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Election 2018 Thread (An Adult Finally Has the Gavel)


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8 minutes ago, LadySkinsFan said:

Liv Coleman, Democrat, running against Republican incumbent in Florida's 73th district Joe Gruters. 

 

She's a political Science professor at University of Tampa.

 

http://www.bradenton.com/news/politics-government/article196941039.html

 

As the husband of a teacher, I will be voting for her.  

 

She has no chance of winning. In  Manatee County I’m a super lib 

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6 hours ago, PeterMP said:

 

CNN is reporting in that drawing a "fair" map some decisions had to be made.  In the court's map, every one of those decisions appear to have favored the Democrats.

 

Which proves that the court was biased?  

 

Or proves that the existing map was deliberately drawn to provide maximum benefit to Republicans, and therefore, any change made, anywhere, will favor Democrats?  

 

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9 hours ago, Larry said:

 

Which proves that the court was biased?  

 

Or proves that the existing map was deliberately drawn to provide maximum benefit to Republicans, and therefore, any change made, anywhere, will favor Democrats?  

 

 

Did you read the story?

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Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) claimed that people who commit mass shootings are often Democrats during a Wednesday discussion about the Florida school shooting.

The first-term Republican congresswoman made the comment after criticizing the government for failing to act on several tips that might have prevented the deaths of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week.

 

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-congresswoman-claims-many-mass-225448030.html

 

 

Tenney herself is a top-tier target of the Democratic Party in the 2018 midterm elections. She was criticized last week after she deplored the focus on domestic violence allegations against former White House staff secretary Rob Porter, who resigned after one of his ex-wives released photos of a black eye.

“I’m not saying he’s innocent, but I’m saying we don’t know,” Tenney said. “He could be the worst guy in the world, but now we’re getting into prosecution as far as I know. I guess there was an issue about, maybe the FBI knew about it, but really, is this what we’re talking about at this point?” 

  •  
  • This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
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Conor Lamb, Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania district where former Republican Rep. had to resign when it was known that he asked his mistress to get an abortion.

 

Lamb, the Democratic candidate in a neck-and-neck special election on March 13, has to hope the people of Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District will likewise listen to what he has to say before judging him by his party affiliation. In this part of the state, where highway billboards sport Bible verses and the start of deer hunting season is a holiday, Democratic politicians tend to flunk doctrinal tests. Even though registered Democrats technically outnumber Republicans here by 70,000, Trump won the district by nearly 20 percentage points. Mitt Romney and John McCain posted similar margins. Former Rep. Tim Murphy, the outspoken anti-abortion Republican whose seat Lamb is running to fill—Murphy resigned after reports that he encouraged his married mistress to get an abortion after a pregnancy scare—won eight straight elections, the first six by double-digit margins and the last two uncontested.

 

 

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/18/conor-lamb-pennsylvania-special-election-profile-217018

 

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I am probably outside the mainstream with my analyses ( I usually am and tbh I'm quite comfortable there) but it still appears to me that there is a huge disconnect between the national institutional Democratic party and the grassroots fervor boiling up. The upper crusty Pelosi/ Feinstein/ Hillary factions seem to think they can coerce and coopt all that passion to serve their ends, dictating candidates by using funding as the carrot and the stick. I get that, it's the way things have been done for some time now and was effective in its day, but a great many of the parameters have shifted, altered and morphed all out of recognition so as to render that weltgestalt almost meaningless.

 

Take for instance the Virginia state voting, many candidates were dismissed out of hand and got no support or funding because they were told "You can't win there", yet they went on to mount campaigns anyway, crowd funding and friend resourcing in ways really never seen before. The worked the living **** outta social media platforms and got out there and pounded the pavement, knocked on doors and did what candidates ought to be doing, connecting to voters. There was an awful lot of winning that was in spite of the party, not because of it and the reaction by the DNC has been to run their asses off trying to get in front of the parade so they can claim they're leading it.

 

The institutional structure has been the party going to candidates, encouraging (aka bribing) them to run with promises of $$$ and airtime, done with a shortsighted mercantile view of running marketing campaigns for votes. The outcome is candidates that are from the start utterly beholden to the party. When Red State  et al swelled, their reaction was to try and bind Dems even closer to the party. The results speak for themselves, the Rs raged across the landscape.

 

Now we're seeing candidates declaring, touting their CV and ideals rather than their connections and warchests. The Womens March, Indivisible, Emilys List, MeToo, etc., have been energizing and empowering many women to step up and declare candidacies, choosing to run as Dems but largely not as a direct outgrowth of any allegiance to existing party hierarchy. IMO one of the essential elements will be candidates that do not depend on expensive TV ads that subsume everything else to chasing a buck, and leave them unfettered to have actual positions, actual ideals that are not held in thrall by overfunded fringe groups (on ANY of the fringes).

 

I am expecting the DNC is be savaged in the midterms, not by Rs but by grassroots fighting to seize power from the centralized authority and reclaim the party for themselves, to remake it into something very different, more passionate and powerful, with genuine ideals instead of just superior fundraising.

 

The Rs are just that, reactionary, there is little or no hope of them changing, the only possible chance the people have is through the D side and for that to happen the Ds need to be burned down and rebuilt into something very different from the Republican-Lite poseurs they have become.

