We've Got the Candidates. Now We Get Out the Vote.

Don't waste time trying to persuade trump voters and other repugs to vote Democratic.  They never, EVER will.  Spend your time tracking down the non-voting Democrats in your county. They are there. All they need is somebody to knock on the door and say "We need you.  Please help us."

From the Herald:

Three hundred Kentuckians filed to run for a seat in the Republican-dominated Kentucky General Assembly this year, with Democrats slightly outpacing their GOP counterparts in an election year that promises dozens of intense political battles.

Hoping to ride a wave of discontent, 155 Democrats filed for a seat in the 100-member House or 38-member Senate. The GOP, which holds a super majority in both legislative chambers, fielded 145 legislative candidates. The deadline to file was 4 p.m. Tuesday.

All 100 House seats and 19 of 38 Senate seats are up for election in 2018.

Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in the 2016 general election for the first time since 1920. After using their new-found power to quickly push through a package of anti-abortion and anti-union laws, House Republicans were beset by a sexual harassment scandal that prompted their top leader to step aside and helped derail an unpopular proposal to overhaul Kentucky’s financially ailing pension systems.

Democrats, though, hope to regain power by stoking discontent with President Donald Trump and harnessing outrage over Gov. Matt Bevin’s bid to overhaul the pension systems. 

“In my 31 years of serving in the Kentucky House, I have never seen as much enthusiasm on the ground as I have this election cycle, and you can sense the tide that is building as we prepare for the wave that is coming in November,” said Minority Floor Leader Rocky Adkins, D-Sandy Hook.

The filing deadline also brought an influx of women candidates. Ninety-three women are seeking a seat in the General Assembly, including 70 challengers. That’s a huge increase from the 11 non-incumbent women who ran in 2016 and the three non-incumbent women who ran in 2014.

There are only 13 uncontested House races, with six Republicans running unchallenged and seven Democrats. 

SNIP

There is only one open seat in the Senate, which currently belongs to Sen. Joe Bowen, R-Owensboro. Two Republicans are vying to replace Bowen: state Rep. Matt Castlen and Diane Burns Mackey, who lost to Jim Gooch in a race for the House of Representatives in 2014. The winner of that primary will take on Democrat Bob Glenn.

Despite the retirement of only one Republican, Democrats have filed to run in all but two Republican-held seats up for re-election in the Senate.

Congress

In Central Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District race, three well-known candidates — Lexington mayor Jim Gray, former fighter pilot Amy McGrath and state Sen. Reggie Thomas — all filed to seek the Democratic nomination well before the filing deadline. They’ll be joined in the race by Geoff Young, Theodore Green, and Daniel Kemph, all from Lexington. 

U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington, drew a late primary opponent Tuesday. Chuck Eddy, of Lexington, said on his Facebook page he is running against Barr in the GOP primary to take Congress back from “renegade Republicans.”

A little more than an hour before the filing deadline, Health and Family Services Secretary Vicki Yates Brown Glisson, a Republican, announced that she would resign immediately from her role in the Bevin Administration to run against U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth in Louisville’s 3rd Congressional District.

“I want Louisville to succeed,” Glisson said. “And I want Louisville to become a city that is strong and robust and a place where our citizens can succeed. So that’s why I’m running.”

Yarmuth is Kentucky’s only Democratic congressman.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article197399989.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article197399989.html#storylink=cpy

Something's Happening

It just keeps getting better. Even the long-shots came in, and the winners won by double their predicted margins.

Via Wonkette:

 

 Charlie Pierce:

Elsewhere, Jackson Miller, the GOP legislative whip, lost to a Marine veteran named Lee Carter, who ran as a Democratic Socialist. Late in the campaign, Miller’s people sent around a flyer linking Carter to Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx. That didn’t work, either. In the western part of the state, a Democrat named Chris Hurst flipped a Republican-held seat; Hurst’s girlfriend, Alison Parker, was a TV reporter who was shot to death live and on camera. Unsurprisingly, Hurst ran, and won, on a gun-control platform. The Democrats also elected the first Latina ever to serve in the House.

SNIP

A Sikh was elected mayor of Hoboken, and a Liberian immigrant named Wilmot Collins ran as a progressive for mayor of Helena, Montana, and beat a four-term Republican incumbent. African-American mayors were elected for the first time in Statesboro, Milledgeville, and Cairo in Georgia, and in St. Paul, Minnesota. Charlotte elected its first African-American woman to be its mayor. All of these people were Democrats.

