Is the Republican Party sliding toward a full-on embrace of authoritarianism?

 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Across the country, Republican-dominated legislatures are trying to suppress the voting that led to the high voter turnout that fueled Democratic victories in 2020. According to the Brennan Center, which tracks voting rights, 28 states have put forward more than 100 bills to limit voting. Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, whose voters chose Biden this year after going for Trump in 2016, all have introduced plans to lower voting rates. So have other states like Texas, which have voted Republican in recent years but show signs of turning blue.

Former president Trump’s exit and ban from his favorite social media outlets has left a vacuum that younger politicians imitating Trump’s style are eager to fill by rallying people to the former president’s standard.

Notably, Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have tried to step into the former president’s media space by behaving outrageously and becoming his acolytes. Gaetz last week traveled to Wyoming to attack Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), the third most powerful Republican in the House, for her vote in support of Trump’s impeachment. Not to be outdone, yesterday Greene tweeted that she had spoken to Trump and has his support, although neither her camp nor his would comment on her statement.

Republican state parties have also thrown in their lot with the former president. In Arizona, the state party voted to censure former Senator Jeff Flake, the late Senator John McCain’s wife Cindy, and Governor Doug Ducey for criticizing the former president. In South Carolina, the state party formally censured Representative Tom Rice for voting to impeach Trump, and Republican lawmakers are starting to consider stripping Cheney of her party position, a development that led former President George W. Bush to indicate his support for her this weekend. She has already drawn a primary challenger.

The former president would like to solidify power over the party, but he has his own problems right now. The top five lawyers in his team defending him against the article of impeachment in his Senate trial all quit this weekend. Trump apparently wanted them to argue that the attack on the Capitol was justified because Democrats stole the election from him. Recognizing that this is pure fantasy which could put them in legal jeopardy, the lawyers instead wanted to argue that it is unconstitutional to try a former president on charges of impeachment.

Tonight, Trump’s office announced that David Schoen and Bruce L. Castor, Jr., will lead his defense. Schoen represented Trump advisor Roger Stone when he challenged his convictions; Castor was the district attorney who promised actor Bill Cosby he would not be prosecuted for indecent assault. The impeachment trial is scheduled to start on February 9.

But, there are also signs that some Republicans have finally had enough of their party’s march toward authoritarianism, especially as pro-Trump Republicans grab headlines for their outrageous behavior, including shutting down a mass vaccination effort at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles for about an hour yesterday.

Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a 2010 Tea Partier but now one of the ten Republicans in the House to vote in favor of impeachment, told Anthony Fisher of Business Insider that “My dad’s cousins sent me a petition — a certified letter — saying they disowned me because I’m in ‘the devil’s army’ now….”

Kinzinger announced today that he has started a political action committee (PAC) to finance a challenge to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. Calling Trump’s loyalists in the Republican caucus “political terrorists,” Kinzinger said in the video launching the PAC, “Republicans must say enough is enough. It’s time to unplug the outrage machine, reject the politics of personality, and cast aside the conspiracy theories and the rage.”

It also appears to be sinking in to Republicans that momentum is on the side of the Democrats. Biden’s executive actions have generally been popular, and his support for workers threatens to shift a key constituency from the Republicans to the Democrats.

Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus proposal offers to give to ordinary Americans, hurting badly from the coronavirus recession, the kind of government attention that has lately gone to wealthier Americans. Among other things, it calls for $1400 stimulus payments, extends unemployment benefits, provides funds for state and local governments, and establishes a higher minimum wage. While Biden has said repeatedly that he would like Republican support for this measure, the Democrats have enough votes to pass a version of it without Republican support.

This would put Republicans in the position of voting against a measure that promises to be popular, and at least ten Republican senators would prefer not to do that. Today, they offered their own $600 billion counterproposal, [insufficient as it is, it may have only been an initial bargaining offer-Esco], and asked for a meeting with President Biden to discuss it.

In their letter to the president, they hinted that they think the nation has devoted enough money to the economic crisis already, noting that there is still money unspent from the previous coronavirus packages. 

In the Washington Post, James Downie noted that the proposal cuts stimulus checks down to $1000, cuts supplemental unemployment insurance, gives no local or state aid, and kills the minimum wage increase.

When asked why Democrats should compromise rather than go ahead without them, as Republicans repeatedly did when they held the majority, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) told “Fox News Sunday” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” respectively, that Biden should honor his call for unity and that refusing to do so would kill future hopes for bipartisanship.

In an article in The Guardian today, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich dismissed Republican concerns about the national debt, noting that if they were worried about it, they could just tax the very wealthy. “The total wealth of America’s 660 billionaires has grown by… $1.1 [trillion] since the start of the pandemic, a 40% increase,” he noted. Those billionaires could fund almost all of Biden’s proposal and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic hit.

Reich suggested that “[t]he real reason Republicans want to block Biden is they fear his plans will work.” A successful government response to coronavirus, the economic crisis, inequality, the climate crisis, and poverty would devastate modern-day Republicans’ insistence that the solution to every problem is tax cuts and private enterprise. If Biden’s plans succeed, Reich wrote, Americans’ faith in government, and in our democracy, will be restored.

Tonight, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced that Biden has spoken with Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and has invited her and the other nine signers of the letter to the White House (we later learned they will meet tomorrow).

But Psaki’s statement did not give ground. It reiterated the need for fast action, and noted that “$1400 relief checks, a substantial investment in fighting COVID and schools, aid to small businesses and hurting families, and funds to keep first responders on the job (and more) – is badly needed. As leading economists have said, the danger now is not in doing too much: it is in doing too little. Americans of both parties are looking to their leaders to meet the moment.”

Biden Forges Ahead on Issues Popular with American Voters.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

The contours of politics today look much like they did yesterday. President Biden is forging ahead through executive actions—today pausing oil and gas leases while switching the government to electric vehicles— while the two factions in the Republican Party claw for supremacy.

Dead center of both of these political fights is the future of this country. The dangers of Trumpism are becoming clearer each day. Today, for the first time, the Department of Homeland Security issued a national terrorism bulletin that warned of violence from domestic extremists angry over “perceived grievances fueled by false narratives” and emboldened by the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The bulletin expires at the end of April.

