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thisdaynews · 7 years ago

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Breaking News: Hillary and Bill Clinton Go Separate Ways for 2018 Midterm Elections

New Post has been published on https://www.thisdaynews.net/2018/05/21/breaking-news-hillary-and-bill-clinton-go-separate-ways-for-2018-midterm-elections/

Breaking News: Hillary and Bill Clinton Go Separate Ways for 2018 Midterm Elections

For years they dominated the party, brandishing their powerful financial network and global fame to pick favorites for primary elections and lift Democrats even in deep-red states. They were viewed as a joint entity, with a shared name that was the most powerful brand in Democratic politics: the Clintons.

But in the 2018 election campaign, Hillary and Bill Clinton have veered in sharply different directions. Mrs. Clinton appears determined to play at least a limited role in the midterms, bolstering longtime allies and raising money for Democrats in safely liberal areas. Her husband has been all but invisible.

And both have been far less conspicuous than in past election cycles, but for different reasons: Mrs. Clinton faces distrust on the left, where she is seen as an avatar of the Democratic establishment, and raw enmity on the right. Mr. Clinton has been largely sidelined amid new scrutiny of his past misconduct with women.

Mrs. Clinton is expected to break her virtual hiatus from the campaign trail this week, when she will endorse Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York in a contested Democratic primary, her spokesman, Nick Merrill, confirmed — a move sure to enrage liberal activists seeking Mr. Cuomo’s ouster at the hands of Cynthia Nixon, the actress turned progressive insurgent. Mrs. Clinton has also recorded an automated phone call endorsing Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic leader in the Georgia House, who is competing for the party’s nomination for governor on Tuesday.

It is unclear whether Mr. Clinton will be involved in either race.

Mrs. Clinton’s stunning defeat in 2016 delivered a blunt-force coda to the family’s run in electoral politics, and many Democrats are wary of seeing either of them re-engage. They worry that the Clinton name reeks of the past and fear that their unpopularity with conservative-leaning and independent voters could harm Democrats in close races. And among many younger and more liberal voters, the Clintons’ reputation for ideological centrism has little appeal.

President Trump, meanwhile, has continued to level caustic attacks that have made the Clintons radioactive with Republicans. A Gallup poll in December found Mrs. and Mr. Clinton with their lowest favorability ratings in years.

So far, the couple have avoided high-profile special elections in Alabama, Georgia and Pennsylvania, and engaged sparingly in the off-year elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia.

Even in their former political backyard — in Arkansas, where Mr. Clinton was governor — there is scant demand for their help. In Little Rock, Ark., where on Tuesday there is a Democratic primary election for a Republican-held House seat the party covets, none of the four candidates running has reached out to seek the Clintons’ support, their campaigns said.

“I see the Clintons as a liability,” said Paul Spencer, a high school teacher running as a progressive in the Arkansas race. “They simply represent the old mind-set of a Democratic Party that is going to continue to lose elections.”

Still, Mrs. Clinton plainly maintains a following in the party and aims to help in corners of the country where she can. She introduced a political group, Onward Together, after the 2016 election, and has directed millions to liberal grass-roots organizations, like Indivisible and Swing Left. And she is in talks about campaigning for some Democratic candidates in the fall, likely in a cluster of House districts where she defeated Mr. Trump.

“We have to win back the Congress,” Mrs. Clinton said during a seven-minute speech Friday in Washington, at a women’s leadership conference organized by the Democratic National Committee.

Her interventions for Mr. Cuomo and Ms. Abrams are rare steps for the former secretary of state, who has rebuffed other requests for help and signaled even to close allies that she would not meddle in primary elections.

The difference in her approach toward the two races underscores the delicacy of her role: In New York, where Mrs. Clinton is popular and Mr. Cuomo needs help mainly with fellow Democrats, she intends to deliver her endorsement publicly, at a state party convention on Long Island. In Georgia, where Mrs. Clinton’s imprimatur could harm Ms. Abrams in a general election, the endorsement will be delivered only through phone messages to Democratic voters — making the appeal imperceptible to everyone else.

But Clinton associates say the bulk of her activities will be in the fall.

Former Representative Ellen Tauscher of California, a close ally who is on the board of Onward Together, said she expected Mrs. Clinton to campaign later in the season and cited Senator Dianne Feinstein’s re-election campaign in her home state as a likely choice.