Political Animal:

Of the 16 seats picked up by Democrats, 12 of the winners were women. Not only did trans woman Danica Roem defeat “bathroom bill” sponsor Bob Marshall, Joan Walsh described some of the other winners:

Progressive Jennifer Carroll Foy, one of the first black female graduates of the Virginia Military Institute, became the only public defender in the House of Delegates. Hala Ayala, a single mother who became a Department of Homeland Security cyber-security specialist, and Elizabeth Guzman, an AFSCME member, social worker and Latino immigrant, became the first two Latinas in the House of Delegates. Kathy Tran, who came here at seven months old, became the first Vietnamese refugee. Cheryl Turpin, who ran in a special election earlier this year and lost, defeated her GOP opponent in Virginia Beach.

Tom Periello, who lost the Democratic primary to Ralph Northam but proceeded to work his heart out to help his party win in Virginia said, “Turnout was way up where we ran candidates. And particularly where we ran a diverse slate.”

TPM:

Now, we’re a year from election day 2018. A lot can happen. But if numbers and enthusiasm look like this on election day, Democrats are in a strong position to reclaim the House and possibly the Senate. A certainty? Of course not. And it is critical to recognize that this didn’t just happen. It happened both because of the country’s basic rejection of Trump and the Trump Republican party but also because of countless hours of work organizing, knocking on doors, planning, and money to fund it all. It took lots of people simply deciding to take the effort to vote.

If there is not a Democratic candidate in Every. Single. Goddamn. Race. In. Kentucky. Next. Year. we richly deserve the down-to-bedrock stripping we are going to get from Governor I Got Mine Fuck You.

Only Massive, Unprecedented Democratic Turnout Can Win 2018

Digby:

I'm not sure people have fully grokked just how fully the GOP has been able to tilt the playing field in their favor. They need to. Just blaming "bad messaging" and "bad candidates" is lazy and simplistic. There's something much more fundamental going on here.

It's going to be very difficult for Democrats to win in 2018 because of these structural impediments.  And just becoming more aggressively progressive is unlikely to be the panacea that many people erroneously assume it will be. Maybe in the past that wasn't such a dangerous assumption. We had time to learn and experiment and figure out through trial and error how to progress.
There are a lot of extremist, right wing Republicans in this country and they are spread all over in places where they have an electoral advantage despite the fact that they are fewer in numbers.

Trump and the Republicans have to be stopped. Maybe the Resistance will be enough to do that. But it would be nice if every left of center American recognized just what it's going to take to get that accomplished, however, and we all put our shoulders to the wheel.

On the other hand, I suppose it's always comforting to watch Republicans win and then stand around blaming the Democrats for being embarrassing losers.  It's so familiar.

The Resistance: VOTE, goddammit

The deadline for filing to run in Kentucky's 2018 state house and senate races and congressional races is just 12 Months Away. January 30, 2018. Four months ahead of the primary and nine months in advance of the general election.  Ridiculous, I know.  But it means we have to start recruiting candidates, registering voters and raising money yesterday.

DR Tucker at Political Animal:

Here’s the thing, though: those “uninformed, angry white men and the women who love them” always show up, election after election, be it midterm, special or presidential. You can’t keep them away from the polls on Election Day. What about the rest of us?

Those who failed to show up at the polls on November 8 bear just as much responsibility for Mr. Trump’s rise to power as those who directly backed his candidacy. How many of the folks who will be demonstrating this weekend are doing so out of guilt over the fact that Mr. Trump became President because they fell for the nonsense that there was no moral, ethical or intellectual difference between Trump and Clinton, and thus chose not to vote at all? Those who will be severely hurt by Mr. Trump would appreciate it if these folks would apologize.

If these demonstrators don’t start voting as consistently as the right-wingers do, all the yelling and screaming in the world won’t matter, and Mr. Trump will leave office as a two-term President on January 20, 2025. If protesters from New Jersey and Virginia don’t both to show up in this year’s gubernatorial elections, their complaints will have no power. If protesters don’t show up for the November 6, 2018 midterm elections, their words will be worthless. If they don’t get engaged on a local and state level–the same way the right-wingers have done for decades–they’ll never have a national impact.

Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) nailed it going away a few years ago:

[Frank] said liberals sometimes draw the wrong lesson from the success of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Frank said Gandhi and King were forced to resort to marches and demonstrations because they were representing groups that lacked the right to vote.

He said perhaps for that reason the conservative Tea Party has been more successful than the liberal Occupy Movement.

Frank said, “When the Right gets mad it votes, when the Left gets mad it marches.”

