From a longtime TPM Reader in Maine …
Nate Silver pegs ME-2 as the tipping point district for Democrats to take the House. The GOP incumbent is in his second term and he and Trump won by 10 points in 2016.
BUT this is also a district that Obama won twice. It’s supported referenda on minimum wage increases and Medicaid expansion.
It turns out the backstory to Brian Kemp’s accusation against the Georgia Democratic party is about as stupid as you could imagine. According to this report, a voter found the vulnerability, alerted an attorney for the plaintiff’s in one of the on-going lawsuits against Kemp’s office. That lawyer alerted the attorneys for Kemp’s office. There were apparently a couple lines of communication. See the details here. But the gist is this. There was a security vulnerability in the system Kemp’s is responsible for securing. His office was alerted the vulnerability. Then instead of focusing on fixing it he put out a press release accusing the state Democratic party of trying to “hack” the state system. Shocking and awful and about as bad as you can imagine.
An update from a TPM Reader in Tennessee. It’s an interesting update on a lot of fronts, much as the one I posted over the weekend from Maine. But one key point is the importance of political organizing, building organizational capacity at the state and local level, even if a lot of the results may only show up in future elections.
I wanted to send you a quick update from the deep red state of Tennessee. I don’t know if Democrats will win any new seats here, though Bredesen has a shot at it and we should pick up some state legislative seats. But I wanted to let you know that Democrats are energized and more importantly ORGANIZED here like never before.
A brief note on reader reports I have and will be publishing. In the nature of things some of them will be very rah-rah. That’s natural for people heavily involved in organizing in the final days of a campaign. That’s just as it should be. Do not assume by what I publish that I’m validating anyone’s predictions, positive or negative, implicit or explicit. My interest is getting reports from people who are in the nuts and bolts of get out the vote and organization- and capacity-building.
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From TPM Reader AC in Georgia …
You are undoubtedly getting a massive number of emails from across the country, and especially the most contested races. I thought I’d throw in a few cents, fwiw.
We live in John Lewis’s City of Atlanta district, but we’ve been canvassing heavily in the burbs — GA-6 and GA-7, both competitive House races in increasingly Asian and Latinx communities (Gwinnett County), as well as the southern suburbs of Clayton County, which are majority African American. Much of this organizing has been done through the Working Families Party (which you no doubt know from NY politics, and is trying to build a base in the South) and the New Georgia Project (founded by Stacey Abrams herself as the sort of ACORN-ish nemesis of the GOP vote-suppressing crowd).
This is an ad (“Like a Girl”) for MJ Hegar who’s running against Rep. John Carter (R-TX). I’m not sure whether it’s getting a heavy run on TV. But Hegar has massively out-raised Carter. So I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be. Cook rates this a “Likely Republican” district, so well on the outer margin of the possible for a Democrat. As far as I can tell though it hasn’t been polled.
Ad after the jump … Read More
I’ve been waiting so long for this. You’ll remember that one of the big scammers in the US Attorney firing scandal, which was really a voter suppression scandal, was a guy named Bradley Schlozman, a character who was just as democracy-malevolent as Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams but somehow outdid them both in pure hapless gooberism. Well he’s back, as the lawyer representing the official trying to find ways to make it hard to vote in Dodge City, Kansas. John Light has our full Schloz report and retrospective (sub req) here.
If you really need an additional Schlozman fix watch this video of Sen. Leahy slapping Bradley around in congressional testimony in 2007. Video after the jump …
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There are now three states in which the total “early vote” is larger than the entire vote (early and election day) in 2014. Those states are Texas, Nevada and Arizona.