Law enforcement has moved National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., in part to guard against violence on March 4, a day that QAnon supporters who still believe Trump is part of an elaborate trick to reclaim the nation from the Democrats think will be the day on which the former president is finally sworn in for his second term. (March 4 was the nation’s original inauguration date; it changed under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937.)

In testimony yesterday, the acting chief of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington told the House Appropriations Committee that at least 65 officers filed reports of injury after the January 6 attack. The chair of the Capitol Police officers’ union, Gus Papathanasiou, put the number closer to 140. "I have officers who were not issued helmets prior to the attack who have sustained brain injuries. One officer has two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs. One officer is going to lose his eye, and another was stabbed with a metal fence stake," he said. One officer died of injuries sustained on January 6. Two officers have since taken their own lives.

Meanwhile, a video emerged today of the new Republican representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, harassing David Hogg, who survived the mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018. Greene followed Hogg down the street in Washington, D.C., in March 2019, with an accomplice filming as she badgered him, called him a crisis actor paid by George Soros, told him she was armed, demanded he talk to her, and called him a coward. He walked on, without engaging her.

The video emerged the day after reporters discovered old Facebook activity on Greene’s page in which she responded positively to a commenter talking of hanging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama and another talking of killing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

While Representative Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) has called for Greene’s expulsion from Congress, leading Republicans in the House responded to the Facebook news simply by saying they condemned violent rhetoric on both sides. Today, Republican House leadership assigned her to the Education and Labor Committee.

Republican lawmakers seem to be siding with Trump’s supporters, turning against the ten House Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment. In the House, Trump supporters are trying to throw Liz Cheney (R-WY) out of her spot in the party’s leadership, and the former president’s new political action committee is ginning up anger against her as it urges primary challengers to jump into the race in 2022.

Increasingly, Republican lawmakers are pushing to let Trump off the hook on impeachment. In the Senate yesterday, Rand Paul (R-KY) insisted that a former president could not be tried on an impeachment charge, and 45 Republicans agreed with him. This is not necessarily a signal of how the eventual Senate vote will go, but Paul said it was. Republican lawmakers seem to be coming down on Trump’s side as polls show that while most Americans are horrified by the attack on the Capitol and blame Trump for it, most Republicans- 78%-- don’t blame him. 

Some Republicans are, though, alarmed at the idea that a president might get away with inciting an insurrection. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) dismissed the idea that the country could have unity without addressing the causes of the current anger. 

Also notable is the firm stance of Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who has bucked his party to speak out against the former president’s attacks on the election and incitement of the rioters.

When a reporter today asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki if the administration had any comment on Greene, Psaki made it clear the administration was not going to give any oxygen to her or those like her. “We don’t, and I am not going to speak further about her, I think, in this briefing room,” Psaki said.

While Biden is starving the Republicans of oxygen, he is also moving quickly on a range of issues that are popular among ordinary voters of both parties. Today’s executive order on addressing climate change calls for the government to buy zero-emission vehicles made in the U.S., and to rebuild federal infrastructure, creating construction, manufacturing, engineering, and skilled-trades jobs. Job creation and infrastructure development were both promises the previous president made in 2016 that boosted his support but which never really came to pass. If Biden can actually deliver on them, he could reclaim those Trump voters for the Democrats, as well as addressing climate change and our failing infrastructure.

Biden’s people are also making sure we see a White House that is addressing issues that created concern in the past administration. They are upholding old norms—holding daily press briefings, for example—honoring science, restoring government websites, and treating members of the media with respect.

They seem to be trying to remind us how our democracy is supposed to work.

A Possible Split In GOP Ranks

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

What is taking oxygen today is the war between the two factions of the Republican Party: the Trump faction and the business faction. Republican leaders embraced Trump—unwillingly—in 2016 because he promised to bring energized voters to a party whose pro-business policies were increasingly unpopular.

During his presidency, Trump delivered to business Republicans their wish list: tax cuts and appointments of right-wing judges who are generally opposed to federal government power, which will benefit the businesses who oppose regulation. Trump played to his base and did his best to politicize the U.S. government and make it loyal to him. He seemed eager to turn the government into an oligarchy overseen by him and his children. Business Republicans looked the other way, refusing to convict him in his first impeachment trial.

But when Trump botched the coronavirus response, tanking the economy and turning the U.S. into an international laughingstock, business Republicans began to slide away from the Trump administration. His increasingly unhinged behavior over the course of the past year increased their discomfort. And then, his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election sparked their alarm.

In contrast, Republicans who were hoping to pick up Trump’s supporters in future elections signed on to his challenge of the election outcome. For some of them, pushing the idea that there were questions about the election was a safe way to signal support for Trump and his supporters, knowing that argument would fail. Others, though, apparently intended to take that idea forward to attack our government.

The January 6 attack on the Capitol split the party. 

The attack implicated a number of Republicans: the president, of course, and also Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO), who was the first senator to agree to challenge the counting of the certified electoral votes for Biden, and Ted Cruz (R-TX), who jumped on board the challenge, along with about ten other senators. More than 100 Republican representatives also signed onto the challenge.

Arizona Republican representatives Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs reportedly asked Trump for pardons before he left office because of their participation in the events leading up to the attack on the Capitol. Seven Democratic senators filed a complaint with the Senate Committee on Ethics asking for an investigation of how Hawley and Cruz might have contributed to the January 6 attack. Hawley is trying to brazen it out: today he filed a counter-complaint continuing his objection to the election results and attacking the seven senators who asked for the investigation.

The actions of the insurgents spurred corporate donors to flee, refusing to donate money either to them or to the Republican Party, at least in the short term. Today, Dominion Voting Systems, the company Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other supporters accused of falsifying the election results, announced it was suing Giuliani for defamation, seeking damages of more than $1.3 billion.

In contrast, some Republicans joined Democrats to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection. Some business Republicans—like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—are furious with Trump for working against Republican Senate candidates in Georgia in his attempt to pressure party members to overturn the election results for him. Trump now has nothing to offer that they want.