“People she has supported for a long time, like Dianne Feinstein and others, know she’s with them,” Ms. Tauscher said.

Mrs. Clinton’s husband appears far less welcome on the trail, with his unpopularity among Republicans compounded by new skepticism on the left about his treatment of women and allegations of sexual assault.

Mr. Clinton is said to remain passionately angry about the 2016 election — more so than his wife — raising concerns that he could go wildly off message in campaign settings, several people who have spoken with Mr. Clinton said.

Democrats have been keeping their distance: During the special election for Senate in Alabama in December, Doug Jones, the Democrat who won the race, considered enlisting Mr. Clinton’s help before abandoning the idea as too risky.

When Mr. Clinton offered to campaign for Ralph Northam, now the governor of Virginia, Mr. Northam’s camp responded cautiously. Rather than headlining a public event, Mr. Clinton was urged to attend a fund-raiser already scheduled in the Washington area — a suggestion that offended the former president, according to people briefed on the awkward exchange. The Northam and Clinton camps discussed a church visit in October but failed to agree on a date.

Yet Mr. Clinton appears eager to engage where he can, holding an event last fall with Phil Murphy, now the governor of New Jersey. This year, Mike Espy, Mr. Clinton’s former agriculture secretary who is running for Senate in Mississippi, told a fellow cabinet alumnus, Rodney Slater, that he was hoping to reach Mr. Clinton. Minutes later, Mr. Espy has told associates, his phone rang: It was the former president, who launched into a monologue advising Mr. Espy on campaign strategy and pledging to deliver fund-raising help.

Angel Ureña, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton, said the former president has been focused on nonpolitical projects, including the publication of a thriller next month. Noting that Mr. Clinton left office nearly two decades ago, Mr. Ureña called it “remarkable” that questions were being asked about his role in the midterms.

“Candidates from across the country have been in touch about him supporting their campaigns,” Mr. Ureña said. “But we’re not past primary season, and he’s focused on the work of his foundation and his book.”

Mr. Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said she had been largely focused on her new political group, and promised “there will be more to come.”

“While Republicans are hellbent on focusing on the past, she is focused on the future,” Mr. Merrill said.

But Mrs. Clinton has stirred frustration among Democrats who hope she plays a muted role in 2018. Last year, she chose to focus quite a bit on the past, revisiting the particulars of her 2016 defeat in a memoir, to the consternation of other Democrats. And in a series of public speeches, she has offered cutting criticism of American political culture.

During a visit to India in March, she seemed to suggest that many women who voted for Mr. Trump did so because of pressure from their husbands. This month, Mrs. Clinton declared in New York that her support for capitalism had hurt her in 2016 — because so many Democrats are now socialists.

At least two Democratic women have nearly begged Mrs. Clinton to stay away from their high-stakes red-state Senate races. After Mrs. Clinton said in March that she won parts of America that are “moving forward,” unlike Trump-friendly areas, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri rebuked her.

“I don’t think that’s the way you should talk about any voter, especially ones in my state,” Ms. McCaskill said.

Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota was blunter when asked, on the radio, when Mrs. Clinton might “ride off into the sunset.”

“Not soon enough,” she replied.

Associates of Mrs. Clinton said she is aware of the political pressures that make her unwelcome in red states, and they do not expect her to charge into races where she is undesired. They generally anticipate she will focus on fund-raising.

Her bond with Democratic donors was on grand display last month: In late April, Mrs. Clinton convened a gathering in New York for the liberal groups backed by Onward Together, meeting for hours with organizers and donors at an airy conference center overlooking the East River.

Mrs. Clinton delivered an unsparing critique there of the Democratic Party’s political infrastructure: She said the left had failed to match Republicans’ enthusiasm for party-building and lamented what she called the poor state of Democrats’ electioneering machinery in 2016, according to several attendees.

“On the Democratic side, she talked about how we want to fall in love with the candidate and Republicans will fall in line,” said Cristóbal Alex, president of the Latino Victory Project, a group backed by Mrs. Clinton’s organization.

But Mr. Alex said Mrs. Clinton had not taken aim at the man who defeated her.

“I don’t remember her uttering the word ‘Trump,’” he said, “but so many others did and you couldn’t escape that context in this meeting.”

