”...I know that he’s a busy man…”

Yeah, impotently watching the useless <strike>House of Lords</strike> Senate not do anything must just be an amazing drain on his time.  Poor man…

***

If Reid’s defeated, but the Democrats retain the majority in the House of Lords (which will leave freshman Senator Angle - uggg! - just another face in the useless crowd of do nothing Republicans), who is the next useless Democrat who’s slated to become Senate Majority Leader?...

Why didn’t Reid start attacking earlier?
Why don’t the Democrats in general fight back?  It’s maddening.

I saw someone on facebook today whining about how her husband’s insurance costs have tripled, so can someone please explain to her why Obamacare is horrible.  She really doesn’t understand that her husband’s insurance tripled b/c it’s a for-profit insurance company and that most of the Obamacare reforms haven’t even taken place yet. 

Republicans are more than happy to let people believe insurance rate hikes are Obama’s fault, when they would have happened even if the bill hadn’t passed.

I’ve seen others saying crap like “Hey Mr. President!  Why aren’t your fellow dems running on passing that health care bill?”

Really, they should, since it’s the Republican bill from 94.  I understand that they are afraid to, but they’ve pissed off their base by wimping out and they are apparently happy to let Republicans frame every issue and invent facts.

The Republican plan if they win is to shut down the government.  That’ll help!

I’m pissed.  They deserve to lose for being rightward leaning wimps.  And when they lose the MSM will crow about how the Tea Party now has a mandate and the Dems just moved too far to the left and away from Americans.  Steve Huntley in the Sun-Times wrote the op-ed today saying just that bullshit:  How could Obama go from someone who was so good at giving speeches to being so out of touch?  Why did he move so far to the left and away from those who voted for him.

I mean, fuck it, people voted for him because they wanted the country to move to the left.  People are pissed b/c he didn’t follow through on his promises.  Others are pissed b/c they don’t understand shit.

“Keep government off my Medicare” 
“If we lose an election, it was stolen by evil socialists and we should take up arms!  Because peaceful elections are unAmerican!”

While I have some optimism about Senate Majority Leader Schumer being a lot less wishy-washy than his predecessor, the fact that Schumer will get that job as a direct result of a whackjob like Angle getting elected to the U.S. Senate gives me little comfort.

Nobody is excited about voting for Harry Reid, and I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of his votes will come from people who are voting against Angle more than they are voting for him. As detached from reality as most of her positions are, Angle is wildly popular among the hardcore wingnut base of the right. Historically, the candidate whose base affirms him or her more usually wins… which is why Angle looks very likely to win that race. There are pro-Angle people, anti-Angle people, and anti-Reid people. There aren’t too many pro-Reid people. Reid’s loss will be his chickens coming home to roost, because you can only dismiss your party’s most active base for so long until they eventually dismiss you.

I think Angle wins this race, but I’ll be extremely grateful if Nevada voters prove me wrong. I don’t think Harry Reid deserves to win, but I think America is even less deserving of having Sharron Angle foisted upon us.

My milquetoast Senator, Dick Durbin, will be next if Dems remain in control and Reid loses.

I’m ready for a blue state Democrat leading the Senate, in principle.

Murrow Fan, will you be giving out “Murrow Spinning in His Grave” awards after the election. Anyone who choses your handle must be a news historian geek.

Politico, being wingnutty, takes a skeptical tone towards Reid’s accusations that Angle speaks in code and wants to eliminate the vast majority of the federal government, with a special eye towards services that it actually provides people.

This reminds me of Jay Rosen’s post on the “church of the savvy”—I’m guessing Politico knows what Sharron Angle is saying and has decided she’s just telling the rubes what they want to hear to get elected.  It’s the same way a lot of journalists decided George W. was just telling Saddam what he had to hear to comply with weapons inspections.  There’s a tendency among journalists to decide that anytime politicians say they’re going to do something extreme, it’s just political theater and anyone who takes them at their word is hysterical and naive.  Of course, when the politicians end up doing that very thing, journalists will be the first to tell you you shouldn’t be surprised—and you can’t get them on their failure to take the extremism seriously early on because it’s hard to prove an omission.