The two Republican factions are struggling for control over the party. The Trump faction is organizing around the former president, who is launching broadsides at business Republicans he fears will vote to convict him in his upcoming impeachment trial. Over the weekend, he threatened to start a new political party—the Patriot Party—with the idea of backing Trump challengers to Republican politicians in upcoming Republican primaries. He took in a lot of money after the election on the promise to fight for his reelection; he may or may not have significant money to spend on new candidates. Determined to continue to pressure Republicans, today he launched an “Office of the Former President.”

His supporters—including the Republicans implicated in the January 6 insurrection—are downplaying the attack on our government and suggesting that impeaching the president or holding accountable the lawmakers who helped the attack is “cancel culture.” They are insisting that questioning the election is simply free speech. “Give the man a break… move on,” former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said in opposition to Trump’s conviction in the Senate.

With Trump blocked from most major social media channels, state Republican parties are acting on his behalf. This weekend the Arizona Republican Party voted to censure Republicans Jeff Flake, the former Senator; Cindy McCain, Senator John McCain’s widow; and current Governor Doug Ducey, who got swept up in their dislike of Trump opponents because he didn’t try to switch the state’s electoral votes to Trump. The Oregon Republican Party did them one better, suggesting that the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation by Democrats to discredit Trump. The Texas Republican Party is now openly supporting the QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Other Republicans are running away from the party as it becomes a personality cult. More than 2000 Florida Republicans switched parties after January 6, and today former Representative David Jolly of Florida, a Republican who has criticized Trump, floated the idea of running for Congress as an independent. About 7500 Republicans switched parties in Arizona. In North Carolina, 6000 Republicans switched out. An ABC News/Washington Post poll from January 10-13 discovered that almost 70% of Americans said the Republican Party should move away from Trump.

But business Republicans still need Trump voters, and the Wall Street Journal today urged them back into the fold. It will not be an easy sell: they are now wedded to Trump, not the party, and his interests are in pressuring Republican senators not to convict him in his upcoming impeachment trial and in keeping his supporters loyal to whatever he decides to do next.

‘American Carnage’ Shows How War Between Republicans Led to Their Peace With Trump

NY TIMES

Bigoted president, cowardly party. Trump's Racist Tweets About Four Democratic Congresswomen.

RICHARD COHEN, DAILY NEWS

POLITICS

House Votes to Condemn Trump’s Language as Racist

• The measure passed nearly along party lines, with only four Republicans voting with Democrats, after a bitter partisan brawl.
• It was the Democrats’ response to President Trump’s remarks that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to their countries.

John Boehner, House Speaker, Will Resign From Congress

NY TIMES

Speaker John A. Boehner, an Ohio barkeeper’s son who rode a conservative wave to one of the highest positions in government, said Friday he would relinquish his gavel and resign from Congress, undone by the very Republicans who swept him into power.

Mr. Boehner, 65, made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans on Friday morning as lawmakers struggled to avert a government shutdown next week, a possibility made less likely by his decision

His downfall again highlighted the sinewy power of a Republican Party faction whose anthem is often to oppose government action. It also made vivid the increasingly precarious nature of a job in which the will and proclivities of a politically divisive body must be managed. No House speaker since Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., who held the gavel from 1977 to 1986, has left the job willingly.

For Mr. Boehner, who has been pressured throughout his tenure to push for deeper spending cuts and more aggressive policy changes than were possible with President Obama in the White House, seemed both exhausted by the fight and yet at peace with his final move: to leave rather than face a potentially humiliating fight within his party.

Most recently, Mr. Boehner was trying to devise a solution to keep the government open through the rest of the year, but was under pressure from conservatives who told him that they would not vote for a bill that provided funding for Planned Parenthood.

Mr. Boehner’s announcement lessened the chance of a government shutdown because Republican leaders joined by Democrats will almost certainly go forward with a short-term funding measure to keep the government operating, and the speaker will no longer be deterred by those who threatened his job.



Mr. Boehner said he would leave at the end of October. The leading candidate to replace him is Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, [above] who is viewed more favorably by the House’s more conservative members both for his willingness to bend to their will and for his cheerful manner. The preferred candidate among many Republicans, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, has said he does not want the job.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader in the House, learned about Mr. Boehner’s resignation when she read a breaking news alert on a staff member’s phone. “God knows what’s next over there,” she told staff members. Ms. Pelosi, who had been privately negotiating on a plan to keep the government open, told reporters that Mr. Boehner’s resignation was “a stark indication of the disarray of House Republicans.”

With antigovernment fervor helping to prompt Mr. Boehner’s decision, several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination were quick to try to capitalize on the animus. At the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, which was taking place a few blocks from the Capitol, many jumped to their feet and cheered when Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, announced that Mr. Boehner was resigning.

Addressing reporters after his remarks at the conservative summit meeting, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas spoke harshly of Mr. Boehner.

“If it is correct that the speaker, before he resigns, has cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi to fund the Obama administration for the rest of this year, to fund Obamacare, to fund executive amnesty, to fund Planned Parenthood, to fund implementation of this Iran deal, and then presumably to land a cushy K Street job after joining with the Democrats to implement all of President Obama’s priorities, that is not the behavior one would expect from a Republican speaker of the House.”

Donald Trump Reflects Conservative Rage.

WASHINGTON POST



WASHINGTON POST

Congress Can Still Mess Up the Iran Deal

Senator Bob Corker  {Jonathan Ernst/Reuters }

MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

“Now, Congress takes up the matter” are words that are ensured to send shudders down the spine, so shudder away: We’ve just entered the congressional phase of the Iran talks, with a Senate hearing next Tuesday, after which it’s up to Mitch McConnell to decide how fast and aggressively to move with the bill from Tennessee Republican Bob Corker that would bar the administration from making any changes to U.S. sanctions against Iran for 60 days while Congress reviews and debates any Iran agreement.

There are, as the Dude said, man, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous here. It’s all quite complicated. But here, it seems to me, is your cut-to-the-chase question: Is there enough good faith in this United States Senate for something to be worked out? Or is it just impossible?

