Posts Tagged ‘
New York ’
Monday, September 12th, 2011
The Progressive Policy Institute
by The Progressive Policy Institute
Mark Ribbing, PPI’s former Director of Policy Development, was a senior speechwriter for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on September 11, 2001. Here’s how he remembers that day, over at NewGeography.com:
Up on the sidewalk I kept my eyes on the pavement, lost in my own thoughts. Finally, after a good 70 yards or so, it occurred to me that the street was different today. There were countless people out, as always, but instead of rushing around in their usual morning bustle, they were standing still. Something about this felt weird, displaced, transfixed. It momentarily reminded me of children huddled outside a school during a fire alarm.
Then I looked up. Ahead and to the right, four blocks to the southwest, the Twin Towers were burning. Keeping symmetry even now, each tower had a gash of yellow flame from which black smoke blew upward in tight veils.
City Hall was a whirl of confused, frightened activity. The mayor was not in the building. He had gone to the towers. In the frenzied buzz, reports and rumors flew. Someone said a hijacked plane had hit the State Department; someone else added that another plane had struck the Pentagon; another jet, its intentions unknown, was said to be heading for New York.
Read the rest of Mark’s account here.
Photo credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.
Tags: 9/11, New York, Rudy Giuliani, September 11
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Thursday, May 26th, 2011
Will Marshall
Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
by Will Marshall
Republicans are crying foul over Democrats’ resort to “Mediscare” tactics to win an open House seat in New York. Democrats are chortling because they think the GOP’s heretofore unstoppable austerity offensive may have met its Stalingrad.
All this is diverting to aficionados of partisan thrust-and-parry in Washington. But the rest of the country may be less amused. By adhering to unbending, absolutist positions on Medicare and taxes, could Democrats and Republicans be cracking open the door to a serious third party challenge in 2012?
On Tuesday, Democrat Kathy Hochul won a traditionally Republican House seat in upstate New York in a special election. She relentlessly linked her GOP opponent to Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan for making deep cuts in Medicare while preserving the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Many Democrats now see this as the winning formula for next year’s elections.
Ryan complained yesterday that Democrats are “shamelessly demagoguing and distorting” his plan. It was hard to feel any sympathy for the earnest House Budget Commission chairman, however, since Republicans in 2010 spent millions on ads shamelessly blasting Democratic candidates for backing the proposed Medicare cuts in Obamacare. There’s actual double hypocrisy at work here, since Ryan’s Medicare proposal works through the same health exchanges Republicans find so objectionable in Obama’s plan.
Being called a demagogue by the party of death panels and death taxes is like being called ugly by a crab.
Nonetheless, Democrats need to resist the temptation to pay back their opponents in kind. They need to retain the flexibility to slow down Medicare’s cost growth, which as Bill Clinton said yesterday at the Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit, is the sine qua non of any serious proposal to reduce federal deficits and debt.
Medicare spending is by far the biggest driver of federal spending growth. Together with Social Security, it represents nearly one-third of federal spending. According to the Social Security and Medicare Trustees, the government is slated to transfer over $3.4 trillion in general revenues to Medicare by 2020. This problem needs to be tackled now, even if it complicates Democrats’ ability to run on “Medagoguery” in 2012.
Meanwhile, “progressives” aren’t helping by running a ridiculously over-the-top ad showing a Ryan look-alike pitching a wheelchair-bound granny off a cliff. True progressives believe in solving the nation’s core dilemmas, not fetishizing the status quo. Cutting the nation’s debts down to manageable size will require both higher revenues and lower rates of entitlement spending growth.
If Democrats and Republicans can’t produce a fix along these lines, they practically invite the 2012 version of Ross Perot into the race.
Tags: Bill Clinton, Deficits and debt, Kathy Hochul, Medicare, New York, Paul Ryan, Ross Perot, Social Security, third party
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Wednesday, November 24th, 2010
Scott Andes
Scott M. Andes is a research analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
by Scott Andes
When it comes to innovation-based growth, not all states are equal. Certain states are on the front lines, and are accordingly most likely to lead the way to economic recovery. According to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the most leading New Economy states all excel at supporting a knowledge infrastructure, spurring innovation, and encouraging entrepreneurship.
The new report, The 2010 State New Economy Index, uses 26 indicators to assess states’ fundamental capacity to successfully navigate economic change. It measures the extent to which state economies are knowledge-based, globalized, entrepreneurial, IT-driven and innovation-based – in other words, the degree to which state economies’ structures and operations match the ideal structure of the New Economy. Indicators include percent of the population online, fastest growing firms, exports, industry and state R&D among others.
The top five states – Massachusetts, Washington, Maryland, New Jersey, and Connecticut —are at the forefront of the nation’s movement toward a global, innovation-based economy. Massachusetts has been the top ranked state in all iterations of the report (1999, 2002, 2007 and 2008). The Bay State boasts a concentration of software, hardware, and biotech firms supported by world-class universities such as MIT and Harvard in the Route 128 region around Boston. It survived the early 2000s downturn and was less hard hit than the nation as a whole in the last recession. And it has continued to thrive, enjoying the fourth-highest increase in per-capita income. Washington State (which ranked fourth in 2007 and second in 2008) scores high due not only to its strength in software (in no small part due to Microsoft) and aviation (Boeing), but also because Puget Sound region has emerged as entrepreneurial hotbed.
Maryland remains third (as it was in 2007 and 2008, as well), in part because of the high concentration of knowledge workers, many employed in the District of Columbia suburbs and many in federal laboratory facilities or companies related to them. These and the other top ten New Economy states (New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, California, Virginia, Colorado, and New York) have more in common than just high-tech firms. They also tend to have a high concentration of managers, professionals, and college educated residents working in “knowledge jobs” (jobs that require at least a two-year degree). With one or two exceptions, their manufacturers tend to be more geared toward global markets, both in terms of export orientation and the amount of foreign direct investment.
All the top ten states also show above-average levels of entrepreneurship, even though some, like Massachusetts and Connecticut, are not growing rapidly in employment. Most are at the forefront of the IT revolution, with a large share of their institutions and residents embracing the digital economy. In fact, the variable that is more closely correlated with a high overall ranking is jobs in IT occupations outside the IT industry itself. Most have a solid “innovation infrastructure” that fosters and supports technological innovation. Many have high levels of domestic and foreign immigration of highly mobile, highly skilled knowledge workers seeking good employment opportunities coupled with a good quality of life.
The two states whose economies have lagged most in making the transition to the New Economy are Mississippi and West Virginia. Other states with low scores include, in reverse order, Arkansas, Alabama, Wyoming, South Dakota, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Historically, the economies of many of these and other Southern and Plains states depended on natural resources or on mass production manufacturing, and relied on low labor costs rather than innovative capacity, to gain advantage. But innovative capacity (derived through universities, R&D investments, scientists and engineers, and entrepreneurial drive) is increasingly what drives competitive success.
