If the Democrats lose the Senate majority in November it will be because Harry Reid and DSCC chair Michael Bennet decided to concede South Dakota without a fight. So far Establishment Republican Mike Rounds has spent $2,941,991 on the race to win the seat being abandoned by Democrat Tim Johnson, while populist Democrat Rick Weiland has only raised $1,094,098 in total and spent $650,325.
UPDATE: John Walsh officially dropped out of the race this morning.When the DSCC under Schumer tried to insert a Beltway-oriented corporate DLC hack, John Morrison as the Democratic candidate against floundering Republican incumbent Conrad Burns in 2006, Montana Democrats rose up and slapped Schumer down by nominating insurgent populist John Tester (now Senator John Tester).
There is exactly zero chance the Democrats will take back the House in November. And there is not a single serious, non-senile person who will tell you that there is a chance. A few days ago we looked at some of the underlying reasons here, in an open letter to Nancy Pelosi: extraordinarily bad leadership. The situation in the Senate is not as hopeless, although the leadership at the DSCC this year is not what it was when Patty Murray ran the show in 2012 and swept the field.
Josh Kraushaar's National Journal post yesterday started off just right: "If Democrats fall a seat short of holding the Senate, there will be a lot of second-guessing on the one race that never materialized but should have held a lot more promise: South Dakota." But then he veered right off the rails.
The DSCC preview of the electoral cycle that they hand out to big contributors is as upbeat as they can make it. In the section on South Dakota, where Democrat Tim Johnson is retiring, the DSCC asserts that "Democrats and the DSCC are committed to holding Senator Johnson's seat next year and will devote all the resources necessary to elect a new Democratic senator in South Dakota.
The South Caolina Senate race may be more of a tossup than anyone realizes. With Patty Murray, the architect of the DSCC's stunning series of victories in 2012, having turned over the reins of the committee to one of the Senate's weakest, lamest and least capable members, Michael Bennet, there are ominous signs ominously pointing to the possibility that Democrats will narrowly lose the Senate this year.
Rick and RoundsThe Rapid City Journal is arguably the most conservative newspaper in South Dakota. And they are certainly more conservative than the Beltway operative who seems hellbent on handing control of the Senate over to the Republicans, DSCC executive director Guy Cecil.
The video above comes from a TED Talk Lawrence Lessig did last year. He contends, correctly, that we have lost our representative democracy and that we have to act to get it back. Choosing between garbage candidates like David Jolly and Alex Sink won't help anyone get anything back. All it will do is perpetuate the deterioration of American democracy.This short news story from the Associated Press this week shouldn't surprise anyone by it's specifics. But it is instructional nonetheless.
Monday we asserted-- and we stand by it-- that there's no legitimate reason to assume Shenna Bellows can't defeat Susan Collins in Maine. Although she vowed to Maine voters, she would only seek the Senate seat twice, she's embarking on her fourth run. And she's not even that popular. How does Susan Collins’ 2008 re-election vote (61%) compare with other Maine Senate elections? In 2006 (also a good year for Democrats) Olympia Snowe’s re-election vote was 13% higher at 74%!
The Republican civil war is pretty front and center and getting quite a lot of media attention. There is also something of a Democratic civil war brewing, a more ideological/less careerist based one. You may have seen sparks of it last week when the Wall Street owned ConservaDem group, Third Way, went on the attack against Elizabeth Warren and the progressive populism she espouses. Third Way, the Blue Dogs and the New Dems are the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.