One proceeds from the assumption that the Senate will do whatever it can to kill a deal. It’s a Republican Senate, by a pretty wide margin (54-46); history would suggest that these Republicans simply aren’t going to hand President Obama a win like this. It hardly matters what the details are, about what Iran can or can’t do at Fordow, about the “snapback” provisions of the sanctions, about the inspections regime, or about what precise oversight role Congress has. It’s just basically impossible to imagine that this Republican Party, after everything we’ve seen over these last six years, and this Republican Senate majority leader, who once said it was his job to make Obama a one-term president, won’t throw up every roadblock to a deal they can conjure.



Once again, we’re left separating out the factors the way scientists reduce compounds to their constituent elements in the lab. How much of this is just Obama hatred? How much is (this is a slightly different thing) the conviction—quite insane, but firmly held—that he doesn’t have the best interests of the United States at heart? How much is a genuinely paranoid, McCarthy-ish world view about the intractably evil nature of our enemy and the definitional Chamberlainism of ever thinking otherwise?

And how much is just self-interested politics, as it is bequeathed to us in its current form? Which is to say—if you are a Republican senator, you simply cannot cast a vote that can be seen as “pro-Obama” under any circumstances. You just can’t do it.

I asked in a column last week whether there would be one Republican officeholder in Washington who might say, “Hey, upon examination of the details, this looks like a decent deal with risks that are acceptable, and I’m going to support it?” It’s still a good question.

Some suggest Corker himself. Corker has this reputation, in part earned, as one of the reasonable ones. He gets articles written about him like this one,  from The New York Times a couple of days ago, which limned him as a Republican of the old school, a sensible fellow who still wants to horse-trade.

And he is—but only up to a point, at which the horses return to their stalls. The most notable example here is the Dodd-Frank bill. This is all detailed at great and exacting length by Robert Kaiser in his excellent book about how financial reform became law, Act of Congress. Then, Corker talked for hours and hours with Chris Dodd about the particulars—derivatives reform, oversight of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, more. He wanted to play ball, even thought he might deliver some votes. But as time passed, it became clear to Corker that the base just wasn’t standing for it. He faced reelection in 2012. Not tough reelection—he won with 64 percent of the vote. But reelection campaigns are great excuses for senators to do nothing, and nothing is what Corker did. He withdrew from all participation with Dodd and Frank, and he ultimately voted against the bill.  When it mattered, he caved to the extremists, in other words, among his colleagues and in his base. Why that means he should be getting credit for a spirit of compromise now in New York Times articles is something that, to my obtuse mind, requires further explanation.

Senator Tim Kaine

Happily, though, all is not lost. It’s far from clear that [Rebooblicans] can block a deal. There are, I’m told, three categories of senators on this question. The first is our own mullahs—no deal no how. The second is a group of mostly Democrats and independents—Virginia’s Tim Kaine, who is a close ally of the White House, and Maine’s Angus King—who basically want a deal but want to be sure that it’s good, and want to influence the shape of any legislation the Senate might pass.

The third group is senators who also basically would like to see a deal but want the Senate to serve as a backstop against a deal they see as bad. I’d put Chuck Schumer in that third camp. So when these people say they back the Corker bill, as Schumer did this week, it doesn’t mean they’re against the administration or a deal per se. Democrats aren’t going to be Obama’s problem here. A few, the ones from the deep red states, may be boxed in. But most will stick with the administration, if a deal is finalized along current terms.




I don’t think our mullahs have the numbers right now. [They need a 2/3 majority to override a presidential veto. But Obama is going to have to sell this to more parties than [being interviewed by Tom Friedman and Steve Inskeep of NPR]. He has, or should have, Friedman’s readers and Inskeep’s listeners already. The way to get someone like Corker to play ball is to sell it in Knoxville. Public opinion still influences foreign policy, as Obama knows from his Syrian experiences. Put it to work.

How Can Dems Be Losing to These Idiots?

MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST


.... it just amazes me. [The Democrats] are running against a party that is as intellectually dishonest and bankrupt and just plain old willfully stupid as a political party can possibly be, and they have developed no language for communicating that to voters.
I mean it is truly admirable, in its perverse way, how anti-idea this party is. It has no economic plans. Did you see this Times article last week called “Economists See Limited Gains in G.O.P. Plan”? I trust that you understand the world of newspaper euphemism enough to know that “limited gains” basically means “jack shit.” It’s all tax cuts and fracking and the wildly overhyped (in jobs terms (PDF)) Keystone pipeline.

 Of course, there are a few actual ideas they do have, like the Ryan Budget, but those are deep-sixed at campaign time, because the Republicans know that it would indeed force seniors to pay more out-of-pocket for their Medicare—I mean, as far as Paul Ryan is concerned, that’s the point!—and they’d much sooner not have to answer such questions at election time.
So they’ve got nothing. Not on the economy. Not on immigration reform. Not on health care—ah, health care. Think back with me now. In the first half of this year, there were a lot of news stories that got pumped out through Speaker John Boehner’s office about the Republicans working on a plan to replace Obamacare. Oh, it’s coming along, he said in summer. And the media scribbled down stories: Lookout, Obama! Republicans coming with alternative proposal!


Well, try Googling it now. You won’t find a word. They have no intention of “replacing” Obamacare with anything, and they never did. It was just something they knew they had to say for a while to sound responsible in Beltway land. Oh and by the way, that celebrated House lawsuit against Obamacare—remember that one, announced back in June? It turns out they haven’t even filed it! How empty can you get? Even their smoke and mirrors is smoke and mirrors.

Getty Images

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I could go on, but you follow me. The GOP has absolutely nothing of substance to say to the American people, on any topic. The Republicans’ great triumph of this election season is their gains among women, which have happened because (mirabile dictu!) they’ve managed to make it through the campaign (so far) without any of their candidates asserting that rape is the will of God. All these extremists who may be about to win Senate seats are winning them basically by saying opponent, opponent, opponent, Obama, Obama, Obama.
And the Democrats can’t beat these guys? This should not be hard. But it is hard. Why? There’s the “who votes” question. There’s money, especially the outside dark money I wrote about last week. And there’s the GOP skill at pushing the right fear buttons. And there’s the fact that the president happens to be, well, you know.

