Senate 2014

Last Monday we offered to give away a rare, collectible platinum record award for Enya's Paint the Sky with Stars. Today's your last chance to "win" this contest.

Even House progressives tell me it's Hoyer's turn to be leader next-- doom!Adam Green of the PCCC pointed out when Landrieu was handily defeated by some hack GOP nonentity Saturday that the last of the Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party who prevented the public option in the Affordable Care Act-- the others being Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln-- had all been driven from office within 4 years; I think he left o

Just so you know, Peter Stavrianos served as Chief of Staff for South Dakota Senators George McGovern, Jim Abourezk and Tom Daschle from 1962-1995. Stavrianos holds a BA and MA in political science from Harvard and UC Berkeley respectively. He's been retired since 2005 but served as an occasional adviser to Rick Weiland's campaign. This is his analysis:Most Democrats ran hard toward the muddled middle in the 2014 elections.

"We have a huge problem: People do not think the recovery has affected them, and this is particularly true of blue collar white voters. What is the Democratic economic platform for guaranteeing a chance at prosperity for everyone? Voters can’t articulate it.

With a very few exceptions, it was congressmen from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Wall Street whores who fight alongside the Republicans against working families-- who got the short end of the stick Tuesday. Strong progressives in both Houses tended to win.

No surprise that McConnell won. And not a surprise that that was the very first race called last night. The Democrats had a weak, inauthentic, poll-driven candidate who didn't inspire anyone who didn't already hate McConnell or who wanted a family friend of Bill and Hill to win or just a generic woman in office. McConnell won by a bigger margin than most pundits were predicting-- 754,777 (55.7%) to 557,652 (41.2%).

DSCC Executive Director Guy Cecil will reap big rewards for his incredible string of abject failures yesterdayGuy Cecil, is the Executive Director of the DSCC. He wants to run the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

Do fascists now control the Senate GOP? Curtis Haas and Ted CruzFormer Colorado congressman and virulent racist Tom Tancredo wrote on some fringy, far right website that if the GOP captures the Senate today the GOP leadership should move immediately to impeach President Obama. So? Who cares what a crackpot like Tancredo, a private citizen with absolutely no mainstream credibility, has to say?

-by Gaius Publius As we move to election day, I'd like to offer the following as a quick scorecard, a list of Senate races to watch. In the following table, the first seven races (bolded) are those marked "competitive" by the New York Times in an interesting interactive write-up. The second group (Roman font) lists races I'm interested in, for a variety of reasons. In some, the Republican is likely to win (for example, McConnell, Collins, Capito). In others, the Democrat is given at least a chance (Pryor, Landrieu).

Last week we talked about how Republicans were unleashing a barrage of attack ads against weak conservative Democrats, like John Barrow, for voting with Republicans. Democrats who crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans to cut Social Security benefits for retired people are now being bombarded with ads-- that are true, regardless of the disingenuous source-- pointing out that they are the enemies of working people.