I’m not trying to knock the power of marching. Participating in the September 2014 People’s Climate March was one of the proudest moments of my life. However, the most important march one can make is the one to the polls, on a habitual basis. The Trump crowd understands this. They’ve understood it for years. Koch money, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News weren’t the only things that made the right so powerful in this country. Right-wing activists showed up at the polls consistently to advance a reactionary agenda. If those disgusted and troubled by Donald Trump don’t start demonstrating similar resolve every Election Day, then America’s light will fade away–and “American Carnage” will be real and not just rhetorical.

The Mean and Moronic Will Always Be With Us

This is nothing new.  For the 10 millennia of human civilization, reactionaries have harnessed fear and bigotry and stupidity to block or reverse progress. They didn't need the Internet or Fox news or talk radio, and trying to connect our current iteration of Leading by Lies to technology is a snipe hunt.

Progress waxes and wanes, but over time stays ahead of Reaction and increases its lead.  If it didn't, Reaction wouldn't need to exist.

But Progress never advances by persuading the fearful and bigoted and stupid.  Those belong to Reaction always.  Progress advances by expanding the ranks of the Human.

Ten thousand years ago, Reaction defined "human" as "people who live in my village." Everyone else was not-human.  The Enemy.

Nine thousand eight hundred years later, Progress had expanded the definition of Human citizen-entitled-to-vote to male, wealthy and white.

And while Progress thinks it has since expanded the rights of full humanity to people of color, the poor and women, to Reaction, the non-male, non-white, non-wealthy are still the Enemy.

Reaction always and only appeals to fear, bigotry and stupidity. Progress advances always and only by fighting fear, bigotry and stupidity. Because Progress never has, never can and never will win over Reaction's fear, bigotry and stupidity.

Progress advances only by increasing the ranks of the Human people who vote.

That means we have two fights:

• Stopping voter suppression and ensuring full access to the polls for everyone - ideally, vote-by-mail.  We have to fight this one like rabid ferrets, because this one is literally the life and death of our democracy.

• Turning out the vote.  Anyone who is non-white, non-male, non-rich, non-straight and/or non-christian and who does not vote is a traitor to democracy and to every ancestor who fought, bled and died for that right.  Once you get the right to vote, it's not a right any more.  And it is absolutely fucking not a "privilege."  It's a duty.

Everybody votes.

Or Progress dies.

Turnout. Turnout, Turnout, TURNOUT. Nothing Else Matters

So Kentucky, like a lot of other states, now boast record-high voter registration.

It doesn't matter unless all those registered voters actually get to the polls.

That's the goal now.  Forget everything else.

From the Herald:

A record number of Kentuckians will be eligible to vote on Election Day, according to Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes.

More than 3.3 million people are registered to vote in the November election, an increase of more than 50,000 from the primary election.

Grimes said 106,000 voters have registered since March, when the state unveiled its online voter registration system.

About 30 percent of all new voters registered online, with younger voters using the online system the most.

“I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done to launch online voter registration,” Grimes said. “It’s an enormous success in Kentucky.”

Everything We've Accomplished Is On the Ballot

Turnout, Turnout, Turnout.  And this will do it.  Show it to everyone.

No, Anti-Trumpist repugs are not voting for Hillary. Ever.

Yeah, no, this isn't happening.

There are no such things as independents, swing voters or undecideds.  There are repugs too embarrassed to call themselves repugs and who register as "independent" but who always - ALWAYS - vote repug.  And there are dems who are too stupidly pure to call themselves Democratic voters and who register as "independent" but who always - ALWAYS - vote Democratic.  When they don't sit at home on Election Day and sulk, that is.

Any attempt by Hillary or any other Democratic candidate - like the always-moronic Democratic candidates for the Kentucky state House - to pick up "anti-Trump" repug voters is doomed to not just fail, but to take the entire Democratic campaign down with it through either pissing off actual Democratic voters or giving false confidence that this election is going to be a blowout.

Stop. Just Stop.  

 

There are millions of loyal Democratic voters who would be happy to vote for Hillary - unless they think the election is already a dem blowout or they think they're being taken for granted.

 

Those are the voters you need, Hillary.  Those are the voters you need to court.

KY Dem Party Still Doesn't Know How to Run Campaigns

For the eleventy-millionth time, there are no swing voters who can be persuaded to cross party lines.  There are only occasional voters in both parties who have to be inspired or bullied into getting off their fat asses and into the voting booth.

This stupid shit just pisses people off and subtracts thousands more Democratic votes from the total number any Democratic candidate needs to win statewide.