While lower ranking states face challenges, they also can take advantage of new opportunities. The IT revolution gives companies and individuals more geographical freedom, making it easier for businesses to relocate, or start up and grow in less densely populated states farther away from existing agglomerations of industry and commerce. Moreover, notwithstanding the recent decline in housing prices, metropolitan areas in many of the top states suffer from high costs (largely due to high land and housing costs) and near gridlock on their roads. Both factors may make locating in less-congested metros, many in lower ranking states, more attractive, particularly if their metropolitan areas offer high-quality schools, high-quality and efficient government, and a robust infrastructure.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the New Economy is its relentless levels of structural economic change. The challenges facing states in a few years could well be different than the challenges today. But notwithstanding this, the keys to success in the new economy now and into the future appear clear: supporting a knowledge infrastructure (world class education and training); spurring innovation (indirectly through universities and directly by helping companies); and encouraging entrepreneurship. In the past decade a new practice of economic development focused on these three building blocks has emerged, at least at the level of best practice, if not at the level of widespread practice. The challenge for states will be to adopt and deepen these best practices and continue to generate new economy policy innovations and drive the kinds of institutional changes needed to implement them.
photo credit: Chantal Wagner
Tags: Alabama, and Connecticut, Arkansas, biotech firms, Boeing, Boston, California, college-educated, Colorado, Connecticut, DC, Delaware, digital economy, domestic immigration, downturn, economic recovery, entrepreneurship, foreign direct investment, foreign immigration, global markets, Harvard, high quality schools, high-tech firms, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Innovation, innovation capacity, innovation infrastructure, innovation-based growth, IT-driven, Kentucky, knowledge jobs, knowledge-based, Louisiana, low labor costs, managers, Maryland, Massachusetts, Microsoft, Mississippi, MIT, New Economy States, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Puget Sound, quality of life, R&D, recession, Route 128, South Dakota, state economies, structural economic change, The 2010 State New Economy Index, Virginia, Washington state, West Virginia, Wyoming
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Friday, November 5th, 2010
Will Marshall
Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
by Will Marshall
To fully appreciate the scope of the Republicans’ midterm victory – and the nature of the Democrats’ political predicament – look at the map.
In Congressional contests, Democrats flipped just three House seats across the whole, wide country, and they were in the traditionally blue bastions of Delaware, Hawaii, and New Orleans. They won two open Senate seats (in Delaware and Connecticut) but those have been held by Democrats for decades.
Republicans advanced everywhere except the West Coast, where they picked up just one House seat in Washington state. Their gains were mostly concentrated in the Midwest rustbelt and the upper South. With the exception of black belt regions of the South, Latino-dominated south Texas, a smattering of blue in Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a few Rocky Mountain districts, America’s vast interior is solidly red.
The West Coast (including Hawaii) and New York/New England (excepting New Hampshire) are the only remaining Democratic strongholds. The geography of defeat lends credence to GOP claims to represent the American heartland against bicoastal elites.
Republicans also won a passel of governorships and state legislatures across the Midwest. Democrats, in short, got slaughtered in working class America.
Republicans won working-class whites by a crushing, 63 to 34 percent margin. “They have taken the brunt of this recession, particularly the men, but Obama looked as if he was not engaged with it,” pollster Stan Greenberg told the National Journal. “Health care created a sense that he was not focused on the jobs issues and economic issues, and they were very angry.”
The Journal’s Ron Brownstein notes that, “In all, 47 House Democratic losses so far have come in districts in which the level of white college attainment lags the national average; just 16 came in districts that exceed that average. Talk about blue-collar blues.”
But in fact Democrats badly underperformed with white voters in general. College-educated whites also backed GOP candidates, by 58 to 40 percent. Where Democrats held onto their seats, they ran closer to even among college-educated white women while rolling up huge margins among minorities.
Nonetheless, the political map sends Democrats an unmistakable message: you are not connecting with ordinary working Americans. This is only in part a reflection of the current economic crisis, and the evident failure of President Obama’s policies to spur recovery. After all, blue collar whites have been alienated from Democrats for a generation. That should be a source of constant embarrassment to the party of the people.
Many liberal commentators, echoing Thomas Frank, have argued that blue collar voters’ antipathy to Democrats reflects their cultural conservatism. GOP demagoguery on “values” has blinded these voters to the reality that Democrats are on their side on economic issues. But the conspicuous absence of “God, guns, and gays” from the 2010 elections actually make them a pretty good test of this proposition. This time, there’s no question that blue collar voters rejected Democrats on economics rather than values.
All this underscores President Obama’s core challenge: crafting a credible plan for rebuilding America’s productive base. This isn’t a cyclical challenge; it’s not a matter of more public spending to boost demand. It’s a structural challenge which requires modernizing U.S. infrastructure, removing obstacles to entrepreneurship and innovation, seizing leadership in clean energy, and revamping tax and regulatory policies to promote economic growth.
Incredibly, however, some liberals are contemplating a blizzard of new federal regulations with the purported aim of putting Democrats on the side of the middle class by demonizing Wall Street banks and big business. The last thing blue collar Americans need is an economic morality play in which they are cast as victims. What they need, and what progressives owe them, is not a condescending populism, but a practical plan for economic success.
Tags: 2010 midterm election, and gays, bicoastal elites, big business, black belt, blue-collar blues, college-educated white women, condescending populism, Congressional contests, Connecticut, cultural conservatism, current economic crisis, Delaware, Demography, economic growth, economic issues, entrepreneurship, federal regulations, Geography, God, GOP demagoguery, governorships, guns, Hawaii, House seats, Innovation, Iowa, job issues, Journal, liberal commentators, Midwest rustbelt, Minnesota, modernizing U.S. infrastructure, National Journal, New England, New Hampshire, New Orleans, New York, Obama, political map, President Obama, progressives, recession, recovery, regulatory policies, revamping tax, Rocky Mountain, Ron Brownstein, seizing leadership in clean energy, Stan Greenberg, structural challenge, Texas, the upper South., Thomas Frank, Wall Street banks, Washington, West Coast, Wisconsin, working class
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Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010
Elbert Ventura
Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.
by Elbert Ventura
The smoke has cleared; only the maimed and the dead remain on the battlefield. They are, for the most part, Democrats. The job of carting them off will take weeks; the post-mortems will take even longer. And yet progressives — we with our fetish for soul-searching — should reject a new, indulgent round of autocritique, or at least recognize that there is only so much to reflect on. The electorate’s rejection of Democrats is a lot of things, but a referendum on the quality of our ideas it isn’t.
How can that be? Isn’t a rebuke of this magnitude by definition a rejection of a party’s ideas? Well, it is if the ideas were carefully inspected and considered by an informed electorate. But sobriety has been hard to come by this election season. And what we tend to forget is that, before our discourse got sucked into the Fox-powered Tea Party vortex, our ideas were actually popular across the spectrum. Far from dogmatic and divisive, the policies that progressives have pushed in recent years have been sane, sensible fixes that have drawn support from left, right, and center.
