The second rating change involves the Illinois governor’s race. Incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn has been struggling for a plethora of reasons, but recent polling has shown Quinn rebounding considerably and moving ahead of Republican businessman Bruce Rauner. Given Quinn’s big move in the polls, and his history of overcoming long odds to prevail, not to mention the state’s strong Democratic edge, this blog has now moved the Illinois governor’s race from “Leans Republican” to “Leans Democratic,” though it also has been added to the Watch List.
This rating change now shows an even split at the gubernatorial level, with Republicans and Democrats each poised to control 25 seats, though two of this blog’s ratings (favoring Democrats in Michigan and Wisconsin) are out of step with most predictions at this point. This blog favors Democrats Mark Schauer in Michigan and Mary Burke in Wisconsin due to their recent upward polling trends. It remains to be seen if a plagiarism flap involving Burke will halt or reverse her momentum.
Click here for the newest ratings sheet.
by Cliston Brown | Sep 13, 2014 | Election Analysis
Now that all states have held their primaries and the general-election nominees have all been determined, I am publishing my first list of race ratings for the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and governors’ races across the country. Here I will provide some basic explanations of my Election Race Ratings Chart.
First, I have selected only those races that have been deemed competitive, either by myself or another leading, reputable election analyst (such as Larry Sabato, Charlie Cook, Stu Rothenberg, etc.). Therefore, not every race will appear here. Those offices that are not listed are considered safe for the party currently holding them.
My chart lists, from left to right, the state or district; the Democratic candidate; the Republican candidate; and my current rating of the race. If the state or district is currently held by a Democrat, it is colored blue; if the state or district is currently held by a Republican, it is colored red. Lighter shades of blue or red denote an “open seat” race in which no incumbent is seeking reelection. In the candidate columns, incumbents are listed in bold type. In the rating column, races in which I rate the Democrat a favorite will be colored light blue if it leans Democratic; medium blue if it is likely Democratic; and dark blue if it is safe Democratic. Similarly, I use light red, medium red and dark red, respectively, for leaning, likely or safely Republican.
As to the ratings themselves, I will differ from the more established analysts in one crucial respect: I do not list any races as toss-ups. In races that appear extremely close, I am exercising my best judgment to project them either “Lean D” or “Lean R.” I make these judgments based on the following factors:
1) Current polling numbers (where available). This is the key factor, but these are much more available in Senate and gubernatorial races. Many House races have little, if any, reputable public polling readily available.
2) Current polling trends; even in a case in which a candidate may still be trailing by a small margin, if his/her polling trends are clearly moving upward, I may move a race rating in his/her direction. (Key examples here include the governors’ races in Michigan and Wisconsin, which I currently rate “Lean D” due to the upward trending of the Democratic candidates in that race. If those trends reverse in the coming weeks, I will reassess.)
3) The district’s electoral history—for example, if a state or district has a history of flipping depending on whether it is a presidential year or a midterm; if the race is a rematch of a close race in a previous election; if the trends in a state or district are moving in favor of one party or the other; etc. (A key example is the 10th District of Illinois, which has a Democratic partisan voting index, but where Republican House candidates traditionally overperform and where the Republican candidate, Bob Dold, has previously been elected to the House.)
4) An unusually impressive (or unimpressive) candidate, or a relatively new or unknown candidate who may appear to have great potential (A key example is Republican nominee Marilinda Garcia in New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District.)
In marginal races that would normally be listed as toss-ups in which I still have a strong degree of uncertainty, I add a black box next to the rating to denote that the race is on my “Watch List.” A race may be watch-listed for any of the factors listed above.
This site will publish an updated list every Saturday between now and the election. At this moment, my ratings indicate the Republican Party will pick up a net of 7 seats in the U.S. House, for a 241-194 majority, and 6 seats in the U.S. Senate, for a 51-49 majority. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, appears headed for a net pickup of 3 governors’ mansions, which, if accurate, would leave the Republicans with a 26-24 advantage.
In future ratings, this site will also make estimates as to the partisan control of state legislatures after the November elections.
For the current race ratings, please click here.
by Cliston Brown | Jul 6, 2014 | Political Commentary
I stayed the night last night in an unfamiliar city in southern California, and needed to get some breakfast before embarking on an eight-hour drive home. As I knew nothing about the town, I didn’t know where I could find a good breakfast place, but there was a Denny’s right next to my hotel. It’s not the most spectacular food, but it is predictable and cheap, and when it comes to road food in an unfamiliar location, predictable-and-cheap is often preferable to the alternatives.
