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Harry Reid’s Ingenious Plan To Retake The House

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Yuri Gripas

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Yuri Gripas

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid thinks he knows how to win in 2014.

Step 1: Attack a Wichita donor most of America has never heard of; Step 2: Link said-donor to global warming hysteria ; Step 3: Lie about it so blatantly that even Washington Post bloggers call bull.

On Wednesday, Mr. Reid took to the floor of the Senate to bash libertarian donors Charles and David Koch, saying, “These billionaire oil tycoons are certainly experts at contributing to climate change, that’s what they do very well. They are one of the main causes of this — not a cause, one of the main causes.”

To back up his charge, Mr. Reid cited a UMass Amherst study: “In one year, Koch Industries released 31 million pounds of toxic air,” Reid said. “That’s more than Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, and General Electric combined.”

Who knows? Might work. We mean, Al Gore’s howls aren’t so popular with the kids these days, but voters have responded well to lies in the past.

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‘Major Hurdles’ Ex-Obama Strategist Says Dems Face Midterm Defeat

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Photo Credit: REUTERS

Photo Credit: REUTERS

Former top Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod acknowledged Saturday that Democrats face tough challenges in November, following a new Associated Press-GfK poll that shows voters increasingly appear to want Republicans over Democrats to control Congress.

“Every bit of evidence points to stronger GOP turnout in a low turnout elections this fall. Major hurdle for Ds,” Axelrod tweeted after the poll was released Saturday.

Thirty-seven percent in the poll last month chose Republicans, compared to 36 percent who said they would rather see Democrats in charge, with the November general elections seven months away.

Asked the same question in January, 39 percent favored the Democrats and 32 percent favored Republicans.

In the new poll, registered voters, who are most strongly interested in politics, favored the Republicans by 14 percentage points — 51 percent to 37 percent. In January, they were about evenly split, with 42 percent preferring Democrats and 45 percent the Republicans.

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Frightened Dem: ‘We Could Lose’ Congress To More Candidates Like Ted Cruz

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

In another sign that Democrats are worried that the 2014 midterm elections may resemble the 2010 midterms in which the Tea Party movement gave the GOP historic gains, Vice President Joe Biden sent out a fundraising email Sunday imploring Democrats to donate to prevent more conservatives like Ted Cruz from getting elected.

Biden and Cruz (R-TX) may be rivals for the presidency in 2016, and Biden’s email on behalf of the Democratic National Committee a day before the end of the fundraising quarter warned supporters, “We could lose.”

“Losing will mean more senators like Ted Cruz, and more Tea Party Republicans in the House,” he writes in the email.

Claiming that he is not engaging in hyperbole, Biden urges supporters to chip in $3 before the fundraising deadline to help Democrats because “the deadline tomorrow is among the most important.”

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Young Libertarians Aim to Be Players in 2014 Elections

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Photo Credit: US News Get ready to meet the next generation of conservative political action committees.

Super PACs like Club for Growth Action and Senate Conservatives Action might be the grown-ups dominating the headlines today, giving the GOP establishment a headache and driving Republican Party squabbles. But now, a libertarian youth group is hoping to get in the midterm election game, attract a new generation of donors and contribute to the cause.

Young Americans for Liberty’s political action committee – Liberty Action Fund – bills itself as a youth-driven, grass-roots machine ready to harness enthusiasm for former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, and leverage it into support for constitutionally focused and libertarian-minded congressional candidates. The PAC is an offshoot of Young Americans for Liberty, a libertarian youth organization with 500 chapters and more than 125,000 participants, according to the YAL website.

The PAC, which claims to be the “voice of a new generation of political donors and activists,” has lofty ambitions. But according to campaign finance reports, they’ve got a long way to go before they can catch up to the big boy super PACs. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Liberty Action Fund has raised just more than $16,000 this election cycle. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to groups like Club for Growth, which spent more than $17 million on campaigns in 2012.

“We are just getting started,” says Jeff Frazee, Young Americans for Liberty’s executive director. “Our hope is to raise between $10,000 and $50,000 per candidate.”

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Miller and Begich in Dead Heat According Facebook Modeling Used to Predict Election Outcomes

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Photo Credit: InTheCapital

Photo Credit: InTheCapital

Thanks to Facebook’s prominence (there are over 128 million active monthly users in the U.S.) it has become the perfect sample pool for researchers conducting large scale studies. Particularly the social media platform has given political strategists a fascinating glimpse on how political campaigns are being perceived in real time, as well as the ability to predict election outcomes with startling accuracy. Campaigns themselves are also starting to better understand this correlation, with 12 percent of campaign communication budgets going to social media in 2012. So what is Facebook so far telling us about the critical 2014 elections?

In a piece published by POLITICO Magazine, Ph.D. candidates Matthew MacWilliams and Edward Erickson, along with research assistant Nicole Berns, took a look at what Facebook reveals about the political changes to come in 2014. These scholars studied three major variables to make their predictions. First, the growth of a candidate’s fan base, measured by the number of “likes” over time on their page. Next they look at the growth of engagement, measured by the shares and comments on the candidates content that users share with their friends. Lastly, they divide these two factors to discover the candidate’s effectiveness in mobilizing voters, by seeing how many of those that “like” the candidate actually engage with others about it.

Based on this formula, the researchers predicted the outcome of four Senate races in 2014, taking place in North Carolina, Alaska, Kentucky and Michigan, and conclude that the Republicans will likely pick up a seat this year…

The big upset could happen in Alaska, where this Facebook model has incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Begich dead even with both of his Republican challengers, Joe Miller and Mead Treadwell.

