Tag Archives: Senate

The Fall Campaign

By tmess2 | Published September 4, 2022

Traditionally, Labor Day Weekend was seen as the start of the Fall campaign (at least by the media).  If that was ever true, it no longer is.  With cable and websites like Facebook and Youtube, there are a lot of relatively inexpensive way to get advertisements out during July and August.  If a campaign waits unti September to begin its ad campaign, the other side has already defined the race.

But, by this point in the cycle, we are down to the last handful of primaries, and the national committees and big PACS are already looking to decide where they are going to be spending the big bucks in late September and early October.  (As the change in the mechanism for advertising has obliterated Labor Day as the start of the fall campaign, the change in voting habits (with a significant percentage casting early votes or mail-in ballots) has also altered when the big final push begins.  While, in a close race, last minute news and ads can make a difference, it is just as important to get as many votes locked in as early as possible so that the last-minute spending can be focused on a tiny number of votes.

But that is the inside baseball stuff of campaigns.  The purpose of this post is to set the stage for the next eight weeks.  For the past two years, Democrats have had the frustration of a very narrow margin in the House of Representatives and a dead-even Senate.  Because Nancy Pelosi may be one of the all-time great Speakers, Democrats have been mostly able to pass things in the House.  The Senate, however, has been very, very difficult.  The filibuster rules has limited the Democrats to passing anything significant via the reconciliation process.  Even the reconciliation process requires keeping the entire Democratic caucus together which has proven difficult as a single member can insist on changes to any proposal.  And the  lack of a majority has also prevented any changes to the filibuster rule (again due to the ability a single Democrat to veto any proposed change). Continue Reading...

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2022 Elections — A First Glance

By tmess2 | Published January 30, 2021

The 2020 elections left both the House and the Senate closely divided.  And two years is a long time in politics.  But experience has taught politicians two, somewhat contradictory, things that will impact what can get done during the next two years.

The first, especially for the House of Representatives, is that the President’s party typically loses seats.  But the reason for this normal rule is that a new President has typically helped members of his party to flip seats.  As such, this might be less true for 2022 than in the past.  In 2020, the Democrats only won three new seats, and two were the results of North Carolina having to fix its extreme gerrymander.  And only a handful of Democratic incumbents won close races.  And the rule is less consistent for the Senate, in large part because the Senators up for election are not the ones who ran with the President in the most recent election but the ones who ran with the prior president six years earlier.  In other words, the President’s party tends to be more vulnerable in the Senate in the midterms of the second term than in the midterms of the first term.  But the likelihood that the President’s party will lose seats is an incentive to do as much as possible during the first two years.

The second is that one cause of the swing may be overreach — that voters are trying to check a President who is going further than the voters actually wanted.  This theory assumes that there are enough swing voters who really want centrist policies and that they switch sides frequently to keep either party from passing more “extreme” policies.  Polls do not really support this theory and there is an argument that, at least part of the mid-term problem, could be the failure to follow through on all of the promises leading to less enthusiasm with the base.  But this theory is a reason for taking things slowly and focusing on immediate necessities first and putting the “wish list” on hold until after the mid-terms. Continue Reading...

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Cut Time

By tmess2 | Published September 5, 2020

A political party serves two fundamental purposes.

First, people form and join political parties to advance policy.  (Of course, there are disagreements on the exact priorities or the specific details of policy proposals.)  In fact, one of the biggest mistakes that the Framers made was not anticipating that, once there were elections for federal offices, the groups in New Jersey that favored rural farmers over “urban” merchants would unite with similar groups in Georgia (and vice versa for the groups that favored merchants) rather than stay isolated in their own states.  Simply put, if you want a single-payer health care system, you are more likely to get it by forming a large group with other supporters of that type of proposal than working on your own.

Second, the way that political parties try to advance policy is by getting their candidates elected to office.  You can’t pass a single-payer system if the opponents of single-payer have the majority in Congress or control the White House.  And political parties win elections by finding good candidates and raising and spending money to support those candidates.   Especially in the year before the election, money tends to be spent on creating tools (like voter databases and helping state parties) that are available to all candidates that run on the party’s ticket.  And at this point in time, with the exception of the last handful of state primaries, the parties have their candidates. Continue Reading...

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Ranked Choice Voting and the Senate

By tmess2 | Published August 4, 2019

Earlier today, DocJess posted the first Sunday with the Senators of this cycle.  I am posting this follow-up on the weird features of Maine election law that could determine whether there is a Democratic majority in 2020.

In Maine, for federal elections, there is ranked choice voting — both for the general election and the primary.  While we do not yet know the full list of candidates who will be running in 2020, my hunch is that ranked choice voting probably hurts Senator Collins in the primary but may help her in the general election.

My thinking behind this is that a multi-candidate primary field would make it difficult for any candidate to get more first choice votes than Senator Collins.  However, I think that most of the primary challenge to Senator Collins will be from candidates who do not think that she is loyal to the new LePage-Trump version of the Republican Party and see her as a RINO.  The voters who support these candidates are likely to rank Senator Collins last among their choices.  So if Senator Collins only got 45% or so of the first choice votes, there would be a decent chance (assuming that everybody ranked the entire field) that the strongest of her opponents would pass her once all preferences are distributed.  A primary loss by Senator Collins would move the Maine Senate race from lean Republican to likely Democrat. Continue Reading...

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Fall Elections

By tmess2 | Published October 22, 2017

In most of the world, the practice is to limit the number of races being contested on any given election day.  Thus, regional elections are held on a separate day from national elections.  In the U.S., however, most states opt to hold state elections on the same day as national elections.  Thus, in most states, the election for governor either falls on the same day as the mid-term election or on the same day as the presidential election.  In a small number of states, however, the election for governor occurs in an odd-year.

Two states — Virginia and New Jersey — hold the election in the year after the presidential election.  (Three states — Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi — hold the elections in the year before the presidential election.)  Both New Jersey and Virginia have a tendency — not absolute, but a tendency — to elect a governor from the party not in the White House.  In New Jersey, the last time that the party in the White House won the governor’s race was 1985.  In Virginia, while the party in the White House won in 2013, the last previous time that the party in the White House won was 1973.  There are a lot of reasons for these results — including. similar to the problem that the party in the White House faces in mid-term elections, the simple fact that governing is much harder than running for office, so supporters of the party in power tend to be disappointed with the actual fruits of their victory while those out of power tend to be angry and motivated.

As things currently stand, things are looking very good for the Democratic candidates in New Jersey.  Aside from New Jersey’s normal Democratic lean and the tendency for the party not in the White House to win, the Republicans nominated the current Lieutenant Governor, making it hard to separate the current Republican ticket from the corruption of the current administration of term-limited governor Chris Christie.  The Democratic candidate, Ambassador Phil Murphy, leads by double digits in every poll this fall.  While some of the polls show enough undecided voters to leave a theoretical opening for the Republican candidate, the race in New Jersey is not particularly close. Continue Reading...

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