As I ordered—a shaved ham-and-egg sandwich with Swiss and American cheeses on sourdough and hashbrowns—the server asked if I’d like anything else, maybe a short stack of pancakes.
For a second, I was sorely tempted, and then it hit me that the question—which could be paraphrased as “Would you like 600 calories’ worth of pancakes, butter and syrup to go with the 1,100 calories of ham, egg, cheese, potatoes, bread and grease?”—was really a metaphor for the last 70 years of American politics: “You don’t have to choose one tasty meal or the other, hungry patron of mediocre breakfast food! You can have both!”
This is the same idea we Americans have been sold from the political menu since the end of World War II, and by and large, we have happily consumed it. “Guns OR butter? Who says you have to choose? You can have guns AND butter—and you can put that butter on that extra side of pancakes!”
In the heady postwar era, it really did seem like we Americans could have all we wanted and never have to concern ourselves with the consequences. While most of Europe and large swathes of Asia and Africa were devastated, America was the only major industrial power that was largely unscathed. America became the material colossus of the world, the leading supplier of goods. Factories worked in three shifts around the clock, and well-paid jobs were there to be had by anybody who grabbed a high school diploma one day and walked into the local factory the next.
Hindsight is always 20/20, and it is easy to look back and realize that it couldn’t last—that sooner or later the rest of the world would rebuild itself and compete with us, and that we would no longer be the only major seller of industrial and consumer goods, with inevitable consequences for the postwar U.S. economic boom. The economic crisis of the 1970s, with skyrocketing inflation and a growing dependence on cheap imports, made it plain to people such as President Jimmy Carter that the nation’s voracious consumerism needed to go on a diet. The late 1970s was an era of downsizing and increased efficiency—smaller, fuel-efficient cars, turning down the thermostat, installing solar panels. The gravy train was also over, certainly, in the political realm; we either had to raise taxes or cut services, or some combination thereof.
However, Ronald Reagan—who ironically rose to political prominence by delivering a speech, on behalf of the doomed 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign, titled “A Time For Choosing”—came along in 1980 and essentially told us all that no, we did not have to make any hard choices. We could continue to have all the essential government services, and we could also institute massive tax cuts (largely benefiting the wealthiest Americans). He gave us a third option by which we could avoid both raising taxes and cutting services, and we eagerly took it: Put it all on the credit card. We’ll pay it off later. Reagan told us we could have both the tasty sandwich-and-hashbrowns meal, AND the pancakes, and we listened because it was what we wanted to hear.
The truth is that we do face hard choices as a society, and the longer we put those choices off, the higher the bill is going to be. In the same way that a person who makes no responsible choices at the table will eventually suffer health consequences, the longer we go on failing to choose as a society, the more it will hurt us in the end.
So our choice is this: do we continue to allow a small number of extremely wealthy people to continue to hoard vast sums of money, more than many of them could spend in dozens of lifetimes, while everybody else lives either in poverty or the realistic possibility of poverty? And let’s be honest, that’s exactly the situation we face. How many Americans today live a life of quiet desperation, knowing that if they lose a job or suffer a major illness, they go from financially comfortable to bankrupt, or even homeless, in a few short steps?
Do we continue to pay our bills as a country on a giant credit card, knowing that at some point, future generations will have to pay the bill? Hell, they’re already paying the bill. As colleges have raised tuition to meet growing costs, students have had to take on massive amounts of debt that were largely unheard of prior to the 1990s. They are then entering a job market in which there are very few jobs for them, in part because older workers, whose ability to draw secure pensions has been severely eroded, lack the financial security to retire. Those same older workers, faced with working into their 70s, are also faced with partially or fully supporting their adult children—as upwards of a third of all Americans between 18 and 31 now live with their parents. And their adult offspring, more and more, are faced with delaying their careers, thereby delaying their ability to save money, pay off their loans, buy homes, have children if they wish, and eventually retire. We are just now starting to see the consequences of our failure to choose.
