Is there a ‘Blue wave’?

Is a ‘Blue wave’ really coming?

Image result for blue wave 2018

I’m not so sure. Or to put it better, I cannot see it from here, in the blue state of Maryland.

I’ll come back to the question next week. For now, here are some numbers on early voting, from TargetSmart, sent via Politico’s “Morning Score” emessage.

Early voting so far has been hefty but not out-of-sight (unlike the $$$ donations). (More on those next week.) Here are the top ten states, by vote totals reported or estimated of early voters and absentee voters so far:

  1. Florida – modeled GOP   (1,168,600)             [now 1,448,251]
  2. California – modeled Dem      (786,096)
  3. Georgia – modeled GOP         (742,017)
  4. North Carolina – modeled Dem     (709,603)
  5. Texas – modeled GOP            (678,680)         [now 1,187,007]
  6. Tennessee – modeled heavily GOP     (521,918)
  7. Michigan – modeled GOP       (428,692)
  8. Arizona – modeled GOP         (370,137)
  9. Ohio – modeled GOP  (369,526)
  10. Illinois – modeled heavily Dem  (246,006)

Of the ten states with the most early and absentee voters, seven are modeled GOP by this Democratic political data-services firm.

The only plus sign for the Democratic Party in this top-ten list both in modeling and in high early/absentee vote, so far, is North Carolina. (California and Illinois are both modeled deep-blue, but as usual; not much surprise there.)

Just below the top ten states, the next good news for Democrats is Iowa – modeled Dem (220,635). Minnesota early voters are also projected at more Democratic than GOP (185,215). Virginia is also modeled Dem, but with lower early voting at 124,752.

The two biggest states in the top ten, Texas and Florida, appear to be going GOP, if the trend lines continue. Meanwhile, the fact that Michigan and Ohio voting appears Republican-majority at this point calls into serious question any ‘blue wave’, let alone a blue tsunami.

Same point re Wisconsin – modeled GOP (119,168) [now 200,626], and for Pennsylvania – modeled GOP (56,004). If North Carolina is a bright spot for Democrats with high early/absentee voting and Democratic modeling, Pennsylvania looks correspondingly worse, with low voting and Republican modeling.

Obviously, early voting is still going on; the early and absentee ballots are not all in yet. Some updates can be found quickly, vide the State of Texas website.

Then there’s Election Day to come.

Predictions are vain, and there is no crystal ball. But some of the thuggish blue-wave triumphalism I’ve glimpsed looks premature, to say the least.

Image result for blue wave 2018

May 8 primary results hold interest for Democrats

May 8th primary more interesting for Dems

The series-of-oddities parade of GOP presidential contests since summer 2011 seems to be over for now, and the May 8 primary results hold some potential for improvement in government at the federal and state level. Quick spot-check below.

Sen. Lugar

Indiana:

