I don’t have much intelligent to say about this one, except gosh, don’t nominate a child molester for your Senate candidate.
Earlier this evening, I made a funny:
Will Charlie Baker’s last minute endorsement clinch the deal for Doug Jones? 🧐
— Blue Mass Group (@bluemassgroup) December 13, 2017
And doggone if he didn’t pull us over the finish line!
HOLY —- YOU DID IT @MassGovernor !! https://t.co/6zLZkeQi6K
— Blue Mass Group (@bluemassgroup) December 13, 2017
- I will simply echo everyone else who says: Be everywhere; compete everywhere; 50-state strategy; you lose all the races you don’t run; etc.
- Doug Jones seems like a fine, upright, dignified fellow.
- I couldn’t have made up a political-satire character more grotesque than Roy Moore.
Truth is stranger than fictionGo home Truth, you’re drunk. - I wonder where Steve Bannon is tonight.
- Intentional and clever vote-suppression couldn’t keep black people away from the polls tonight. 92% voted for Jones (according to exit polls). Dems take notice.
- There seems to have been a good, well-organized and -funded ground game from Dems and affiliated groups. Did you send Jones some money? Good on you. Seems well spent.
- Also from WaPo: The young went heavily for Jones. The future.
What do you think?
We need to go all in, though this may take more than one cycle, on driving African-American turnout, including helping to make sure they actually can comply with whatever requirements are erected to make it harder for them to vote. If they voted in proportion to their population we could have a solid Democratic South again.
A vote is a vote is a vote. Yes, running up the score with African American votes helps. But keep in mind that AAs make up about 31% of Alabama and were 29% of the vote. You can’t win without whites, and the Democratic party isn’t winning very many whites.
Senator-elect also got something like 85% of the city vote (50,000+). Not much room to grow there either.
But the suburbs? You bet. The opportunity for growth is with whites, and especially women. College educated people were more likely to vote for Jones than non-, so you go after them too.
And — and this is key — it helps you downballot. The Alabama House is 70-33 GOP. The Senate 26-7. Picking up a few more House seats at least lets you hold out for winning the governorship and preventing a veto override. not to mention create more “minor leaguers” for future races.
P.S. ” If they voted in proportion to their population we could have a solid Democratic South again.” is just plain wrong. The Dems can cobble together victories, but it takes all the groups that aren’t rural white uneducated evangelical men.
Just to nitpick; Black voter registration percentage in Alabama was 26%.
OK, I guess I made a couple of bad assumptions. I thought AAs were well north of 40% and there was a greater gap between that and their turnout rates.
Doug Jones won on a platform that included:
* Climate action
* “Health care is a right”
* A woman’s right to choose
* Marriage equality
* Equal pay
* Raising the minimum wage
* Criminal justice reform
IN ALA-FREAKIN’-BAMA. Maybe Democrats should try running on progressive ideas to make people’s lives better everywhere! Because running in red states on “like Republicans, but 13% less cruel” … Republicans control the White House, both houses of Congress, and a majority of governorships & state legislatures. Stand-for-nothing centrism has failed.
I don’t know that centrism, of whatever variety, can be blamed here…. It’s tempting to call the Republican party extreme, but the truth is that they have mainstreamed their insatiable appetite for white, and male, entitlement and have used a variety of means, subtle and not-so, as well as bending and outright breaking many rules to maintain their hold. But it is insatiable: give them everything they want and they only want more until White Supremacists march openly and petulantly demand what they can’t possibly be allowed to have (again), absolute hegemony. Anything less is deemed ‘oppressive.’ Being able to say “Merry Christmas” being only the simplest version of this demand.
I certainly think that Obama was a centrist, but not a ‘stand-for-nothing’ one… and I think that Hillary Clinton would have followed more closely to Obama than to her husband (who could fairly have been accused of ‘standing-for-nothing’…). But Obama’s flaw, perhaps paradoxical.ly, was in trying a negotiated centrism. In theory, that could work, but the other side has to want to negotiate, and they clearly didn’t when he was in office and now want to claw back, indeed negate, his entire 8 years.
Or, put another way, any centrism is irrelevant when the other side is, put simply, batshit crazy.
