Democrats May Be Poised to Take Back Multiple Governorships

The Democrat goal: electing more Ralph Northams to governorship's across America. 

The far left of the Democrat Party - think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren - has been taking it on the chin in many state level primaries where moderate, common sense approach Democrats have been winning the primary elections.  Elections, after all are about WINNING as opposed to anointing one's perfect candidate or staying home in a huff if one's preferred candidate doesn't win the Party nomination.  This concept was lost by many in 2016 and, as a result, we have the utterly foul and toxic Trump/Pence regime in the White House.  In the run up to the 2018 midterm elections - as was the case in Virginia in 2027 where the more moderate candidate won the primary and went on to win the general election - moderate Democrats who can appeal to independents and even moderate Republicans sickened by Trump's lies and moral bankruptcy  are winning gubernatorial nominations.  If they win in November, such successes could cause major problems for the GOP as Democrat governors are poised to block Republican gerrymandering of districts.  The long term impact could be significant.  Yes, Democrats need to retake control of Congress, but they also need to win back governorship's.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the Democrat opportunity.  Here are highlights:

The backlash against President Trump and the steady rightward journey of the Republican Party could sharply shift the distribution of political power in state capitals across the nation in this fall’s elections. And because reapportionment is coming, this could change the contours of American politics for more than a decade.

Strengthening that possibility is the success of pragmatic Democrats in gubernatorial primaries who are stressing issues that appeal simultaneously to the center and the left.

 

On Tuesday, Wisconsin Democrats chose Tony Evers, the state schools superintendent, to face two-term Republican Gov. Scott Walker. In Minnesota, Democrats nominated Rep. Tim Walz to defend his party’s hold on the state’s governorship. Both Evers and Walz advance progressive priorities in areas such as education and health care but cannot be cast as ideologues.

Democratic gubernatorial nominees are similarly positioned in Ohio, Iowa and Michigan, all pickup opportunities.

At the same time, Trump’s dominance of the Republican primary electorate and the long-term flight of moderates from an increasingly conservative party have led to victories by right-wing candidates who may not be attractive to a broader electorate.

One of Tuesday’s headline results was the defeat of former governor Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota by Trump-supporting Jeff Johnson, a county commissioner who castigated Pawlenty for criticizing Trump toward the end of the 2016 campaign following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape.

 

And in Kansas on Tuesday, Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer finally conceded the GOP primary race to Secretary of State Kris Kobach, after a week of tallying ballots. Kobach is a Trump loyalist with far-right views on immigration and restricting access to voting. Kobach’s victory greatly increases the chances of the Democrats’ nominee, state Sen. Laura Kelly. The Cook Political Report immediately reclassified the race as a toss-up in a traditionally Republican state.

 

Like many Democrats, Kelly is focusing on schools. It’s an issue with particular power in Kansas. Former governor Sam Brownback (R) — he left office before his term was out — had reduced education spending to pay for large tax cuts.

 

The program became so unpopular that it was rolled back on a bipartisan vote in the legislature, and Kelly has targeted the Brownback plan (she calls it his “big tax-cut experiment”) in her advertising. “Sam Brownback’s massive education cuts weren’t numbers on a spreadsheet,” she says. “They were an attack on who we are as Kansans.”

 

Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, says Kansas offers a particularly dramatic example of what is happening in many other Republican-led states. “Everyone knows about the Trump effect, but the untold story is Republican governors going on ideological tears in their states,” Inslee said in a telephone interview. “You have a one-two punch to Republican prospects both from the White House and from the damage that’s been wrought out of the statehouses.”

11 of the Republicans’ 26 governorships at stake this year appear vulnerable. Illinois and New Mexico already lean Democratic, and seven others are toss-ups. These include the powerhouse states of Florida, Michigan and Ohio. The GOP will also have to struggle to hold on to Wisconsin and Georgia.

 

The governments elected this year will be key to drawing congressional and state legislative district lines after the 2020 Census. So even Republicans who demonstrated slavish loyalty to Trump to win primaries are likely to regret his presidency (and their own ideological enthusiasms) if 2018 leads to a statehouse catastrophe. They have been playing with fire, and it could consume them.

One can only hope that these pragmatic Democrats replicate the ground game used by Ralph Northam in 2017.  While defeating Republican gubernatorial candidates is the goal, defeating the by significant margins would be even sweeter - and would send terror through the GOP.

Will the GOP Get the Message in Kansas?

Many of us are hoping that the GOP will get a much needed message in Kansas with the re-election defeat of Gov. Sam Brownback and Senator Pat Roberts (as well as other GOP elected officials).  Based on the Congressional GOP's economic agenda recently reviewed in a post on this blog, even if Kansas goes blue, one has to question whether or not the message will be received.  After all, part of being a Republican nowadays is to reject objective reality in every form and to blindly cling to ideology and one's Bible. A piece in The Daily Beast asks whether or not the GOP will get the message that its 30+ year old policies simply do not work.  Here are excerpts:

For many political observers, the question about Kansas these days is no longer, “What’s the matter?” so much as, “What the fuck?”