Take cap-and-trade. Only the truly delusional still think that climate change and our voracious consumption of fossil-based fuels are nothing to worry about. Cap-and-trade was an innovative solution to the problem, harnessing the market — and eschewing command-and-control regulation — to bring about a reduction in carbon emissions.
Or take health care reform. Despite cries from left and right, the Obama administration got reform generally correct, setting us on a path to cutting costs and increasing access, all while leaving a system that Americans had grown accustomed to intact.
Or infrastructure. Economists of all stripes believe that we need more stimulus to spur economic activity. Every American who uses our roads, bridges, and water supply knows that our infrastructure is crumbling. In light of those needs, President Obama pushed through billions in infrastructure spending and just recently proposed a new $50 billion infrastructure bill.
All of these are good ideas that have achieved a certain degree of consensus, or at least support from moderates. An original version of cap-and-trade was co-sponsored by John McCain and was backed by moderate Republicans in the prelapsarian days before the Tea Party’s rousing. Health-care reform: As Jonathan Cohn noted, “Obama’s plan closely mirrors three proposals that have attracted the support of Republicans who reside within the party’s mainstream” — the most prominent of whom is Mitt Romney, whose health-care legislation in Massachusetts is a fairly close sibling of the national reform passed this year. As for infrastructure, money for more spending on the nation’s backbone was supported by Republican senators like Kit Bond and George Voinovich (both retiring – no coincidence) in an earlier jobs bill vote.
In all these cases, an urgent public problem was identified, and sensible, pragmatic solutions were proposed. But we no longer have politics that can accommodate the sensible and the pragmatic. The same John McCain who co-sponsored cap-and-trade now rails against it. Romney and Republicans who supported previous iterations of the Obama health plan have nothing but calumny for reform. Meanwhile, the only news of conservatives dealing with infrastructure is when they shrink from the challenge, like Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey backing away from a proposed, and badly needed, tunnel to New York.
Over and over again, progressives have come up with solutions to our problems that can be embraced by the moderate middle. But in these last two years, we’ve seen that no matter how good and moderate the ideas are, it doesn’t seem to matter.
In this dilemma lies the priority for the pragmatic progressive in these next two years. The fact is our ideas are good. They are sound. Progressives of the Obama era have brought an innovative, reformist sensibility to government that prizes empiricism and problem-solving above all. Yet the party across the table has pulled back and shown little interest in engaging. They want us to keep coming to the table with more concessions — while hardly offering any concessions of their own. If we keep whittling down our ideas to meet their whims, our ideas will be hardly worth enacting at all.
We must, of course, never slow our indefatigable search for new ideas – it is what defines progressivism. But the paramount challenge, for these next two years at any rate, is finding a new politics. The calls for a new radical center are all well and good, but we need to remember that that’s where our ideas already are. It’s the right that has abandoned that center. The consensus ideas of yesterday have become the Marxist plots of their 2010 campaign. And sensible ideas have little chance of growing in political soil parched of sense. Will the part of the conservative movement that still cares about fiscal responsibility, fact-based argument, and good-faith dialogue resurface? Will they make their voices heard against the know-nothings and the ideologues who have taken over their party?
No doubt progressives should continue to be on the lookout for all who are sober and serious about solving our nation’s problems. Challenges must be issued and coalitions of the willing must be sought. But we shouldn’t allow the emergent faction of hysteria and irresponsibility to sway us from a core conviction: that when one already occupies the reasonable center, standing one’s ground is the reasonable thing to do.
Tags: Cap-and-tade, center, Chris Christie, Climate change, consensus, cutting costs, dogmatic, Environment, fossil-based fuels, Fox, George Voinovich, health care reform, independents, information, Infrastructure, John McCain, Jonathan Cohn, Kit Bond, know-nothings, left, Marxist plotsfiscal responsibility, Mitt Romney, moderates, New Jersey, New York, Post-Election, President Obama, progressives, radical center, right, Tea Party, Transportation
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Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
Mark Reutter
PPI Fellow Mark Reutter is the former editor of
Railroad History and author of
Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (2005, rev. ed.).
by Mark Reutter
Give Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson credit – he’s a strong believer in recycling. Last year, he loudly derided the “mirage” of high-speed rail as “the triumph of fantasy over fact.” Yesterday, he denounced the “absurdity” of fast trains as “a triumph of politically expedient fiction over logic and evidence.” OK, he’s gotten a bit wordier, but you can see that once his mind is made up, it’s fixed in stone.
The same kind of thinking comes from nearly all critics of high-speed rail who bunker at the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and other right-leaning groups – they have a curiously static view of transportation. To them, investing in future high-speed rail is an extravagant and illogical expenditure of public money because the lack of prior investment in high-speed rail has done little to change our travel patterns.
By that logic, America should never have built a transcontinental railroad. Consider that only a handful of wagon trains made it to California in 1862. Had Samuelson been writing then, he probably would have criticized President Lincoln’s proposal to spend taxpayer money on a steam railroad to San Francisco as a plan that “would subsidize a tiny group of travelers and do little else” – to borrow a phrase from yesterday’s column.
What’s missing from Samuelson’s worldview is that major advances in transportation drive economic growth. They have throughout human history. The joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads in 1869 ushered in what economic historian Walt Rostow called the “takeoff period” of American industry.
Likewise, President Dwight Eisenhower did not justify interstate highways on the basis of established transportation patterns. U.S. railroads – not roads – carried the bulk of interstate freight, military personnel, and civilians during World War II. Instead, he warned that our national security in the Cold War 1950s depended on our ability to establish fast new highways to transport supplies throughout the country.
So when Samuelson denounces high-speed rail by citing today’s Amtrak ridership levels, he’s forgetting that rail traffic is far below what it would be if our passenger trains were remotely up to world standards. When we begin opening 200-mph railroads, a new level of traffic will appear very rapidly. It’s been dormant, waiting for a chance to move.
It is impossible to predict how much dormant traffic is waiting for a truly modernized rail system. Economic models don’t tell us, and Samuelson fails to even pose the question amid his attacks on high-speed rail as government “pork barrel.”
What’s remarkable (though not surprising, if one reads Cato’s Randal O’Toole and other rail critics) is Samuelson’s utter blindness to the fact that highways and airports require massive government “pork” to build and maintain. They don’t pay for themselves through fuel or ticket taxes, as their backers like to assert.
A Texas Department of Transportation study found that a new section of highway in Houston would generate only 16 percent of its total lifecycle cost from gas taxes. Texas DOT estimated a gas tax of $2.22 per gallon – nearly six times the present state and federal tax of 38.4 cents – reflected the actual cost of building and maintaining the highway.