PHOTO: Matthew Cavanaugh-Pool/Getty Images

 But the underlying reason is this: The Democrats don’t have the right words for attacking the Republicans’ core essence and putting Republican candidates on the defensive. When Republicans attack Democrats, the attacks quite often go right to the heart of Democratic essence, and philosophy. “My opponent is a big-government, big-spending, high-taxing” etc. That gets it all in there in a few short words. Every Republican says it, and the fact is that it’s typically at least sort of true, because Democrats do believe in government and spending and taxes.

As a result, in almost every American election, the Democrat is instantly put on the defensive, while the Republican is playing offense. Of course that’s going to be truer in a sixth-year election of an incumbent Democratic president. But it’s usually more true than not. The Democrat, who is for things, who wants to do things besides cut budgets and taxes, carries the burden of explaining why those things will be good.

In fairness to the Democrats, they’re a little boxed in, because they can’t respond to the above attack by saying, “Well, my opponent is a small-government, low-spending, low-taxing” etc., which wouldn’t sound like much of an attack to most people.

So what they have to do instead is find a way to talk about this policy bankruptcy and duplicity of the GOP that I describe above, the party’s essential anti-idea-ness, because it’s through that bankruptcy and duplicity that the Republican Party manages to conceal from voters its actual agenda, which is to slash regulations and taxes and let energy companies and megabanks and multinational corporations do whatever it is they wish to do. Most Americans may be for limited government and lower taxes, but they sure aren’t for that.

In my experience, Democrats seem kind of afraid to do this. Partly afraid of the Republicans, and partly afraid of the conglomerates (they seek campaign contributions from Citibank too). And maybe my suggested way isn’t the only way to do it.
But high-ranking Democrats collectively need to perform the following exercise. Sit down together in a room. Distribute index cards. Let each of them write down five adjectives they associate with the GOP, adjectives they not only believe themselves but hear from constituents. Because the crowd has wisdom that the individual does not, take those that get the most mentions and turn them into attack on the GOP’s essence that will put Republican candidates on the defensive. Maybe that’s when our campaigns will change.

[Esco fears the problem that comes after completing this exercise; when the Democrats discover the best accusations, turn them on the Rebooblicans, and find that the populace would still prefer limited government, low taxes and less regs. Esco believes Democrats would get more traction, especially in senate and presidential elections, by sticking to their bread-and-butter issues: playing the fear card; that Rebooblicans, no matter what they say, want to take you back to the turn of the century (the 19th century) by slashing and ultimately ending social security, medicare, medicaid, and if the Dems had a scrimption of courage, they would yell their support of Obamacare from the rooftops. Of course, in this country, in this year,  Democrats are, probably doomed to failure being as they are under a severe handicap as "the president happens to be, well, you know."]

OBAMA AND THE COMING ELECTION

ELIZABETH DREW, N.Y. REVIEW OF BOOKS

—August 27, 2014

The most important question in this year’s midterm elections is whether the Republicans will gain control of the Senate while retaining their majority in the House. That could make Congress still more belligerent toward the president. It would not only continue to block progress on pressing national needs but also prevent him from shoring up the progressive faction on the Supreme Court against what a possible Republican successor would do.

Also uncertain is to what extent the Democrats can reverse the enormous gains the Republicans made in 2010, when they took over both the governorships and the legislatures of twelve formerly Democratic states. They now control twenty-six states, which has had major substantive effects on national policy. For example, twenty Republican-dominated states have refused to expand Medicaid coverage to their poorest citizens or to set up their own health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.

As of now, the turnout this November is predicted to be uncommonly low, even for midterms, which traditionally attract fewer voters than do presidential elections. Midterm voters are older, whiter, and, since they include fewer and fewer veterans of the New Deal era, over time they have come to represent more conservative values than the voters in presidential contests.

Republicans have been remarkably successful in blocking bills supported by Obama, and this in turn has helped convince voters that his accomplishments are meager. Frustration with the gridlock in Washington and feelings of discouragement about the future have led to a particularly sour electorate, which also takes a dim view of the Republican Congress. (In recent polling, no more than 19 percent approved of it.) The sour mood could well affect the turnout; and a small number of voters could determine how the country is governed for the next two years.

With the president’s job approval dropping below 50%, Republicans are trying to identify his party’s candidates with him. And since for the first time his rating for likability is below 50 percent, the president now has less to fall back on. It’s often difficult for politicians of the president’s party to deflect the attacks on him. It’s even more unlikely to happen if they don’t try.

As expected, the Republicans are attacking incumbents who supported Obamacare—or they are demanding that would-be Democratic senators say whether they would support it, but the fact is that congressional Republicans have given up even pretending that they would repeal it. Though Obamacare is by now generally working, it remains deeply unpopular. Yet voters don’t list it as among their top concerns. It turns out that it’s the president’s name in the nickname for the law—Obamacare, a Republican invention that the president had no choice but to embrace—that’s highly unpopular, and even Republicans aren’t challenging the health care law’s most popular reforms. So Democratic candidates are loath to extoll Obamacare as such, and many of them are offering up the less than rousing line that it needs to be fixed but not ended.

Probably not since Richard Nixon have so many candidates shied away from being in the presence of their party’s president when he shows up in their states—though they welcome his strenuous fund-raising efforts on their behalf. It’s often said that the president should socialize more with Republicans, but they, too, don’t want to be seen in his presence and often turn down White House invitations; John Boehner has been forbidden by the House Republican caucus to negotiate with Obama on his own. Yet the public perception is that the failure of Washington to solve major problems during the past six years falls on the president as well as on those actually responsible—the Republicans. In fact, no president in history has faced such intransigence from the opposition party. It’s undeniable that the president’s race has a significant part in the destructive ways in which he is talked about and opposed.