The good news is that Reid is still in this. I’ve been lurking at SwingStateProject lately, where people have been crunching the numbers for early voting, and so far, it seems to be favoring Reed very slightly. This is no guarantee that Reid will win, but I’m hopeful.(I’m also still hoping that the “polls aren’t catching younger voters with cell phones” theory holds up. )

That said, it’s true that Reid is pretty lousy as a campaigner.

I think Reid will win by a larger margin than most of the polls give him. He’s got an excellent machine behind him, and Senate Dems need someone as worthless as him to lead them, so that their constant capitulation can be plausibly seen as the result of incompetence rather than the cooperation with the other half of the Corporate/Military party that it actually is.

Why don’t the Democrats in general fight back?  It’s maddening.

Why should they?  They vote where the money is.

Grayson is worth $30 million personally.  He can afford to engage in his hobby of, you know, representing Americans.

I have my own reasons for not loving Harry Reid, but I am a Democratic Socialist who votes for Democrats because they are not Republicans.  What I wonder is why so many people in Nevada apparently hate Harry Reid.  Can it really be the economy?  Do people believe that their US Senator can cause or prevent a recession?  Are there some other issues that causes Nevadans to hate Reid?

It might just be the economy, James. There is an article we read for a polsci class about how Congressional districts with higher than average shark attack rates in an election year vote against incumbents. When people are worried, they vote to through the bums out, regardless of whether this makes sense.

@alysia:  I thought Amanda made a good point a couple of posts ago about how maybe the economy gets too much credit in discussions like this one.  What if there’s only one shark attack in a county, but the coverage of the shark attack is prolonged and deafeningly loud?  This year, the personalities on Fox have been shrieking about one manufactured emergency after another, predicting American collapse.  It’s frightening for those who believe Fox, and it’s frightening for those of us who see people believing Fox (and stockpiling guns and gold and talking about the blood of tyrants).  Even if the economy were humming along, I have complete faith that Fox would find some way to make sure that Americans, one way or the other, were frightened and miserable and felt unsafe.  When a democrat is in office, that’s pretty much their job.  (I’m basically parroting Digby’s great post from a while ago, where she wrote about the fatigue liberals develop when faced with such aggressive and widespread ignorance.)

ryang—IIRC Amanda’s point was about rightwing terrorism. Of course, converntion can be wrong, but bad economy=incumbent losses is one of the most etablished trends in political science. I don’t think there has been a single example of the incumbent party in the whitehouse keeping it during a recession sincem FDR who was able to convince people that the recession was not his doing. And before FDR it was still a very rare occurance.

I think the “why don’t the Dems fight back/speak up” is the most maddening thing about the last two years.  I watched Obama on Jon Stewart and wanted to scream, “Thanks for listing all the things your administration has done. That’s nice. So WHY AREN’T YOU TALKING ABOUT IT, LOUDLY AND OFTEN???”  I just caught a small bit of “This American Life” tonight on NPR and they were talking about this very thing. I had to switch off before they said if they knew…. my guess is they don’t know, either.

Caren @2, we must have the same Facebook friend; I had that exact conversation this week.  Of course her insurance rates are going up; the insurance companies CAN and WILL before they’re forced to stop. What part of “for profit” and “that’s why we have HCR, since the insurance companies obviously can’t control themselves” do these people not understand?

I have to hold with ryang, above, and through her with amanda and digby.  There is something much more than ‘bad economy’ going on.  In addition to what those three writers mention, we should consider that the battle cries against Obama & the Democrats (socialism, etc.) started weeks into the administration and have not really changed since.  At that time, no one knew what was going to happen with the economy nor what exactly Obama & the Democrats were going to do.  A review of the wikipedia entry on the tea party puts its beginnings in January and February 2009.

We have a few things operating at the same time:  FOX and the right-wing propaganda network have been pumping a race and ethnicity based rejection of Anything Obama since Day One, Democrats who apparently saw no reason to do anything to counter it, and a corporate press/media that refuses to report what the tea party really is, instead accepting and promoting their own narrative.

