VA-Monmouth: Gillespie +1

[IceSpear]

Even though it's an outlier, it's pretty embarrassing for Dems that this is even close. If Hillary was president Gillespie would probably be a shoo in.

[IceSpear]

Even though it's an outlier, it's pretty embarrassing for Dems that this is even close. If Hillary was president Gillespie would probably be a shoo in.

Why is that? This is Virginia. It was probably always going to be close.

2009 wasn't close. Neither was the 2008 Senate race.

Gillespie is facing massive anti-Trump/anti-GOP headwinds in a lean D Clinton state with 2 Dem senators and a Dem governor. Granted, this is mitigated somewhat by governor's races tending to be less partisan than federal races, but still. It's remarkable that he's still in the game at all considering those headwinds. If Hillary was president it's probably safe to say it would either be a neutral or pro-GOP environment.

[IceSpear]

Even though it's an outlier, it's pretty embarrassing for Dems that this is even close. If Hillary was president Gillespie would probably be a shoo in.

Maybe yes, Maybe no. Virginia has become pretty inelastic, stuck between D+1 and D+6 for all races between 2005-2016, with the exception of the 2008 senate race, which was "Moderate Dem vs. Total Gadfly", and the 2009 gubernatorial election. However, in the long-term nationally, it is probably better strategically for dems that they lost the presidency. With Trump as President, dems have a chance at breaking even in the senate in '18, maybe even a net gain of 1 seat. With Hillary as President, the GOP would have a shot at 60 seats.

They still have a shot at 60 seats now, lol. We really have no idea what the political environment will be like in a year. At least with Hillary we would've gotten a SCOTUS seat and a veto pen. It's pretty strange how, according to common sense and the polls, we're currently in a pro-D political environment that rivals if not eclipses 2006/2008, yet actual election results have not lined up with this reality outside of a couple crimson red seats Dems didn't try in (KS/SC.) It seems like every time Dems actually try in a race, they end up bungling it somehow (GA, MT, and now possibly VA.) Hell, even in NJ the race is defaulting to a generic D vs. generic R margin despite Trump AND Christie's toxicity in the state. Good lord, Dems couldn't even beat a guy who literally assaulted a reporter the day before the election, LOL. I have to laugh at that otherwise I'd cry.

It seems to be a fairly consistent trend that Dems do very well in hypothetical polls of races months/years in advance, then completely fall apart on the actual day of the election or in polls taken close to it. This happened with Hillary, Ossoff, Quist, Feingold, most of our incumbents in 2014, the generic ballot polls in 2013, and the list goes on. And it spans the entire ideological spectrum, so don't give me any of that muh Hillary wing vs. muh Bernie wing crap. Feingold was the Berniebros' hero before most of them even knew Bernie's name, yet he lost by a far bigger margin than Hillary did in Wisconsin in a race he supposedly had in the bag for over a year. Quist was also from the "Bernie wing" and got thumped by an assaulting carpetbagger from New Jersey.

[IceSpear]

@IceSpear: In case you're not aware, the official excuse for Dems not being able to beat Assaulterforte in MT (I refuse to call him by his real name after his actions), is that most of the vote was cast during early voting.

I'm pretty sure most Democrats agree that it had more to do with the fact that Quist by all accounts proved to be a piss-poor candidate despite initially looking solid on paper.

Why is it that the Dems need stellar candidates to win, but the GOP can nominate and elect Trump, Greg Gianforte, Roy Moore, Roy Blunt, Sam Brownback, Pat Roberts, Thom Tillis, Rick Scott, Paul LePage, etc. etc. without repurcussions?

I think Dems need to start accepting that deplorables are unwinnable and Republicans are far more "locked in" than Democrats are. Times have changed drastically since Akin/Mourdock, both of whom were exceptions to begin with. If Democrats routinely nominated candidates as piss poor as that above list we'd be a permanent minority. Even lazy but otherwise harmless milquetoasts like Martha Coakley and Anthony Brown end up losing in the most Democratic states in the country. When Dems imported some rich guy to run in an evenly split upstate NY seat, something Republicans do on the regular with occasional success, he lost by like 57 points, lol. The double standard is real.

[IceSpear]

@IceSpear: In case you're not aware, the official excuse for Dems not being able to beat Assaulterforte in MT (I refuse to call him by his real name after his actions), is that most of the vote was cast during early voting.

I'm pretty sure most Democrats agree that it had more to do with the fact that Quist by all accounts proved to be a piss-poor candidate despite initially looking solid on paper.

Why is it that the Dems need stellar candidates to win, but the GOP can nominate and elect Trump, Greg Gianforte, Roy Moore, Roy Blunt, Sam Brownback, Pat Roberts, Thom Tillis, Rick Scott, Paul LePage, etc. etc. without repurcussions?