Obama has on occasion fretted aloud that the focus in the news on the gridlock and dysfunction in Washington diverts attention from what he’s been able to achieve. When he’s long gone from the White House it could well become apparent that despite the odds Obama was responsible for notable achievements, among them Obamacare; getting gay marriage widely accepted; beginning to turn federal energy policy toward a more environmentally conscious set of policies; the Dodd-Frank bill’s restraints on Wall Street, however limited, with its rules still being argued over; and the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency championed by Elizabeth Warren.
Obama did much to pull the country out of the deep recession he inherited, including a rescue of the automobile industry, but a lot of people still don’t benefit from the improved economy, or have dropped out of the labor market, or have been forced into part-time jobs and lower wages.
No doubt it would have been beneficial if more money had been approved for rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, but the votes in Congress weren’t there, just as they weren’t for a single-payer health system, and no amount of presidential rhetoric or arm-twisting—about which there is a fair amount of mythology—would have made a difference.

It’s been evident for quite a while that a certain chilliness on Obama’s part has affected his relations with Congress, but it’s also questionable how much substantive difference this has made. A Cabinet officer said to me, “He’s a loner, and one result is that few Democrats are willing to take the hill for him.” Obama rose swiftly in politics and essentially on his own—he’d been on his own for most of his life—and political camaraderie is of little interest to him. His golfing foursomes are most often made up of junior White House staff and close nonpolitical friends from Chicago. This might not make much difference in the number of bills passed but it has had one very serious effect on his presidency: the Democrats’ unwillingness to praise, defend, much less celebrate the president has left the field clear to his multitude of attackers.

Obama tended to proceed on the theory that if he made some concessions to the Republicans—say, by speeding up deportations of undocumented immigrants—they might be more cooperative; but this hasn’t worked out. It’s true that he is innately cautious, and it’s also true that it is a lot easier to declare what he should have done than to show how he could actually have gotten the votes for that. Little is as simple in the Oval Office as it is to outside critics.

 

Obama has been beset by the same problem on foreign policy. And as a result of his own actions (or inactions), Obama is accused of often overthinking an issue until too late, of being too slow to act, of allowing events to dictate his responses. It might seem that after eight years of George W. Bush’s rash and disastrous actions, caution would be welcome.

But the Ronald Reagan–John Wayne myth of bold, simple solutions lies deep in the American psyche. It was all so much simpler during the cold war; and the country became accustomed to simpler rhetoric. When Obama acts, or declines to, his critics—be they John McCain or an editorial writer or one of a myriad of foreign or defense policy “experts” who pop up on television—can urge from their comfortable perches that he should do more. But when McCain and his pal Lindsey Graham argue that the president should use greater force in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, or wherever, they aren’t required to explain the downside risks, or what they would do next if their strategy failed.

When the president authorized air strikes against ISIS in Iraq in August, the usual Republicans inevitably said he wasn’t going far enough and some Democrats began to fret aloud that he might get too involved. Though some leading Democrats quickly drew a line at the use of American ground troops, the president is as reluctant as anyone else to use them. An official who has dealt with him on policy in the Middle East says, “Avoiding another Iraq is his guiding principle.”



The difficult situation Obama was in, politically as well as militarily, over ISIS made all the more jarring Hillary Clinton’s comment that if he had taken her advice and armed the “moderate” Syrian rebels, ISIS might not have developed. It also raised serious questions about both her political and strategic judgment.
An oddity about Mrs. Clinton’s complaint that the president allowed a vacuum in Syria in which ISIS could develop is that ISIS is an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and it first emerged there as a result of Iraq’s dysfunction; so it’s questionable whether it could have been stamped out in Syria, much less by arming “moderate” forces. Bruce Riedel, a former high-level CIA official specializing in the Middle East and North Africa, a presidential adviser, and now with the Brookings Institution, told me, “ISIS’s base and stronghold is still in Iraq—the critics are in the wrong battlefield when they claim helping in Syria would have prevented ISIS.”
Mrs. Clinton’s efforts in the face of widespread criticism to smooth things over with the president weren’t likely to cause him to forget the whole thing. He can do a slow burn with the best of them. Moreover, the Clinton camp had been trying for weeks to call attention to her disagreement with the president over Syria, among other differences with him. Obama may recall that when he was first elected president and it became known that he was considering Clinton for the nomination for secretary of state—undoubtedly on the theory of “keep ’em in the corral”—Senator Edward Kennedy warned him that he was about to make a very serious mistake that he would come to regret: that the Clintons are about themselves.

Bruce Riedel [above] reaffirms the president’s view of the risks of arming “moderates” in Syria. Riedel said in a recent Brookings forum: “If you think you can give weapons only to the good guys, forget it. The bad guys will get them.” Later, he told me, “The president has had a very clear policy toward Syria: stay out of it at any cost. His governing policy is to avoid getting tangled up in situations in the Middle East and North Africa that can turn out to be disasters.” But ISIS may force his hand to get more and more involved in Syria with air strikes and special forces and perhaps drones, as he has already done in Iraq.

 

A problem for the public is that the president occasionally sends confusing signals—doing a little of what he’d adamantly said shouldn’t be done, or feinting in the direction of more involvement without wanting to follow through. The president more than once moved toward greater involvement in Syria while at the same time seeking to make sure that it wouldn’t happen. In 2012 he drew a “red line” on the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens and then was much criticized when he didn’t follow through after Assad used them.

Unfortunately for the president, such criticism is based on a partial recollection of what happened. After Assad defied him and used chemical weapons, Obama felt pressed to respond. But rather than go ahead with bombing in Syria, with all the risks of getting further drawn into a civil war he was trying to avoid, he took the famous long walk on the White House grounds with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to whom he’s said to feel closer than anyone else he works with—other than, of course, the ever-present Valerie Jarrett—and decided to put the issue to Congress by asking its permission to bomb in Syria.
There’s little reason to doubt that he did this in the knowledge that the permission was unlikely to be forthcoming. But the outcome was more felicitous than that. Obama accepted an offer by the Russians to negotiate the removal of the chemical weapons from Syrian hands. Since the Russians are allied with the Syrian government, Obama’s threat seems to have been more credible to Assad than to his American critics.