Constructing 800 miles of high-speed rail in California is liable to cost more than $40 billion. Constructing and operating all 13 corridors proposed by the Obama administration could easily approach $200 billion. But these dramatic headline figures need context. The current transportation act allots $300 billion to highways – not for new construction since the interstate system is completed, but just for maintenance and rebuilding.
Huge costs loom as America’s highways reach the end of their productive life. Replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York State is estimated to cost $17 billion. That figure is guaranteed to rise.
If interstate thoroughfares and vital bridges paid their way, private investors would be clamoring to commit funds to refinance them. They aren’t.
All modes of transporting people require subsidies. Amtrak’s direct subsidies of about $1.5 billion a year are transparent and highly publicized. Subsidies for cars and airlines are hidden in trust fund appropriations, user tax breaks, and local and state programs paid for by all taxpayers, including those who rarely drive and never fly.
In portraying himself as a hard-nosed realist free of the “fashionable make-believe” of rail advocates, Samuelson would do well to explain how he’d fix congestion, advance mobility, lessen pollution, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil by jettisoning an infrastructure program that directly addresses these issues.
photo credit: arbyreed
Tags: 200-mph, airlines, airports, Amtrak, California, cars, Cato Institute, Cold War, Dwight Eisenhower, fast trains, gas taxes, hard-nosed realist, Heritage Foundation, highly publicized, highways, Houston, HSR, interstate freight, Lincoln, military personnel, mobility, modernized rail system, national security, New York, Obama Administration, pollution, pork barrel, public money, Randal O'Toole, recycling, Samuelson, San Francisco, subsidies, Tappan Zee Bridge, tax breaks, taxpayers, Texas Department of Transportation, transcontinental railroad, Transportation, travel patterns, U.S. railroads, Washington Post, World War II
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Sunday, October 31st, 2010
Lindsay Mark Lewis
Lindsay Mark Lewis is Executive Director of the Progressive Policy Institute.
by Lindsay Mark Lewis
All the screaming (and some stomping) is coming to an end. Pundit upon pundit has beaten the drum of defeat for the Democratic Party. John Boehner can measure the drapes, the Tea Party’s here to stay, blah blah blah.
Don’t go sulking just yet, and you heard it here first: Democrats will hold the House. Let’s take a step back and look at the facts and races that tell the hidden story of this election.
1. Ideas Matter
To state the obvious, the Republicans haven’t offered a single concrete idea, asking voters to forget years of ill-gotten tax cuts and an ill-advised war. Do they really believe voters are ready to turn over trust to them again so quickly? They have played it safe and will take the anger vote and hope it gives them a majority. The public isn’t buying it—the Republican brand stands at just 23 percent approval
Many swing voters focus on the election over the weekend and realize that Democrats told the country what they would do two years ago and then did it—healthcare, stimulus, and financial regulation reform.
Some of these ideas might be more long-ball (e.g., healthcare) but Democrats will get more credit than you’d think for ideas and leadership. That’s why I’m betting that late-deciding voters will either break slightly to the Democrats or just stay home.
2. Campaigns matter
It might seem like every Democrat in the country is down 50 percent in the polls. The truth is that most all of these races will come down to one-to-four percent and that in the end, the actual hard work of grassroots fighting for the last vote is very much in favor of Democrats.
When I was at the DCCC in 1994, I was all too aware that Democrats lost 52 House seats by a grand total of 18,000 votes (not the overall vote but the difference in seats lost). Those votes are turned by a campaign ground game, and the Republicans don’t have a good one, thanks to the incredibly poor leadership of Michael Steele at the RNC. The DNC is pouring its all into GOTV efforts of this final stretch. When you look at the latest polls and see 10-to-12 percent undecided vote, it is most likely those voters will never show up at this point.
3. Seat by Seat
The “Pundit Consensus” is a 55-seat gain by Republicans, which would give them a 16-seat majority in the House. But if we examine those races on a case-by-case basis, the details indicate Republicans only stand to gain 35 seats, or four shy of a majority.
The top list of Democratic holds that all show up as losses currently.
Let’s start with 55 seats and work our way backwards:
New York
Three candidates on top of the ticket running 20-30 percent ahead of flawed Republican Senate candidates. Are we going to see vote splitting at the 25 percent level? That just doesn’t add up. The Republican Party in New York is in complete disarray and that will affect turnout in the closing days.
Take away at least the following pickups:
Owens -3rd party candidate getting between 5-15 percent of the vote
Murphy
Hall
Pickup now stands at 52.
Pennsylvania
Democratic well-oiled turnout machine will be prepared to do battle and hold:
Murphy
Kanjorski
Carney
Pickups now stand at 49.
New Hampshire
It’s doubtful that voters will return Charlie Bass to Congress, and marginal plus to have Paul Hodes on top of the ticket in this seat, who will bring that 1-to-2 percent extra vote out for Annie Kuster.
Pickups now stand at 48.
Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina
Marshall – he has been written off before, likely to hold with the tightening of the Governors race doing nothing but help.
Kissel won his seat by imploring serious grassroots organizing, and that still holds true for him this year. He ticked off many with his no votes on health care, but they are coming home to help him.
Nye is a strong candidate that votes his district and attracts strong crossover support.
Perriello – a strong case for getting credit for doing what’s right and standing up for your votes. Obama is coming to rally for him tonight.
Pickups now stand at 44.
Texas
Rodriguez—the demographics strongly favor a win by Ciro.
Pickups now stand at 43.
The Dakotas
Pomerory—unemployment is only at 4 percent in North Dakota, and Pomerory has a strong record of constituent service—the independent minded democrat holds on again.
Hurseth-Sandlin has voted her state and is running against a republican with flaws.
Pickups now stand at 41.
Idaho
Minnick – the Democrat-endorsed by the Tea Party, voted his district…he will hold on.
Pickups now stand at 40.
Illinois
Phil Hare, conservative district that continues to vote 55-60 percent for the democrat candidate for the House, spending is even and outside groups are almost spending more to badger the Republican.
Pickups now stand at 39.
Nevada
Dina Titus, another Dem who will get credit for standing up for her votes and showing leadership—and she does not have the negatives of Harry Reid. In the end she will hold this swing seat.
Pickups now stand at 38.
Colorado
John Salazar is strong candidate against weak Republican who received 37 percent of the vote last time he ran.
Pickups now stand at 37.
Those are the seats that the Democrats won’t lose. Now for the few they’ll actually flip:
Minnesota
Michele Bachman—she has the money and the media attention, but her actions and personality don’t fit the Midwest common sense approach of Minnesota…first upset of the night. Tarryl Clark with the big upset.
Pickups now stand at 36.
Florida
Joe Garcia has run a strong campaign against a very weak flawed-almost off the ballot- republican. Second somewhat surprise of Tuesday.
Pickups now stand at 35.
I could include other possible upsets (WA-8, CA, FL etc)
From leading on ideas, being prepared for the fight and the other side not offering any new ideas, lacking a true grassroots campaign and the voter being a lot smarter then pundits and the chatting inside the beltway give them credit for, the Democrats hold the House with a five-to-nine seat majority. You heard it here first.
