OK…first, I wrote the guts of this as a comment, but decided to put it up as a diary.
I know I know….don’t jinx it, don’t get your hopes up. It ain’t over until its over, but I have to say here that my gut is telling me we have a very good shot at pulling this off….not just a House majority, but a BIG House majority….big enough to raise the additional possibility of winning the Senate. Here’s my thinking:
I think the only hope of taking the Senate is VERY high turnout. I think we are getting very high turnout… but is it high enough? We won’t know until actual votes are counted but, my gut has been telling me for the last 48 hours that things seem to be inching the Dems way steadily….slowly, but steadily and I do so because:
1- I think pollsters may not be accurately reflecting the stronger than expected turnout of women, Hispanics, milennials, and African Americans in the actual voting cohort. If you look at latest available results though the key pollsters….especially those that include aggregate polling results, = things are steadily shifting leftward….more close races are shifting to toss-up or Leans Dem.
That seems valid since most elections tend to start out with a large block of people on each side who KNOW how they will vote and then the smaller group of those who decide in the closing days. Over and over in past elections, the pollsters can (post election) track the trend of that election developing and shifting down to election day. It happened with Trump in 2016 and a lot of that seemed to center around the Comey statements very close to election day.
2- It is purely anecdotal, but I think a sizable number of folks who have voted Republican and for Trump in the past, are NOT going to do so this time. It’s twitter comments, its anecdotes, but but…..it’s also a growing feeling that too many members of the GOP are, in these final days, accepting that THIS GOP is no longer theirs. The arguments of the Steve Schmidts and Max Boots of the more traditional GOP are resonating. I think a sizable number of past GOP/Trump voters have been steadily coming to the conclusion, in these final days, that they simply cannot justify continuing to support this administration and this ideology and this chaos.
3- I think of all the things that have happened post Kavannaugh that have been a disaster for Donnie (even he lamented the loss of momentum he perceived in the wake of the shootings and bomb threats:
- His numerous rallies may be great draws for his base, but his ]statements and antics conversely drive away other potential or past supporters — strengthening their loathing of his bombast, lies and despotic statements. (BTW….is it just me or is Donnie these days looking like he applied his orange face makeup with a garden trowel. The stark areas of white around his hairline and his eyes makes him look like an orange raccoon on TV. It is NOT a good image and reminds me of Nixon and his beard shadow during the Kennedy debate.)
- Add to that the bomber, the synagogue shooting, the shooter in Kentucky, the virulently racist ads,
- the clear and blatant efforts at voter suppression (America basically believes in fairness and they don’t like seeing all this cheating and lying — stuff so bad they aren’t even trying to disguise what they are up to — the shift of the polling place in Dodge, the street number gambit on North Dakota reservations, the exact match con job in Georgia),
- the demagoguery over the caravan and the mis-use of troops (the optics of troops setting up a camp at the border today is NOT positive. People are matching the size of the supposed mobilization of up to 15,000 troops against a small and shrinking group of immigrants who are hundreds of miles away from the border and nowhere near the kind of threat Donnie is trying to paint them as. Voters are also asking what all of this is costing when the troops can’t actually serve a police function and are clearly being deployed as political theater.)
And finally….more and more Americans are just tired of the daily chaos this administration generates —
the clear lying, the corruption, the battles with the courts, the lack of professionalism, the chaos in our foreign relations, the failure to actually deal with real and present challenges from climate change to infrastructure to health care, the mounting deficit and the clear warnings from GOP leaders that they are going to try and gut Social Security and Medicare if they somehow manage to keep control.
For all those reasons my gut is telling me this: —
I think the House will be a blowout,
and it may just be large enough to get us to either a tie or (the Lord willing) a majority in the Senate.
OK...I’ve gone out on the limb. Am I out of my mind?