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Dems Believe Income Inequality To Be Winning Issue In November

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Democrats aren’t wasting any time tackling an issue they are convinced will help them this election year: income inequality.

One of the Senate’s first votes upon returning to Washington from its holiday break Monday will be on a bill reviving emergency unemployment benefits that lapsed at the end of 2013.

The vote marks the first concrete step by Democrats toward a populist economic platform ahead of the November elections. The inequality campaign will intensify later in the year with a push in the Senate to raise the federal minimum wage that will be synced with President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, which is expected to dig heavily into the issue of economic disparity.

The focus on income inequality builds on the economic themes Obama successfully harnessed to beat Mitt Romney in 2012. Democrats believe they can win again by spotlighting the growing divides between the rich and poor and daring Republicans to oppose legislation aimed at benefiting low-income Americans.

“Our Republican colleagues should take note. Certainly we’re going to build on the progress we’ve made to reduce the deficit, but it is no longer the most important issue that we face,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in laying out Senate Democrats’ agenda for the coming year. “Issues like job creation, minimum wage and unemployment insurance are going to weigh on the minds of voters far more than Obamacare by the time the 2014 elections roll around.”

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Generic Vote Shaping Up to Be Like 2010 Again for GOP

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

One interesting, but not always precisely reliable, measure of partisan preference is what pollsters call the generic vote — which party’s candidates people would vote for in elections to the House of Representatives. Over the past two decades, responses have tended to underpredict Republicans’ performance in subsequent elections, though that was the case more in 1992-2002 than recently.

The last two months have seen sharp shifts in the generic vote, as National Journal’s Charlie Cook notes, with Democrats peaking during the government shutdown in the first half of October and then a sharp swing to Republicans after the spotlight shifted to the Obamacare rollout. (The Huffington Pollster provides a vivid graphic on this.)

The current RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows Republicans leading Democrats 43 percent to 41 percent (they actually put it at 43.5 percent to 41 percent, but I prefer to round off to integer percentages and always round the .5 percentages down). I went back to RealClearPolitics’ 2010 figures to see how they compared.

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Democrats Running for Re-Election Keep Distance as Obama Popularity Drops

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Photo Credit: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE, APDemocrats running for re-election in Arkansas, Louisiana and other Republican-leaning states faced enough problems before President Barack Obama’s popularity swooned in November. Now they are awkwardly distancing themselves from him a year before the election, seeking the right balance between independence and betrayal.

A popular president can help his party’s candidates for Congress and governor candidates in mid-term elections. But Democrats increasingly worry they could suffer losses, much as they did in 2010, Obama’s first mid-term elections.

In a twist few expected, Republicans are still hammering the issue that fueled their successes in 2010: the health care overhaul they call Obamacare. They are making life especially uncomfortable for Democratic senators in states Obama lost.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, facing a tough re-election bid in Louisiana, recently posed for photographers exiting Air Force One with Obama after flying from Washington to New Orleans. But she skipped the president’s public event there to attend a small-dollar fundraiser elsewhere, saying it had long been on her schedule…

In Alaska, Democratic Sen. Mark Begich has not asked Obama to campaign for him. If Obama and other federal officials should visit Alaska, said Begich campaign manager Susanne Fleek-Green, the senator wants them to travel to the North Slope “so they understand the opportunities and challenges we face with oil and gas development.”

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Health-care Law has Changed Game for Democrats Looking to Retake the House in 2014

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Photo Credit: APFew places may better explain how the bungled launch of President Obama’s health-care law has scrambled the political landscape for Democrats than this hamlet north of Philadelphia.

Democrats have been hoping to capitalize on the political fallout for the GOP from the recent government shutdown. If they can do so anywhere, it should be in the suburbs north and west of the city where three adjoining congressional districts represent a confluence of Democratic Party ambitions for the 2014 midterm elections.

The 13th District is represented by Allyson Y. Schwartz, a popular five-term Democrat who is the leading candidate for governor against a Republican incumbent widely regarded as the most vulnerable in the country.

The two other districts are held by moderate Republicans: Rep. Patrick Meehan in the 7th and Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick in the 8th. Obama won both in 2008 and lost both by less than one percentage point in 2012. If Democrats are going to get anywhere near the 18 seats they need to take control of the House in 2014, these two are must-wins, and a few weeks ago, with the GOP suffering in public opinion polls, everything seemed possible for Democrats.

The Affordable Care Act may have changed that.

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DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz: Democrats Will Win in 2014 Running on Obamacare

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Photo Credit: AP/J. Scott ApplewhiteRep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that Democratic congressional candidates would win by running on Obamacare in the 2014 midterm elections.

“I think, actually, Candy, that Democratic candidates will be able to run on ObamaCare as an advantage leading into the 2014 election,” Wasserman Schultz told host Candy Crowley.

Crowley had been asking Wasserman Schultz about the common perception that the Obamacare issue had made the Virginia governor’s race closer than expected, causing Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe to lose ground in the final days of the raise, ultimately eeking out a narrow victory over Republican Ken Cuccinelli,

“I think Obamacare, because Americans have been feeling the benefits since 2010, where young adults can stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26, where on January 1 if you have a preexisting condition, like I do, as you know, as a breast cancer survivor, the peace of mind … that those Americans are going to have knowing that they can never be dropped or denied coverage for that preexisting condition, the preventative care that’s available without a co-pay or a deductible, those are benefits that Americans have already been feeling and will increasingly feel as Obamacare is fully implemented,” said Wasserman Schultz.

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