Tags: 3rd party, Annie Kuster, campaign ground game, Campaigns and elections, Carney, Charlie Bass, Ciro, Colorado, Dakota, DCCC, Democratic Party, Democrats, Dina Titus, DNC, financial regulation reform., Florida, Georgia, GOTV, Hall, Harry Reid, Healthcare, Hurseth-Sandlin, Idaho, Illinois, Joe Garcia, John Boehner, John Salazar, Kanjorski, Kissel, last vote, leadership, Michael Steele, Michele Bachman, Mid-Term Elections, Midwest, Minnesota, Minnick, Murphy, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nye, Obama, Owens, Paul Hodes, Pennsylvania, Perriello, Phil Hare, Pomerory, Pundit Consensus, Republican Senate, republicans, RNC, Rodriguez, stimulus, swing voters, Tarryl Clark, tax cuts, Tea Party, Texas, Virginia
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Friday, October 29th, 2010
Mark Reutter
PPI Fellow Mark Reutter is the former editor of
Railroad History and author of
Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (2005, rev. ed.).
by Mark Reutter
Hats off to the Obama administration. The $2.4 billion in high-speed-rail grants announced yesterday by the U.S. Department of Transportation not only helps fix deficiencies in the original round of rail awards back in January, but shows welcome political moxie.
By allocating the bulk of its FY 2010 investment to California and Florida, the administration has thrown its support behind true “bullet train” service, or trains running on dedicated rights of way at more than 150 mph. It now appears possible that high-speed segments could be open in California’s Central Valley and between Tampa and Orlando, Fla., by 2016.
That’s a big change from the first round of grants last January, which we argued was flawed by a scattershot approach of approving projects that only marginally increased passenger train speeds on upgraded freight track. What was needed, we believed, was funding focused on “do-able” 150-mph-plus links that would serve as templates for an emerging state-of-the-art passenger train initiative.
For the most part, the administration has done just that. To be sure, it has not come up with a way to finance HSR over the long haul and it still faces multiple challenges in Congress, especially if Republicans take over one or both chambers. But what’s striking about yesterday’s awards is the administration’s firmer grasp of how to get HSR segments up and running in the face of local obstacles.
Consider California, which received the biggest grant yesterday, $902 million. The DOT award requires the state to primarily focus on rail development in the Central Valley between Merced and Bakersfield, where land acquisition costs are low and trains could reach their full speed, rather than build costly urban segments through greater Los Angeles and between San Francisco and San Jose that have stoked Nimby opposition.
That’s a shrewd way to get a workable segment built and in revenue service to make the case that HSR is an attractive choice of transportation for Californians. Kicking off construction in the Central Valley also gives a political boost to Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif.), a strong HSR backer who is in a tough race with Andy Vidak, a Republican with Tea Party backing.
Likewise, the administration took a decisive step toward fully funding the Tampa-Orlando HSR line (which we’ve repeatedly supported) by awarding $800 million to the project yesterday. Florida now has $2.05 billion in the kitty to complete the $2.6 billion project, including the $1.25 billion it received in January.
The new grant has already softened criticism by Republican gubernatorial hopeful Rick Scott. In the last few days Scott has dialed down his rhetoric against the rail line as an example of federal overreach. With groundbreaking scheduled for early 2011 and the Obama administration hinting at more money from discretionary funds, it appears unlikely that Scott would sacrifice thousands of construction jobs by scrapping the project outright. The Democratic candidate, Alex Sink, is a strong supporter.
Two other projects awarded grants yesterday, while not strictly high speed, will improve rail service in critical corridors. DOT gave Connecticut $121 million to help double track the Amtrak line between New Haven and Springfield, Mass., and upgrade service to 110 mph.
As part of the agreement, Connecticut agreed to release $260 million in state funds to rebuild other infrastructure, which will eventually increase train service from six daily roundtrips to 25 or more. This would make the Springfield segment an integral part of the Northeast Corridor and eventual route of a proposed “inland” corridor between New York and Boston.
A flaw of past federal policy was its failure to flag rail lines abandoned by freight carriers as potential passenger routes. As a result, thousands of miles of secondary lines between major cities, considered duplicative by freight railroads, were torn up between 1970 and today.
A similar fate now threatens 135 miles of rail line between Kalamazoo and Dearborn, Mich., owned by Norfolk Southern (NS). The track, used for Amtrak’s Chicago-Detroit trains, was downgraded this summer, a preliminary step toward a petition for abandonment by NS.
Yesterday, DOT stepped in with a $150 million grant to fund Michigan’s purchase of the line. Since Amtrak already owns 97 miles adjacent to this section, the proposed purchase would result in public ownership of nearly 80 percent of the Chicago-Detroit corridor, laying the foundation for a high-speed passenger route.
Yesterday’s awards include the remaining funds in the $8 billion stimulus package as well as money allocated for FY 2010 by the Democratic Congress. Funding for HSR has yet to be agreed upon by Congress for FY 2011. Outside of discretionary funds within DOT, yesterday’s announcement represents the last definite federal distribution for high-speed rail.
For a full list of DOT grants, see http://www.fra.dot.gov/rpd/passenger/2243.shtml
Tags: 110 mph, 150 mph, Alex Sink, Amtrak, Andy Vidak, Bakersfield, Boston, bullet train, California, California’s Central Valley, Chicago-Detroit, Connecticut, Dearborn, DOT, federal policy, Florida, freight track, FY, high-speed rail, HSR, Jim Costa, Kalamazoo, Los Angeles, Merced, Michigan, New Haven, New York, Nimby, Norfolk Southern, Obama, Obama Administration, Orlando, Rick Scott, San Francisco, San Jose, Springfield, Tampa, Tampa-Orlando, Tea Party, Transportation, U.S. Department of Transportation
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Friday, October 22nd, 2010
Ed Kilgore
Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.
by Ed Kilgore
The title of this piece might seem a bit counterintuitive given the presumed certainty of Republican gains on November 2, but within that context, there really is a surprising amount of uncertainty about which party is likely to get the late breaks in this cycle.
On the one hand, state polling is showing some good signs for Democrats in Senate and some gubernatorial races. Two left-for-dead candidates, Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, have rebounded into highly competitive positions, according to some polls. Joe Manchin of WV seems to have recovered from a near-fatal swoon. Poll numbers for Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut have stabilized, as they have (at a lower level) for Patty Murray of Washington and Barbara Boxer of California. At least one poll shows Robin Carnahan of Missouri with a mini-surge, and Michael Bennet of Colorado seems to have drawn even with Ken Buck. The brief period of hysteria about a possible Tea Party takeover of New York politics has ended in derision. And at the moment, Democrats are optimistic about winning at least one southern governorship, in Florida, and believe they have an outside shot in Georgia and (surprise, surprise) South Carolina as well (polls are showing Nikki Haley losing support and making the race competitive).