  • Most famously, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) will leave the Senate at the end of 2012, after thirty-five years in Washington. Represented as a statesman, Lugar did not question either the Iraq war or trillion-dollar tax breaks for the wealthy under GWBush. Some Pale-Blue-Dog media commentators are spinning this as a political loss for Democrats–oddly, since the GOP senate nominee in Indiana will be State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who filed a losing lawsuit against the Obama administration’s bailout of the auto industry. Auto parts and supplies are a significant industry in Indiana. Mourdock, a former coal and oil geologist running as an outsider, tried for Congress unsuccessfully three times in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
  • Lugar’s loss to Mourdock has been represented in media almost entirely as a story of Tea-Party-wins-one. Dick Armey of FreedomWorks sent around the same line by mass email. A version of the same narrative has Lugar the statesman driven out by extreme partisanship, faulted for his votes to confirm the president’s Supreme Court nominees, for example. Lugar’s own statement takes this line. No one points out that Lugar’s Senate votes since 2006 may have made sense as political calculation also, given that Obama won Indiana in 2008. Indeed, given not only that Obama carried the state but also that Democratic party affiliation in Indiana exceeded the GOP by nine percentage points, it looks less than wizardly that Dems didn’t bother putting up a senate opponent for Lugar in 2006. Lugar ran unopposed in 2006, but can’t even win his own primary in 2012? –Q whether that’s a major sea change, or another polite major-party bargain to ignore the popular voice.
  • That Lugar’s giving a false home address for decades went unremarked does not speak well either for political participation in Indiana or for national political reporting. If memory serves, Indiana was represented exclusively as a ‘red state’ in the 2008 elections, with no media reportage of the Dem party advantage in the state. Typically, that kind of thing gets reported only after Dems have lost the advantage; no media outlets reported that Dems outnumbered Repubs in Texas, either—until Gallup argued that Obama should have won even more states than he did, in the link above. The bright spot here is that the large media outlets have lost so much credibility in political reporting that most people know to get their information elsewhere.
  • Democrats have shown the sense to field solid candidates in all Indiana congressional districts, contesting some held by the GOP and leaving no current GOP Reps to coast to reelection unopposed. The GOP nominees all defeated Tea Party challenges except for incumbent Marlin Stutzman in the 3rd District, a Tea Partyer himself; he is challenged by Pastor Kevin Boyd (D). Two women House nominees are Democrats, Shelli Yoder in the 9th District and Tara Nelson in Indiana’s 4th District.
  • Indiana’s 5th District has State Rep. Scott Reske (D) facing GOP former U.S. Attorney Susan Brooks. The seat opened up through the retirement of Rep. Dan Burton (R). If Brooks won, she would be the first woman elected to the House by Indiana Republicans in more than fifty years. Brooks is a self-declared ‘anti-choice’ candidate linked to funding Planned Parenthood. One of the GWBush U.S. Attorneys (Southern District of Indiana) not fired, she like Mourdock is receiving heavy anti-labor support.
  • Indiana’s 6th District also has a good House contest, GOP Rep. Mike Pence leaving to run for governor. Bradley T. Bookout is the Dem nominee, a strong contestant in a Republican district against a far-right ‘young gun’ GOPer, Luke Messer. Messer like Brooks has received funding from the anti-labor ‘Citizens for a Working America’, based in Virginia.
  • In the governor’s race, the dubious Pence faces Dem attorney and former state house speaker John R. Gregg. Gregg also hosts an Indiana radio call-in talk show.
  • Unfortunately, the Indiana state legislature is so horrendously gerrymandered that only devoted legwork from the ground up will retrieve anything. State Democrats stupidly engaged in same when they were in office, leaving a field depleted of grassroots credibility for the GOP to move in on and take over in 2010.

 

Renee Ellmers

North Carolina:

  • Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton won the Democratic primary outright to run against GOPer Pat McCrory for governor. The North Carolina governorship has been Democratic for twenty years, although the GOP has money advantage. Top of the ticket is a boost in NC, which Barack Obama carried in 2008. Dems will have to work to keep the Pale-Blue-Dog media from torpedo-ing this one.
  • The Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor is former Director of State Personnel Linda Coleman.
  • More notoriously, of course, an anti-same-sex marriage amendment was added to the NC state constitution. Setting aside larger issues for the narrowly political assessment, this move in other states has yet to augment GOP successes in fall elections following. Nut-right victories are usually followed by general-electorate pullback, a point that has yet to be noticed in most ‘insider’ political commentary. These are not inspirational moves, and they offer nothing for most young voters.
  • Weird-right GOP nominees and incumbents Virginia Foxx in North Carolina’s 5th District and Renee Ellmers in the 2nd face solid Dem challengers—Elisabeth Motsinger and retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Steve Wilkins. Foxx is on recent record criticizing people who take out student loans. Foxx, on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, proclaimed that she worked her way through college without borrowing—although her husband did take out some loans. No record of whether Foxx knows about the gap between 2012 college tuition and entry-level pay, or about the difference between 2012 and 1961, when she started college. While Foxx’s early self-support and commitment to her own education are laudable, it might be noted that Foxx has had what Repubs call ‘government jobs’ since 1987. That’s 25 straight years of ‘government jobs’.
  • The Democratic challenger in the 10th District is NC Rep. Patricia Keever. The incumbent is another GWBush appointee, Patrick McHenry. McHenry was among other things one of Karl Rove’s men in the 2000 political campaign. He is another long-time labor-hater, having worked for Bush’s Sec. of Labor, Elaine Chao, as a Special Assistant.