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On 2/20/2018 at 2:33 PM, Kilmer17 said:

I think that the Legislature alone has the authority to draw the maps.  If the Courts new map creates a 12-6 Dem delegation, and the votes dont match that percentage, will the GOP have the same argument to make that the Dems are using now?   

 

Either way, the SCOTUS is going to rule on this issue before the next election.  

 

This particular case was based on PA state Constitution so SCOTUS already declined to intervene.

 

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/us/politics/supreme-court-pennsylvania-gerrymandering.html?referer=https://www.google.com/

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1 minute ago, bearrock said:

 

This particular case was based on PA state Constitution so SCOTUS already declined to intervene.

 

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/us/politics/supreme-court-pennsylvania-gerrymandering.html?referer=https://www.google.com/

Not quite.  They declined to intervene on the demand that the legislature redraw the maps.  They have not yet answered whether they will intervene on the map drawn by the PA Court.  That's a separate issue.

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49 minutes ago, Kilmer17 said:

Not quite.  They declined to intervene on the demand that the legislature redraw the maps.  They have not yet answered whether they will intervene on the map drawn by the PA Court.  That's a separate issue.

 

If PA GOP is challenging the new map based on some other alleged violation of the Constitution or Federal election law, then that will have to be sorted out.  But I was referring to the argument that the legislature, and not the courts, had to draw the map.  PA GOP already asked SCOTUS to take the case on the argument that Constitution only allows legislatures to draw the map, but cert was not granted on that issue.

 

I would imagine that PA GOP is mainly looking out for their own interest, but it is a bit of a catch-22 for the national GOP.  If this map is overturned because it overly favors one political party, what would that spell for all the other politically gerrymandered maps in the US?

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1 minute ago, bearrock said:

 

If PA GOP is challenging the new map based on some other alleged violation of the Constitution or Federal election law, then that will have to be sorted out.  But I was referring to the argument that the legislature, and not the courts, had to draw the map.  PA GOP already asked SCOTUS to take the case on the argument that Constitution only allows legislatures to draw the map, but cert was not granted on that issue.

 

I would imagine that PA GOP is mainly looking out for their own interest, but it is a bit of a catch-22 for the national GOP.  If this map is overturned because it overly favors one political party, what would that spell for all the other politically gerrymandered maps in the US?

Maybe I'm mistaken.  But I'm pretty sure that the PA GOP asked the Court to intervene on the PA Courts ruling that the legislature needed to redraw the map.  They are now going back to the Court and asking them to intervene on the legality of the PA Court drawing a map, when that responsibility belongs to the Legislature, not the PA Court.  Of course since the legislature refused to redraw it when directed, they kind of opened up this argument.  

 

I'm confident the SCOTUS will rule this year on alot of matters regarding election maps.

 

The other issue, imo, is the idea that the PA Court can dismiss a map drawn to favor the GOP and replace it with one designed to favor the Dems.  

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4 minutes ago, Kilmer17 said:

Maybe I'm mistaken.  But I'm pretty sure that the PA GOP asked the Court to intervene on the PA Courts ruling that the legislature needed to redraw the map.  They are now going back to the Court and asking them to intervene on the legality of the PA Court drawing a map, when that responsibility belongs to the Legislature, not the PA Court.  Of course since the legislature refused to redraw it when directed, they kind of opened up this argument.  

 

I'm confident the SCOTUS will rule this year on alot of matters regarding election maps.

 

The other issue, imo, is the idea that the PA Court can dismiss a map drawn to favor the GOP and replace it with one designed to favor the Dems.  

 

To be honest, I didn't read the petition for the writ, so I'm just going off the article, but 

 

Quote

Republican lawmakers filed an emergency application last month asking the United States Supreme Court to step in, saying the case was partly governed by federal law. They pointed to Article I, Section 4 of the United States Constitution, which says that the times, places and manners of congressional elections “shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”

 

The lawmakers said the State Supreme Court had thus usurped the legislature’s role in violation of federal law. They relied on a closely divided 2015 decision from the United States Supreme Court allowing an independent redistricting commission in Arizona rather than its Legislature to draw congressional districts.

 

The commission had been authorized by a referendum, and the justices in the majority said that the Constitution’s reference to “legislature” encompassed the people’s legislative power when acting through ballot initiatives. The dissenters said the term legislature should have been read more narrowly.

The lawmakers in the Pennsylvania case argued that the term was in any event not elastic enough to encompass a court.

 

In response, lawyers for Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, pointed to another part of the Arizona decision’s discussion of Article I, Section 4. “Nothing in that clause instructs, nor has this court ever held, that a state legislature may prescribe regulations on the time, place and manner of holding federal elections in defiance of provisions of the state’s Constitution,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority.

 

So, I think the writ was seeking to have SCOTUS rule that state court could not draw the map.  But, I agree with you, SCOTUS is going to hear a lot of election related matters in the near future.

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25 minutes ago, Kilmer17 said:

The other issue, imo, is the idea that the PA Court can dismiss a map drawn to favor the GOP and replace it with one designed to favor the Dems.  

 

The newly drawn map is still Republican favoring when looking at raw numbers.

 

It's really kind of an amazing argument that this map favors the Dems.

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