My wife, alternately ecstatic over the Jones victory and worried about the response to it, asked me last night, “Can Senators get Secret Service protection?”
Leadership gets US Capitol Police protection, which I suppose might be extended to others if there is a specific need.
Doug Jones won on a platform that included:
* I am not Roy Moore
Doug Jones, initially, expected to run against Luther Strange, handpicked by the Republican establishment to be the successor to Sessions, in the general election. Roy Moore’s upset primary win was a surprise to everyone. Maybe, over time, Jones v Moore morphed into “I am not Roy Moore” but it, pretty clearly, started out with “I am not a Republican”…. and maintained that over the course of the race, which I think was thegreenmiles initial point. Jones, if he was of lesser virtue, would have easily run the table by pivoting on a lot of the issues and poaching those Republican votes that still possess a gag reflex. That he didn’t is a credit to him and to the party.
You’re both right!
You’re all right!
Re: Christopher
Putting this kind of money and infrastructure to match Obama level African American turnout in every state for every race that would be truly transformative. We should totally keep doing that!
Re: stomv
Focused on flipping suburban voters is also really smart and worked here and in VA. Really smart play for Clinton-R districts.
Re: greenmiles
Yes. Every race is nationalized now and a referendum on the President and a bold progressive economic agenda. Let’s run that way.
America is better today than it was yesterday. Thank you Alabama.
“African American voters in Alabama did more to help white working Americans last night than DT has ever done.” John Fugelsang
Fun fact: Doug Jones’ share of voters who are African American is nearly identical to his share of voters who are women == both were just under 60% of his vote share.
Let’s break this down by gender and race, per the Washington Post exit polling.
White Men: 26% Jones/72% Moore
White Women: 34% Jones/63% Moore
Black Men: 93% Jones/6% Moore
Black Women: 98% Jones/2% Moore
…and by race:
Whites: 30% Jones/68% Moore
Blacks: 96% Jones/4% Moore
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/special-election-results/alabama/?utm_term=.ec0ccf989733
Specific to black voters, two things contributed to Jones’ win. The Democratic field plan was premised upon a minimum of six contacts with each black voter (including unlikely voters); and grassroots organizations (conspicuously local NAACP branches and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law) did get-out-the-vote operations and resisted voter suppression attempts at polling places.
Really amazing numbers.
A less depressing split I saw today: Moore won people over 65, but lost everyone else.
It’s actually a super depressing stat. It’s because black people don’t get old. Instead, they die.
Yes, there are exceptions — but from an actuarial point of view, African Americans don’t live nearly as long as whites. so Roy Moore won over 65 because there just aren’t that many blacks who live much past that age to vote against him.
But I think the point is that he won the generation that is dying out. Even if others don’t make it to 65 they will be the voters that are left in future cycles.
The more telling stat is that Jones won a landslide victory with under 25 voters, and a more modest but still strong victory with under 45 voters. We could really see a sea change in our nations politics in just 10-20 years time as these cohorts become median voters and replacement voters are even more liberal. All the more reason to pursue a 50 state strategy and capitalize on gifts like this, while also building the infrastructure needed to make future coalitions. There is already talk of a competitive Governors race in AL, and people are taking a second look at making TX competitive for Senate. These are all positive trends. So is the 48/48 Trump approve/disapprove split in exit polls from all voters. If that means AL is nearly 50/50 on Trump, it makes Waukesha a lot more winnable.
I work with a fairly diverse group, including many in the 18-35 range. Politics is rarely mentioned but they are all VERY upset and nervous and angry about the loss of net neutrality.
If Democrats want to take advantage of their position with this and get a tsunami of young voters in 2018 and 202, this is something that ought to be on every candidate’s issue list.
“You either win or you learn.” Michael Jordan
Maybe we Dems have finally learned the lesson our friend, Howard Dean, taught us years ago : You can’t win unless you show up with a team on the field. The 50 state strategy works. Give them nothing. Take from them everything.
To that end, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is reporting that for the first time ever Democrats are fielding candidates for EVERY Congressional district in Texas.
I can feel the tsunami coming !