Anyone with insight in the Nevada or North Carolina races?
538 has both of those States Blue for President but a very light Pink for Senate.
Florida is also showing Blue for President but Pink for Senate but it’s a darker Pink than Nevada and North Carolina.
Nevada has Joe Heck slightly leading the Democrat. North Carolina has Burr slightly leading his Democratic opponent, but Burr’s numbers look awfully low for an incumbent. He’s in trouble.
So this seems weird.
Right now 538 has Democratic control rating at 64% odds on NowCast, 56% PollsOnly, and 61% PollsPlus. PollsPlus and NowCast being close and PollsOnly as the relative outlier just is odd.
Anyway NowCast, the current temperature metric, has moved from D 43% (the lowest it had been since end of July) on 10/6 to D 64% today and 68% yesterday. Yeah a move up of 25% probability between yesterday and the one week before.
Kind of puzzling why yesterday had a 538 post on how much the D’s chances in the Senate are “losing ground.” NowCast has bounced up and down around 60% probability since the end of August. PollsOnly and PollsPlus staying mostly mid 50s with the same bouncing.
Sometimes 538’s analysis gets very silly.
A Democratic Senate could be huge. Decades-long influence huge. Clinton’s going to nominate SCOTUS judges, and she only needs the Senate to confirm them. If RBG steps down instead of rolling the dice on a Democratic Senate after 2018, Clinton will have two seats to fill in her first two years.
Not that huge. It just changes the balance to 5-4 liberal. One election fixes that. And REpublicans are almost a lock to gain the Senate, probably with a bigger majority than they have now in 2018, regardless of what happens in November.
What I don’t understand is why the Senate doesn’t just hold a snap vote on Merrick Garland without informing the President.
Probably because they are gambling on the possibility, however small, of Trump winning. Or failing that, on the possibility of the Senate remaining in Republican hands. From their point of view, even this tiny chance is worth it if it keeps the Supreme Court conservative.
Even if the Senate remains in GOP hands, they can’t block a nominee for four years. Well, I suppose they can, but it sets a horrible precedent. The precedent they’ve already set is bad enough.
McConnell has made it clear he doesn’t give a crap about any of that. As long as he is majority leader I expect him to block any D President being able to switch SCOTUS to 5-4 liberal.
That just raises the stakes too much. It means that if vacancies build up, whichever party wins both the Senate and the Presidency gets to just nominate and confirm the whole bunch. Leaving the morality of the tactic aside, I don’t think that’s a strategy likely to work well for Republicans. These dudes, they just don’t think.
They don’t give a damn about those kinds of stakes. The one force unifying all parts of the GOP will be scorched-earth opposition to Hillary.
If she wins and the GOP holds the Senate, I fully expect that they will block her executive-branch appointments, either across the board or in a sufficiently wide swath as to make normal governing difficult, and demand some sort of ransom in return for [del]releasing their hostages[/del] approving them.
The only question in my mind is the extent of the ransom demand: would they go whole-hog and demand that she acquiesce to the Ryan budget? Or would they be satisfied with something a bit smaller?
But you heard it here first: if they hold the Senate, they will try this. And the media will normalize it, treat it as just typical hardball politics, rather than an outrageous violation of political norms.
I fervently hope we don’t get the opportunity to find out if I’m right.
ETA: This doesn’t even get to Federal judges. They’d be a whole separate negotiation. And SCOTUS nominations would be DOA. The GOP leadership would look at Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Breyer and say, “let’s see who dies first.” If all three of them go while Hillary’s in the White House, they’d have a 3-2 SCOTUS majority, which they’d be perfectly OK with.
Well, so far they’ve been slow with the cabinet nominations, but they’ve voted on them, so hopefully they don’t escalate. I fear they might try to do what you said with SCOTUS. As for blanket opposition to Clinton, I suspect there’s going to be a change in the atmosphere once she takes office. Although really, if the Republicans maintain control of the Senate they have an equal claim to governing.