I hate being negative, but I’ve been watching this right-wing thing since the 70s.  I don’t see it being beaten until the generations of Americans that make up the tea party die out.  Cf. Max Planck:  A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Don’t know if this helps but this post sums up Mid-Term election political science nicely:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/78761/how-tell-if-obama-blew-the-election-or-if-it-was-blown-all

  The basic point is that political pundits read too much ideology into elections and don’t place enough emphasis on the structural factors of whether its a mid-term election, where the President’s party usually lost seats; how exposed is the incumbent party (i.e. how many seats does the incumbent party hold that would be normally held by the opposite party), and personal income growth.

  These structural factors basically meant that the Democratic Party was going to loose seats regardless of how they government. Since its a mid-term, chances are that the Democratic Party would loose seats just like in most mid-term elections. This is especially true since many seats that the Democratic Party holds are traditionally Republican seats. The residents of these districts were bound to get anxious regardless of how the Democratic Party government. The only thing that would have helped Democratic politicians would be a better economy. Now governing in a more liberal fashion at least on economic issues might have helped but this would only blunt loss rather resulted in gain.

Here is a post from political scientist Jonathan Bernstein regarding his opinion on Harry Reid’s effectiveness as Senate majority leader:

  http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/2010/10/question-day-answers-2-senate-leaders.html

  The basic point is that Reid has done an excellent job as a Senate leader and its rather hard to imagine that anybody could have done better from a liberal point of view. The job of Senate majority leader is two fold. One is to ensure that something resembles the Party agenda passes while getting the votes of Senators that really don’t want to vote for a particular piece of legislation. Reid had the added challenges of having to deal with unanimous opposition from the Republicans and being required to run for re-election in a campaign that was going to be tough. Democratic senators from conservative states did not want to vote for the public option. Even if popular with the population at large, it would be incredibly unpopular with most of the people that would be voting for them in mid-terms. Since even the most principled politicians would prefer to remain in office more than anything else, it is unlikely that politicians would do things that they can be used against them in a re-election campaign.

Tea Party activists are hardened partisan operatives. The people who decide elections are swing voters who tend to be low-information voters that are not heavily invested in the political process. It is these voters and not teabaggers who are likely to vote to throw the bums out because of a bad economy. It is possible (and I think probable) that the right wing would be flipping its shit right now if the economy was soaring, but it is the independent voters who are going to throw the Dems out of office.

Lee—there is also the issue of regression towards the mean. The Dems one an unusually high number of seats the last 2 cycles, which means we had more weakly held seat to lose.

I made out with Sharon Angle at a party.

sincerely

larry sinclair

How is it that the Senate Majority Leader who got ObamaCare and the stimulus plan passed is being regarded as so useless by the liberals here?  He needed sixty votes every time, and he managed it, and even got Arlen Specter to switch parties.  We Republicans only wish that Harry Reid had been as ineffective as y’all think he is!

“How is it that the Senate Majority Leader who got ObamaCare and the stimulus plan passed is being regarded as so useless by the liberals here?”

as it says in the title…

too little, too late

Yeah, passing the Republican healthcare plan from 94 is a real liberal accomplishment…

And he only ever needed sixty votes because of his own spineless incompetence, so no I’m not impressed.

People should really link what I posted in Comment 18 and should also read other posts on that blog. It really helps make sense of what could and could not be done. America isn’t a parliamentary system and bills are rarely if ever perfect when first passed. Social Security took years of hammering and reform before it got to its current level. Same with Medicare and Medicaid.

FWIW, here is a link on why Reid and the Democratic Party couldn’t force the Republicans to do a Mr. Smith style filibuster:

  http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/2010/01/live-filibuster-one-more-time.html

Short version, because of the way that the actual filibuster works, a live filibuster would hurt the majority over the minority.

Actually, I am pretty sure that it is our silly Constitution that says point blank that anyone who escapes the womb on US soil is a US citizen. But what do I know? I am just a devotee of the socialist space bar.

I’m wracking my mind trying to come up with a Greek word meaning “hubris” that is not in fact hubris, but rather a type of hubris. (Unless corwin had intended to type the Ancient Greek ὕβρις or hybris, the first time, although that is also not technically a type of hubris…. The mystery continues.)

