Mark McCloskey is considering a Senate run in Missouri. Don't know who he is? Sure you do, you just forgot... That's him on the left. . . This guy holding a gun looks like a penguin trying to ride a unicycle. Mark McCloskey, gun-toting St. Louis lawyer, considering Senate bid - POLITICO Mark McCloskey — the gun-toting St. Louis attorney who drew headlines last year for brandishing an assault rifle at Black Lives Matter protesters — says he’s looking at running for Missouri’s open Senate seat. “I can confirm that it’s a consideration, yes,” McCloskey said in a brief interview on Tuesday evening
That's going to be an interesting candidacy. Being NC's largest city, Charlotte always has people running for the Senate or Governor, but they almost never win. McCrory failed in 2008, but then won in 2012. He was a classic, and I mean CLASSIC, country club Republican. That bathroom bill was totally a creature of our very wingnutty general assembly. Yeah, he signed it, so what happened to him is fair. The comical thing is that the GOP LG was actually a huge fan of the bill, but all of the blame accrued to McCrory. So McCrory lost a squeaker while Forrest won with room to spare.
BREAKING: new Census apportionment counts...TX +2FL +1CO, MT, NC, OR +1CA, IL, MI, NY, OH, PA, WV -1— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) April 26, 2021 Generally speaking, this is better than expected for Democrats. Even some of the states losing a district may allow for more favorable districts, like New York (which despite numerous predictions of a multi-seat loss was only 89 people away from losing no seats).
Barely related to the House, but Val Demmings is seriously considering running for FL governor next year. This is a pretty big deal, in that Desantis is emerging as a top GOP presidential candidate for 2024. He disappears as a viable candidate if he loses next year.
I doubt he will lose, I do hope she runs and proves me wrong, but it is Florida, so I doubt I will be wrong.
No surprise here, Democrats shut off the special elections in Texas. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-backed-candidate-heads-runoff-133833641.html
538 on what may be coming https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/will-2022-be-a-good-year-for-republicans-yes-we-know-its-early/
Vaguely related. Mississippi’s state Supreme Court just killed the state’s ballot initiatives on a technicality. Back when initiatives were added to MS constitution, the state had five congressional districts and, as written, it required that 1/5th of the signatures needed to qualify for the ballot must come from each congressional district. However, due to MS’s stagnant population, it lost a congressional seat in 2000 and now has 4 congressional districts. Ever since 2000, MS has treated that 1/5th as a floor, meaning a minimum of 1/5th of the total must come from each CD. However, in a ruling overturning the voter approved legalization of medical marijuana, MS’s SC ruled that the amendment means a maximum of 1/5th of signatures must come from each CD. Since it is impossible to gather signatures from a CD that does not exist, this means it is now impossible for initiatives to qualify for MS’s ballot. And before people get all angry about conservatives, 2 liberal judges were in the majority and 2 conservatives were in the minority. https://apnews.com/article/ms-state...f81d577aeb2ed8a04849f62c86c707e?ICID=ref_fark
On Tuesday, New Mexico 1 will have a special election to replace Democrat Deb Haaland, who resigned to be Secretary of the Interior. She won 58.2-41.8, so the Democrats don't have a chance to impress. If state representative Melanie Stansbury wins by a lot, it will be as expected. If she wins by a little or loses to state senator Mark Moores, it will be bad for Democrats. There are four candidates, with the others being Independent Aubrey Dunn Jr. and Libertarian Chris Manning. Dunn Jr. is a man who was New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands while a Republican before he switched to run for senator in 2018 as a Libertarian and then switched to Independent. He withdrew from the senate race, which led to the Libertarians nominating former presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who got 15.4 percent. Manning doesn't have a Wikipedia page. After that, Texas 6 will have a runoff between two Republicans on July 27, and there won't be anything else until Election Day when there will be general elections in Ohio 11 and 15 and primaries in Florida 20. Federal law requires ballots to be sent to overseas voters 45 days in advance. That applies to primaries and general elections, which is part of the reason many special elections are not held quickly. New Mexico had parties decide the nominees, and Stansbury wasn't expected to be the Democratic nominee. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-red-or-blue-is-your-state-your-congressional-district/ links to FiveThirtyEight's "partisan lean" of every state and district. It is similar to the Cook Partisan Voting Index (PVI). I am now in Omaha in Nebraska 2, which is the most even district at 0.0009696. Positive means left of the country. Nebraska 3, which has most of the state's area, is the most Republican district at -57.36016. Here is how many districts in each state are left of the country followedby how many House seats are held by Democrats going by the winners in 2020 for seats that are vacant: AK: 0/1, 0/1 AL: 1/7, 1/7 AR: 0/4, 0/4 AZ: 4/9, 5/9 (1 more D) CA: 44/53, 42/53 (2 fewer Ds) CO: 4/7, 4/7 CT: 5/5, 5/5 DE: 1/1, 1/1 FL: 11/27, 11/27 GA: 5/14, 6/14 (1 more D) HI: 2/2, 2/2 IA: 0/4, 1/4 (1 more D) ID: 0/2, 0/2 IL: 11/18, 13/18 (2 more Ds) IN: 2/9, 2/9 KS: 1/4, 1/4 KY: 1/6, 1/6 LA: 1/6, 1/6 MA: 9/9, 9/9 MD: 7/8, 7/8 ME: 1/2, 2/2 (1 more D) MI: 5/14, 7/14 (2 more Ds) MN: 4/8, 4/8 MO: 2/8, 2/8 MS: 1/4, 1/4 MT: 0/1, 0/1 NC: 5/13, 5/13 ND: 0/1, 0/1 NE: 1/3, 0/3 (1 fewer D) NH: 1/2, 2/2 (1 more D) NJ: 8/12, 10/12 (2 more Ds) NM: 2/3, 2/3 NV: 1/4, 3/4 (2 more Ds) NY: 18/27, 19/27 (1 more D) OH: 4/16, 4/16 OK: 0/5, 0/5 OR: 3/5, 4/5 (1 more D) PA: 8/18, 9/18 (1 more D) RI: 2/2, 2/2 SC: 1/7, 1/7 SD: 0/1, 0/1 TN: 2/9, 2/9 TX: 13/36, 13/36 UT: 0/4, 0/4 VA: 5/11, 7/11 (2 more Ds) VT: 1/1, 1/1 WA: 6/10, 7/10 (1 more D) WI: 2/8, 3/8 (1 more D) WV: 0/3, 0/3 WY: 0/1, 0/1 230 districts are right of the country, and 205 are left of the country. The Democrats won 222 seats, which is 17 more than that. 33 states match the amount of House seats, 11 were 1 off, and 6 were 2 off. All of the safe Republican states matched except for Nebraska, which had District 2 elect a Republican while being a negligible 0.001 left of the country, and Iowa, if you consider it to be safe after Trump exceeded has national popular vote by 11.51 in 2016 and 12.65 in 2020. The three very highly populated safe Democratic states were not matches. Comparing it to the Cook PVI, the Cook has 226 R+, 6 Even, and 203 D+. If Cook gave exact values rather than rounding to the nearest whole number, it might be an exact match with FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight is also very close to Cook on a state level. FiveThirtyEight has 31 states right of the country, and 19 states left of the country. Cook has 30 R+, 2 Even, and 18 D+. Again, if Cook gave exact values it might be an exact match with FiveThirtyEight. These should not be used to predict 222 because there will be redistricting. Even in states that keep the same amount of House seats and aren't gerrymandered or un-gerrymandered (if that's a word), there will be minor changes to keep the districts with equal populations.
CNN wrote about the possiblity of the next speaker being Trump if the Republicans take the House in 2022. The speaker does not have to be a member of the House, and after 2018 at least one Democrat voted for Stacey Abrams for speaker. A majority is 218. Giving vacancies to the party that won them in 2020, there are 213 Republicans, including 203 who did not vote to impeach Trump, so it would take 15 more to make a majority. CNN says that if the Republicans announce that plan, it would be good for Democrats because people voted against Trump in 2018 and 2020 and will do so again. CNN said the reason Trump might want to be speaker is to lead impeachment investigations of Democrats. I think if McCarthy becomes speaker he will investigate anybody Trump wants, so Trump doesn't need to be speaker to get what he wants.