 

Mountaintop removal in WV revisited

West Virginia:

  • Obama did not carry West Virginia before, in either the primary or the general in 2008, and has little chance of doing so this time—even if the mind rejects an image of West Virginians turning out enthusiastically to vote for Mitt Romney. Sadly for it, West Virginia is not a makeweight in presidential politics, and its unimportance this primary season was highlighted by the relative success of a Texas inmate named Keith Judd as the mickey-mouse candidate who got votes. Sadly, the declining population of the state is preyed upon by vested interests. West Virginia is one of the states that most benefited from the New Deal and the Rural Electrification Administration, but any populace that sees the president as a ‘muslim’ gets little chance at a better life now.
  • That said, Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and Sen. Joe Manchin are both incumbents, and neither faces a strong challenger. Tomblin’s is conservative Republican Bill Maloney, who has no experience in public office but ran a drilling company and was involved in planning the successful rescue of the trapped Chilean miners. Manchin’s is businessman John R. Raese, who lost to him before in the campaign with the infamous ‘hick’ ad. Raese also lost elections in 1984, 1988, and 2006.
  • Dems nominated two women, Robin Jean Davis and Kanawha County attorney Letitia Chafin, for seats on the West Virginia Supreme Court. Davis is also an incumbent. Reportedly the races will be expensive. The combination of low education levels and a dearth of viable newspapers means that WV, like Tennessee and Kentucky, is targeted by lobbyists against legislation and regulation in the public interest. Fertile fields.

 

Wisconsin:

 

More later

The 2004 election revisited, part 1

Revisiting election 2004. Part 1

Ohio results as published 2004

As the U.S.A. heads into a new election year, a string of GOP presidential candidates has demonstrated conclusively that each will need all the help s/he can get, to get into the White House. Thus it is timely, in this holiday season, to review the 2004 election.

Short story: Election Day 2004 involved more signs of election fraud, in more states, than any other election including that of 2000, when our not counting votes in Florida gave George W. Bush the White House without compelling him to win it.

Exit polling in Venezuela

The 2004 anomalies were revealed when polling consultants Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International released final exit polls conducted in all states. A troubling pattern emerged, which has not to this day been explained away. Although the data were analyzed in an excellent paper by Prof. Steven F. Freeman, “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,” there was no significant follow-up by the national political press. Undoubtedly this cavalier disregard for the fundamental right to vote contributed to fuel the big changes of 2008, including the rise of Barack Obama and the further decline of the news media in public esteem.

Media rep 2004

Quick run-down, 2004:

  • In 2004, contrary to results in every other election for the previous twenty years, there was a variance between exit polls and the published vote tally of more than two points in 33 of 51 jurisdictions.
  • This variance amounted to a swing in each state of 4% or 5% or more to Bush.
  • That is, regardless of which candidate won in those states, a significant variance allegedly occurred in every exit poll in all of them, and always in the same direction.
  • This crucial swing occurred in all the close states: Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa all had the same alleged ‘red shift.’
  • Most of the close states seemingly shifted more than two points, a swing of 4% or 5% favorable to Bush, regardless of the size or region of the state, and regardless of whether the state ultimately went for Bush or Kerry.
  • Exit polls from nine other states, less close, were also contradicted by a smaller swing toward Bush in the published vote tally. The same seeming swings to Bush occurred in the District of Columbia and Maryland.
  • Thus four out of five states are alleged to have swung to Bush, in an election where previous polling had consistently indicated new voters, independent voters, and younger voters trending toward Kerry and/or away from Bush.
  • This four-out-of-five swing is alleged for an election in which turnout increased, although increased voter turnout is generally held to favor the challenger against the incumbent.
  • In four states, the swing from exit poll to published vote tally was enough to swing the state from Kerry to Bush–Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa.
  • These four states added up to 59 electoral votes, more than enough to change the outcome of the national election.
  • Numerous election problems were reported on the ground from counties and precincts in Ohio, Florida, New Mexico and Iowa.

According to Professor Freeman, whose PhD in organizational studies came from MIT and who holds professorships at the University of Pennsylvania and at an international MBA program founded by Harvard, the swing between exit poll and vote tally is an anomaly even in just three battleground states. Take Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida alone, and as Freeman calculated, “The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to one.”

“As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.”

Even for a non-scientist, the statistical problem above seems fairly obvious: If the exit polls were simple mistakes, then they should have diverged from the vote tallies randomly. Honest mistakes should vary at different locations. Honest mistakes should vary in favor of different candidates, benefiting different parties. You don’t have a nationwide set of honest mistakes all magically benefiting one candidate. This is not random, it is a pattern.

Freeman

It would also be near miraculous for a nationwide set of honest mistakes all to fall within a fairly short percentage range, just significant enough to affect the outcome of the election but not dramatic enough to trigger federal and state investigation under the law.

Disclaimer:  It is only reasonable to read opinion polls and other polling with skepticism.  Incessant polling can weaken the individual’s reliance on his/her own judgment, can plant suggestions, can intimidate reporters, and can manipulate public acceptance of the unacceptable. Following the 2004 election, an opinion poll was quickly published suggesting that most people were relieved—ironically–that the outcome was clear.

