Is this the year when experts are going to be proven on the dime with their predictions and the conventional wisdom — that the Democrats are poised to lose the Senate and President Barack Obama will go down in history has being a President with some of the lousiest mid-term election results in American history? Or will the experts and conventional wisdom be wrong again, and the experts quickly try to move away from their previous (wrong) predictions and do what they accuse politicians of doing: changing the subject?
A sign that the experts may have something this time comes from (at present) Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who says the Democrats have to win Iowa to hold on to their majority. And a new poll shows Iowa breaking strongly for the GOP.
If Joni Ernst beats Rep. Bruce Braley in Iowa on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he expects to kiss the Democratic majority goodbye.
The Nevada Democrat said if Braley wins in Iowa, Democrats will do “just fine.” And if they lose? Say hello to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Reid said in a conference call Saturday with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
“Joni Ernst would mean — coming to the United States Senate — that Mitch McConnell would be leader of the United States Senate, who agrees with her on everything. Think of what would mean for our country,” Reid said of Ernst, repeatedly attacking her positions against raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.
Caitlin Conant, a spokeswoman for Ernst, replied: “Reid says Democrats will be ‘just fine’ if Braley wins, but Iowa can do better. Reid is only backing Braley because he supports Obama’s agenda of higher taxes, more debt and Obamacare.”
The Hawkeye State is being viewed increasingly as a national bellwether in the battle for the Senate, and Ernst has maintained a narrow but stubborn edge in recent polling. Reid said he was confident that Democrats could pull out tight races in New Hampshire and North Carolina but left Iowa as the “critical” question mark in Democrats’ hopes.
In typical fashion, Reid laid into Ernst and tied her to the billionaire Koch brothers. He laid out Democrats’ defense of Braley as essential to “protecting the people of America from these insidious groups,” then attacked Ernst for skipping out on an editorial board meeting with the Des Moines Register, which endorsed Braley.
Joni Ernst has charged to achieve a 7-point lead over Democrat Bruce Braley in a new Iowa Poll, which buoys the GOP’s hope that an Iowa victory will be the tipping point to a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate.
Ernst, a state senator and military leader, enjoys 51 percent support among likely voters. That’s a majority, and it’s her biggest lead in the three Iowa Polls conducted this fall. Braley, a congressman and trial lawyer, gets 44 percent, according to The Des Moines Register’s final Iowa Poll before Tuesday’s election.
“This race looks like it’s decided,” said J. Ann Selzer, who conducted the poll for the Register. “That said, there are enormous resources being applied to change all that.”
Go to the link to read it all.
But the highly perceptive Martin Longman does make a good argument that THIS LADY has not sung yet.
What’s consistently missing from these kinds of analyses is that the main contest in Iowa on Tuesday is the governor’s race, and all the polls show that the incumbent Republican governor has an overwhelming lead, perhaps exceeding twenty percentage points. So, given that the biggest race on the ballot is not remotely competitive, we shouldn’t expect the early voting numbers to look good at all for the Democrats.
And they do look pretty bad if you look at just the raw numbers of registered Democrats who have voted relative to registered Republicans and compare the difference to past elections. Normally, the Democrats bank a much bigger advantage during early voting. But, as I have already said, the Register’s analysis shows that the Republicans have cut into this advantage to a significant degree by getting their Election Day voters to cast their votes early. Democrats are doing a better job of getting new voters to the polls.
The real story out of Iowa is that there is a very large universe of voters who are going to vote for the Republican governor despite not being registered Republicans, and a very large segment of these Branstad voters are not going to vote for the lunatic Joni Ernst. This set of pro-Branstad anti-Ernst voters is made up of independent and Democratic registrants, and their size will determine the winner of the Senate race. There will even be a few registered Republicans in this group, albeit Iowa is not Kansas.
When the leader of the state party in a very popular incumbent governor, all other candidates from that party who are running for statewide office should be able to win easily unless there is something desperately wrong with them, and there are definitely a few things desperately wrong with Joni Ernst. Her lunacy is putting what should be a slam dunk election at risk. She’s literally on the verge of blowing it in humiliating fashion.
Right now things are looking gloomy for Democrats on the media narrative front, which usually means Democrats won’t vote because a)some Democrats feel it’s only worth voting when they think they will win b)some Democrats become disheartened and stay home if their party doesn’t deliver on all they wanted then bemoan the new reality later when Republicans in power use every iota of power they are legally allowed to do (and perhaps even then moresome) c)some Democrats are single-issue voters who will decide to punish their party and stay home and then bemoan the new reality later when Republicans in power use every iota of power they are legally allowed to do (and perhaps even then moresome) d)polls show Democrats are losing Hispanic voters this cycle e)polls show Democrats are losing young voters this cycle.
Although some analysts are now hedging their predictions, it looks bad for the Dems. A cross-section of takes on what we will find out actually happened later in the week:
–The country’s most accurate election forecaster and analyst (he is the anti-Dick Morris) the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball this week declares “Bet on a Republican Senate Majority.”
—Stuart Rothenberg writes that “President Barack Obama is about to do what no president has done in the past 50 years: Have two horrible, terrible, awful midterm elections in a row.”
–Democrats are reportedly counting on their edge with women to help control their losses.
So the questions become:
Does Reid know something we don’t know?
Is Reid trying to send the fear of God Mitch McConnell into Democratic voters to have them get out the vote?
Or is what Reid knows what many experts suggest they through their analysis already knows?
Who’s in an echo chamber this time, the Democrats or the Republicans?
Or has the whole country now become one big, fat media echo chamber?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.