#A Gallup poll in December found Mrs. and Mr. Clinton with their lowest favorability ratings in years #and raw enmity on the right #bolstering longtime allies and raising money for Democrats in safely liberal areas #brandishing their powerful financial network and global fame to pick favorites for primary elections and lift Democrats even in deep-red sta #But in the 2018 election campaign #confirmed — a move sure to enrage liberal activists seeking Mr. Cuomo’s ouster at the hands of Cynthia Nixon #For years they dominated the party #has continued to level caustic attacks that have made the Clintons radioactive with Republicans #Her husband has been all but invisible #her spokesman #Hillary and Bill Clinton Go Separate Ways for 2018 Midterm Elections #Hillary and Bill Clinton have veered in sharply different directions #It is unclear whether Mr. Clinton will be involved in either race #meanwhile #Mr. Clinton has been largely sidelined amid new scrutiny of his past misconduct with women #Mrs. Clinton appears determined to play at least a limited role in the midterms #Mrs. Clinton faces distrust on the left #Mrs. Clinton is expected to break her virtual hiatus from the campaign trail this week #Nick Merrill #President Trump #the actress turned progressive insurgent. Mrs. Clinton has also recorded an automated phone call endorsing Stacey Abrams #the Clintons #the former Democratic leader in the Georgia House #They were viewed as a joint entity #when she will endorse Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York in a contested Democratic primary #where she is seen as an avatar of the Democratic establishment #who is competing for the party’s nomination for governor on Tuesday #with a shared name that was the most powerful brand in Democratic politics:

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colleesansmith · 7 years ago

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Hillary and Bill Clinton Go Separate Ways for 2018 Midterm Elections

Hillary and Bill Clinton Go Separate Ways for 2018 Midterm Elections Mrs. Clinton plans to endorse Andrew M. Cuomo for governor of New York this week. But elsewhere on the 2018 campaign trail, she and Mr. Clinton are not always welcome. https://ift.tt/2keNDRg

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phroyd · 7 years ago

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American presidents lie. They always have. Just Google “Lyndon Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin,” “Bill Clinton and NAFTA” or “George Bush and weapons of mass destruction.” Even Honest Abe likely told a fib or two.

But no U.S. president has ever lied as prolifically, constantly, insidiously and dangerously as Donald Trump. He never stops. He’s the Energizer Bunny of endless falsehood.

It’s enough to make even Orwell’s head explode.

Trump, who received votes from just one in four U.S. adults in 2016, claimed that he would have won the popular vote over Hillary Clinton were it not for the voter fraud of undocumented immigrants. The alleged criminal votes were never cast.

Trump called his 2016 Electoral College victory “The biggest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan.” It was no such thing.

Trump lied about the size of his inauguration crowd even as aerial photographs of the event contradicted his boasts.

He has repeatedly and preposterously claimed that the Latinx immigrant population is full of murderers, rapists and gang members. It is not.

Trump claimed that President Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” just before his 2016 election victory. They were not.

He claimed to have as president-elect negotiated a deal to “save 1,100 jobs” at a Carrier plant in Anderson, Ind. He did no such thing.

He absurdly concocted a terrorist attack that never occurred, in Sweden, during his first month in office.

He claimed that the head of the Boy Scouts called him to say his speech was the best ever delivered to the Boy Scouts Jamboree. No such call ever took place. Trump’s terrible oration was widely reviled.

Trump claimed to have fired James Comey because the FBI director mishandled Hillary Clinton’s email scandal prior to the 2016 election, not because he was continuing to investigate Trump and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. That was another baldfaced lie.

He claimed that white-nationalist and neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Va., were “protesting very quietly,” and that liberal and left counter-protesters “didn’t have a [protest] permit.” False and false.

Trump laughably told oil workers in North Dakota that environmentalists “didn’t know why” they opposed the ecocidal, petro-capitalist Dakota Access and Keystone-XL pipelines. Ridiculous.

Trump lied repeatedly and viciously about the number of people who diedduring and after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

He ludicrously claimed to have led a strong federal response to the devastating storm in Puerto Rico. (He gave himself a “ten.”)

Trump absurdly claimed that his former national security adviser Michael Flynn didn’t do “anything wrong.” Flynn was later convicted for lying about his communications with the Kremlin during Trump’s presidential transition.