I do not think that all conservatives are stupid. Only that stupid people who comment on pandagon are consistently conservative. This is such an obvious truth that I don’t see why anyone would dispute it.

I’m not sure if the comments are messed up but I’ll try again:

I’m scared.

I’m too sick to work or even go to school (I tried) and need social security disability payments, and hopefully in the future medicaid to cover the costs of my doctor visits and prescriptions, basically cover what keeps me alive.

If the republicans shut down government or destroy the safety nets how are people like me supposed to live?

People are going to die if they carry out their threats and I don’t know what can be done about it.

“If the republicans shut down government or destroy the safety nets how are people like me supposed to live?

People are going to die if they carry out their threats and I don’t know what can be done about it.”

R.T., people dying is a feature, not a bug.  If you aren’t white (male), Christian, and wealthy, then they want you to either GTFO, or shut your mouth and accept the way things are in our Capitalist Paradise.

Never forget, these were the same people who were thrilled when Hurricane Katrina wiped out a bunch of poor Black folks in New Orleans.  Their “pro-life” beliefs begin with ejaculation and end with birth…

Fuck ‘em all. I voted straight party-line Green except for the bonafide Socialist running for Barbara Boxer’s seat. I like Barbara Boxer; she’s one of the few Dems in the Senate who doesn’t capitulate to the Republicans, but I had the electoral wiggle-room to go farther left, so I did.
I’ve been saying forever if we’re going to shift the Obsidian window back to where it was before Reagan and make Democrats act like Democrats again, the left needs to embrace its wingnuts as the right embraces theirs. Ours aren’t anywhere near as near as unreasonable. If the Greens ever got enough votes to get public funding, D.C. would collectively shit itself.

The difference snobographer is that their enough Rightists to elect rightist wingnuts to office. It should also be noted that rightists got to this point by taking over the GOP, not by voting third party. Its not clear that there are enough people willing to take a risk in any particular district to vote Greens into office.

There are enough leftists to elect leftists to office, but the political and media narratives for the last 20+ years have been that the left needs to keep voting for conservative Democrats for fear of electing worse Republicans. So now we’re left with this one-party system that uses LGBT and reproductive rights and social security as electoral cudgels.

The answer isn’t to futiley engage in trying to elect Greens as a party. It’s to find every far leftist who wants to run for dog catcher and town council and vote for him as a Democrat. Get enough of gem I local office, and pretty soon it seems “normal.” I mean, come on, how hard can it be to drum up a few votes for your local left wing gadfly ?

Of course, this implies that liberals want to use power and money, two things they seem almost congenitally uncomfortable with.

Whenever Dems lose, the message is move to the right. They never ever ever go after the 2-5% voting Green or what have you; the message is always that we are a center right country and they need to go after the most moderate segment of the population. Furthermore, the media are lazy above all other things and they have already wrote the stories for every election for forever. The more people vote Dem, the more liberal we are, the more people who vote repub, the more conservative we are. There is absolutely no nuance in the American political discussion. Look at how the Healthcare debate played out. If you add the people who sad they opposed healthcare because it was not enough to the people who supported healthcare, it ended up a majority, but that never made it through the discussion, instead the message is that American’s didn’t want health reform.

Tyro has the right idea; we need to promote the most liberal possible candidates for state and local offices, but it needs to be smarter than that. We need to try to elect the most liberal candidate a district will tolerate. Herseth-Sandlin is a conservative Democrat, but she is loads better than dumbass conservative Kristi Noem who will likely beat her in 2 days. But when we get a conservadem in a liberal district, we need to primary the shit out of them. For example Donna Edwards ousted a blue dog from the very liberal suburbs of DC in a primary there—we need more of that.

I also think that Soros has the right idea when he decided to support cause campaigns instead of political candidates; candidates have to follow public opinion whereas cause campaigns can work to change it. Instead of Dems being afraid of the rath of independent voting homophobes we need to make politicians of both parties afraid to cop to being homophobes or anti-choice and make “privatization” a dirty word.

