Dec. 24, 2021
[In the holiday and year end spirit, if you click on the links, a few of them reveal musical treats.]
This is the second installment. As with most TV serials, you’re advised to check out the first installment before taking this on, but the intro here will bring you up to speed.
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| Ted Lasso |
I’m pulling out songs and lines to prompt you to believe, as Ted Lasso might tell you to, that the beleaguered Democrats have the opportunity of a campaign-time to take over the Senate with room to spare.
The conventional wisdom is dire for the Dems.
The Senate is divided 50-50, and as we approach the new year, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, one of the Dem’s 50, seems to be saying he’s not backing President Biden’s seminal Build Back Better legislation that contains provisions for universal pre-school, a child tax credit, home care for older Americans and people with disabilities, and climate change initiatives with jobs for displaced workers. Without the legislation, Biden looks like an albatross around the neck of any Dem running for the Senate.
Then there’s covid. There’s always covid. The fate of covid has come to dictate everything from inflation to world markets, meaning the economy, stupid. It also looms over how families and schools cope, whether college and pro sports get played, how governments are perceived to respond, and the favorability of presidents, which in Biden’s case hovers at about 42%.
As it is, four incumbent Democratic Senators - Raphael Warnock in Georgia, Mark Kelly in Arizona, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire - are considered vulnerable in the 2022 elections. If they lose, that would eliminate the razor thin and compromised Democratic majority, and leave the Republicans with a four-vote unified majority.
In the first installment, I staked out the case that Dems can win Senate races in five states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida, which would leave the Dems up one critical Senate seat even if they lose all four of the states they now claim, though tenuously.
I’m about to move to the high wire and suggest that there are five more states ripe for Democratic pickin.’ My invocation to Dem strategists and moneyed interests is don’t become obsessed protecting the back flank of incumbency at the expense of five, make that ten, harder to get gettables.
It isn’t even 2022 yet and word is seeping out incrementally, as the Washington Post reports, that the now dominant omicron variant of covid appears to be less severe than the delta strain. Is it possible that the iron curtain of covid may lift with enough time before the elections? News on covid will evolve daily for the next ten months until the 2022 elections, so don’t get cocky or complacent.
One lesson as I roll out this installment’s five additional gettables is that although there is only a year before the 2022 elections, there IS a year before the elections.
Time enough for covid and inflation to ease, for supply chains to open up, for the enacted $1.2 trillion infrastructure package to be more visible to the public it benefits, for Manchin and Biden to come to terms on how to Build Back Better, for the public to appreciate Biden’s accomplishments, and for the investigations into sedition committed by notable GOP lawmakers last Jan. 6 to bear the fruit that we know is thriving on the vine.
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| Lotta livin' to do |
6. Iowa Incumbent Republican Chuck Grassley still has a lot of livin' to do to become the oldest person to serve in the U.S. Senate. At 88 years old, he’s a few months younger than Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California. Grassley will be 89 as of election day. Feinstein’s seat isn’t open until the 2024 elections, and as a way to keep her campaign committee active, she’s filed paperwork indicating she’ll run again. Both are years behind the bar Strom Thurmond set by remaining Senator of South Carolina until he retired in 2003 as the only member of either chamber of Congress to reach the age of 100 while still in office. Iowa has been slip slidin’ away since Dem. Tom Harkin retired from the Senate in 2014. For 30 years before that, back to 1984, Iowa sent one Republican, Grassley, and one Democrat, Harkin, to the U.S. Senate, and Democratic candidates won every Presidential election but one. When Harkin retired, Joni Ernst won the
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| Slip slidin' away |
open Senate seat and was re-elected in 2020. Iowa bleeds red now, and controls the governor’s office and both state houses, allowing Iowa to engage in voter suppression tactics, as I’ve documented before. Bleak, due in part to a state Democratic Party, whose closely-held secret of ineptness leaked out nationally when they botched the bellwether Democratic caucuses in 2020. Yet, the state party continues to usurp control over the campaigns of Senate candidates. To be seen if they do again. This time, the Dems have a clear internal frontrunner for the nomination to oppose Grassley in former Congresswoman Abby Finkenauer . They also have three other candidates since a fourth withdrew last month. As the year ends, there are 660,000 registered Republicans; 610,000 registered Dems. Active Independents hold the power. They number 576,000. Iowa is red, can you show us some
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| Roses are red |
7. Alaska Incumbent Republican Lisa Murkowski has been one of Alaska’s senators since 1980, when her dad left the seat to become governor. She, Susan Collins, and Mitt Romney are the three GOP senators most often mentioned who might be inclined to break the Republican stone wall on legislation. They formally recognized Biden as president, and after all, Murkowski voted to convict Trump of inciting the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. For that, in March, she was officially censured by the Alaska GOP Central Committee, which resolved to find a GOP alternative to her in the buildup to the 2022 election. Trump jumped right in and has endorsed a Republican to oppose Murkowski. She’s campaigning as a pro-life Christian. Last year, Alaska voted for a non-partisan primary system with ranked choice voting, in which the top four names on the ballot, regardless of party, advance to the election. That means that on the non-partisan primary ballot, there will be Trump’s hand-picked choice and Murkowski, whom Trump’s candidate has, in Trump-style, dubbed "Biden’s Chief Enabling Officer," and whichever other candidates surface. Ranked choice voting is designed to encourage candidates to run and discourage negative campaigning, a tough challenge when Trump has a bullseye on Murkowksi. To make matters quirkier, Manchin has endorsed Murkowksi all the way from West Virginia presumably over any to-be-announced Democratic candidate. Quirkier yet is that Sarah Palin has floated her candidacy and plans to run…if God wants her to. Oh yes, the Democrats. A Washington Post columnist is staking out the position that a Dem can win, so I won’t be the first. The Dems have many options, the most obvious Al Gross, who lost for the Senate in 2020, though he raised a state record of $19.5 million in funding. His Twitter account self-identifies in part as an orthopedic surgeon and commercial fisherman. Wikipedia heralds one of his achievements as having the first bar mitzvah in Southeast Alaska. Though Alaska is considered a red state and Trump won in 2020 with 53% of the vote, in 2016 he won with only 51% of the vote. In the spirit of ranked choice voting, bring on all comers. This caveat: In ranked choice voting, once the final four candidates from the primary get to the election, the ones with broadest appeal tend to have better chances of winning. As fans of Northern Exposure know, life
is nasty, brutish and short, the universe is a hostile place, and the Declaration of Independence doesn’t promise happiness. I’m going to enjoy this one.