Trump farcically claimed that Paul Manafort never played a major role in his 2016 campaign. (Manafort chaired the Trump campaign up through the Republican National Convention that year.)

Trump falsely claimed that a Justice Department inspector general report exonerated him of collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. The report did neither of those things.

Trump ridiculously claimed that Michael Cohen was never a big player in his career or campaign. Cohen was Trump’s longstanding personal attorney and “fixer,” and he too has been convicted on federal charges.

Trump has claimed to know nothing about the illegal campaign finance payoff of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Cohen exposed that lie this summer.

After Cohen turned himself in to federal authorities, Trump said that Cohen pleaded guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that “were not crimes.” False. The violations are indeed federal crimes.

Trump unbelievably claimed not to have known that his son and son-in-law met with Russians claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton in Trump Tower in June 2016.

Trump helped concoct the White House lie that the real subject matter of that June 2016 meeting was U.S. adoption policy.

He says that China “has been attempting to interfere in the upcoming 2018 elections.” There is no evidence to support that charge.

He falsely claims to be a self-made billionaire, something that The New York Times shows to have been a lie. (His father staked his entire business.)

Trump says that he and the Republican Party passed a “middle-class” tax “reform.” He certainly knows that they enacted a plutocratic tax cut, a great windfall for big corporations and the richest 1 percent.

Trump absurdly claimed before the tax cut that “we [U.S.-Americans] pay more taxes than anybody in the world” (we don’t) and that the tax “reform” would “cost me a fortune.”

He absurdly said that “public lands will once again be available for public use” while handing over 2 million acres to private corporations for coal mining, oil drilling, uranium extraction and other environmentally disastrous industrial activities.

He falsely claimed that he was legally compelled to order a “zero tolerance” border policy last spring that separated Mexican and Central American children from their parents.

In defense of his good friends atop the absolutist, head-chopping Saudi Arabian regime (which sends kill teams to torture, kill, and vivisect dissenting journalists in foreign embassies), Trump claims that Saudis have purchased $110 billion worth of military equipment from the U.S. and that this purchase creates “five-hundred thousand jobs,” later inflated to ““1 million jobs.” ”in the U.S. His numbers here are absurdly exaggerated.

He claims without evidence that there are “people of Middle Eastern descent” in the latest Central American migrant “caravan” moving through Mexico towards the U.S.’ southern border.

He baselessly insisted that “Democrats are paying members of the caravan to try and get into the U.S. to harm Republicans in the midterms.”

He has sent U.S. troops to guard the border on the absurd lie that the beleaguered caravan constitutes a “national emergency.”

He preposterously claims that it is the mainstream media, which he calls “the enemy of the people,” and not him that has created our current climate of hatred and violence—even as he applauds a Montana congressman for body-slamming a young reporter.

Trump’s evasion of responsibility follows a hate-filled campaign and 21 months of ax-grinding in the Oval Office that has seen him call immigrants criminal gang members, murderers and rapists, while maliciously describing his political enemies and media critics and journalists as “evil,” “low lifes,” “low IQ” and “the most dishonest people on Earth.” Along the way, the openly sexist Trump has referred to women as “animals,” “dogs,” “horse-face,” “fat” and worse. The white supremacist who killed 11 people in a Jewish synagogue last Saturday was egged into violent action by Trump’s ridiculous and hateful caravan rhetoric.

The Trump Lie Machine is going into head-spinning and soul-numbing overdrive as the midterm elections draw closer.

Trump claimed earlier this year that leftist violence will break out across the country if Democrats reclaim Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. The absurdity speaks for itself.

Trump said in Arizona recently that immigrants had illegally taken over a city council in California. The claim was complete nonsense.

Trump has recently and insanely suggested that people are “rioting” in California “to get out of Sanctuary Cities. …They’re demanding to be released from sanctuary cities.” (This may be the single craziest thing I’ve ever seen Trump claim. It is truly bizarre.)

Trump is ridiculously claiming the Democrats will kick seniors off health insurance, abolish insurance protections for people with health problems, destroy Social Security, abolish U.S. borders and (I am not making this up) give “illegal” immigrants “free cars.” That’s right: “free cars” for “illegals.”

Trump repeatedly—36 times across seven political speeches this fall—called the Democrats “radicals.” Of course, the Democrats are a deeply conservative, Big Business-friendly, imperial/pro-military, and depressingly centrist apparatus. There isn’t a single genuine radical in their entire party.