In sum, liberals need to 1) always vote democrat 2) primary conservadems when the district is liberal enough to handle it 3) volunteer/donate money for/right op-eds for/etc to causes and never political parties.

It’s rather difficult to go after the 2% Green vote, as they’ve already decided that there’s no reason to compromise.  So how would you go for them?

Whenever Dems lose, the message is move to the right.

When it comes to the mainstream media, the message is always move to the right, regardless of which party wins the election.

Not even 24 hours after Obama won the 2008 presidential election, people like Limbaugh and Coulter were saying that McCain lost only because he wasn’t nearly conservative enough, and the GOP in general lost because Dubya hadn’t conservative enough. Funny how the same people that kept George Bush’s balls in their mouths for eight straight years had no problem throwing him under the bus once he was out of office in an absurd effort to maintain the myth that the GOP was still the party of fiscal conservatism.

I never imagined two years ago that I would be saying something like this, but George W. Bush is beginning to look like a bleeding-heart liberal compared to many of the teabagger assholes running for Congress this year. I believed in 2008 that the GOP couldn’t possibly become more delusionally detached from reason and logic than they had become under Dubya, yet here we are two years later, and they have proven me quite wrong.

The Tea Klux Klanners of 2010 are every bit as kooky and dangerous to this country as were the John Birchers of 1960. I am grateful that we have not seen the amount of actual bloodshed today that was tragically witnessed several times throughout the 1960s, but I’m quite fearful that it’s only a matter of time until another Tim McVeigh type goes for his moment of infamy.

If you add the people who sad they opposed healthcare because it was not enough to the people who supported healthcare, it ended up a majority, but that never made it through the discussion, instead the message is that American’s didn’t want health reform.

Absofuckinglutely. Hearing wingnut relatives spouting off about the unpopularity of HCR made me want to pull my hair out, because they honestly believed that the 65% (or whatever the number was) who disliked the final HCR bill shared their reasons for disliking it. Utter bullshit. I don’t know the exact breakdown, but I’m pretty sure that at least 40% of those opposed to the final HCR bill were opposed to it because they felt that it didn’t go far enough.

The media took the group that opposed HCR because they want no government intervention whatsoever in our broken healthcare system and lumped them together with the group who opposed HCR because they didn’t think the government would be involving itself enough in our healthcare system under the final plan. And so the narrative becomes “2/3 of Americans say they are not happy with the HCR bill that was passed by Congress in 2010” as if all of those people are in agreement about the best solution, when in fact they couldn’t have been more opposed in their beliefs about government involvement in our healthcare system.

Tyro and Alysia have it right, liberals need to elect the most liberal person possible to have position possible.

  To Tyro, I wouldn’t say its entirely that liberals fear using money and power. Another element is that many liberals seem to disregard the local and state elected offices as unimportant. The focus on the prizes of the House, Senate, and Presidency and through them the appointed federal offices and judgeships. The view seems to be that change will come faster through federal rather than local and state offices. This view is more than a little mistaken. The federal government can’t do shit for same-sex marriage and to legalize same-sex marriage in all fifty states will either require a Supreme Court decision or fifty-state slog. Also, a lot of decisions regarding housing, public transportation, education, and other liberal causes are made at the local and state levels.

  However, you are right and fear of using money and power, especially the latter, seems to make many liberals squirm. Its probably residue for the battles of the 1960s.

Another element is that many liberals seem to disregard the local and state elected offices as unimportant.

I really don’t know if this is true. It might be. But I don’t know that liberal groups like EMILYs List and others ignore local and state offices. Another is that lots of liberal groups are simply more practical-minded: liberals don’t necessarily care if their favorite town council member might be against abortion, as long as he gets stuff done, whereas conservative activists will be quick to stack the school board with creationist anti-abortion activists, even if they have no idea how to read a school budget.

Murrow Fan, I think that having Bush in office took the edge of the crazy. Bush, to his credit, did make an effort to emphasize that the war on terror was supposed to target the radical fringe of Islam and not Islam itself or all muslims. I thought it was disingenuous and dumb at the time, but I have come to see how important it was to have a conservative opinion maker at least making token gestures towards not being racist.