There was the unexpectedly close GOP Senate primary—three-term incumbent Pat Roberts wound up winning by 7 points—and the forced retirement of the Democratic Senate candidate; there’s the fact that Gov. Sam Brownback, whose average margin of victory in state-wide races is 23 points, is now fighting for his political life. Tom Frank made the state famous for illustrating how its citizens elected conservative candidates whose actual policies went against the voters’ economic self-interest; after one term of Brownback’s “Tea Party experiment,” Kansas voters seem to have enlightened their self-interest and want to undo the extremism that Brownback both promised and delivered. The question remains as to whether their Republican candidates will ever wise up to the same conclusion.

There’s no doubt that Brownback’s radically conservative economic policies failed. Schools closed, the deficit ballooned, highways crumbled, jobs disappeared—I imagine ruby slippers were hocked. That failure has the reddest state in the nation blushing blue.

Citing the state’s fiscal woes, moderate and not-so-moderate Republicans have flocked to Brownback’s opponent, Paul Davis, who trails by just 0.6 points. On the Senate front, independent candidate Greg Orman, who will likely caucus with the Democrats, is reaping the benefits of that Tea Party-weighted primary. “Traditional Republicans for Common Sense,” made up of 70 Republican moderates who served in the Kansas legislature, endorsed Orman and he is favored by independent voters by a margin of 30 points.

In the face of this, both Brownback and Roberts have chosen not to battle for the wide swath of Kansas voters who identify as moderate Republicans (47 percent, versus 38 percent “conservative Republicans”), but to move further to the right.

[O]ne has to wonder not just if the Republican leadership is shooting itself in the foot, but why it is. Is it misplaced, or at least short-sighted, cynicism, which might have them believe that their old white guy coalition (if you can call it that) will sustain them a few more cycles? (At least long enough to pass voting restrictions?) Or is it a form of psychosomatic blindness, a function of such deeply held, incorrect perceptions, that the party leaders literally cannot imagine the need to change their tactics, much less their policies?

In other words, are we dealing with cynics or zealots?  Obviously, one hopes for the former. Cynics respond to defeat, for one thing. Cynics and opportunists look at polls. Cynics are the lifeblood of representative democracy. Cynics will do anything to save their own skin, even change their minds.

Sadly, I suspect we are dealing with zealots who cannot grasp the reality that the nation is changing and pushing the same failed agenda is not the route to victory.   As for Brownback, he seems to think that attending every anti-gay rally is his ticket to reelection.

Is Bobby Jindal Self-Destructing?

Candidly, I do not like the policies that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has been pursuing in his quest to bolster his image with the national Christofascist and Tea Party crowd.   The irony now seems to be that while he has increased his name visibility at the national level, his popularity is on a sharp decline in his home state where the policies cheered by the knuckle draggers and saboteurs of the Christofascist/Tea Party are proving not so popular with the hometown crowd.  Of course, if one's popularity crashes and burns in one's home state, it makes the likelihood of success nationally far less certain.  Apparently, Jindal should have kept his eye more on the wants and desires of those in Louisiana.  Here are highlights from a Washington Post article:

Jindal’s approval rating appears to be in steady decline. On Monday he dropped his tax reform plan that would have replaced income taxes with higher sales taxes, acknowledging a widespread backlash from the public, religious groups, business and state lawmakers in his own party. ”It certainly wasn’t the reaction I was hoping for,” Jindal said.

That very public failure comes just 16 months ago after Jindal was easily reelected with two-thirds of the vote against minimal Democratic opposition. What happened? The answer is that the policies that have made Jindal an increasingly attractive national candidate have hurt him back home.

Deep budget cuts, particularly to health care and education spending, have been unpopular. Polling suggests that a small majority also opposes the vouchers at the heart of his educational reform plan, which a judge has deemed unconstitutional. While other Republicans gave in, Jindal has held firm in his opposition to a federally-funded Medicaid expansion — an unpopular position, according to a Southern Media Opinion & Research poll.

Jindal’s popularity dip is the price of getting things done, Anderson [a Jindal political consultant] argued. At six percent, unemployment in Louisiana is lower than the national average and low for the region. In 2011 the state GDP ticked up .5 percent. Per capita income has also grown, although it’s still below the national average.

The current slump is hardly the end of the story. Jindal is still pushing for an income tax repeal without the sales tax swap — and his staff is no longer insisting that the package be revenue-neutral. To pass that legislation he needs only a simple majority rather than the two-thirds required to raise sales taxes and it will likely be much more popular (at least in the short term) even if fiscal hawks in the state cry foul. (Republicans control both the state House and state Senate.)

As a presidential contender, Jindal has been touted not just as a reformer but as one who can stay hugely popular while making dramatic cuts. Of late, that’s not been the case, however.

I'm sorry, but anyone willing to prostitute themselves to the Christofascists/Tea Party doesn't deserve a promising political future. Long term, these groups are political poison to the GOP's future.  When will someone grow a spine and stand up to them?