Trump says that the “new platform of the supposedly ‘radical’ Democrats is to abolish ICE” (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). That is flatly false.

Trump lies and distorts so relentlessly and profusely that tracking and fact-checking his false statements has become a full-time job for journalists at home and abroad.

One of these journalists is Daniel Dale, the Washington bureau chief of the Toronto Star. He calculates that Lyin’ Don has made four false claims per day since being sworn into the presidency 21 months ago with his hand on the Bible.

When Dale was first assigned the Trump beat in September 2016, he found the Republican candidate “so incessantly dishonest” that his habit of twisting and inverting reality required a specific focus “separate from the day-to-day news coverage I was doing.” Dale looked forward to being “freed from this [ugly] task” of covering Trump’s persistent untruths once Hillary Clinton prevailed, as was widely expected. Trump won “and so, [he] had to continue.”

What accounts for this endless mendacity and rhetorical manipulation? Speaking to “Public” Broadcasting System “NewsHour” anchor and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Judy Woodruff last week, Dale theorized that Trump and the Republican allies and outlets who repeat his outlandish and bogus assertions want to drive media coverage and political discourse away from topics they wish to avoid—health care, the Mueller investigation and “anything else the president doesn’t want us to talk about,” such as Trump’s still unreleased tax returns, climate change and the party’s regressive tax cuts.

Dale is on to something there, no doubt, but the real meaning of the president’s Twitter-amplified Fibby Pulpit is deeper and darker than mere diversion and partisan spin. As Chris Hedges suggests in his latest book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” Trump and his party’s continuing defiance of reality suggests that the United States is sliding into “corporate totalitarianism”:

Trump and the Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are intensified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. … But Clinton did not pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.

The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of ‘fake news.’ They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted them with the revoking of net neutrality. … “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed,” Hanna Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. …

The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. … Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit – only there never was a report. … The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. … When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, and depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s faith in threats and force.

Consistency is discarded. The Trump administration has cited “states’ rights” in trying to roll back federal requirements that out-of-date coal and nuclear plants be shut down, even as it endeavors to federally negate the state of California’s right to enforce comparatively stringent emission regulations.

Republican Congressional candidates run campaign commercials proclaiming their commitment to retaining the Affordable Care Act’s provision prohibiting health insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions at the same time that the GOP is viciously challengingthat provision in court.

Trump blames the nation’s bourgeois media and a timid, centrist Democratic Party for the hatred, incivility and demonization that pollute U.S. politics while he calls his opponents “evil” and celebrates violence against liberals and journalists.

It is important to understand, as Hedges does, that the Trump-led assault on veracity, evidence and our very ability to separate truth from falsehood has been able to gain traction only because a decades-long corporate coup has devastated and discredited public education, academia, organized labor and the legal and criminal justice systems. It has done all this and more while turning the Democratic Party into what the late Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin called the nation’s Inauthentic Opposition.

Think of this distinctively American “corporate-managed democracy” and “inverted totalitarianism” as the nation’s pre-existing authoritarian condition for the rise of an Amerikaner-style fascism.

In the face of what an authoritarian like Trump and his white-nationalist Republican Party have done over the last two years of one-party rule—an annulment of what’s left of the U.S. Constitution’s much-ballyhooed “checks and balances”—there’s no credible moral argument against the notion that progressives living in contested districts should choose the lesser of two evils in next week’s midterm elections. Adolph Reed Jr., Noam Chomsky and Arun Gupta’s warnings about the dangers of a Trump presidency have been richly born out. I, for one, should have paid them more heed.

Still, we on the left, what’s left of it, should nonetheless retain our capacity to be properly nauseated by a yard sign I recently saw in arch-liberal, super-blue Iowa City, Iowa. Surrounded by other, smaller signs with the names of a handful of dismal local and statewide Democratic candidates, it read “MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN: Vote.”

Please. The notion that the richly bipartisan corporate totalitarianism of which Trump is the apotheosis can be reversed, and the nation made “good” simply by voting Herr Donald and the Republicans out of office is a childish fantasy.

