GOP Victory in Montana Means Dem Landslide in Next Elections?

[Nickdfresh]

Republicans' 7-point win in last night's Montana election is great news for Democrats
Winning narrowly in safe red seats is a bad sign.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com May 26, 2017, 6:23am EDT

Greg Gianforte’s 7 percentage point win in the Montana special election keeps a seat in Republican hands but fundamentally represents bad news for the GOP. The basic issue, as David Wasserman breaks down for the Cook Political Report, is that for prognostication purposes you don’t only want to know who wins or loses a special election — you want to know the margin.

Montana is considerably redder than the average congressional district. According to Wasserman’s calculations, in an election where Democrats got 50 percent of the two-party vote nationwide, you’d expect them to get just 39 percent in Montana. Quist scored 44 percent, and with the Libertarian pulling in 6 percent, his share of the two-party vote is more like 46.

Things aren’t as simple as saying that Rob Quist outperformed the 39 percent benchmark and therefore Democrats are on track to win — geography means Republicans can hold their majority with less than 50 percent of the vote. But the GOP underperformed badly in Montana, after a similar underperformance in the special election for Kansas’s Fourth Congressional District.

There are 120 Republican-held House seats that are more GOP-friendly than Montana’s at-large district. If Republicans are winning in places like Montana by just 7 percentage points, then they are in extreme peril of losing their House majority in November 2018.

Republican leaders have taken their party on a risky course, and they ought to strongly consider turning the ship around.
Republicans are counting on geography to win

The GOP’s House majority is safeguarded, first and foremost, by geography. Donald Trump lost the popular vote nationally by 2.1 percentage points but won the median House seat by 3.4 points. Or to look at it another way, despite garnering fewer votes than Clinton overall, Trump carried a plurality of the vote in 230 congressional seats against just 205 for Clinton.

A somewhat pointless debate tends to play out among operatives and political handicappers over how much we should characterize this geographical skew as a question of “gerrymandering” versus the allegedly natural “clustering” of Democratic voters in big cities. The reality is that whatever you call it, the lines are drawn in such a way that Republicans could easily hold the majority even if millions more people vote for Democratic candidates.

And that’s lucky for them. With Trump’s approval rating 15 points underwater, the policy agenda dominated by a deeply unpopular health care bill, and a steady drip of stories about Trump’s connections to Russia, the basic ingredients are in place for Republicans to take a drubbing.

Under the circumstances, the knowledge that geography has created safe redoubts that are significantly more Republican than the nation as a whole is what gives the GOP confidence that it can forge ahead with this path. To win by only 7 in Montana, a state that Trump won by 20 points, is a clear sign that seats Trump won by 4 or 5 points or more aren’t truly safe.
Out-of-power parties can localize cultural cues

The precise dynamics of the Quist-Gianforte race obviously aren’t going to play out in other districts. Nor is there particularly any need for them to when they are dozens of good pickup opportunities for Democrats in diverse Sunbelt suburbs.

But the Montana race demonstrates an important principle that does apply across the board — when your party doesn't control the White House, it’s relatively easy for candidates to customize their cultural self-presentation to local conditions. Quist’s policy positions are fundamentally not all that distinct from what Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton offered — a bit more left-wing on health care and a bit more right-wing on guns and energy issue — but his personality is very different. He’s a banjo-playing folk singer who’s all Montana and castigated his opponent as essentially a plutocratic carpetbagger from New Jersey.

You wouldn’t want to repeat that exact formula in districts across the country, but the ability to run a banjo player in banjo country and a 30-year-old documentary producer with a master’s degree from the London School of Economics in the suburbs of Atlanta is a powerful tool. Against it, the only thing the in-power party can hope for is a broadly popular incumbent president. And Republicans don’t have it.
The GOP should consider changing course

Right up until the morning of Election Day 2016, Washington Republicans were profoundly skeptical of Donald Trump. They saw him as unpopular, undisciplined, and unlikely to be an effective candidate or an effective president. Many Republicans in Congress even said they would refuse to vote for him.

When Trump unexpectedly won, that assessment pivoted rapidly even though he pulled it off with an underwhelming 46 percent of the vote against a candidate who herself had unusually weak approval numbers. Republicans lined up, in lockstep, around the propositions that there was no need for an independent inquiry into Russian hacking, no need for serious congressional oversight of Trump’s business conflicts of interest, and no need to push back against Trump’s affection for thinly qualified Cabinet nominees.

And yet everything that’s happened since Election Day only confirms those old doubts. Trump is unpopular, undisciplined, unskilled, and ineffective. His shtick plays well in some areas but not others, and with adequate recruiting Democrats can neutralize the aspects of his shtick that people find appealing. And rather than devise some exciting new way to turn the GOP into a populist tribune of working-class economic interests, he’s simply taken up the business-first policy agenda of Mitt Romney while stripping it of the veneer of businesslike competence and respectability.

