In Minnesota's tight race for the Senate, Norm Coleman is depending on millions of dollars from CEOs and wealthy business interests to fund his campaign. CEOs of Target, Supervalu, Best Buy, 3M, General Mills, and Pepsi all flooded Coleman's campaign with cash. Meanwhile, his challenger Al Franken maintains a healthy base of support from in and out of the state, without receiving a dime from Minnesota's CEOs.
It looks like the Twin Cities business community wants to give Sen. Norm Coleman a second term, at least if campaign contributions are any indication.
The Republican incumbent has drawn far more financial support from local executives than Democratic challenger Al Franken has, according to campaign finance records. In fact, CEOs from the state's 50 largest public and 50 largest private companies combined to donate more than $100,000 to Coleman and not a penny to Franken [...]
Business political action committees (PACs) also overwhelmingly supported Coleman. These groups gave $2.5 million to Coleman and just $15,000 to Franken.
Why the disparity between CEOs support for this Senate seat? It turns out CEOs are banking on Coleman to protect their veto powers in the workplace, while Franken supports rebuilding the middle class.
In comments Friday to Chris's diary, Presidential Forecast, October 24th , fladem argued that there was a much greater chance of later volatility in the race than people were anticipating, that historically, there was a 50% chance of a 5-point swing or more, which could go either way, and that therefore McCain had a 25% chance of winning, rather than the 3.7% that 538.com is projecting.
It's good to be challenged like this, with a well-considered data-driven argument. It makes you think more carefully, and not get intellectually lazy. That said, I think it's pretty clear that fladem is wrong on this one, and I want to quickly run down why. The reasons range from macro to micro, but most of all, they gain from being mutually reinforcing. Fladem's argument and my response on the flip.
Swift Boat funder Robert Perry, a top national Republican donor, is funding overtly racist attack mail this cycle. It's not Swift Boating. It's Race Boating.
A group called "Empower Texans," chaired by Tim Dunn of Midland, an associate of Republican Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick, attacked Democratic state House candidate Joel Redmond of Pasadena with a direct mail piece featuring fuzzy images of black and Hispanic lawmakers (plus Barack Obama), several black birds resembling crows, and a picture of the white Redmund. The tag line: "Birds of a feather flock together."
Anyone with any racial sensitivity gets the meaning of the mailer: Redmond has betrayed whites by befriending people of color. He can't be trusted.
This is happening in the Houston area, down the road from Tom DeLay. George Bush's hometown. While an African-American, Barack Obama, is the Democratic nominee for president.
Today's Race Boaters aren't like the Swift Boaters. They ARE the Swift Boaters. Bob Perry. Tom DeLay. Tom Craddick. The same people whose 2002 campaign funding scheme led to Tuesday's guilty plea from the Texas Association of Business, another organization with close ties to the Race Boaters. That plea came from the same investigation that led to the indictment against DeLay.
Waiting until the night before the election is too easy. Making predictions in July is just plain stupid. Making predictions two weeks out is just right. So let's see what you've got.
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) unveiled a hard-hitting new radio ad yesterday in response to CEO-funded attacks on the middle class.
Ellison's radio ad stands up for the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would help rebuild the middle class by making it easier for people to form or join unions.
Ellison shows his true colors by standing up for this core progressive value. Here's how he closes the ad:
"Politicians who support the Employee Free Choice Act, like me, want to provide a fairer way for working men and women to rebuild America's middle class. I urge you to support candidates who support the Employee Free Choice Act and to reject the lies of those CEOs who want to continue lining their pockets while they keep picking yours."
Note: Polls have tightened some since I wrote the first draft of this on Friday, but there's nothing below that I would change at this point, having tweaked it already a wee bit this morning.
As we've now entered the last three weeks of the campaign, an instructive comparison can be made to where we were just entering the last three months of the campaign, when I wrote a diary, "Swing State Clusters Tell Story of Potential 'Map-Changing' Obama Landslide". (Some maps from that diary reappear on the flip.) Obama's lead in the national polls is up from where it was, as is his projected margin in electoral votes. But the number of Red States potentially in play has plummeted dramatically. There is fairly straightforward explanation for this--the normal consolidation of the bases, combined with the drop in undecideds as low-info voters finally tune into the race. But on the flip I argue for a slightly more nuanced exaplanation. To kick things off, here are the basics in visual form:
National Polls
Chris's Presidential Forecast 07/29
Electoral College: Obama 264, McCain 172, Toss-up 102
National popular vote: Obama 47.2%-41.6% McCain
Chris's Presidential Forecast 10/18
Electoral College: Obama 349, McCain 166 Toss-up 23
National popular vote: Obama 49.8%--43.2% McCain
We are 25 days from an election. At the Jefferson-Jackson dinner you talked about how important this election is, and how we need to send Becky Greenwald and Rob Hubler to Congress, and return Bruce Braley (IA-1), Dave Loebsack (IA-2),and Leonard Boswell (IA-3). In your own race, nobody has ever heard of your hapless opponent, he has no money, and he is going to lose big. So I have to ask, why are you sitting on a campaign warchest of more than $4 million? Why aren't you doing everything you can to turn Iowa blue?