That, too, is a Great Lie. As marchers celebrating a rare legal victory over a white supremacist U.S. police state in Democratically controlled Chicago chanted last month, “The whole damn system is guilty as Hell.” It’s the whole damn system that must be democratized from the bottom up. From the dismal dollar Democrats, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, “P”BS, Tom Steyer, the Gates Foundation, the Brookings Institution, the CFR, the Atlantic Council, the Obama and Clintons on the so-called left, to the radically reactionary Republicans, the Koch brothers, the Mercers, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Fox News, the Weekly Standard, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, Breitbart, right-wing talk radio, the Sinclair Broadcasting Co., the Federalist Society and more on the actual right, imperialism, racial inequality and class rule have brought us to this menacing pre-fascist moment.

Paul Street

ContributorPaul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,…

Phroyd

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theliberaltony · 7 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

When building a statistical model, you ideally want to find yourself surprised by the data some of the time — just not too often. If you never come up with a result that surprises you, it generally means that you didn’t spend a lot of time actually looking at the data; instead, you just imparted your assumptions onto your analysis and engaged in a fancy form of confirmation bias. If you’re constantly surprised, on the other hand, more often than not that means your model is buggy or you don’t know the field well enough; a lot of the “surprises” are really just mistakes.

So when I build election forecasts for FiveThirtyEight, I’m usually not surprised by the outcomes they spit out — unless they’re so surprising (a Republican winning Washington, D.C.?) that they reflect a coding error I need to fix. But there are exceptions, and one of them came in the U.S. Senate race in Texas between Republican incumbent Ted Cruz and Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke. I was pretty sure that once we introduced non-polling factors into the model — what we call the “fundamentals” — they’d shift our forecast toward Cruz, just as they did for Marsha Blackburn, the Republican candidate in Tennessee. That’s not what happened, however. Instead, although Cruz is narrowly ahead in the polls right now, the fundamentals slightly helped O’Rourke. Our model thinks that Texas “should” be a competitive race and believes the close polling there is no fluke.

We’ll return to Texas in a moment, but first, here’s a table comparing the polls and fundamentals in the five Senate races where elected Republican incumbents are defending their seats. (We covered races with elected Democratic incumbents in Part 1 of this series and open-seat races in Part 2). As you can see, there isn’t really a lot of disagreement between the polls and fundamentals in these races:

Republican incumbents are polling about as well as expected

Forecasted margin of victory for Republican senators who are running for re-election, according to FiveThirtyEight’s fundamentals and adjusted polls as of Sept. 26

Forecasted margin of victory Race Incumbent Fundamentals Adjusted Polls Nevada Heller -0.5 -0.9 Texas Cruz -0.3 +3.8 Nebraska Fischer +15.1 +13.0 Mississippi Wicker +19.2 +16.6 Wyoming Barrasso +40.8 —

The Mississippi special election is not listed because Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is an appointed rather than an elected incumbent and our model treats races with appointed incumbents as open-seat races. There has been no polling of the Senate races in Wyoming.

I’m not going to discuss Nebraska, Wyoming or the regular election in Mississippi much further.1 You wouldn’t expect them to be competitive based on the fundamentals, and they haven’t looked competitive when polls have been taken there — although I wouldn’t mind seeing a poll of Nebraska, which hasn’t had a nonpartisan survey all election cycle or any polling at all since January.

I would note, however, that our fundamentals calculation doesn’t expect all Republican incumbents to be in competitive races just as a default — it has Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer winning by 14 percentage points and Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso winning by 41, for example. Rather, it’s factors particular to Texas that make the model think Cruz is a weaker incumbent and O’Rourke is a stronger challenger than usual. So let’s talk about Texas in more detail, and then we’ll loop back around to the other close race, Nevada.

Before this year, we treated incumbency as just another variable in our fundamentals model. That was a mistake, because there are all sorts of complicated interactions between incumbency and the other variables that go into the fundamentals. To take an obvious example, the margin of victory in a state or district’s previous election is a lot more meaningful when there’s an incumbent running than when there are two new candidates on the ballot.

