Tuesday, May 25, 2010

It's a Bad Day When 39% is a Great Win

A tale of two parties...Republicans are patting themselves on the pat for managing to get 39% of the vote in a special House election in Hawaii...and Democrats are trying to figure out how they lost a race even though they got approximately 60% of the votes.

Confused? The race in Hawaii Congressional seat was a three way contest with two Democrats and one Republican. The Democrats split 60% of the vote but that allowed a Republican to win with only 39% of the vote as neither of the Democrats would withdraw to help the other. The two Democrats will now face off to see who will face the Republican in the fall.

While the Republicans gloat about winning a seat where President Obama got 70% of the vote in 2008, what they don't say is that in 2006 the Republicans running for the House seats received 34% and 40% of the vote in the general election.

So, if according to the pundits, Kentucky should elect a Republican Senator in the fall despite getting outvoted in the primary, then Hawaiian voters, in a two-way race, will win the Hawaiian seat.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Why Rand Paul Could Lose in November

Despite being the media darling of the day and the Kentucky Senate race being the be all and end all race of the day, only 352,000 Republicans voted in the primary.

While the GOP turnout was higher than the last non-presidential primary it still shows Paul has a long way to go to win. In 2007 more than 202,000 voted in the Republican primary and 348,000 voted in the Democratic primary.

More than 520,000 people turned out on Tuesday for the Democratic primary and looking at previous turnout for non-presidential general elections, at best Kentucky is looking at a turnout of 1.3 million in November.

With an expected turnout of 1.2 to 1.3 million in November that means the winner will need to get 600,000 to 650,000 votes to win in a two way race. With a base of 520,000 voters showing up for their primary, it will be a lot easier for the Democrats to get 80,000 to 130,000 additional votes, while the GOP faces the challenge of getting 300,000 to 350,000 votes.

While there may be some Democratic primary voters who vote for Paul in the fall, it is more likely that it will be offset by Trey Grayson voters defecting from the GOP. The GOP's hope, perhaps, is that turnout will be closer to the 1.8 million that showed up for the 2008 election and where 953,000 voted for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to win with 53% of the vote.

The GOP will also claim that more Kentuckians are registered as Democrats but vote as Republican in general elections. However, in a year where the GOP electorate is supposedly "energized" it is difficult to see how they they can easily triple their primary turnout.

So while Republicans may be excited about the fall’s prospects Super Tuesday may have been the beginning of the end for the GOP to make advances this year.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Beware of the Rand Paul Hype

Rand Paul's victory in the GOP Senate primary in Kentucky will be the lead story in all the media on Wednesday, implying that Democrats, and incumbents are in trouble. While the second part may be true, if you look a little closer at Paul's support and enthusiam for the GOP, it may well be a mile wide and an inch thick.

While it may be tricky to compare primary voter turnout numbers to project them to a fall election, but it is interesting to note that Paul and Trey Grayson got 95% of the vote in the Kentucky GOP primary, or approximately 330,000 votes. By comparison the top two Democrats got 87% of the Democratic vote, or 440,000 votes.

Overall the difference was much worse as approximately 500,000 people voted in the Democratic primary and around 350,000 in the GOP primary.

Will the 150,000 majority hold for the Democrats, who knows but if I was a Republican in Kentucky and know that, in effect, a national party primary took place in my state and the other party turned out 150,000 more voters for a less well known contest would have me concerned.

But it's doubtful the media will bother to look this closely at the numbers, as it doesn't fit the narrative of the people rising up in the election. Maybe the readers will bug them enough they will have to notice it.

Criticizing the Usual Suspects

In what must be a groundbreaking story, Howard Kurtz, media critic of the Washington Post, jumped on the Republican bandwagon and criticized President Obama's complaints about the "cozy relationship between oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill."

Gee Howie, why didn't Obama go after off-shore drilling with more gusto? Could it be that the “Drill, Baby, Drill” crowd was dominating discussion and that with every single vote needed to get health care passed it didn't make sense to piss off the anti-regulation crowd?

I'm sure it would have played well earlier this year for Obama to come out and say we need tighter regulation of the oil industry. All the oil people, from Palin to Cheney, would have come out and said Obama was trying to make the U.S. less secure by limiting oil exploration.

Yet none of this was mentioned. Why should it? It would only mess up the article with, you know, background information and perspective. And without that kind of information the ill informed can continue their rampage on government.

It’s going to take a long time to get regulatory agencies to actually regulate again and probably will take more accidents to shut up the naysayers and allow regulation to take effect.

It's a lot easier to take pot shots at the government for not regulating enough in an anti-regulation environment than to put the pieces together and ask is it time to stop questioning regulation and allow them to regulate?

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Lack of Experience

One of the conservatives and GOP's major talking points about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kegan is her supposed lack of experience. After all she is the first non-judge to be appointed since William Rehnquist.

Hmmm...maybe they have a point. Just point to Rehnquist's judicial record, i.e. Bush v. Gore. Obviously he didn't know what he was doing. But then Rehnquist had a track record, writing a memorandum arguing against federal-court-ordered school desegregation while the court was considering Brown v. Board of Education and complaints about Rehnquist's attempts to discourage minority voters in Arizona elections when he served as a pollwatcher in the early 1960s.

It's doubtful that a Kagan-Rehnquist comparison will be brought up by the right, and it's also doubtful conservatives, who decry her lack of judicial experience, will bring up the fact that she was appoint to the Court of Appeals in June 1999 but Republicans denied her a vote to serve on the court.

That seat later went to John Roberts who compiled all of two years experience as a judge before being named CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT. So if two years was enough experience to serve as Chief Justice, would one year's worth of experience be okay for a regular justice? How about a year as Solicitor General, the nation's lawyer before the Supreme Court.

And just look at past Solicitor Generals who also had no courtroom experience - Robert Bork, Ken Starr...hmmm...Rehnquist, Bork, Starr, not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Tea Party Exposed

The recent "growth" of the Tea Party has attracted a lot of attention and interest in determining who the party represents and believes. While the media has been consumed by whether the Tea Party has a racist tinge, in reality they should be more concerned to see if there is any logic to their arguments.

On Wednesday, Judson Phillips the founder of the Tea Party Nation, was on Q&A chat on the Washington Post and the answers were, um, enlightening. Among the gems were:
  • "I have problem with democrats and liberals being in control of the government. IT's sort of like leaving a convicted sex offender alone with children."
  • "you folks on the left, as a general rule are not patriotic. You do not love this country."
  • "The clinton balanced budget came mostly after the GOP took over the house in 2004 and he could not spend all the money he wanted to." 2004?
  • "First, cut taxes to increase economic growth. That works everytime." Tell that to conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who said "You are not going to get tax cuts to pay for themselves."
  • Responding to questions asking if he would admit taxes have gone down under Obama he said "No" and in a later question said evidence that taxes HAD gone up was that Obama allowed the bush tax cuts to expire. While they may expire, they haven't yet.
  • When told by a questioner that Tea Party supporters they knew protest taxes but are willing to take support from the government he didn't believe those people existed, saying "And I know liberals who believe in the tooth fairy."
  • When asked about the rallying cry of the group (wanting their country back) all he could respond with was "And as soon as we vote out the obama/pelosi/reid axis of fiscal evil, we will get out country back"
Based on the answers one wondered if either: A.) he was unprepared, B.) the Tea Party Party has nothing to support its beliefs, or C.) the Post was punked and an impostor was answering questions to make the Tea Party look bad.

I vote for B.