Today’s post Benghazi polls among Iowa caucus-goers taken from Oct. 22-24 show Hillary opening a huge lead over Bernie Sanders :
CLINTON SANDERS O’MALLEY
65 24 5 Monmouth University
62 24 3 Loras College
This is the bump we were hoping for following the strong debate performance, Congressional testimony and the Iowa JJ Dinner on Saturday.
YOU GO GIRL !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Please share widely!
…from Senator Brown and Governor Hickenlooper.
(I’d like to get away from the habit of attaching every candidate’s name to the word “momentum”. It’s too corny for my tastes.)
I find posts like this useless without a link to the actual poll.
It’s a PDF. N = 200 Democrats who voted in at least 1 of the last 2 Iowa Democratic primaries and said that they are likely to attend the caucus in February. The whole report is just 4 very accessible pages: http://www.monmouth.edu/assets/0/32212254770/32212254991/32212254992/32212254994/32212254995/30064771087/c83c0429-6c12-47a7-ac86-9bd1beab9bfb.pdf
The NYT’s Nate Cohn seems to have some wishful thinking that there will be a surge of young first time voters attending the caucus who will put Bernie over the top.
n/t
Having worked the one for Obama in 2008, I can attest that these things are difficult to predict. We were very discouraged canvassing for Obama in Iowa City since so many people were for Hillary, for Edwards, for a minor candidate or undecided. Not too many were declared for Obama first choice-and we were told this was one of his better areas. But, a lot of those voters did indicate Obama was their second choice and the undecideds were leaning toward him. So I want to see second choice polling and a better sense of the ground game.
I appreciate the link.
I share jconway’s opinion that it’s very hard to make accurate predictions based on polling in advance of the Iowa caucus.
My takeaway from this is that we Democrats have two very strong candidates, that the Democratic Party has very strong support — especially in comparison to the GOP — and that Iowa Democrats will, like me, enthusiastically support and work to elect whomever the nominee ultimately is.
Each leading candidate is running a sound, positive, and unifying campaign. Each understands the importance of not only winning the presidential election, but also of winning the hearts and minds of ALL Americans.
In spite of what some in the media may tell us, we Democrats are in very good shape today, certainly in Iowa.
On the top of the ticket race only, though. We’re in rough shape for legislative control, at the state level, and in developing a bench of younger national leaders. I think Yglesias is pretty spot on regarding those concerns.
1) He forgot to mention Gerrymandering
It is critical important to remember that the Democrats have won the popular vote in the House the last few elections, it’s just that our votes are clustered in smaller and more compact urban districts where they are effectively diluted while conservative voters are packed into more rural districts that spread out. Cincinatti is a great example, it’s a majority black city that has substantial sections carved into R+double digit districts, including that of the departing Speaker. Now in Illinois this is reversed, but it’s the exception rather than the rule, probably the only state where farm country is carved into minority districts to dilute Republican votes.
2) His conclusion was Dems move to the middle
Which couldn’t be more wrong. That strategy failed us in the 2014 Presidential races, as Vice President Biden astutely said on 60 minutes, it’s a good record, and it’s one we should run on rather than run away from. All the GOP has, as Jeb! is finding out, is nativist resistance to irreversible social change saddled with Dubya’s incompetence. That’s it.
We have a record, and it’s something our members of Congress should run on.
Midterm turnout is abyssmal because their base shows up and ours doesn’t. I had college educated friends in Virginia who skipped Mark Warner on the ballot and voted green or libertarian since he is so squishy on economics and security issues, only to gasp in horror as Gillespsie nearly ran away with that seat. Maybe if Warner had inspired them that race wouldn’t have been close. Chokely lost twice because she was a shitty candidate, not because she was too moderate, and the lessons of the other female we did vote for-Elizabeth Warren-should resonate across the country. Populists win.
Why else would America’s smartest politician right now be running against the banks and towards the people, rather than the other way around?
I don’t agree with everything from Yglesias, but I think the overall criticism is largely correct.
He mentions gerrymandering and how that is and will continue to lead further GOP entrenchment. The GOP had a better overall plan and we’re feeling the brunt of that. They’ve been more concerned about races at all levels (even school board and town stuff) and have been winning. We have a ton of catchup to play and no real plan to do so.