Regardless of his background, it was never a problem for anyone - including Republicans and Chicago's most powerful business leaders - to work with Ayers on Chicago's public schools. In fact, Ayers is widely respected in the field of urban education.
"It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he had led a fugitive life years earlier," said former Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson, who worked with both Obama and Ayers over the years. "It's ridiculous. There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It's nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It's so silly."
As the NPR story reminds us, here's what Sarah Palin said:
"Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country,"
By Palin's so-called "logic," the same could be said of Nelson, too. No wonder she thinks it's silly.
As tremayne has noted, Obama has clearly opened a significant lead in the tracking polls, which can only translate into good news on the ground in specific states. But that got me wondering about what we could reasonably expect to see in terms of the overall geography. Rather than an exhaustive look, like I've done before, the ongoing financial/political crisis hasn't left a lot of time for me, so I decided to look at a few key states, which I've collected in the following table. Ohio represents the ultimate traditional swing state and Virginia is the key new swing states in the South, while North Carolina is a "pinch me" swing states in the South, and Missouri is a "pinch me" swing state in the Midwest.
I, as much as anyone, have been deeply distressed over the reactive nature of the Obama campaign, particularly of late. Yes, he's much better at punching back than Kerry was, but that's still being reactive. I was, therefore, chagrined to read the following front-paged comment from reader JA at TPM, and realize that it was right:
Josh, in dismissing the Gallup poll this morning, you describe the Obama campaign as reactive and "unwilling or unable to take the initiative." Huh? We just watched a GOP convention in which the nominee for the incumbent party agreed the election was about change. In the major speeches given by Republicans, speakers used the word "change" 30 times--more than any other theme, including "reform."
The McCain campaign wanted to frame this election on experience, but had to abandon that when the polls didn't move. The surge issue has likewise attracted no great interest. Although McCain continues to discuss it, as a theme, he has ditched it in favor of this murky "change/reform" theme. (By selecting Sarah Palin, the campaign has officially ceded the point.) This all works to Obama's advantage because if the discussion becomes one of change, it must necessarily shift to policy--the last place McCain wants to go. But he's backed himself into a corner.
Actually, I think both things are true. Obama has forced McCain to fight on his own territory at the macro level of strategy, but he has yet to sieze the advantage at the micro-strategic (story/meme-pushing) and tactical (news-cycle) levels. This may well change, but...
One of the primary ways to Expand the Map of competitive U.S. Senate seats in 2008 is to empower with resources Democrats in states that Republicans hope to take for granted, so that they can focus on more traditionally battleground states. Four such red states in 2008 are Mississippi, Kansas, Georgia, and Tennessee, where former Governor Ronnie Musgrove, former Congressman Jim Slattery, former state legislator Jim Martin, and former Tennessee Democratic Party Chair Bob Tuke are running to oust ethically questionable Roger Wicker, Bush-cover-up-artist Pat Roberts, Shameless Saxby Chambliss, and Lamar!, respectively.
$100 makes a huge difference. $10 makes a huge difference. We're now less than two months from Election Day. Supporting these red state Democrats at this critical juncture expands the map, makes the NRSC sweat even more, and increases Democrats' chances for overcoming historic Republican obstructionism in the U.S. Senate. Let's keep that momentum going!
Every election cycle we are seeing more and more polling. In 2000 you had to make due with the occasional national poll and the even scarcer state poll. The 2004 election had so much polling it sparked a cottage industry of part-time election polling pundits such as "The Mystery Pollster," Mark Blumenthal, now part of the Pollster.com team.
Kos has commissioned a few polls over the years and today announced even more including, yes, yet one more daily tracking poll. The Kos tracking poll (by Research 2000), which debuts Thursday, brings to 4 the number of polls tracking the Presidential race. For those of us who check in on these polls daily, this is great terrible. With each new tracker the number of potential blog posts increases multiplicatively (that's a real word). You can write about why this poll agrees with that or why this poll disagrees with that or why one of them is biased against your candidate, etc. To cut through the mind-numbing haze of decimals, I present a simple time saver: The Open Left Tracking Poll Average. Yes, Obama is behind but it's not that bad. Follow along.
My sense is that we of the progressive blogs aren't exploiting our full potential in terms of the 2008 presidential election. Much of this is out of our hands. That's fine. But what can we influence? And how?
I'm looking for specific ideas. How can we better leverage our online presence into the presidential campaign?
Here are three ideas to show the sort of thing I'm talking about:
1) John McCain is a war victim, not a war hero.
2) The Ten Taboos of John McCain: A Style Guide for Serious Journalists.
3) Mavrick rolling John McCain.
When John McCain announced Sarah Palin my first thought is my best thought: if we don't win the battle over her unacceptability we will lose the election.