Sooner or later, we Americans are going to have to understand that we have to choose the sandwich or the pancakes, and maybe eat only half of what we ultimately do choose. We have to unlearn the lie, which we have eagerly accepted, that we can have everything we want and that we never have to choose—that we can continue to spend trillions of dollars on a bloated military budget, and idiotic wars of choice like the war in Iraq, and that we can simultaneously continue to give tax breaks to bloated billionaires and corporations. Meanwhile our cities fill with the homeless and hungry; our bridges and roads crumble; we are losing an entire generation of Americans whose careers and paths to financial security appear hopelessly blocked; and our educational system continues to collapse, in part because of continued political meddling, and in part because teachers are so poorly paid and underappreciated that the most promising college students choose fields such as finance. We need to decide whether it is more important to fund the things that will benefit our society as a whole, or if we are going to continue to buy more of what we don’t need and can’t afford.
Even if you disagree, as I do, with the solutions Reagan advised us to choose in 1964, he was right about one thing: that we do, in fact, face a time of choosing. But he was wrong, when he told us in 1980, that he was just kidding.
by Cliston Brown | Mar 23, 2014 | Political Commentary
My wife and I saw Divergent today, and while I thought it was an extremely entertaining, high-quality movie, I found one thing in particular to be deeply troubling when we discussed the movie at an early dinner afterward:
Why is it that the “Erudite” faction—the intellectuals—were the evil people who were trying to take over the society and violently wipe out the “rightful” rulers, the “Abnegation” faction?
My wife was also interested in this question, so she looked up the author of the book, and discovered that the writer, Veronica Roth, was reported to be a “moralistic, devout Christian.”
Admittedly, this aroused my suspicion, and I began to look at the movie the way that I know many evangelical Christians look at society, from my own personal experiences and the experiences of friends. When I began really thinking about the movie, I started noticing several notable parallels:
1) The main character, Triss, is deeply uncomfortable about sex and firmly denies the sexual advances of her love interest, Four. The high level of her discomfort about sex becomes clear when we learn that is one of her greatest fears. Evangelical Christianity, of course, has a near obsession with premarital chastity, and Triss, the movie’s heroine, behaves exactly the way the evangelical religious culture would expect her to behave.
2) The plot is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and as anyone who has observed the “end times” element of evangelical Christianity knows, a post-apocalyptic society is a major focus of evangelical Christian thought.
3) Even though we learn that Four’s father abused him as a child, when Four’s father asks his son to save his life, Four does it—exactly what would be expected in a culture in which “honor(ing) thy mother and father” is paramount, regardless of parental transgressions.
4) The Abnegation faction consists of “simple, modest folk” who dress plainly, eat simple foods and behave, at all times, in an unfailingly virtuous way. This mirrors some of the practices—and the conceits—of many evangelical sects that discourage dressing or behaving “immodestly” and decry being “worldly.” They also harbor and shelter outcasts who have run afoul of the intelligentsia; the parallel here is that evangelicals like to view themselves as outcasts from the “immoral” society around them. It seems obvious that the “Abnegation” faction is a stand-in for evangelical Christians.
5) “Erudite,” the intellectual faction, is presented as scheming, evil, and jealous of the prerogatives of the ruling faction, which the “Abnegation” faction has somehow managed to become. How these simple, unassuming, virtuous people became the rulers of the post-apocalyptic Chicagoland is hard to imagine—unless one takes the view, as evangelical Christians in America do, that “God’s people” are the rightful rulers of our “Christian nation.” It is also worth noting that, in Judeo-Christian texts, Satan is portrayed as scheming, evil and jealous of God, and that he uses his intellect to turn the godly toward sin—so it hardly seems a stretch to see a parallel in the movie between intellectuals and Satan himself. This linkage of intelligence and evil should be deeply troubling for those of us who value evidence and intellectual inquiry over blind faith and unquestioning obedience.
6) The Erudites, consumed by their elitist arrogance, decide that they, not the righteous Abnegation faction, should rule. They use their intellect to control and corrupt the “Dauntless” faction—the military—in order to round up and execute the Abnegation faction. This is crucially important, because it lines up, chapter-and-verse, with the tenets of the persecution complex that is rampant in American evangelical Christianity. It is taken as an article of faith among evangelical Christians that they inevitably will be persecuted for their faith. In the evangelical community, mistrust of intellectual “elitists”—who, in the evangelical view, cleverly twist and spin the truth, idolize science and other “worldly” things, deny the Bible, and generally seek to corrupt our “Christian nation”—runs very deep.