I didn’t take away the conclusion about moving to the right, more that when Dems are running in certain areas, the focus of the campaign needs to make sense for the area. And I think the Wendy Davis example is a good one. The core of that campaign was choice. Economic populism might have had a much better chance. That’s not to say support anti-choice economic populists, but that leading with social issues in some areas is a fool’s errand.
I’ve long said we need to rebuild the 50 state strategy and that too many local pols are running to make a living rather than make a difference, while they have committed right wing activists playing a key role at every level of government. So the Dems have to build up from the grassroots not down from the DNC.
I agree about Davis and made that exact argument as well. Control F for gerrymandering and it doesn’t make an appearance, he just laments the loss of state legislatures without elucidating why. And he also argued we needed a bigger, less liberal tent on all issues overall. I disagree with that. I say run a hardcore progressive at every level and eventually those positions become mainstream-as was said about Reagan-it took them 16 years to count the votes, but Goldwater eventually won. And in many ways what we got from Ronny was far worse than Barry, who’d be a “moderate Republican” today.
But I think O’Malley will claw up to double digits now that he’s not lumped in with Chafee and Webb, and now that Biden’s officially not entering the fray. He’s definitely rising in the polls Fred posted.
O’Malley has youth, executive experience and outside the Beltway credentials in his favor. Democrat voters aren’t displaying the radical outsider tendencies the Republicans are, but an anti-DC sentiment surely exists to some degree and MOM stands to get some consideration for it. He checks a lot of boxes.
It’s still Hillary’s race to lose, but I would not rule out O’Malley making it a three-horse conversation and perhaps overtaking Bernie as the principle Clinton alternative by the time we hit primary season.
He’s done.
If there is any mechanics antithetical toward broadening democracy, it’s a caucus. Publicly casting your vote at a long-winded session at a fixed time and place in your community. Third-world dictators run more democratic exercises.
I will say that, at every level the Democratic Party falls short of the GOP when it comes to recruiting new talent. The GOP has YAF, CPAC, and a host of affiliated organizations that turn long time conservative activists into conservative legislators. The conservative movement and the GOP are one in the same.
As Occupy Activists trying to do the right thing and become involved with the Mass Democrats showed, we have a lot of work to do in getting our own activist community to embrace the party and vice a versa so that we can have a pipeline ready to go. Labor, which used to be such a vehicle, has also been underutilized as a party building and organizing tool.
I think we Massachusetts Democrats can again show leadership by again stepping outside the box, this time on labor.
I suggest it is time to separate labor from unions. I don’t mean, at all, that we in any way reduce our support for unions. I think we must instead recognize that most laborers today are NOT members of any union and in many cases by explicit choice.
Massachusetts is well on its way to becoming a service economy. At the top of today’s wage scale are service professionals like researchers, programmers, accountants, lawyers, and the rest. At the bottom are service workers like restaurant workers, maintenance workers, house cleaners, and so on. In the middle are the trades.
I suggest that these service workers are all ultimately cogs on different wheels in the same economic engine. The workings of that engine currently accrue almost entirely to its owners. I suggest that we Massachusetts Democrats should find ways to reach out to and support non-unionized workers across the state.
The demographics about organized labor are working against us in the same way that demographics about race, ethnicity, and gender are working against the GOP.
Labor is broader than unions, and I suggest we explicitly reflect that reality in our party building and organizing.
I’ve been listening to some labor organizers lately who blame the poor union strategy for continually supporting the party and believing that success would follow if only they could get enough Democrats elected. They suggest instead that workers organize in their communities (outside their workplaces – including those who are not working), make more demands, democratize the unions, and stop waiting on the Democrats to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and and get labor law reform.
I’m enthusiastically supportive of labor organizers doing whatever they need to do to improve things for workers. If that means electing more Democrats, I support them. If that means side-stepping Democrats to pursue changes directly, I support that as well. Still, those strategies only affect labor organizers and whomever those labor organizers can influence. I suggest that that population is small and declining portion of our overall workforce.
I’m talking about reframing “labor” to mean “people who depend on wages” — nearly all Americans. If you get a W2, if you are dependent on the compensation reported by the W2, and if you are NOT an officer of whatever entity issues the W2, then I suggest you are part of “labor”.
Yeah, I undertand. I wasn’t offering their suggestions as a complementary strategy to what you advocated but rather the other flip of the coin.
There are some common elements though – like the idea of going outside the traditional methods of organizing and expanding it to include people who aren’t unionized (your suggestion) and those who aren’t working (what the organizers I’ve been listening to have suggested)