Now, this thought does not come naturally to me, because I worked for the late U.S. Senator and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen when he was the Democratic counterpart to Dan Quayle in 1988. That match-up was, in terms of experience and gravitas, no contest. But after Dukakis put on a funny helmet, climbed in a tank, refused to shout down Bernie Shaw's question about the hypothetical rape and murder of Dukakis wife, well, the VP candidates weren't even much of an afterthought to voters. And that remains the conventional wisdom
But I don't think the conventional wisdom will hold this year, and not because of some magical Palin quality. She helped give McCain a convention bump, but it had nothing to do with her and everything to do with network and cable pundits who declared her a "game changer" and star before she'd hiked out of the tundra. Voters heard a lot more about her and about McCain's maverickness from the media than they heard from McCain or Palin. The convention bump is the consequence of media whoring. Nothing more. Palin's got talent, but she's all the more dangerous because she's a child of the pundits.
For all the silly talk of births and babies, the paternity and maternity we should be concerned about is the pundit's very own new love child.
Democrats Post Big Gains In Voter Registration JULIE PACE and STEPHEN OHLEMACHER | September 6, 2008 03:19 PM EST |
CLAIRTON, Pa. - Five days a week, Linda Graham trolls tattered neighborhoods of this once thriving steel city outside Pittsburgh for unregistered voters she can sign up as Democrats _ one of thousands of unknown volunteers whose work outside the limelight has already altered the basic arithmetic of the November election....
To counter this effort, the Republicans are counting on a formidable, high-tech get-out-the-vote operation that has helped them win the past two presidential elections.
Since the last federal election in 2006, volunteers like Graham combined with the enthusiasm generated by the Obama-Clinton struggle to add more than 2 million Democrats to voter rolls in the 28 states that register voters according to party affiliation. The Republicans have lost nearly 344,000 thousand voters in the same states....
At the Edfge of the American West, there's a post with voter registration figures for this year, for 16 states that register people by party, which accounts for about 2/3 of that registration gain. Although it's obviously incomplete, I thought it could help give us a quick-and-dirty peak at what's happening at ground level, especially when combined with what happened in 2004.
Yesterday marked the start of the Democratic National Convention, but our campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act kicked into high gear over the weekend with the rollout ads to broaden support for the Employee Free Choice Act.
Included in this kickoff are two prominentbillboards in Denver, full page ads in Politico and USA Today, and expansive online advertising (including here on Open Left). This is a preview of a larger campaign to make the Employee Free Choice Act a reality for workers struggling in this economy, with plans to run until the bill is passed.
Check out one of our billboards up in Denver:
American Rights at Work is releasing these ads in advance of Labor Day as part of a huge, new coordinated effort among workers' rights advocates, progressives, and labor unions to champion this legislation. These ads help kickoff a new campaign and coordinated push for passage of this critical legislation.
Cross-posted at Project Vote's Voting Matters Blog
Weekly Voting Rights News Update
By Erin Ferns
With little more than two months left before Election Day, prospective voters are rushing to get registered. And like the way that slugs thrive in moist weather, voter suppression attacks spring up around large-scale voter registration drives. Partisan attempts to shape the electorate, in effect choosing the voters rather than voters choosing their own representatives, seek to impose barriers to voter participation by eligible citizens rather than creating a system that works to facilitate the foundational right of American democracy. Voter ID laws are a particularly favorite weapon in the arsenal of partisans seeking to choose their own voters to the exclusion of other eligible citizens. More than 25 states introduced voter ID bills this year and at least nine have such laws in place for this November's election despite scant evidence of voter impersonation, the ill it is supposed to stop.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (cont) Wallace Stevens4
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
This is my second installment in this series, exploring six different ways of looking at John McCain's recent meddling in the Georgian/Russian conflict-as well as their affairs leading up to it. For reference, all six ways are presented in Part 1.
This part deals with The Republican's "October Surprise". Named for a long-suspected, and now virtually certain clandestine plot by the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign to prevent the release of American hostages by Iran prior to the 1980 election, thus ensuring Jimmy Carter's defeat.
A similar effort by Richard Nixon, to sabotage the 1968 Paris Peace Talks, and prevent the election of Hubert Humphrey, has been solidly confirmed. Thus, deliberate interference in foreign affairs by the McCain campaign would be part of an established pattern of GOP lawlessness in manipulating the outcome of presidential elections, and there is increasing reason to think that McCain's campaign--or at least individuals associated with it--played a role in precipitating this crisis. They have certainly involving themselves in trying to keep it alive, and even escalate it. Details on the flip.
In my diary last weekend, "Swing State Clusters Tell Story of Potential 'Map-Changing' Obama Landslide", I pointed out how the punditalkcrazy has been utterly oblivious to the actual configuration of battleground states as revealed by state-level polling this year. Regardless of what the national polls say, there just doesn't seem to be much chance that, even at his best, McCain could win more than one or two Kerry states, while Obama could easily pick off half a dozen, even a dozen Bush states. As I argued in my previous diary today, "Electoral Map Typology", it is quite likely the map will change in this election for many elections to come.
Despite Obama's amazingly consistent lead throughout the general election, the talking heads on cable television returned to their incessant bloviating over whether Obama should be leading by more than just five points over McCain. It's really painful to watch these fools who don't bother to pay attention to history to understand how a five-point popular vote victory translates when it comes to the only metric that matters -- the Electoral College. (Hint: it translates to a landslide)
And his chart of popular vote margins to EV margins is pretty straightforward:
