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Fall US Elections

casebro said:
I keep telling you Dems on this site that you ain't the Landslide Majority you have convinced your selves. Nor are the Repubs a small whacko minority, there's more to us than the Tea Party. Give us some respect.
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Respect is earned not given. Good luck with that.
Maybe starting this Wednesday.
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What I fully expect starting this Wednesday, if the Republican Party takes control, is endless bleating from them (along with their commentariat as well as supporters among the general populace) about how they should now get their way because "elections mean something." It certainly played out that way following the 2010 midterms.

Curious they were silent as Marcel Marceau on the concept post-2008 and 2012.
 
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If the GOP takes over the Senate, will that body adopt the three day work week just like the House?
 
Another election where my reaction is "Ugh, thank god it's over." and that's before the results are in. Between the phone calls and mailers, I would guess at least a hundred dollars was spent just on me and my wife between all the candidates. The phone calls went unanswered (thank you caller ID) and the mailers went into the recycle bin unread. The amount of money wasted on people like me has to be close to the GDP of many a small nation.
 
Patrick J. Egan has an interesting article that examines why the 2014 Senate election is stacked in favor of the Republicans.

Welcome to the most unrepresentative Senate election since World War II:

Simply put, this year’s Senate elections are unrepresentative of the nation to an extent that is unprecedented in elections held in the post-war era. So when we begin to sift through the results on Election Night, the number of Senate seats won and lost will tell us less than we might like about where the two parties stand in the minds of American voters.
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For the UK (admittedly with a far more insane inequitable** system of selecting the upper house) I would like selection by lot - akin to jury service*, but with no penalty for refusal and with significant financial encouragement for service. I would want a 5-10 year service term.

It would mean that the upper house was representative of the country, but would not be elected so it would often have a different constitution (less likely to be party political) and more likely to act as a proper check and balance.


*in the UK, I don't know how it works in the US

**They actually managed to make the system of choice worse than when most were hereditary, by letting the PM choose members - usually by convention, the main political parties get some representation, but it seems to be rather ropey.
 
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Kestrel said:
If the GOP takes over the Senate, will that body adopt the three day work week just like the House?
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Why not? The job is just about getting reelected nowadays. The GOP told us quite clearly that they would do anything to deny Obama a second term. Since he was reelected I've not seen much interest in much of anything other than attacking Obama and telling just how awful his policies are.

Never mind that the stock market is up. Unemployment is down and more Americans today have health care than before.
 
Spindrift said:
Obama hasn't had to veto it, the repeal Obamacare bills infinitum never got passed by the Senate.

Same game as before just some different rules.
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Weekly votes to repeal Obamacare. Senate hearing to investigate Obama for anything even if it isn't even plausible. Perhaps the Senate can also focus on Benghazi and get to the truth in a way that the House has been unable to. Maybe we can finally get to the truth about the IRS. I think some items that the GOP could consider is strengthening the Patriot act and faith based initiatives. Increased warrantless wiretaps are probably off the table until we have a Republican president when it will once again be unpatriotic not to support them. While they are at it perhaps the GOP could Declare a national holiday for Ronald Reagan and why not a second national day of prayer. Along those lines, why are there no laws to protect us from the war on Christmas? What about gays in the military? What about an increased military budget? There are things a GOP senate could focus on from day one.

Finally, has anyone bothered to ask where Obama was during Watergate?

I don't know what the GOP will do. I'm fairly certain though there will be little of anything substantive.
 
RandFan said:
Weekly votes to repeal Obamacare. Senate hearing to investigate Obama for anything even if it isn't even plausible. Perhaps the Senate can also focus on Benghazi and get to the truth in a way that the House has been unable to. Maybe we can finally get to the truth about the IRS. I think some items that the GOP could consider is strengthening the Patriot act and faith based initiatives. Increased warrantless wiretaps are probably off the table until we have a Republican president when it will once again be unpatriotic not to support them. While they are at it perhaps the GOP could Declare a national holiday for Ronald Reagan and why not a second national day of prayer. Along those lines, why are there no laws to protect us from the war on Christmas? What about gays in the military? What about an increased military budget? There are things a GOP senate could focus on from day one.

