Sean Trende…
…is bullish on the GOP’s chances of gaining control of the Senate in 2014:
Barring some sort of change in the national environment or meltdown in the Republican nominations process — neither of which is impossible — Democrats are likely in for a very long night on Nov. 4.
Trende left two other strong possibilities: relentless attacks on Republican nominees by the MSM, and Republican nominees placing feet firmly in mouths.
I can only wait for Emmanuel Goldstien levels of hate to poor out of the Democrats, specifically the MSM and my “friends” I live and work with.
Obama has an executive orde for that written by sheila jackson and the black caucus, so its really fair…
Wow – considering that Ann Coulter was just making noise about conservatives attacking the establishment and that we could lose the Senate. Pfft.
I don’t grok Ann…
For she’s de facto shilling for the RINOs of our time.
I’m much more in the orbit of Leo Lindbeck III.
http://www.campaign4primaryaccountability.org/usa
Because of the way American politics has morphed since 1968, it’s essential to come to the fight during the PRIMARIES.
The general election is a forgone conclusion in most House races — the Gerrymander.
The Founders assumed that the polity would nominate and elect the Congress.
By dint of databases and tabulations, we now have a Congress that is self-selecting.
The dominant reason why the voter pool expanded over the decades: the larger audience inherently favors the ‘Ins’ and thwarts the challengers — just on name recognition and economics.
Politics BY heredity is as pernicious for us, in our republic, as it ever was under monarchy.
Gore, Bush, Kennedy, Sebilieus, Pelosi, on over… these are dynastic politicians.
There’s not a heavy-weight mind in the whole bunch. The contrast with the Founders is stark.
JuliB…
It’s presumption to assume that we can lose what we have not yet obtained.
The Campaign for Primary Accountability is entirely oriented to getting politicians to adhere to the desires of their own constituents — rather than discard such sentiments to troll the K Street swamp.
More than once, Leo has caught career politicians who’ve abandoned their home state! Fake home state residency is all the rage in DC. Back home, the folks are simply enraged.
%%%
As you might imagine, the CFPR finds RINOs easy pickings. Such targets, defeated in their primaries, are NOT replaced by the opposition (D). This is the power of the Gerrymander.
Never underestimate the ability of the republican establishment to shoot themselves in the foot.
A third possibility is if the Republicans ram amnesty down our throats. That would effectively finish them as a viable party.
The REALLY amazing thing is they’ll probably manage to get their feet into their mouths further than the Dems have their heads up their asses.
They’re both in serious danger of becoming some kind of humaniform Klein Bottles…. :-S
The one upside of this is we might manage to figure out some kind of Star Trekky FTL drive from that, should it come to pass… 😛
2014 is just starting, and it’s already shaping up to be interesting…in the Chinese curse sort-of way.
Geopolitical:
-Ukraine is either in civil war or on the verge. The same can be said for Venezuela.
-Argentina is in financial collapse with unrest likely to follow.
-Iran is unresolved. Any “developments” in that area are likely to be unwelcome.
-Turkey is in shambles.
-China continues to provoke in the South China Sea.
Economic:
-US growth is slowing, and by “growth” I really mean growth of the Potemkin economy that never really recovered from 2007. The Fed continues its tapering of Quantitative Easing, which is having worldwide effects similar to removing heroin from a junkie. If they reverse the policy, that will probably be even worse.
-Japan is teetering.
-China has the manufacturing/energy equivalent of our sub-prime crisis. Many, many bailouts of insolvent companies will come due in 2014, with no guarantee that China’s central bank will succeed. In the last 5 years, China created $15 Trillion in credit…by comparison, the US created $4 Trillion. IMO, China will likely be the trigger for the collapse.
-Europe continues its slow decline, in a somewhat accelerated version of the US.
-Emerging markets have slowed. They will not be the engine of growth they once were.
-All of the above points are synergistic (as much as I hate using that hackneyed term), because of globalism. The powers that be are INTENT on preventing the collapse, but they can’t keep it up forever and a failure ANYWHERE could cause it all to come down.
Summary:
All of this points to the idea that things may get much worse in 2014 before November. I wouldn’t count on Obama’s approval rating staying near 40%. And if the SHTF from an international direction, it will be extremely hard to pin that on the GOP.
Incidentally, many of the international failures we’re seeing are traceable back to leftism. Some, like Venezuela are explicit (which is why the MSM isn’t covering them). None of them reflect well on Obama.
“Trende left two other strong possibilities: relentless attacks on Republican nominees by the MSM, and Republican nominees placing feet firmly in mouths.”
Or, more likely, the two working in tandem.
I am cautiously optimistic about the GOP’s chances at a Senate majority as well. The math is overwhelmingly in our favor. Nevertheless, it would be a lot easier to get to 51 if we had 47 right now instead of 45.
The GOP NEVER should have lost the Missouri or Indiana Senate races of 2012. Both states went for Romney. Claire McCaskill was incredibly vulnerable and while the insurgent Mourdock upsetting Luger created a wildcard, he still should have been heavily favored in the general election.
We all know what happened. It really descends into tragicomedy after a while. Republican candidates need to be better vetted and more realistic about the MSM. It is NOT neutral; it does NOT simply “lean left”. Virtually the entire MSM is a de facto arm of the Democratic National Committee, and should be treated as such. GOP candidates should assume the Miranda test when speaking where the media is present: everything they say can and will be used against them. Furthermore, on wedge issues, everything that can – even by the wildest stretch of the imagination – be inferred by what they said, can and will be used against them.
It’s about producing savvier, well vetted candidates. They need not be establishment backed; they can be from the heart of the Tea Party. They just need to understand and be prepared for the deluge the will endure.
Understand your point about better Tea Party candidates…I winced when I heard the crap that Todd Akin said, and again when he refused to withdraw from the race once he’d already won the primary. For the record, Sarah Palin endorsed Sarah Steelman in MO, IIRC, not Akin.
Mourdock shouldn’t have lost, but he got spillover from Akin and was somewhat sabotaged by a disgruntled Lugar. I thought Mourdock was a decent candidate.
What we don’t hear enough about are the many establishment candidates that also lost their races. Dems were defending 21 seats, Independents defended 2 seats (both of whom caucused with Dems), and Republicans were defending only 10 seats…Republicans ended up losing 2 seats net to Dems.
For defending only 1/3rd of the seats, team R did a lousy job. Of course, we now know that the IRS was involved…
Anyway, the point is that the establishment is hardly blameless in our current predicament.
Also, as I remember it, after Akin’s comments there was a significant outcry for him to step down from the right. There was some sort of quasi-manipulation on the part of the McCaskil campaign to pump up the Akin candidacy at that point.
I think she set him (and us) up.
These same sort of dirty tricks were on show in the VA governor’s race, when leftist money seemed to be backing the “3rd party” candidacy of Sarvis. The man ran as a Libertarian, but supported very un-libertarian proposals. I think by the end he was denounced by Ron Paul. He ended up with 6.5% of the vote, which was much more than needed to scuttle Cuccinelli.
The point being that we’re going to have to watch out for the same crap in 2014. I expect Dems to try the Sarvis thing again since they know conservatives/libertarians are already pissed off at the establishment Republicans.
Primaries seem to be the best way to diffuse this, if non-establishment candidates are selected, since the people will be voting for their choices instead of rehashed establishment candidates in the general elections.
A world about America. How does the world like the taste of that?
Because they’ll be getting it sooner than they expected.
Engineered Collapse will be presented to the masses.