All well and good, if it was clear. But the integrity of vote counting is essential to our nation’s survival as a democracy. The horse-race obsession about who is ahead before the election often makes news media look silly. The question of who won the election, after the election, is fundamental.

Exit polls hit closer to the mark than do opinion polls. Exit polls are taken on the ground with people who show up to vote, are taken just after the voting, and are weighted to take into account a preponderance of one group. As Dr. Freeman points out, exit polls have been used globally to check and verify the validity of elections in countries including Germany and Mexico. When exit polls contradicted Eduard Shevardnadze’s claim that he had won election in the former Soviet country of Georgia, Shevardnadze was forced to resign under pressure from the U.S. among other nations.

Pundits’ disdain for the issue of what happened to the 2004 election not shared by the public

Writing about these issues soon after the 2004 election, this author focused initially on the small tilts that added up to a big tilt in the U.S. Electoral College. However, even then I pointed out that questions had also arisen affecting the popular vote count in ‘safe’ states. The responses below, from readers who vote, include this interesting anecdotal account:

“Margie,

A friend pointed me to your article “Did Bush lose the election?” which I found very interesting. I was also interested in your final comment about irregularities “even in safe states.”

I live in the “safe state” of North Carolina where something I observed may be worth passing along.

During the early voting period, the state Board of Elections was releasing daily turnout reports. The early voters were identified by their party registration. It occurred to me that comparing this year’s turnout with early voting in the 2000 election might reveal a trend.

At the close of early voting on Oct. 31, SBOE recorded 705,462 early voters. In 2000, 393,152 early voters were recorded. Four years ago, early voters were 46% Democrat and 38% Republican. This year, early voters were 50.4% Democrat and 36% Republican.

Given a 6-point net gain in Democratic turnout, it seemed reasonable to expect that John Kerry would gain at least several percentage points over Al Gore’s showing four years ago. But when the votes were tallied, Kerry registered virtually no improvement on Gore’s vote in North Carolina (Kerry 43.6%, Gore 43.2%).

Knowing who is voting doesn’t reveal how they are voting, and crossover voting has long been a feature of North Carolina elections. But there’s nothing to suggest that crossover voting was any different this year from four years ago. [emphasis added]

When a similar pattern was observed in parts of Florida, the response was that “Southern Democrats may have been more willing to vote for a moderate Southerner (Gore) than a Massachusetts liberal.” But that doesn’t explain why Democratic turnout increased while Republican turnout seemed to decrease.

This year’s early vote in North Carolina was 20% of the total vote. Four years ago it was 13.5% of the total. So, there’s a statistically significant sample to use as a basis for comparison. If a correlation exists between early voting patterns this year and four years ago, it seems pretty improbable that a significant jump in Democratic turnout would not have translated to some improvement for Kerry over Gore.

If Kerry were getting, say, 47% in North Carolina, that would have put another 130,000 votes in his column. It’s not enough to win the state’s 15 electoral votes, but a 4-point upward shift across the country is in line with the exit poll projection of a 51-48% popular vote lead for Kerry. And it would have moved Ohio and a couple other close states into his column.

It would be interesting to do these comparisons in states where the relevant data is available to see if Democratic turnout increased from 2000 to 2004, and if so, whether it translated to gains for Kerry over Gore.

I’m not ready to conclude there was vote manipulation. But there are a lot of questions about the results that need to be examined and answers provided.

Thank you for your efforts.”

“Dear Ms. Burns,
Thank you for your interesting, informative, and truthful article, “Did Bush
Lose the Election?”
The evidence of what you say has existed for quite some time now

  • patent evidence of election fraud presaged by Avi Rubin at Johns Hopkins University
    and echoed in the recent UC Berkeley study, by Zogby International as reported in IPS News, and
  • as Bill Simpich observes in the SF Bay View
  • by former MIT mathematics professor David Anick, among others. Notwithstanding, the mainstream media continue to exclude from its purvue this most heinous and glaringly evident act of deception
  • the defrauding of the American people of its vote and therefore of its sovereignty. By failing to lend their attention to this issue, the mainstream media act as aiders and abettors of a blatant attack against the security of the United States of America.

It is therefore extremely refreshing to hear someone valiantly speak out for the American people in our time of crisis. I thank you most profoundly for being one of the seminal figures to tell the truth about the Third Millenium scandal that is now gaining a reputation worldwide as “Votergate” or, as I also like to call it: “the NeoCons” [Election] Piracy 2004.”

[name redacted]