Then there’s the states, and as crazy as it sounds, the GOP actually has a better than even shot at INCREASING their state dominance.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/governor/2016_elections_governor_map.html
“Governing” is exactly what they’re not doing.
I’m far from an R sympathizer.
But if one believes the D inmates have taken over the asylum and are driving the country directly to Hell sans handbasket then stopping any and all of their works *is *governing. Better yet to be continuously producing legislation to roll back any and all recent changes you weren’t able to block previously.
Which is not far from what the R’s are doing.
They’re deluded as measured against reality, but they’re as internally consistent as their woolly coalition of incompatibles permits them to be. Their willingness to use stop-at-nothing tactics like government shutdowns and debt defaults only show how desperately cornered the feel.
They OK’d Obama’s Cabinet nominations, due to their high visibility, but they held up numerous lower-level appointments for well over a year, even back in 2009-10. They have gotten less rather than more conciliatory since then.
Why? Never in my memory have I seen a President bend as far backward to work across party lines, as President Obama did for the first six years of his Presidency, to little avail. What’s Hillary going to do that will somehow change the atmosphere, do the Dance of the Seven Veils before the Republican caucus? (Run away! Run away!!)
This notion that Obama’s alienated Republicans by acting unilaterally and tyrannically is one that has somehow formed in the Republican mind, but it’s got no basis in reality. It’s a response to the GOP Congressional scorched-earth opposition that Mitch McConnell and the gang decided to go with before Obama was even inaugurated.
It won’t change due to a change of Democratic President. It will only change if the Republicans change. And now that their party is owned by a rabid base, the only direction they’re going to change in is that of even more radical opposition than ever before. Like it or not, the GOP belongs to the people yelling “Lock her up!” and “Trump that bitch!”
In fact, there seems to be a significant fraction of Republicans whose objection to Obama is that he wasn’t tyrannical enough. They’ve given him plenty of opportunities to squish them like a bug by expanding the executive power, and have tried to blame the resulting mess on him when he hasn’t.
You all recall that on the Lupercal
I thrice did offer him a kingly crown
Which he did thrice refuse.
Was this ambition?
Obama has never negotiated, and his bending over backwards consists of telling Republicans what they are supposed to want and then being surprised that they want something else.
We’ll do that next time we’re in power: Hey, we’re repealing ACA, but we included a repeal of the carried interest rule in the repeal! How can Democrats not support that! Obstructionists, they are!
Gimme a for-instance.
I’ll give you one: Obama spent most of 2009 dickering with the likes of Sens. Grassley and Enzi (Gang of Six, remember?) to try to find out how he could modify the ACA to gain their support. This was a bill, remember, that already was as market-oriented as it was possible for a near-universal health care bill to be - and it was basically the same scheme that Gov. Romney had recently instituted in Massachusetts.
But they never volunteered any changes that would have gained their support without making the bill fail of its purpose of insuring the vast majority of uninsured Americans.
Missed the edit deadliine, but adding this:
I guess Obama’s " telling Republicans what they are supposed to want" consisted of telling them they’re supposed to want all Americans to have access to decent health care.
But he probably wasn’t surprised, just disappointed, “that they want something else” - for tens of millions of Americans to continue to lack health insurance, and get sucky health care as a result. That’s a pretty awful thing to want, but it’s pretty clear that that’s what most Republican officeholders want these days. Own it.
Sometimes your posts seem sincere or even intelligent. Othertimes I wonder if you’re applying for a writing position at The Onion.
[joking] Is there a well-informed Mrs. Adaher who shares the account with a FauxNews couch-potato trophy husband? 
Obama has never negotiated, by virtue of the fact that he’s started off by offering the Republicans everything they wanted. The ACA was designed by Newt Gingrich. His most recent Supreme Court nominee was the one suggested by Orrin Hatch. How much more do you want?