But at the same time, certain meta-indicators are ominous for Democrats. Gallup’s last two generic congressional ballot tracking polls have shown Republicans with double-digit leads among likely voters, an unprecedented phenomenon. Worse yet, in a low-turnout scenario, Gallup has Republicans up by 17 percent, which if accurate would produce House gains well above what most analysts have been talking about. And Gallup’s not alone: another highly respected research firm, Pew, put out its own generic ballot poll this week giving Republicans a ten-point advantage among likely voters.
So how can we explain the macro-micro disconnect in polling at this moment? It’s possible that Gallup and Pew just have it wrong (Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has charged Gallup with making crucial errors), and that other generic polls will soon demonstrate that those results are outliers. Another common theory is that statewide races operate according to different dynamics than overall partisan preferences, and that while Republicans may make big House gains, that doesn’t necessarily translate into victory in close statewide races.
At RealClearPolitics today, Sean Trende suggests it’s the state polls that may be off, thanks to inadequate likely voter screens that are modeling the electorate’s partisan composition too favorably to Democrats. Using a partisan composition model based on the two 2009 gubernatorial contests, Trende hypothesizes that Republicans statewide candidates may on average perform better than their polling by a 3-4 percent margin, which would, of course, throw many close races to the GOP.
Complicating all this analysis of public opinion research, of course, is the fact that the two parties’ ground games are just now really kicking in, which could change turnout patterns, along with the phenomenon of very heavy early voting. On this latter front, the preliminary data indicates that Democrats seem to be doing a relatively good job of early voting mobilization, but don’t have the sort of advantage they enjoyed in 2008, and may not have an advantage at all in certain key states (e.g., Colorado, Nevada and Florida).
Then you get into some really hazy phenomena that may affect particular races. The most discussed is California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize small-scale cultivation and use of marijuana. There is a persistent belief among California Democrats that Prop 19 will turn out younger voters (and perhaps African-Americans and Latinos) at higher levels than in other states, giving Democrats a crucial boost in close contests.
But overall, the varying indicators of late trends (unless unanimity suddenly emerges between now and November 2) are providing some real mystery and drama in this bitter cycle, and plenty of questions to mull over in the post-election rumination period that will ensue.
Photo credit: bjornmeansbear
Tags: 2010 midterm election, African-Americans, Alan Abramowitz, Barbara Boxer, California, California’s Proposition 19, Colorado, Connecticut, Democrats, electorate’s partisan, Emory University, Florida, Gallup, Georgia, GOP, Gubernatorial races, heavy early voting, Joe Manchin, Ken Buck, Latinos, left-for-dead, macro-micro disconnect, marijuana, Michael Bennet, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Nikki Haley, November 2, oe Sestak, partisan preferences, Patty Murray, Pennsylvania, Pew, Public opinion, RealClearPolitics, Republican gains, Richard Blumenthal, Robin Carnahan, Russ Feingold, Sean Trende, Senate, South Carolina, southern governorship, state polls, Tea Party, voting mobilization, Washington, Weatherman, Wisconsin, WV
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Thursday, October 7th, 2010
Mark Reutter
PPI Fellow Mark Reutter is the former editor of
Railroad History and author of
Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (2005, rev. ed.).
by Mark Reutter
America’s transportation infrastructure is enfeebled, Washington’s transportation policy is broken, and we need to start building fast trains.
While that might be old news to readers of Progressive Fix, what is news is who’s saying it this week: Samuel Skinner, Secretary of Transportation under George H.W. Bush, and Norman Mineta, DOT Secretary under George W. Bush, were co-chairs of a conference at the University of Virginia behind a new report making this case. Mary E. Peters, Mineta’s successor under Bush, and a smattering of ex-DOT undersecretaries filled out the roster of 80 transportation experts.
Describing government spending on transportation as woefully underfunded, the report estimated that between $134 billion and $267 billion more is needed each year from now to 2035 to make U.S. roads, rail, and air transportation competitive with other countries.
The report lamented the “pork and political opportunism” in the current transportation reauthorization act, SAFETEA-LU, and advocated the setting up of core national priorities for transportation such as high-speed rail networks.
“High-speed rail has the potential to provide a fast, efficient and integrated alternative to driving and flying,” the report said. The best approach for genuine high-speed rail would be rights of way separate from existing freight lines – a policy strongly advocated by PPI (see here and here).
A major increase in the federal gas tax, which has remained unchanged at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, would help pay the bill for getting America’s transportation systems back to state-of-the-art standards.
Derailing High-Speed Rail
The group’s “call for action” comes at a time when Republican leaders have steered the GOP in a completely different direction. Extending the Bush tax cut has become their top national priority. The White House’s plan last month for $50 billion in infrastructure spending on highways and rail was met with open contempt by House Republican Leader John Boehner.
Several state races are shaping up as tests of whether President Obama’s higher-speed rail initiative can survive Republican hostility. In Wisconsin and Ohio, Republican candidates for governor have called federal stimulus money awarded for train improvements a major waste of taxpayer funds.
Scott Walker, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, has launched a website called notrain.com. He’s ahead in the polls, as is John Kasich, the former House Republican who vows to kill a $400 million federal stimulus project to link Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati by rail if elected the next governor of Ohio.
The anti-rail contagion has spread to New Jersey, where Republican Gov. Chris Christie is threatening to scuttle a train tunnel to Manhattan – and forfeit $6 billion in pledged funds from the federal government and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey – citing concerns of large cost overruns.
Christie yesterday postponed his announcement of whether he will back out of the agreement to build the tunnel – which would create 6,000 long-term construction jobs – in part so that he could campaign for other Republicans in the Midwest.
In California and Florida, where full-scale high-speed train networks have been awarded federal stimulus grants, GOP candidates are suggesting that they would delay or disrupt the projects.
Meg Whitman, running as the Republican candidate in California, says the state cannot afford “at this time” the costs associated with new high-speed rail. Rick Scott, Republican candidate for governor in Florida, has jumped on the same bandwagon, questioning whether the state can afford a rail line between Orlando and Tampa that has been awarded $1.25 billion in federal stimulus money.
Ironically, the current governors of California and Florida, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlie Crist, gained office as Republicans and have been big rail supporters. “To say ‘now is not the time’ shows a very narrow vision,” Schwarzenegger’s communications chief told the New York Times in response to Whitman’s tepid support for California’s rail investment.
The Eisenhower Model
“We’re going to have bridges collapse. We’re going to have earthquakes. We need somebody to grab the issue and run with it,” Mineta told reporters on Monday.
His earnest tone, delivered at the Rayburn House Office Building, was at odds with the anti-tax, anti-government vitriol coming from those of the same political stripe occupying nearby offices.