Lee—I HATE how people completely ignore state and local races. They were something I researched a bit in college, and so many of our state legislatures are run by people who are whatever the politically correct term for those divorced from reality is.

For example I saw this ad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYjeQabhm_w on sioux falls tv today. It is for the guy running for sec of state in SD and features the candidate ranting about washington takeover of SD elections. In light of this controversy http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephanie-woodard/south-dakota-election-sca_b_732278.html where a large segment of the native american population of the state is likely to be disenfranchised. However, the vast majority of voters don’t know who he is, what sex of state does, and what the fuck this commercial is about, but it will have a huge impact on life in that state.

Not to mention that information on state and local politics is difficult to come by and thus has a higher cost to obtain so state and local elections are dominated by elites to a much greater extent than national elections, which are pretty elite dominated.

Tyro—I think that the vast majority of people on both sides of the aisle disregard local elections, but as I mentioned above, local elections are elite dominated due to the high cost of becoming informed. I think that a lot of times your christian fundamentalists might find out about some minutae of the school budget and become involved whereas most folks aren’t paying attention.

Liberals are also much more likely to completely ignore certain regions of the country. Repubs dominate rural areas, and libs dominate the cities, but most campaign donations come from cities, regardless of that city’s politics, so Republicans can’t just completely neglect of have any infrastructure in san fransico or where ever the way dems just ignore vast swaths of the country. It means that we end up with a lot more rightwing dog catchers than leftwing ones.

The answer isn’t to futiley engage in trying to elect Greens as a party. It’s to find every far leftist who wants to run for dog catcher and town council and vote for him as a Democrat.
Get enough of gem I local office, and pretty soon it seems “normal.” I mean, come on, how hard can it be to drum up a few votes for your local left wing gadfly ?
Comment #36: Tyro</blockquote>

And then the DNC would make them all behave like moderate Republicans in order to make them “electable.” As for electing your local left wing gadfly, I’m in San Francisco, and Pelosi’s far from the most liberal candidate available every election, and the electorate of this district is way more liberal than Pelosi is.

Progressive and liberal voters just need to get a clue about their position in the electoral college and stop being chickenshits.

There’s a big difference between casting enough votes for a third party candidate to send a message to the Democrats (remember us? your base? we’re over here!) and perhaps make that third party eligible for federal campaign funding and “trying to elect” a candidate.

It’s rather difficult to go after the 2% Green vote, as they’ve already decided that there’s no reason to compromise.  So how would you go for them?
Comment #38: Crissa

Vote for their candidates until the Democrats have to have public debates with them. I’m not interested in going after the Green vote. I’m interested in making the Democrats act like progressives again or admit they’re Republicans.

http://www.correntewire.com/obama_administration_confused_over_whether_birth_control_healthcare#more

I think Angle wins this race, but I’ll be extremely grateful if Nevada voters prove me wrong. I don’t think Harry Reid deserves to win, but I think America is even less deserving of having Sharron Angle foisted upon us.
Comment #3: Murrow Fan on 10/29 at 03:49 PM

This particular Nevada voter has been canvassing for Harry Reid since July 4th of this year. Nearly every weekend since then I’ve done at least one, sometimes two, 4-5 hour canvassing walks. In the week before Early Voting began (which was two Fridays ago) I started doing evening walks after work, despite having to work a lot of mandatory overtime throughout this period. Once Early Voting started I canvassed about 9 of those 13 days. I have also been walking for Teresa Benitez-Thompson, the Assembly candidate who first got me involved in this election cycle, back in March. Today I did my last walk for her, as we have good reason to believe she is OK. I have taken the next three working days off work, and won’t be back there until Thursday. Tomorrow and until the polls close on Tuesday my Reid campaign organizer totally owns me.

I typically avoid the horse-race stuff because frankly it either gives me false confidence or depresses me. I am in this because of what I believe in, and I put it that way to people who will talk to me. But sometimes I take a look around.

Lots of Assembly candidates we care about are OK. But not all; they are trying to keep a supermajority, because frankly Rory Reid who is running for Governor can only win by a sheer miracle. I keep meeting people on the streets who hope for that miracle as I would like to, but realistically we have to write him off and we are facing Sandoval as our next Republican governor. So even winning the Assembly and State Senate is not enough.