Another example of Obama fuzzing his declared policy actually concerns supplying weapons to the Syrian rebels. On two occasions—once in 2012, under pressure from Hillary Clinton, CIA Director General David Petraeus, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to arm the rebels, and again in June of this year—the president, rather than issuing a formal statement from the White House, had the CIA e-mail halfhearted requests to Congress for relatively small amounts for arms for “moderate” rebels fighting the Assad regime.
Predictably, on both occasions, Republican and Democratic members of the intelligence and foreign relations committees were skeptical, asking such questions as: How do you know whom to give the weapons to, and how does this fit our general policy of not getting drawn into the Syrian civil war? The administration had no good answers, and as the president appeared to hope, only a small and insignificant number of weapons were sent to Syrian rebels.

As when he said “Assad must go,” Obama’s occasional resorting to unsupported rhetoric contributed to the impression of a weak and indecisive leader. The improvised nature of the president’s foreign policy is only partially of his own doing. McCain and Graham notwithstanding, there can be no one-size-fits-all foreign policy now (nor do they represent the views of even the majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill). The disparate nature of the challenges—from Putin’s adventurism to ISIS’s rise—makes it difficult for a president to enunciate a clear, single policy. As Riedel put it, “‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is as smart an organizing first principle as any.”

 

But it’s the sense of ad hoc policy-making that causes the public to wonder if the president knows what he’s doing. The former defense and foreign policy official Leslie Gelb [above] wrote recently in The Daily Beast:

Mr. Obama always says a lot of smart things…. Much more than most foreign policy blabbermouths, he is attuned to the underlying centrality of politics in most world problems, and to the need to seek diplomatic solutions…. Once there is any kind of crisis, he doles out little pieces of policy daily…. Obama may view this as making sensible decisions in a step-by-step manner. To those trying to understand what he’s doing, they simply can’t follow him, let alone understand how the pieces and the day-to-day changes mesh.

 With rare exceptions, moreover, the sixth year of a presidency is usually one that favors the opposition party. People have tired of the man in the White House. The Democratic pollster Peter Hart says that people have made up their minds about Obama and are unlikely to change them before November. Finally, by various measurements Republicans are more fired up than Democrats about voting this time. This could be the decisive factor in many-to-all of the races.
Though a few of the twenty-nine Republican governorships might change hands, Republicans will still dominate the statehouses; but the rightward trend at the state level has already been blunted, and may be more so as of this election. As of now, at least one Democratic governor, Pat Quinn of Illinois, is seen to be in serious trouble. Illinois’s crisis of overpromised and underfunded pension is the most acute in the country and the state is nearly bankrupt.

In most of the Democratic-controlled states that the Republicans took over in 2010, they adopted the agenda of the pro-business organization ALEC, which included tax cuts, reduced spending, particularly on education, and also model laws for voter ID and relaxed gun control. But John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, for example, wised up and began to move away from this essentially unpopular agenda, and so he is in a strong reelection position. Scott Walker, of Wisconsin, who has demonstrated presidential ambitions, hasn’t been quite as agile and is in a tight race, though his Democratic opponent is at a serious funding disadvantage. The two deeply conservative Republican governors in eastern states—Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and Tea Party member Paul LePage of Maine—are highly unpopular (Corbett has the distinction of being the most unpopular governor in the country) and widely expected to go down to defeat.
Rick Scott of Florida is in a close race with Charlie Crist, a Republican turned Democrat.



But probably the most interesting governorship race is in Kansas, where the incumbent Sam Brownback [above] gave full vent to his extremely conservative fiscal and social views. Kansas is now deeply in debt. Brownback also tried to purge the more moderate Republicans in his state legislature. This caused over a hundred leading Republicans to oppose him for reelection this year. If Brownback loses, this would confirm that the country simply isn’t ready to be governed by a highly conservative agenda.

But there are reasons to hold back on prognosticating what will happen in November. There’s still plenty of time for an issue to blow up and have an impact on the outcome. In 1980 the race between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter was quite close heading into the final weekend. Then, going into that weekend, it suddenly became clear that the Iranians wouldn’t release the American hostages then that they had been holding captive for over a year. This failure lit the fuse under a growing frustration with Carter, with the result that Reagan carried forty-four states. Moreover, nine incumbent Democratic senators were defeated in the undertow of the last-minute “wave.” Since the president is on the defensive over a number of issues, his party is more vulnerable to a wave of opposition votes that can still develop at any time up to election day.

One reason for the widespread view that the Republicans would likely take over the Senate is that the election map and math in 2014 favor them. The Democrats have twenty-one incumbent senators up for reelection, several in red or purple states, while the Republicans have fifteen, almost all of them in safe Republican states.



Should the Republicans take over the Senate, then Mitch McConnell, particularly loathed by Democrats for his obstructionist tactics and his wintry personality, would become majority leader. To appeal to the Republican base, McConnell recently said that were he to become majority leader he would favor more government shutdowns—a total reversal of his previous position against them for fear they would hurt his party. As of August, McConnell was facing a stiff challenge by Alison Lundergan Grimes, though he has a record of pulling out victories at the last minute, sometimes with ads that are particularly nasty. But his popularity in Kentucky has hit an all-time low. Of the six Senate seats the Republicans need to pick up in order to capture a majority, three seats held by Democrats who have chosen to retire have for some time been considered by pollsters and analysts to be lost to the Republicans: South Dakota, West Virginia, and Montana. There’s no reason to doubt them on this. In the remaining seven close races where the Democratic incumbent faces a strong challenge or there’s an open seat—Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina, Colorado, Iowa, Alaska, and Michigan—the analyses have gone back and forth on how the Democrat is doing. At times Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Udall of Colorado, and Mark Begich of Alaska have been believed to be in peril, only to be resuscitated as “doing better.”



The Democrats’ highest hopes of capturing a previously held Republican seat have been placed on Michelle Nunn, [above] the former executive director of George H.W. Bush’s Points of Light volunteer association and daughter of the popular former senator Sam Nunn. But Michelle Nunn faces another scion of Georgia’s political aristocracy, David Perdue. While the demography of Georgia has been moving toward the Democrats, the most reputable analysts now say that the state hasn’t yet changed enough for a Democrat to win it this year.

