Vermont's PVI is D+15 and Hillary beat Trump there 178,573 (55.72%) to 95,369 (30.27%). Trump won just one of Vermont's 14 counties (Essex, the least populated). Florida is a more swingy state, although the PVI is R+2. Although Obama won Florida both times he ran, Hillary gave up on the state's crucial 29 electoral votes. Trump beat her (narrowly)-- 4,617,886 (49.0%) to 4,504,975 (47.8%).
McConnell salutes West Virginia grassroots Republican votersThird party Super PACs spent $7,343,577 tearing apart Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race. $6,552,448 of that came from Mitch McConnelll's Senate Leadership PAC. McConnell had so sullied Moore's reputation that when he won the primary against the establishment candidate, he couldn't win the general election.
Thursday, A Progressive California, an independent PAC, aired its first television ad in support of Kevin de León for U.S. Senate. I watched it being played between segments on Chris Hayes' show and thought it was really great. Take a look above.With the help of their new coalition partners at the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, the new TV ad, titled "Act Like Democrats," is airing all across Los Angeles on MSNBC and CNN.
On Monday we looked at a new poll from Reuters showing that white educated voters who went for Trump in 2016 are less favorable towards him now and plan to take it out on Republican congressional candidates in November.
I was never “friends” with her, but before Kyrsten Sinema was elected to Congress we served on a board together. I didn’t know her well because I avoided her. I avoided her because she struck me as insane-- actually dangerously insane. It was a big board with a big table. I always tried to sit as far away from her as possible… in case she started acting out and killing people.
Matt Bai’s post at Yahoo News yesterday, Tired of winning yet? You're not alone., was hilarious. His low approval numbers can be attributed to the public being tired of so much winning.
Although Dana Rohrabacher is a special case we can look at below, basically there are no Republicans in Congress who are being primaried because they are too Trumped-up. The most Trumpified lunatics in the House-- take Matt Gaetz (FL) or Devin Nunes (CA) as perfect examples-- have no mainstream Republicans trying to take them out.
Angus King, an Independent and popular Senate incumbent, caucuses and generally votes with the Democrats. He's up for reelection in November. His ProgressivePunch lifetime crucial vote score is pretty miserable, closest to Missouri conservaDem Claire McCaskill, but slightly better than 3 Democrats, Joe Donnelly (IN), Heidi Heitkamp (ND) and Joe Manchin (WV). Still, his 67.71 score is considerably better than the least horrible Republican, Susan Collins (also from Maine), whose score is 26.24. The state's PVI is D+3-- but the Democratic Party is not exactly thriving there.
The Republican Party attracts bizarre crackpots and because of the nature of the GOP support system, sometimes those bizarre crackpots wind up as officials party nominees. Last night we saw the Illinois Republican Party mortified as Nazi Party leader Arthur Jones win their nomination in a Chicagoland district.
The first Republican candidate that Trump really got behind in a big way-- an actual test of his coattails vs his toxicity-- was Renee Ellmers in North Carolina's second congressional district. Ellmers was the first woman in Congress to back Trump and he reciprocated with an ad when she was challenged in a primary by George Holding and Greg Brannon.