I have some personal experience that informs my knowledge of the evangelical persecution complex. When I was about 10 years old, two friends of mine from school recruited me to join an evangelical imitation of the Boy Scouts. In between hikes and campfires, we were constantly being told by our adult leaders that we, as Christians, might one day be tortured, even killed, for professing our faith. (Finally, one night we were taken into the sanctuary where the Wednesday night services were taking place, and we were told to raise our hands, close our eyes, and softly, rhythmically chant “Jesus, Jesus.” Even as a 12-year-old, I found this experience decidedly weird, and I never went back.)
In short, I think the parallels between the movie and some of the stranger obsessions of American evangelicals are frightfully clear. I can’t help but wonder whether the flurry of books and movies such as this one, as well as Noah, Son of God, the impending Exodus, the Twilight series, and some of the obviously Christian morality parables being filmed by artists such as Tyler Perry, isn’t indicative of a serious push by the evangelical community to reverse their declining hold on American culture and politics via the aggressive use of the arts.
But most of all, I’m deeply troubled by the equating of intelligent people with the forces of evil, and I think we have to be wary of letting this train of thought get down the tracks unchecked. There has long been a tendency toward mistrust of intellectuals in American society—as noted by Frenchman Alexis deTocqueville in his seminal 19th-century work Democracy in America—and in the decades that have followed Charles Darwin’s publication of his Theory of Evolution, this anti-intellectualism has been taken up in a full-throated way by fundamentalist Christians as well. I think it is extremely dangerous when popular culture begins to reinforce this longtime loathing and mistrust of intellectuals.
I can almost smell the book barbecue now.
by Cliston Brown | Mar 11, 2014 | Political Commentary
I know it’s folly to even engage in discussion with Republicans on this topic, but seriously, can some Republican please tell me what exactly we can do about the Russian takeover of Crimea? I keep hearing these Republican politicians yammering about Obama being weak—because they’ve been playing the “Democrats are weak” card for 70 years and they still haven’t figured out anything any more original than that—but seriously, if we had elected Mitt Romney president in 2012, what, exactly, could he have done that would have prevented or reversed what has happened over there? Here’s a hint: the honest answer is “not a damn thing,” short of starting a war, and if you really think that going to war with Russia is an intelligent thing to do, I suggest consulting a couple of fellows named Bonaparte and Hitler and asking how that worked out for them. It’s also worth noting that when Napoleon and the Nazis, respectively, froze their asses off in Russia 130 years apart, the Russians did not yet have a stockpile of nuclear weapons—or you can bet your bottom dollar that Paris and Berlin would have glowed in the dark for decades.
Of course, Obama is blamed for “being weak on Syria” and, thereby, emboldening Russia to invade a country it has no business invading, but I would suggest that our idiotic invasion of Iraq might have set more of an example—and may well have also robbed us of any moral authority or credibility we have to criticize the Russians for their actions. In fact, I could point out that Russia has a much stronger case for its actions in Crimea than we had for our actions in Iraq. The Russians at least can claim, with real justification, that Crimea is historically and ethnically Russian and may well prefer to be part of Russia. We claimed that Iraq was linked to 9-11 and was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, and when those factually challenged claims proved inconvenient, we changed our story to removing a dictator and striking a blow for democracy. I don’t suspect the Russians would have very much respect for any lectures we might want to give them about the appropriateness of armed incursions into other nations.
Now, I know that the Republicans would tell us about that glorious day when Saint Ronnie stood before the Berlin Wall and exclaimed “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And then he circled the gates, blew his horn three times, and the wall fell. Of course, that’s not exactly the way it happened. What actually happened is that 40-plus years of U.S. containment policy, started by Harry Truman and continued by eight more presidents after him, isolated the Russians and wrecked their economy, and they had to pull back from Eastern Europe and Central Asia to save themselves from collapse. But the Gipper was on the mound when the winning run scored, so naturally, the Republicans give him all the credit, and they like to contrast his “strength” with Obama’s “weakness.” It’s a very simple and satisfying trope, but it’s also complete horse hockey, as Colonel Potter was fond of saying in M*A*S*H.
The bottom line is this: the next time a Republican yammers about Obama being “weak,” ask your Republican friend what another president might do differently. You’ll get an answer, of course, and it will be either 1) vague or 2) unrealistic. Because vague and unrealistic are what they do. But the facts on the ground are pretty simple here: if we want the Russians out of Ukraine, there won’t be a quick or satisfying solution; it will take years of isolation and economic pressure, just as it took to destroy the Soviet empire.
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