I think Dems need to start accepting that deplorables are unwinnable and Republicans are far more "locked in" than Democrats are. Times have changed drastically since Akin/Mourdock, both of whom were exceptions to begin with. If Democrats routinely nominated candidates as piss poor as that above list we'd be a permanent minority. Even lazy but otherwise harmless milquetoasts like Martha Coakley and Anthony Brown end up losing in the most Democratic states in the country. When Dems imported some rich guy to run in an evenly split upstate NY seat, something Republicans do on the regular with occasional success, he lost by like 57 points, lol. The double standard is real.

Deplorables, per Hillary's comments, are half of Trump's supporters. 46% (Trump's NPV total) * .5 = 23% of the country consists of deplorables. Quit acting like deplorables are 40% or something.

I happen to think Hillary was being very generous and diplomatic with that comment.

[IceSpear]

Atlas is once again being biased for a Republican. There are two other polls out that show Northam leading, so this one is the outlier out of recent polling.

Well, Roanoke is junk and should be ignored. The other has Northam ahead, but still shows a significant narrowing of the race since their last poll. My posts were mostly referring to how the race was close at all, not how Gillespie was ahead/gonna win. I still think Northam is ahead and the favorite.

[IceSpear]

They still have a shot at 60 seats now, lol. We really have no idea what the political environment will be like in a year.

Historically that is highly unlikely. Even in a favorable midterm, the party that controls the White House almost always has trouble ousting incumbent opposition party Senators. It's not to say Democrats won't lose some, but 8 would be GOP wave numbers and with Trump in office it's hard to argue even for a neutral year when he is digging their party into a ditch with the electorate.

It's undeniable the Republican Party's strength right now, but that came from a succession of favorable election years under what was an unpopular Democratic president (save for his entry, reelection and leaving office). Republicans aren't invincible, rather I think that 8 years is a long time and that is how long it has been since Republicans had a deeply unpopular president wrapped around their necks.

As it stands now, it's actually pretty remarkable things went downhill for Republicans so fast. It took Republicans a lot longer to start posting consistently comfortable leads in the generic ballot than it did for Democrats in 2017.

we're currently in a pro-D political environment that rivals if not eclipses 2006/2008, yet actual election results have not lined up with this reality outside of a couple crimson red seats Dems didn't try in (KS/SC.) It seems like every time Dems actually try in a race, they end up bungling it somehow (GA, MT, and now possibly VA.)

To be fair, Georgia's race was not really a friendly district - there are a lot more that are better targets and with electorates more friendly to Democrats. Coming in at around Clinton's numbers could have been the best Ossoff could do at this point, given how fast the district moved towards Democrats already. As for Montana, well even as he assaulted a reporter, most of the vote was already in at that point. Had he done it maybe a week or two prior, we could be having a different discussion. Suffice to say that there is a reason Trump picked incumbents from these districts, and not, say, people like Coffman, Upton or LoBiondo.

Point is, those Congressional races were all in tough, deeply conservative districts, ones Republicans probably wouldn't even expect to lose in a wave. If you look at the performance of Democrats in the oodles of legislative special elections, they have made decent gains and over-performed quite a bit. I think the average of it is +11 or +12 points better than they should, which even surpasses most of the generic ballot leads.

There was a Cook article (link) recently that went over something I've been saying for a while now, and that is that Virginia's gubernatorial race isn't the one to watch. It's the HoD races. That is where people's default opinions / opinions of the president tend to play out. It's easier for a single Republican candidate to wage an effective campaign for a single high-profile statewide race, but all those smaller races that people are largely in the dark about are where you see a potential wave building. So far Democrats have been posting pretty tall leads in the HoD generic ballot, which could translate to substantial gains. Maybe not enough to flip it, given all the incumbents Republicans have, but enough to use 2019 to build a majority.


I get your pessimism, I think it's warranted in some respects (NJ Democrats should be performing better given the state's leanings, but oh well), but after the Obama years, I find the energy on the left and current special election results (as a whole) rather encouraging

Normally that would be true, but the map is so stacked this time that even in a "neutral" year the Republicans would probably gain quite a few seats. Dems are having to defend a lot of deep red territory which could still be very vulnerable even in a Dem wave, and our prospects for gains are limited due to nearly hitting our ceiling in this class after 2012.

I'm glad Dems are crushing it in the generic ballot polls. But if it doesn't translate into actual results, then it's worth nothing. The only thing Hillary's 20+ point leads in the 2013-2015 polls got us was a lesson that early polls are totally worthless.

Is it safe to say that GA-06 is a race the Dems would almost certainly win in any scenario where they flip the House? I'd think so. Close but no cigar isn't gonna cut it, particularly since there's hardly any margin of error due to egregious gerrymandering. I think Republicans have a point about moral victories. I'm sick of them. I want some actual victories. The massive swings in KS/SC from the Trump/Clinton margin cannot be understated, and if replicated across the entire country it would make the 2008 and 2010 waves look like ripples in the kiddy pool. But then when we actually needed only the tiniest swing to win the Georgia district, it failed miserably.

Murphy and Northam matching Clinton's margin in their respective states isn't really going to give me much hope for 2018, much less if one or both of them either fall below Clinton's margin or, god forbid in Northam's case, lose.

You bring up some good points about the legislative and HoD races though. It'll be interesting to see how those turn out.