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| Northern Exposure wisdom |
8. Kentucky Incumbent Republican Rand Paul deserves whatever he gets. He supports a Constitutional amendment limiting Senators to two terms. He’s served two terms. He’s running again. He’s not in favor of self-imposing term limits. That would result in some senators leaving office and others staying. Not fair.
Charles Booker, a former Democratic state representative, is seeking to enforce term limits the old fashioned way, by defeating Paul in the 2022 election. Booker ran in 2020 to take on Mitch McConnell, Kentucky’s other senator and defacto leader of the GOP (sorry, Donald) and lost in the Democratic primary. So he knows the campaign territory and the funding lanes. In his first fundraising quarter (Q3 2021), he raised $1.7 million from 55,000 individual donations. Not a bad start. Kentucky is a red state and it’s Mitch McConnell’s state. It’s also a state with a Democratic governor, Andy Beshear. During the recent tornado devastation that pummeled Kentucky, Beshear was visibly empathetic and ever-present. The Louisville Courier Journal featured a photo essay documenting Beshear and the Lieutenant Governor handing out shoes to victims in Western Kentucky, a Republican stronghold. The tornado has thrown Paul into a precarious position. He, like McConnell and Beshear immediately petitioned Biden for federal disaster relief. In Paul’s case, it presented a dilemma because he’d vocally and legislatively opposed relief in many situations, invoking the fiscal conservative mantra that relief funds should be offset by budget reductions elsewhere. For instance, in response to Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017, and even voting against aid for first-responders who answered the call on 9/11. A video of one of Paul’s speeches on the Senate floor is being circulated throughout Kentucky and beyond: "People here will say they have great compassion and they want to help the people of Puerto Rico, the people of
Texas, and the people of Florida, but notice they have great compassion with someone else's money." In time for Christmas present, Booker’s campaign came up with a clever video, The Grinch who stole Progress.
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| Grinch who stole progress |
9. Missouri Incumbent Republican Roy Blunt is retiring. When he announced, he became the fifth GOP Senator to move on. USA Today framed the story this way: Sen. Roy Blunt won't run for reelection, complicating Republicans' bid to retake the Senate. Missouri has become a red state, flaming red in the case of the other senator Josh Hawley, who defeated two-term Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill to become, at 39, the youngest member of the Senate.
Hawley has become a force to be reckoned with. On Dec. 30, 2020, he said he would object to counting the electoral votes for the presidential election and he became the first senator to announce formal opposition to Biden’s election. The day before the Jan. 6 insurrection, he tweeted that while he was in Missouri, “Antifa scumbags” came to his DC home and threatened his wife and daughter. Local police reported that the protests were peaceful. A photo of Hawley raising a fist at the Jan. 6 insurrection has become iconic. Recently, almost a year later, the Kansas City Star’s editorial board published a piece urging the Senate investigative committee to “use every tool it has to explore Hawley’s role in the chaos.” The reason Hawley figures into the 2022 senate race is that he and Trump complicate the GOP selection process in arriving at a standard bearer. Will a Hawley/Trump-oriented nominee emerge from the GOP primary in August, and what homage will be paid in the process considering that Hawley seems to be a more glaring liability for Republicans than Trump? As of the Sept. 30 reporting period, five GOP hopefuls have raised nearly $1 million or more each to run that gauntlet. As for the Dems, McCaskill is not running. "Nope. Not gonna happen. Never. I am so happy I feel guilty sometimes," she’s tweeted. Got it? As with the GOP but without the gauntlet, the Dems have a number of announced candidates. Only one, Lucas Kunce, a 14-year Marine vet, has raised more than $1 million. Another, Scott Sifton, a former state legislator, is getting there. If you can’t show me, it doesn’t mean a thing in Missouri. Hit it, US Navy Band’s Country Current.
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| Missouri, Show me |
10. Louisiana Incumbent Republican John Neely Kennedy is a sanctimonious and unapologetic embarrassment. He was one of six Republican senators who voted to sustain an objection to Arizona's electoral votes presented by Ted Cruz and Rep. Paul Gosar during the counting of electoral votes last January. His recent interrogation of Saule Omarova, Biden’s nominee to serve as Comptroller of the Currency, was hilarious in how inane he chose to be. You have to watch it to believe it, and pay attention to how Omarova managed to hold back her reaction to how bizarre his line of questioning, in which he addressed her as comrade, was. Bring back Senator Joe McCarthy, Joseph Welch and the call for basic decency. Louisiana uses a unique election system, often called the jungle primary, in which all candidates
run in one election regardless of party affiliation. If a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, they win. If not, the top two face off. Louisiana is a deeply red state. Trump won with nearly 60% of the vote. Yet it has a two-term Democratic governor in John Bel Edwards. So there’s hope. Luke Mixon, a political newcomer, has announced he’ll take on Kennedy. At this point, Mixon is the hope. Kennedy is the embarrassment. Louisiana, Louisiana. Your time to wash him away, your time to wash him away.
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| Louisiana |
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