Especially if Nevada loses Senator Reid. So what are the odds of that?

This race should not be a squeaker. Either Senator Reid and the Democratic leadership establishment should have delivered enough bacon so that they would generally be secure, and Reid with his leadership position especially so. Or the Republicans should have elected someone who could pretend to be half-sane long enough to guarantee Harry’s doom, and I’d be focusing just on my favorite potential Assemblywoman, and maybe splitting off to support the guy who I could actually vote for here in my district—who is a good candidate and probably doing OK without me.

Instead we have this agonizing situation. Based on the demographics of the Early Votes (which ended last Friday) we know that more Dems than Republicans voted early, and that we have actually defied predictions by getting a higher Early turnout than in 2008. So we are optimistic.

Based on my personal canvassing experience on the ground—-I’ve first of all learned that it never pays to make assumptions about my experience at the door based on the categories my walk sheet indicates. I’ve had hellish times trying to talk to people who were listed as Democrats and remarkably good experiences talking to registered Republicans. It could be that this state is out of step with the nation in that they seem to take the idea of an ornery personal independence in politics very seriously here. But this has worked well for “Landslide Harry” in the past; he got that ironic nickname because his margin of victory in 2004 was numbered in the hundreds. And a certain number of that vital barely sufficient majority were Republicans, as has always been the case with every Reid victory.

I can agree with a Pandagonian consensus that there should be a more progressive and aggressive Democratic Senate Majority leader. But as a Nevada resident I cannot lose my only Democratic representative in Washington—our candidate for Congress is a fine woman but unfortunately the congressional district she is trying to win is everything outside of Clark County (ie Las Vegas) so again that’s pretty much written off—this regions Representative will continue to be whoever the Republicans nominate for some time to come. And Reid’s Majority Leader status is definitely a factor in winning over vital support and also motivating Democrats to actually show up and vote.

A lot of Republicans hate Angle. The core (people like my parents) love her. Angle has taken the typical modern Republican path of attacking Latinos and I have some hope this will be part of her downfall as it was for California Republicans. There are a lot less Latinos here in Nevada than in California but still quite a lot. Angle’s attacks on them are particularly ugly in their open and unnuanced demogougic bigotry. Perhaps if she does win it might lead to an eventual solidification of the Democratic party here as she continues to irritate them and we respond by getting more control of the state government. But meanwhile we’d be in a pitiful and dangerous situation.
...more…

What I wonder is why so many people in Nevada apparently hate Harry Reid.  Can it really be the economy?  Do people believe that their US Senator can cause or prevent a recession?  Are there some other issues that causes Nevadans to hate Reid?
Comment #11: jamesepowell on 10/29 at 05:33 PM

Remember, when I say I have some good experiences with Republicans on my canvasses, I am being sent to particular doors that our wizards have divined might be worth our effort. That said, some of the best talks I’ve had have been with these Republicans, whereas some of the most negative responses I’ve got regarding Senator Reid have been from Democrats. A few of these are clearly right-wing types that I have to wonder why they bother to call themselves Democrats at all (just as some though not all of those Republicans appear, based on what they tell me about their beliefs and concerns, to be natural Democrats). But the most common complaints I have heard is that “he doesn’t do enough for us.” And this is apparently from a leftist (left of the corporate-defined “center” anyway) slant. We wanted more New Dealy steak and some sizzle too; we’ve gotten thin rations and cold. As Harry Truman said, “give ‘em a choice between a Republican and a Republican and they’ll vote Republican every time.”

Reid is definitely a pro-business type of Democrat. There is a lot of talk (which I don’t follow) about how this that or the other thing is cronyism that benefits the Reids financially.

But just today while walking for my favorite Assembly candidate I met a woman who brought up Reid and spoke of how his office was a big help to her in getting her disability benefits. I know of general benefits Reid has delivered in this state. The trouble is of course that these only partially offset the deep crisis we are mired in. (Our current Republican Governor, Gibbons, has a lot of responsibility for these messes too, and I somehow doubt our future one will be much help there, and will probably move to obstruct offered Federal aid just as Gibbons has done, for the same reasons.)