Unless the state Democratic Party starts knocking on doors and talking directly to Democratic voters, begging them to go to the polls, we're going to get Governor Heiner and the Democratic party will have no one to blame but itself.

Sam Youngman at the Herald:

It has become conventional wisdom in the 2015 race for governor that one of Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway's greatest assets is the contentious Republican primary.

Highlighting that asset, the Kentucky Democratic Party released a new web video, titled "Slugfest," on Tuesday that demonstrates the heated turn the Republican field has taken in the last few weeks.

The state party said in a news release that the video shows "how the GOP primary has turned into a brutal, intra-party fight that is exposing the flaws in each candidate and will leave their ultimate nominee deeply wounded."

Gee, that sounds familiar ... oh yeah.  That's what the repugs said about Clinton and Obama in 2008.  I wonder how that turned out.

"the GOP primary has turned into a brutal, intra-party fight that is exposing the flaws in each candidate and will leave their ultimate nominee deeply wounded will force the candidates to hone their arguments and leave the eventual nominee enormously strengthened."

FIFY. 

Why Vote?

Kentucky's primary election is May 19th.  The Secretary of State is predicting nine percent turnout.

For the gubernatorial race.  Plus Secretary of State, Auditor and Attorney General. The election that will have far more immediate effect on the lives of Kentuckians than the presidential or congressional races.

Nine percent. 

via Undercover Blue at hullaballoo:

A quote from former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon (D-Denver) expresses it better:

“We think that voting actually is not just a private vote for the person who gets the vote, but a public good, and that the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and that they represent the actual values of the electorate.”

Advice for Democratic Candidates

Inspiring discouraged Democrats to get out and vote in the numbers that will prevent a repug tsunami is not going to be easy, but neither is it rocket science, if dems just concentrate on what's really happening.

Steve M:

So what can Democrats do? I think they have to start talking about why popular Democratic policies don't get enacted. The reason is that there are too damn many Republicans in Congress.

I think they have to say, "When you elect Republicans, they block any increase in the minimum wage. When you elect Republicans, they block every bill that would put people to work. When you elect Republicans, they block immigration reform. When you elect Republicans, they insist on trying to get the budget under control by cutting programs that people really need because they refuse to allow the taxes of the wealthiest Americans to go up by even one dime." And so on and so on.

Maybe you even need to explain the filibuster -- yes, on the campaign trail. Don't you think Bill Clinton could pull that off in a speech and still keep an audience's attention? Well, why should that be a unique skill? The president is a pretty good speaker, too, isn't he?

According to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, 59% of voters are at least somewhat "disappointed" in the Obama presidency, including 24% of Democrats. Why is that? Partly it's because people thought he could do more. Well, most voters don't have a clear picture of why he can't do more. They need some Civics 101 so they'll understand. And they need someone to explain what the solution would be, even if it's highly unlikely to be attainable.

Why is it so difficult for Democrats to say that Republicans are the problem? Republicans have no problem blaming Democrats, and they're not punished at the polls for "divisiveness," at least in non-presidential elections.

Assess the blame where it belongs. Otherwise, voters just think that ineffectual Democrats are the real problem.

As Kevin Drum put it:

 Democrats simply don't consistently support concrete policies that help the broad working and middle classes. Half of them voted for the bankruptcy bill of 2005. They've done virtually nothing to stem the growth of monopolies and next to nothing to improve consumer protection in visible ways. They don't do anything for labor. They're soft on protecting Social Security. They bailed out the banks but refused to bail out underwater homeowners. Hell, they can't even agree to kill the carried interest loophole, a populist favorite if ever there was one.

Sure, Democrats do plenty for the poor. They support increases in the EITC and the minimum wage. They support Medicaid expansion. They passed Obamacare. They support pre-K for vulnerable populations. They expanded CHIP. But virtually none of this really benefits the working or middle classes except at the margins.

Now McElwee wants to use environmentalism to appeal to the working class. I'm all for that. But you don't have to play 11-dimensional chess to figure out how Republicans will respond. They'll say that Democrats want to raise your taxes. They'll say Democrats want to take away your plastic bags. They'll say Democrats want to make us all drive tiny cars or take the train everywhere. In coal country they'll say Democrats want to take away your jobs.

And then Democrats will wonder yet again why a big chunk of the working class votes for Republicans. It's a stumper all right.

Apologies for being peevish. But honestly, Democrats have done virtually nothing for the middle class for three decades now. They're nearly as reliant on the business community for campaign funding as Republicans. Can we all stop pretending that there's some deep mystery about why lots of working and middle class voters figure there are no real economic differences between the parties, so they might as well vote on social issues instead?