Whether or not the Republicans take control of the Senate, the ground there has already shifted to the right. While national Republican officials boast that not one of their incumbents was defeated by a Tea Party challenger—and unlike in the last two elections they had avoided nominating any goofballs (doing so had cost the party six seats)—the victories of what are called “mainstream” Republicans over Tea Party challengers haven’t been without cost to the party’s standing in the next presidential election. For one thing, some of the victories weren’t so thumping as to warrant discounting the Tea Party’s effect on the GOP. In most cases the incumbent had to move to the right in order to prevail.
The Republicans are so uncertain of victory in elections to federal offices that they’re still resorting in several states to passing laws that make voting more difficult for minorities and other groups who would ordinarily vote for the Democrats. Some of these laws are even stricter than those adopted in 2012. Democrats might appear to have issues that could drive their voters to the polls. These would include Republican efforts to deprive women of their own reproductive decisions and opposition to such measures as raising the minimum wage and making unemployment insurance last longer.
Still, largely because of the president’s unpopularity, the Democratic candidates have been having problems finding their voice. Most of their races are focused on the vulnerabilities of their opponents, making for a thus far unedifying election. The result is that a midterm election with national implications so far has no overall national theme.

Unknown at this point is the effect of the unprecedented amounts of outside money being poured into many of the races. It’s estimated that the Kentucky race alone will cost $100 million, the highest amount ever for a state contest. In addition, numerous members of the more militantly liberal Democratic wing have been holding back support of their party’s candidate because of impurities they find in the president’s or candidate’s positions. Democrats “disappointed” in Obama could help elect a Republican Senate. The odds may be stacked against the Democrats this November, but whether they can stave off a loss of control of one half of Congress is still up to them and their would-be supporters.

64% CHANCE OF REBOOBLICANS TAKING THE SENATE.

NATE SILVER, FIVE BY THIRTY EIGHT

Republicans are favored to take the Senate, at least in our view; the FiveThirtyEight forecast model gives them a 64 percent chance of doing so.

The reasons for the GOP advantage are pretty straightforward.
Midterm elections are usually poor for the president’s party, and the Senate contests this year are in states where, on average, President Obama won just 46 percent of the vote in 2012.¹ Democrats are battling a hangover effect in these states, most of which were last contested in 2008, a high-water mark for the party. On the basis of polling and the other indicators our model evaluates, Republicans are more likely than not to win the six seats they need to take over the Senate. This isn’t news, exactly; the same conditions held way back in March.
An equally important theme is the high degree of uncertainty around that outcome. A large number of states remain competitive, and Democrats could easily retain the Senate. It’s also possible that the landscape could shift further in Republicans’ direction. Our model regards a true Republican wave as possible: It gives the party almost a 25 percent chance of finishing with 54 or more Senate seats once all the votes are counted.²

Why so much uncertainty? Consider some of the challenges that election forecasters face this year:

• The quality and quantity of polling has been poor. We have stunningly few polls in some states. In Colorado, for example, which could easily determine the balance of the Senate, no polls at all were published in August. And in many states, most of the polls we do have are from non-traditional polling firms, including those that conduct “robopolls” or Internet polls, or which have an explicitly partisan affiliation.

• In contrast to 2010, when major swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin were key to the Senate picture, this year’s races take us all over the country, including to politically idiosyncratic states like Arkansas and Alaska. These states are harder to pin down: Arkansas has begun to vote strongly Republican for president, for example, but sometimes still elects Democrats to other offices. In certain other states, polls and partisanship diverge. Ordinarily in a year like this one, you’d give Democrats no chance at all in Kansas, for example. But polls show a somewhat close race there, and there’s further uncertainty because of the presence of an independent candidate.

• Readings of the national mood are ambiguous. President Obama remains unpopular — and the president’s party has a long history of performing poorly in midterm election years. However, Democrats remain roughly tied with Republicans on the generic congressional ballot. That may reflect the Republican Party’s poor image, which remains quite a bit worse than that of the Democratic Party. But it could also mean there’s some upside for Republicans. On average in midterm years since 1990, the generic ballot has favored the opposition party by 5 percentage points by Election Day instead of being even.

• We don’t yet have a good sense for the potential turnout and enthusiasm advantage. It’s reasonably safe to assume it will benefit Republicans; their (older, whiter) demographics are usually associated with higher turnout at the midterms. But we don’t have much evidence yet about the magnitude of this effect. One way of measuring the turnout edge is to compare polls that release results among both registered and likely voters in the same state. In 2010, Republicans polled a net of 6 percentage points better in the likely-voter surveys, a historic high. Compare that with a GOP advantage of about 2 percentage points on average in midterms from 1990 to 2006. This year, however, we’ve seen very few polls to release both registered and likely-voter results in the same state. That leaves us somewhat in the dark about whether 2010’s turnout pattern was a fluke.

Another complication is the broad Senate playing field. There are, according to our model, either nine or 10 races in which each party has at least a 20 percent chance of winning.³ There are several others in which each party’s chances are at least 10 percent.
The Republicans’ edge comes from an abundance of opportunity. They are almost certain to win the Democratic-held seats in Montana and West Virginia, and very likely to do so in South Dakota. That gives them three of the six seats they need. Beyond that, they have few guarantees but a lot of good prospects:

• Republicans are slightly favored, though far from certain, to oust Democratic incumbents in Louisiana and Arkansas.
• Four more Democratic-held seats — in Alaska, Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina — rate as tossups.
• While Democrats are favored in Michigan and New Hampshire, Republicans retain some chances to win those states as well.

Democrats, by contrast, have plausible chances to win only three Republican-held seats — in Georgia, Kentucky and Kansas — and they aren’t favored in any of those races.

Footnotes:

1. This calculation excludes states holding special Senate elections. ^
2. What about Republicans’ dream of a 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority? The model gives them only a 0.1 percent chance of that. ^
3. The ambiguous case is Kansas, where the odds for Democrats are 17 percent, for Republicans 79 percent, and for the independent candidate Greg Orman 3 percent. ^