Advocates of infrastructure spending must offer specific data and concrete examples of the damage that continued underfunding of transportation projects could inflict on America’s standard of living and economic security. A starting point would be America’s dangerous overdependence on gasoline coming from unstable or hostile foreign countries. Add to this the lost productivity for U.S. drivers stuck in traffic jams, which the Mineta-Skinner report estimated at $87 billion in 2007, or $750 for every driver.
And consider that our population is expected to grow by 90 million in the next 40 years. These citizens will need to move, and high-speed rail is cheaper to build and causes much less environmental damage than new highways and airports.
A role model for such educational outreach is Dwight Eisenhower. The Republican president launched the Interstate Highway System by articulating a vision of top-quality roads benefiting all citizens and secured bipartisan support in Congress. It was part of his crusade to win the Cold War.
There’s a new battle out there – in the form of competition from emerging economic powerhouses like China, which plans to spend over $1 trillion in the next 10 years on a comprehensive 220-mph train system. While China builds its future, many of our politicians welcome gridlock as a way to wrest short-term partisan gains.
Photo credit: aussiegal
Tags: 220-mph train system, air transportation, America’s standard of living, anti-government, anti-rail, anti-tax, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bush tax cut, California, call for action, Charlie Crist, China, Chris Christie, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Cold War, Columbus, DOT Secretary, earthquakes, economic security, Eisenhower Model, environmental damage, fast trains, federal gas tax, federal stimulus, Florida, freight lines, gasoline, George H.W. Bush, GOP, government spending, high-speed rail, high-speed rail networks, highways, House Republican, HSR, Infrastructure, infrastructure spending, Interstate Highway System, John Boehner, John Kasich, Mary E. Peters, Meg Whitman, Midwest, Mineta-Skinner, national priority, New Jersey, New York, New York Times, Norman Mineta, notrain.com, Ohio, Orlando, political opportunism, Port Authority, PPI, Progressive Fix, rail, Rayburn House Office Building, Republican leaders, Rick Scott, SAFETEA-LU, Samuel Skinner, Scott Walker, Secretary of Transportation, short-term, state races, Tampa, traffic jams, train tunnel to Manhattan, Transportation, U.S. drivers, U.S. roads, underfunded, University of Virginia, Washington’s transportation policy, White House, Wisconsin
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Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
Will Marshall
Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
by Will Marshall
Among the many midterm imponderables is this: will the Tea Party have as big an impact on the election as it’s had on the chattering class?
The media obsession with the Tea Party has made it the big political story of the year. Fox News helped to midwife and validate it, and liberal commentators seem equally fixated on the phenomena, which they view with a mixture of dread and envy. They are forever dreaming of populist uprisings, and when it actually happens, it’s on the wrong end of the ideological spectrum!
But is the Tea Party really a new and genuinely independent expression of conservative populism, or is it something more familiar – the right wing of the Republican Party? A study released yesterday sheds some interesting light on the question.
It’s called Religion and the Tea Party in the 2010 Election, by Robert Jones and Daniel Cox of the Public Religion Research Institute. The study confirms much of what is already known about the Tea Party – its members are generally white, older, more affluent and more male than the population at large. They are very conservative, and as we all know, they have a gimlet-eyed view of government.
But the report also purports to correct some common misconceptions about the movement. Some key findings:
- One in 11 voters describe themselves as a Tea Party member. That’s a lot, but hardly an irresistible force in America politics. As Jones and Cox note, it’s only half the percentage of voters who identify themselves as Christian conservatives.
- Despite Dick Armey’s opportunistic attempts to get to the head of the Tea Party parade, the movement is more socially conservative than libertarian, at least on social issues. Its members, for example, are strongly opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
- Nearly half (47 percent) say they are also part of the religious right, a key GOP constituency that supposedly has gone to ground in recent years.
- Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly partisan Republicans. Most (76) say they lean Republican and over 80 percent say they plan to vote for GOP candidates in their districts.
This last point is offered as upending conventional wisdom, but it shouldn’t be. Many commentators, including PPI’s own Ed Kilgore, have pointed to the basic compatibility of Tea Party attitudes with those of hard-core GOP conservatives. In backing challenges to GOP moderates, in fact, the Tea Party looks like a looking glass version of the “netroots” progressives who backed Howard Dean in 2004 and Ned Lamont’s primary challenge to Sen. Joe Lieberman.
There are some distinctly new flavors in the Tea Party brew, of course. One is an antic Constitutional fundamentalism that yearns to roll back amendments providing for the direct election of Senators and the progressive income tax. And the Tea Party’s decentralized, headless nature means its members really don’t take orders from the GOP hierarchy.
But in general, Tea Partiers look like GOP conservatives, only more so. Not surprisingly, they are disproportionally from the South, the GOP’s geographical and ideological bastion.
So maybe progressives shouldn’t worry too much about the movement. Ultimately, the Tea Party is a Republican, not Democratic, problem. Yes, its members are energized to vote and will turn out in droves in November. But they are also divisive, polarizing and, often, downright weird (Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell) or borderline psychotic (New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino).
If Democrats do as badly as everyone seems to expect in the midterm, it won’t be because of the Tea Party. It will be because independent voters, who put Barak Obama solidly over the top in 2008, have defected to Republican candidates to protest joblessness and the sluggish recovery. Meanwhile, Tea Party passions are pushing Republicans to the nether fringe of conservativism, leaving an abandoned center for progressives to recapture after the election.
Photo credit: bvcphoto
Tags: 2010 midterm election, abortion, Barak Obama, borderline psychotic, Campaigns and elections, Carl Paladino, Christian conservatives, Christine O’Donnell, conservative populism, Constitutional fundamentalism, Daniel Cox, Delaware, Democrats, Dick Armey, divisive, downright weird, Ed Kilgore, Fox News, gay marriage, GOP, GOP moderates, Howard Dean, independent voters, joblessness, Joe Lieberman, lean Republican, libertarian, midterm, Ned Lamont, New York, polarizing, populist, PPI, Progressive Political Institute, Public Religion Research Institute, religion, Religion and the Tea Party in the 2010 Election, religious right, Republican Party, Robert Jones, sluggish recovery, social issues, Tea Partiers, Tea Party
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Tuesday, October 5th, 2010
Ed Kilgore
Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.
by Ed Kilgore
As spin wars continue over polling assessments of the two parties´ prospects nationally and in individual contests, the overall situation remains relatively stable, with a lot of the fireworks in the national news coming from California, where a controversy regarding Meg Whitman´s employment of an illegal immigrant is not exactly helping her gubernatorial campaign.
The most ominous news for Democrats came yesterday, when Gallup’s weekly tracking poll offered a likely voter sample for the first time this year. It showed Republicans with a 13 percent margin among likely voters, much larger than the three percent margin among registered voters.
At 538.com, Nate Silver offers a useful analysis Likely Voter/Registered Voter numbers from all pollsters, showing the Gallup “gap” to be unusually high. But it bears close watching, since likely voter estimates tend to become more accurate the closer you get to election day.