Some Democrats saying they would grudgingly support Harry Reid in the Senate also said they would not support his son Rory for Governor, because the latter’s campaign for Governor the same year as his father is trying to keep his seat hurts the ticket. (Again it wouldn’t be that way if people either appreciated Senator Reid more, say if more had been delivered these past two years, or knew and liked Rory better. Unfortunately neither is extremely charismatic, nor are the policy benefits the Senator has delivered the kind that one can point to as spectacular, so instead they are indeed hurting each other. I hear that people will vote for the Senator but not for his son, to express their distaste of the idea of a Reid dynasty.

Regarding the basic idea of Amanda’s post—well, I don’t have TV so it is hard for me to judge whether Reid’s recent and presumably final assault on Angle is more substantial, but way back in July the negative anti-Angle campaign got going on the basis of her very shocking statements. (This was before she went all full-metal-jacket on the Latinos too, an ugly trend well-reported in the free Spanish newspapers I see and try to puzzle out in the taquieras I like). Eventually one of the top complaints I began hearing at doors was “I hate the negativity!” (I also met a few people determined to help, out of fear of what an Angle victory might mean).

So I am not sure that this recent “truth bomb” will have any particular effect—people will either already agree with what the Senator says, or they will write it off as yet more overblown negative rhetoric if that’s what they have a mind to do.

Anyway, I have come to think that despite Harry’s shortcomings from my viewpoint as a progressive, it is amazing that on a statewide basis Nevada ever elected someone as moderate as him in the first place, and until someone comes along with a lot more charisma coupled with a solidly liberal position to support instead, we are lucky to have him whatever he means to the other 49 states.

On that basis, this Nevadan is out there giving Harry his all and hoping for the best from his fellow Nevadans this Tuesday.

that a significant % of the NV voting populace would willingly cast their ballot for the empty vessel that is sharron angle, says more about them than it does about either sen. reid, or ms. angle.

as pogo sagely noted: “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Snobographer at 44: There is absolutely no evidence that DNC can or will even try to make liberal Democratic politicians vote like moderate Republicans. It had a very hard time controlling large swaths of Blue Dog Democrats and liberal Democrats during the HCR and Financial reform debates. If enough liberals or at least somewhat liberal Democratic candidates are vote into office than the DNC would conform to their liberalism for the sake of political power at the very least, just like the Machine Democratic politicians conformed to liberal policies when it became clear that this was the way to power. Re Tammany Hall and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Its not the most principled stance but it results in getting liberal laws passed.

  Alysia- Generally, I think that conservatives recognize the value of local and state positions more than liberals do. Even if they can’t impose conservative orthodoxy on the entirety of the United States, they know that through domination of local and state offices they can at least create their own little rightist paradises in pockets of America. Colorado Springs is pretty good example of this. Its the most maladministrated medium-sized city in the United States but to conservatives its a low tax utopia. States like South Dakota are examples of this writ large. Liberals seem generally uninterested in creating pockets of liberal utopia’s on a local or state level, although their are exceptions like San Francisco and the wider Bay Area plus Portland and maybe Seattle/King’s County. But usually, liberals are more focused on the entirety of the United States rather than a small part of it. But yes, liberals also have a bad tendency in avoiding most rural areas in the United States.

  Conservatives also seem to understand that by sitting on school boards, it makes it easier to indoctrinate children into conservative orthodoxy. Liberals would rather have people come to liberalism organically through their own thought than through indoctrination. It kind of makes controlling school curriculum problematic for liberals in a way it wouldn’t be for conservatives. Conservatives believe that people need to be taught conservatism, liberals think that if you give them the facts that they would naturally come to liberalism.

Lee, you may be right. It does sort of fit into the whole ideology of the the southern strategy; in order of states’ rights to imply the right to discriminate, they had to realize the importance of a state government that goes out and discriminates.

@49: Lee - Or, like I said, if they see enough of their base being siphoned off by an actual progressive party, who gets enough votes to get in on the debates, they’ll stop acting like Republicans.