Finally, has anyone bothered to ask where Obama was during Watergate?

I don't know what the GOP will do. I'm fairly certain though there will be little of anything substantive.
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First, the GOP will save us all from Ebola by repealing Obamacare and giving everyone a gun. Then, deport all illegal drug dealing immigrants and re-ban gay marriage in all 50 states. Then create jobs by slashing food stamps and welfare and eliminating the capital gains tax.
 
maxpower1227 said:
First, the GOP will save us all from Ebola by repealing Obamacare and giving everyone a gun. Then, deport all illegal drug dealing immigrants and re-ban gay marriage in all 50 states. Then create jobs by slashing food stamps and welfare and eliminating the capital gains tax.
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This.

On top of preventing Obama from taking everyone's guns, we can finally get rid of abortion, bring Jesus back to schools, and return this nation to proud Reagan principles.
 
This thread is turning into the mirror image of the "If Obama, then..." thread.
 
Brainster said:
This thread is turning into the mirror image of the "If Obama, then..." thread.
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Please. We obviously don't actually believe that these things are in danger of happening. For instance: Gay marriage is going to be legal everywhere within a generation. Doesn't mean plenty of right-wing troglodytes wouldn't love to be able to ban it though.
 
maxpower1227 said:
Please. We obviously don't actually believe that these things are in danger of happening. For instance: Gay marriage is going to be legal everywhere within a generation. Doesn't mean plenty of right-wing troglodytes wouldn't love to be able to ban it though.
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:) It's kind of a reverse of Poe's law. Parody on the left that mirrors the hysteria of the right is taken at face value.
 
Nova Land said:
Usually the polls are a good indicator of what's going to happen. And usually Nate Silver has been an excellent interpreter of what the polls are saying.

But for this election I think turnout is going to be the key -- and the polls aren't able (at least not yet) to factor the comparative merits of the GOP and Democratic Get Out The Vote efforts into their numbers.

I can't, either -- but I can make a guess. And my guess is the Democrat's GOTV in many states is going to far outdo the GOP's.

Let's set aside that the GOP has promised me, repeatedly, that if I don't contribute they'll lose. That may be simply rhetoric.

But the GOP has also told me repeatedly that if I give them $24 they can get one voter to the polls. The Democrats have told me that if I give them $3 they can reach 100 voters. So that would be 800 voters reached for the same $24 amount.

Now those figures aren't directly comparable; one is for voters contacted in an effort to motivate to vote and the other is for voters actually motivated to vote. But unless the Democrats have a .125% success rate with their outreach, the Democrats look to be a lot better at this kind of thing. That matches what I think I've seen in the last few elections, starting in 2008.

I think the Democrats have been doing a better job of reaching out to their voters and urging them to vote in this election than the Republicans have, and that that's going to make a key difference of several percentage points in several close races. My prediction: Democrats at least 48+3, Republicans no more than 49.
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As Silver said, the polls tend to be biased to one party or the other, but there's never any consistency. This time the polls were weighted to the Dems and the results in the pre-election "toss-up" states are showing that. Most notable is Colorado, where the ground-swell of Dems was going to vault Udall to the seat. Didn't happen. The numbers for the GOP are almost double what the pre-election polls had forecast. Arkansas? Similar. North Carolina and New Hampshire should've been relatively "safe" Dem wins. NH was tougher than the polls said, and North Carolina is still up in the air as of 11:30 EST.

GOTV really only works if they don't know it's coming. The GOP aren't stupid. (Mean, cheap, nasty, misanthropic..? Sure. But stupid? No.) They've been countering this with their own version of GOTV, and I think the Republican voters were more motivated by their hatred of everything Obama and feeling that this is another in a series of referendums on his presidency.
 
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