Monday, December 28, 2015

Who Turned My Blue State Red?

By Alec MacGillis, ProPublica

It is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.

In his successful bid for the Senate in 2010, the libertarian Rand Paul railed against “inter-generational welfare” and said that “the culture of dependency on government destroys people’s spirits,” yet racked up winning margins in eastern Kentucky, a former Democratic stronghold that is heavily dependent on public benefits.

Last year, Paul R. LePage, the fiercely anti-welfare Republican governor of Maine, was re-elected despite a highly erratic first term — with strong support in struggling towns where many rely on public assistance.

And in November 2015, Kentucky elected as governor a conservative Republican who had vowed to largely undo the Medicaid expansion that had given the state the country’s largest decrease in the uninsured under Obamacare, with roughly one in 10 residents gaining coverage.

It’s enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map where the red keeps seeping outward, confining them to ever narrower redoubts of blue. The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.

But this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that’s taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic Party’s growing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps us from fully grasping what’s going on in communities where conditions have deteriorated to the point where researchers have detected alarming trends in their mortality rates.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

How Democrats Could Win The U.S. House

Whoever wins the White House in 2016, it’s an article of faith among political pundents that not much will change in the House, where Republicans have a seeming lock on the majority.

It’s true the Democrats’ odds of flipping the 30 seats needed to win back the House of Representatives are not good. But the current polling leaders for the Republican presidential nomination are candidates almost perfectly designed to turn off Republican voters in the districts Democrats need to win to retake the House.

Read more at Politico.com:

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Hillary v. Bernie Polls And Sampling Frames

If the 2016 U.S. presidential election were held today, a sampling of all voters finds Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would win by a landslide over GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, according to a new poll released Tuesday by Quinnipiac University.

Voters favor Sanders over Trump 51 to 38 percent, giving Sanders the general election win by 13 points — nearly double Sanders' chief rival for the Democratic nomination, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton would likewise beat Trump, but her margin of victory over Trump is seven points  47 to 40 percent. This suggests Sanders would attract some politically disaffected voters Clinton would not.

Columnist Brent Budowsky writes for The Hill:
If Sanders' margin held in a general election, Democrats would almost certainly regain control of the United States Senate and very possibly the House of Representatives.
It is high time and long overdue for television networks such as CNN to end their obsession with Trump and report the all-important fact that in most polls, both Hillary Clinton and Sanders would defeat Trump by landslide margins.
[....] It is noteworthy that in this Quinnipiac poll, Sanders runs so much stronger than Clinton against Trump.
Budowsky concludes, "analysts would be talking about a national political realignment and new progressive era in American history if an enlightened candidate such as Sanders would defeat a retrograde race-baiting candidate such as Trump by a potentially epic and historic margin."

Season's Greetings From DemBlogNews


We offer our readers a holiday treat with a video of Bob Dylan reading “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan hosted a satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, once a week for almost three years. For his 2006 Christmas broadcast, the show featured a wide variety of Christmas music with Dylan’s commentary.

Following the Dylan video, we offer a 1939 radio broadcast and then a 1935 British movie of  "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens.


Here is the 1939 Campbell Playhouse radio broadcast productions of "A Christmas Carol" featuring Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge.


Play starts at 3:00 minutes [MP3] - [Mercury Theatre Info]

Seymour Hicks plays the title role in the first sound version of the Dickens classic about the miser who's visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve. This British import is notable for being the only adaptation of this story with an invisible Marley's Ghost and its Expressionistic cinematography. This is the uncut 78 minute version from the Internet Archive.