So this year, we built separate fundamentals models2 for races with elected incumbents, compared with open-seat races. One of the most important differences is that a state or district’s overall partisanship, as measured by voting in elections for president or state legislature,3 is less important in races with incumbents. Something like presidential voting is a very useful indicator when you don’t have a lot of other data to go by. But in races with incumbents, we have a lot of information pertinent to the specific incumbent and his or her strengths. For instance, our fundamentals calculation for Florida’s 26th Congressional District knows that Republican Carlos Curbelo won the district by 12 points in 2016 even as the area voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton for president. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Curbelo will survive the “blue wave” this year. (He’s only a slight favorite for re-election.) But it does mean the presidential vote doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the district

Cruz, on the other hand, shows signs of being a weak incumbent — and O’Rourke shows signs of being a tough challenger. Here’s a detailed calculation of exactly what goes into the fundamentals model in Texas.

Some factors hurting Cruz have nothing to do with Cruz himself, but rather with the state of Texas. Historically, the incumbency advantage is larger in small, idiosyncratic states and smaller in larger, more diverse ones. This is why Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono’s incumbency advantage in Hawaii is much larger than Cruz’s in Texas or Sen. Bill Nelson’s in Florida, for example. In addition, Congress’s overall approval rating is low, which hurts incumbents in all states and all parties.

Still, Texas is a red state — redder in statewide elections than in presidential ones, in fact — and Cruz won by a fairly healthy (although by no means overwhelming) margin in 2012. That ought to be enough to offset a blue national environment as measured by the generic congressional ballot. If you add up the first four indicators in the table — incumbency, state partisanship, Cruz’s previous margin of victory and the generic ballot — they’d project him to win by about 9 percentage points.4

It’s the other factors that push the race toward toss-up status, however. When a challenger has previously held an elected office, they tend to perform better with each level higher that office is. To run for Senate, O’Rourke is giving up his seat in the U.S. House, which is a higher office than had been held by Cruz’s 2012 opponent, Paul Sadler, a former state representative. Strong incumbents tend to deter strong challengers from entering the race, but Cruz wasn’t able to do so this time. Cruz also has a very conservative voting record, one that is perhaps “too conservative” even for Texas. The model actually penalizes O’Rourke slightly for his DUI scandal, but because the scandal has been public knowledge for a long time, the model discounts its importance.

Fundraising is another influential factor hurting Cruz. Ordinarily, you’d expect an incumbent to have a pretty healthy fundraising advantage. Instead, O’Rourke had more than doubled Cruz in dollars raised from individual contributors as of the end of the last filing period on June 30 — an advantage that will probably only increase once the campaigns file their next fundraising reports, which will cover up through Sept. 30. (Our model considers money raised from individual contributors only — not PACs, parties or self-funding.) If fundraising were even, Cruz would still lead in our fundamentals calculation by 4 percentage points, but O’Rourke’s money advantage is enough to bring the overall fundamentals forecast to a dead heat.

One could get into some pretty good arguments about exactly how fundraising should be included in the model. Should out-of-state or out-of-district contributions get less weight, for example? Are Republican donors contributing less in the post-Citizens United era because they expect super PACs to fill in the gaps for them? Still, individual fundraising totals have one really nice quality, which is that they represent hard evidence — tangible action undertaken by individual voters. If you thought you could never trust the polls, fundraising might be one of the first things you’d look at instead. And the fundraising numbers have generally been really good for Democrats, in Texas and in other races for Congress, perhaps reflecting their enthusiasm advantage.

Now that you’ve read all those words explaining why the fundamentals look the way they do in Texas, I should probably tell you that they don’t actually have that much influence on our top-line forecast there. That’s because a lot of polling has been done in Texas, and our model doesn’t weigh the fundamentals heavily when it has a lot of polling. Nonetheless, the fundamentals help explain why it isn’t necessarily a surprise that the polling shows a close race in Texas or that O’Rourke has gradually been gaining ground. At the moment, Cruz leads in our adjusted polling average by 3.8 percentage points; adding in the fundamentals pushes the forecasted margin to 3.3 points, a close race.

Let me also show you the detailed fundamentals calculation for Nevada, which is a more straightforward race:

Republican Sen. Dean Heller is a fairly typical incumbent who should have a decent-sized incumbency advantage, and Nevada is a fairly average swing state. He’s drawn an experienced opponent in U.S. Rep. Jacky Rosen, however, who has raised slightly more money than Heller has — and the overall political environment is blue. All of that adds up to a race that “should” be a toss-up, which is exactly what the polls in Nevada show too. Nevada may not be as high-profile a race as Texas, but it’s just as important in determining control of the Senate.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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