Evidence suggests GOP wave

By LeRoy Goldman
Special to the Observer
Charlotte Observer - Charlotte, NC

Posted: Wednesday, Sep. 10, 2014

ReaEvidence suggests GOP wave

Evidence suggests GOP wave

Election experts are in overdrive debating whether or not the forthcoming election will be a “wave election,” one in which the Republican Party makes major gains and takes control of the Senate. For example, the Cook Political Report recently opined that the GOP is on track to pick up four to six Senate seats. If they are correct, that would certainly not constitute a wave election. In order to take control of the Senate the Republicans need to gain at least six seats. Picking up four to six seats would amount to a humiliating defeat or winning by a whisker.

On the other hand, Stuart Rothenberg of the Rothenberg Political Report said recently, “I am now expecting a substantial Republican Senate wave in November with a net gain of at least seven seats. But I wouldn’t be shocked with a larger gain.”

And Nate Silver’s 538 Senate Model stated recently, “our model regards a true Republican wave as possible: It gives the party almost a 25 percent chance of finishing with 54 or more seats.” But, hedging his bets, Silver also says, “A large number of states remain competitive and Democrats could easily retain the Senate”.

So there you have it, the experts aren’t sure. We can either wait until November 4 or try to anticipate what’s coming. Let’s try.

The website Real Clear Politics (RCP), among many other things, provides updated polling on all of the contested Senate races. Of particular importance is its polling in the closely contested battleground states of North Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alaska, Iowa, Colorado, Georgia and Kentucky. How well or poorly the GOP fares in these states will determine whether the Republicans regain the Senate and whether they will be swept to power by a wave or not.

In North Carolina, for example, the RCP average of all polls shows that Republican Thom Tillis leads Democrat Kay Hagan by less than 1 percent, 43.3 percent to 42.5 percent. The seven other battleground states follow the same pattern. The leader, whether a Republican (in five of those states) or a Democrat (in two of those states), has a very small lead. Hence the uncertainty in the collective minds of the experts.

But look more closely at the North Carolina numbers. They only add to 85.8 percent. The winner on election night almost certainly will be the candidate who wins most of the missing 14 percent. And this same pattern of missing votes exists in all of the battleground state polls. So how will those folks cast their ballots? If we know that, we can know whether a wave is coming or not.

To a very large degree Americans vote their pocketbooks. It is also the case that congressional elections at the sixth year of a president’s term in office are a referendum on the president. And on both measures there are data that point in a clear direction.

Writing in the Washington Post on September 3, Ed Rogers cites economic data that are chilling. He references an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showing that almost half of Americans believe that we are still in a recession. 76 percent of respondents in that poll said they do not believe that their children will fare as well as they have fared. Rogers also referenced a report from Sentier Research showing that household income is down 4.8 percent from December 2007, and down 3.1 percent since the recession ended in 2009. In addition, the Pew Charitable Trust recently reported that from 2007 to 2014 no state reported employment rate gains for 25-54 year-old persons, and 29 states, including all of our eight battleground states except Iowa and Alaska, had statistically significant declines.

A recent poll by the Washington Post and ABC News reports that by a margin of 52 percent to 42 percent, Americans believe President Obama has been a failure. Only 38 percent approve of his handling of foreign affairs, only 31 percent approve of his handling of immigration, and only 43 percent call the president a strong leader.

Some 69 percent of Americans believe the economy is in bad shape and 65 percent say the country is on the wrong track. By a 17 percent margin the American people believe that President Obama has done more to divide the country than unite it.

These data run in the same direction, and it is a direction that forecasts a wave that will engulf the Senate on November 4. If it’s really big, it could also sink Democrats in states like Michigan, New Hampshire, and/or Minnesota. We’ll know soon enough.

LeRoy Goldman worked on Capitol Hill and at the National Institutes of Health and has been predicting elections since 1948. He has retired to Flat Rock and can be reached at :  EmailMe

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"We Don't Have A Strategy Yet"

Barack Obama's audacity of hope, revisited

On July 27, 2004 then Illinois state senator and U.S. Senate candidate, Barack Obama, delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. That speech, "The Audacity of Hope," propelled the unknown Obama to rock star status in the Democratic Party. The speech's title had been borrowed from a 1990 sermon from Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

In that speech Obama stated, "The audacity of hope! That is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead."

Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 and in October of 2006 he released his second book, "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream." It quickly rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. The book embellished the themes of his keynote address and laid the foundation for what would become his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 against the presumptive nominee, Sen. Hillary Clinton.

And then Obama surprised everyone, especially Clinton. Her Achilles heel turned out to be her vote in favor of the Iraq war. Obama won the nomination and the general election. The time had come for him to turn the promise of the audacity of hope into reality.

In June of 2009 President Obama spoke to the Muslim world in a speech delivered at the University of Cairo. He opened his speech by saying, "I come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based on mutual interest and mutual respect." And he closed it saying, "We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning."

However, less than six months later in December of 2009, the President addressed the cadets at West Point and said, "As Commander-in-Chief I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months our troops will begin to come home." There it was a foreign policy of escalation and withdrawal in back-to-back sentences!

Since then, the United States has been surprised, humiliated, out-thought, and outfoxed by breathtaking events and by our adversaries in the Middle East and Russia. The Obama administration was caught off guard by the upheaval brought about by the Arab Spring that engulfed the Arab World beginning in late 2010. Rulers were swept from power in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen.

Our relations with our longtime ally, Israel, have sunk to their lowest point since the birth of the Jewish state in 1948. Secretary of State John Kerry has not been able to broker a permanent agreement in the armed conflict between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip, let alone a two-state solution between the parties.

In Libya, the Obama administration did not anticipate the consequences of their removal of Muammar Gaddafi. Libya is now a failed state and a breeding ground for jihadists. Regarding our 2011 Libyan intervention, Obama told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times on Aug. 8, "I think we (and) our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force."

Our armed forces are leaving Afghanistan after 13 years with precious little to show for our sacrifice. It remains a failed state, largely controlled and terrorized by the Taliban.

In Syria's ongoing civil war where more than 200,000 have perished and millions have fled the country, Obama established a red line and then ignored its being crossed.

Since our troop withdrawal, Iraq has descended into a religious civil war. And now the specter of ISIS has spread across much of Syria and Iraq. In an interview with the New Yorker last January, Obama dismissed ISIS as a jayvee team. He said, "If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant." Last month, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel described ISIS as an "imminent threat to every interest we have (and) this is beyond anything we've seen."

Obama's foreign policy has been a colossal failure. It has not been audacious. It has not offered hope. Why do you think former Secretary of State Clinton has begun to distance herself from it by saying, "Don't do stupid stuff is not an organizing principle." It's just the beginning of her effort to put light between herself and the audacity of failure.

LeRoy Goldman is an unaffiliated voter who lives in Flat Rock. He can be reached at:  EmailMe

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