Our regional roundups continue today with the Northeast, the most pro-Democratic region in 2008, and a source of considerable residual Democratic strength today. According to Gallup´s tracking polls, the northeast region gives President Obama his only majority job approval numbers, currently at 51 percent.
There are eight Senate seats currently at stake in the Northeast, seven currently held by Democrats. Two of them—held by Vermont´s Pat Leahy and New York´s Chuck Schumer—are completely safe. Among the other five Democratic seats, Democrats have a robust if not invulnerable lead in three (Gillibrand of New York, Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Coons of Delaware); Republicans have held a steady lead in one (Toomey over Sestak in Pennsylvania); and one is dead even (Manchin versus Raese in West Virginia). Republicans have a strong but not insurmountable lead to hold on to the one (open) Republican seat, in New Hampshire, where Kelly Ayotte leads Paul Hodes.
The best-case scenario for Republicans, which would include Linda McMahon`s dollars making Connecticut truly competitive, is a gain of three seats. Democrats would be happy with a net loss of one.
In the gubernatorial races, Democrats currently hold six governorships that are up this year (Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland) and Republicans three (Vermont, Rhode Island and Connecticut). According to the Cook Political Report, all but two of these nine gubernatorial races are currently tossups, with Democrats heavily favored to hold onto New York and Pennsylvania being rated “lean Republican.” Polling shows Republicans leading in Maine as well as Pennsylvania, and Democrats leading in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland; Vermont appears to be very close. The range of possible outcomes is very broad, but in gubernatorial races, the northeast appears to rival the West as the most promising Democratic region, in no small part because Dems are likely to pick up some Republican seats.
In House races, New York and Pennsylvania seats make the northeast a potential source of major Republican gains. Two New York and four Pennsylvania Democrats are in races considered toss-ups by Cook; four more New York districts and another in Pennsylvania are rated “lean Democratic,” vulnerable to a last-minute pro-GOP wave. Both New Hampshire seats, now held by Democrats, are also tossups, along with an open seat in West Virginia and Frank Kratovil`s seat in Maryland. The region does include a rare probable Democratic House pickup, in Delaware. In general, the Northeast is the region where the size and scope of Republican House gains will most be determined.
Photo credit: Peter Miller
Tags: 538.com, Blumenthal, California, Campaigns and elections, chuck schumer, Connecticut, Cook Political Report, Coons, Delaware, Frank Kratovil, Gallup, Gillibrand, governorships, illegal immigrant, Kelly Ayotte, lean Democratic, lean Republican, linda McMahon, Maine, Manchin, Maryland, Massachusetts, Meg Whitman, Nate Silver, New Hampshire, New York, Northeast, Pat Leahy, Paul Hodes, Pennsylvania, Politics and politicians, pro-Democratic, Raese, Rhode Island, Toomey, tossups, Vermont, West Virginia
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Mark Ribbing, PPI’s former Director of Policy Development, was a senior speechwriter for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on September 11, 2001. Here’s how he remembers that day, over at NewGeography.com:
The Geography – and Demography – of Defeat
Friday, November 5th, 2010Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
In Congressional contests, Democrats flipped just three House seats across the whole, wide country, and they were in the traditionally blue bastions of Delaware, Hawaii, and New Orleans. They won two open Senate seats (in Delaware and Connecticut) but those have been held by Democrats for decades.
Republicans advanced everywhere except the West Coast, where they picked up just one House seat in Washington state. Their gains were mostly concentrated in the Midwest rustbelt and the upper South. With the exception of black belt regions of the South, Latino-dominated south Texas, a smattering of blue in Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a few Rocky Mountain districts, America’s vast interior is solidly red.
The West Coast (including Hawaii) and New York/New England (excepting New Hampshire) are the only remaining Democratic strongholds. The geography of defeat lends credence to GOP claims to represent the American heartland against bicoastal elites.
Republicans also won a passel of governorships and state legislatures across the Midwest. Democrats, in short, got slaughtered in working class America.
Republicans won working-class whites by a crushing, 63 to 34 percent margin. “They have taken the brunt of this recession, particularly the men, but Obama looked as if he was not engaged with it,” pollster Stan Greenberg told the National Journal. “Health care created a sense that he was not focused on the jobs issues and economic issues, and they were very angry.”
The Journal’s Ron Brownstein notes that, “In all, 47 House Democratic losses so far have come in districts in which the level of white college attainment lags the national average; just 16 came in districts that exceed that average. Talk about blue-collar blues.”
But in fact Democrats badly underperformed with white voters in general. College-educated whites also backed GOP candidates, by 58 to 40 percent. Where Democrats held onto their seats, they ran closer to even among college-educated white women while rolling up huge margins among minorities.
Nonetheless, the political map sends Democrats an unmistakable message: you are not connecting with ordinary working Americans. This is only in part a reflection of the current economic crisis, and the evident failure of President Obama’s policies to spur recovery. After all, blue collar whites have been alienated from Democrats for a generation. That should be a source of constant embarrassment to the party of the people.
Many liberal commentators, echoing Thomas Frank, have argued that blue collar voters’ antipathy to Democrats reflects their cultural conservatism. GOP demagoguery on “values” has blinded these voters to the reality that Democrats are on their side on economic issues. But the conspicuous absence of “God, guns, and gays” from the 2010 elections actually make them a pretty good test of this proposition. This time, there’s no question that blue collar voters rejected Democrats on economics rather than values.
All this underscores President Obama’s core challenge: crafting a credible plan for rebuilding America’s productive base. This isn’t a cyclical challenge; it’s not a matter of more public spending to boost demand. It’s a structural challenge which requires modernizing U.S. infrastructure, removing obstacles to entrepreneurship and innovation, seizing leadership in clean energy, and revamping tax and regulatory policies to promote economic growth.
Incredibly, however, some liberals are contemplating a blizzard of new federal regulations with the purported aim of putting Democrats on the side of the middle class by demonizing Wall Street banks and big business. The last thing blue collar Americans need is an economic morality play in which they are cast as victims. What they need, and what progressives owe them, is not a condescending populism, but a practical plan for economic success.
Tags: 2010 midterm election, and gays, bicoastal elites, big business, black belt, blue-collar blues, college-educated white women, condescending populism, Congressional contests, Connecticut, cultural conservatism, current economic crisis, Delaware, Demography, economic growth, economic issues, entrepreneurship, federal regulations, Geography, God, GOP demagoguery, governorships, guns, Hawaii, House seats, Innovation, Iowa, job issues, Journal, liberal commentators, Midwest rustbelt, Minnesota, modernizing U.S. infrastructure, National Journal, New England, New Hampshire, New Orleans, New York, Obama, political map, President Obama, progressives, recession, recovery, regulatory policies, revamping tax, Rocky Mountain, Ron Brownstein, seizing leadership in clean energy, Stan Greenberg, structural challenge, Texas, the upper South., Thomas Frank, Wall Street banks, Washington, West Coast, Wisconsin, working class
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