After losing a special and regular election to Republican Mike Garcia, Christy Smith is running again for a House seat in California's District 25. Democrat Abby Finkenauer, who gained Iowa's District 1 in 2018 and lost last year, is running for Senate, where Chuck Grassley has not announced if he will run again. Democrat Anthony Brindisi, who defeated Republican Claudia Tenney in New York's District 22 in 2018 and lost to Tenney by 109 votes last year, will run to be a judge. Republican Dan Rodimer, who lost to Democratic incumbent Susie Lee by 3 percent last year in Nevada's District 3, already ran elsewhere, and he was eleventh with 2.66 percent in the jungle primary in Texas's District 6 special election where Jake Ellzey defeat Susan Wright (the widow of Ron Wright who won last year) in the runoff yesterday.
TDRL news is a British channel, so this video is to explain this to Europeans. $ reasons on why republicans will win the 2022 elections.
More bad news for Democrats in 2022. If they want to make big changes, they have about 16 more months. Supreme Court decision could set off gerrymandering 'arms race' (msn.com)
A democrat from a Trump district to retire. Veteran Rep. Ron Kind — a Wisconsin Democrat who represents a district carried by former President Donald Trump — is planning to retire, Democratic sources say. Kind has represented the seat since 1997. https://t.co/4aEw5Lxthr— CNN (@CNN) August 10, 2021
Screw jobs, climate change and the economy!!! CRT is the defining issue of our times!!! Ds hope to defy history in 2022 is to win swing voters w jobs. But @SarahLongwell25's focus groups finds Trump voters don't care about infra, "are fixated that critical race theory is poisoning their children'' & "deeply committed" to idea elex was stolenhttps://t.co/WqUUtYpuhP— Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) August 11, 2021
https://www.axios.com/census-data-r...lert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alerts_all The GOP is literally dying off. Almost all growth in urban areas, making it much harder for GOP to gerrymander. It's more likely that they'll have to do a "Titanic" gerrymander where a decent wave could knock off 40+ incumbents.
To help explain what I mean: examine this map. My home state of Ohio is dominated by Republicans, who plan to use the gerrymandering process to try and remove a Democratic district. The original plan was to "pack" Democrats into two districts in Cleveland and Columbus that would be ridiculously Democratic, like +70 or +80 PVI. Then a ring of R+10/+15 seats in the suburbs could be constructed around the urban cores, guaranteeing Republican dominance. However, Republicans now face a few significant problems, which I'll detail one at a time: 1) The most obvious one is that only the Columbus (and Cincinnati) metro areas actually grew! Many of the areas that would comprise the safely R suburban seats lost population, meaning that in order to meet federal redistricting guidelines, the plan will be discarded. Instead, perhaps only R+6 seats can be constructed. 2) These Census maps reflect population trends *today* and not in a year at the midterms, or three or five or seven years from now. Things could get much, much worse for Republicans trying to hold suburban seats if the population grows substantially in places like Delaware, Butler, Montgomery, or Warren counties. If they set a boundary now to pack in Democrats, but the suburban growth is all nonwhite or lean-Dem, then Republicans could see an R+6 district become an R+1 district in a big hurry. 3) We're talking about population growth as though it's all people moving in and having kids, but obviously that's not the reason. There are two pandemics going on across the US, a drug overdose problem, and deindustrialization. The population and electorate are going to be less predictable in 2022 than in 2012. The correlation between partisanship and vaccines is unlikely to help Republicans; they may examine the data and think they've drawn an R+6 seat only to discover in 2022 that it's a D+3 seat due to the massive pile of Republican-voting corpses the Republicans have created by being anti-science masochists. All this is to say, I'm excited to see how redistricting unfolds.
I do feel bad for all the people dying, but as others have said, they have nobody else to blame but themselves if they can get a vaccine and refuse to.
@American Brummie has been singing the same song since I joined big soccer. Then Trump goes out and gets 70 million votes, all those diying republicans sure like to vote. Then again I am the one that keeps saying turning Texas Blue should be the democrat strategy. So I have also been wrong this whole time.