The good news for Republicans is that the midterms are still a long way off. But unless they put that time to use by changing something about their current approach, they’re positioning themselves to reap the whirlwind.

VOX LINK

[FORD]

Because Montana is massive, in terms of real estate, but tiny in terms of population, most of their voters are mail in absentee. Which means most of the state's residents had already voted before Gianfuckwit, the Republican asshole committed a violent assault on a reporter the day before the election. Some of them actually tried to change their votes yesterday morning, after being disgusted by the candidate's actions, but sadly there's no provision in Montana state law to allow for a re-vote.

Gianfuckwit will unfortunately serve out the remainder of the term of the Trumpsucker he's replacing, but his chances of getting re-elected in 2018 are just slightly less than the odds of getting a speeding ticket on I-90 when you're trying to get out of that state as fast as you can.

Until then, I would advise the residents of the state to drink Moose Drool (and Powder Hound in the Winter). Heavily.

[FORD]

In Montana Race, Rob Quist Had To Fight Off Both the Republicans and the GOP-Aligned Local Media
Zaid Jilani
theintercept.com
5-26-2017

In a surprisingly competitive race in a state that went heavily for Donald Trump, Republican candidate Greg Gianforte beat his Democratic opponent Rob Quist Thursday, overcoming an election-eve assault charge. .

Gianforte pulled just over 50 percent of the vote, with Quist at 44 and Libertarian candidate Mark Wicks pulling in some six percent.

Quist had to fight off not just and ambivalent national Democratic Party and millions of dollars in attacks from the GOP, but also a local media that was aligned with them.

Earlier this month, a trio of Montana’s largest newspapers — The Missoulian, the Helena Independent Record, and the Billings Gazette — all endorsed Gianforte. And a string of local TV stations recently purchased by the arch-conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group offered some unusual coverage of the explosive story of Gianforte’s famous Wednesday night assault of a reporter.

The papers all share a single owner, the Iowa-based Lee Enterprises, whose board is stacked with Republican donors, and all three were dropped on the same day, May 14, as Republicans began to panic that the race might genuinely be in play. All three endorsements made similar arguments — deep reservations about his more extreme ideological positions, such as his rejection of evolution, coupled with optimism that he will set those bizarre views aside and do right by Montana in Washington.

The Lee board includes a number of Republican donors and other conservatives. The enterprise owns two other local newspapers in the state as well; neither explicitly endorsed, though they run copy from their sister publications.

Nancy Donovan, a founding partner of the Circle Financial Group, has been on the Lee Enterprises board since 2003. She gave $1,000 to support former Republican House Leader’s John Boehner’s re-election in 2010, and $2,400 to former Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk’s campaign.

Gregory P. Schermer, who spent 27 years with Lee before retiring and remains a member of the board, donated to the presidential bids of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. Herb Moloney, who is a Lead Director on the board, was previously a publisher of the conservative Washington Examiner.

In addition to the endorsements, the three papers focused their reporting heavily on Quist’s debt and financial woes.

On the Wednesday night before the election, a reporter for the Guardian, which is headquartered in London, Ben Jacobs, was interviewing Gianforte about his evolving position on Trump’s health care plan when the Republican candidate slammed him to the ground, according to Jacobs, backed up by audio of the encounter. The Billings Gazette led its story: “A foreign correspondent from the Guardian has accused GOP U.S. House candidate Greg Gianforte of assaulting him during an interview.”

Eventually, all three papers revoked their endorsements of Gianforte but did not ask voters to back Quist or Wicks.

But it wasn’t just Lee Enterprises that proved a headache for Quist.

In April, Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative local news operator, bought three NBC stations in Montana. The stations’ coverage of the assault was deeply generous to Gianforte on Wednesday night. “Gallatin County Sheriff Brian Gootkin announced Wednesday evening that he is investigating an alleged altercation between Special Congressional Election candidate Greg Gianforte and a reporter from The Guardian,” the networks reported on their collective website. “Gootkin also said there is no evidence of a video to verify the incident as previously reported by other news outlets. NBC Montana takes pride in reporting only verifiable facts from independent reliable sources, officials and documents, regardless of what is reported by other media outlets. The only verifiable facts are what is being stated by the Gallatin County sheriff at this time,” the networks wrote.

A New York Magazine article published late Thursday reports that Julie Weindel, the news director for KECI, one of the NBC stations, refused to cover the audio of the Gianforte-Jacobs encounter. The source claims Weindel argued that “The person that tweeted [Jacobs] and was allegedly body slammed is a reporter for a politically biased publication.”

“There is a pretty long history of papers breaking toward business interests in this state,” said Lee Banville, an Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Montana. “Endorsements came from publishers and they often skewed pro-business. So, the fact that the papers editorialized that way is not too shocking.”

Last week, Chris Rush, the publisher of The World, a local paper in Oregon owned by Lee Enterprises, stepped down from his job, and offered a blunt assessment in his goodbye column.

The industry’s economic fortunes have changed for the worse since the ‘great recession’ of 2008. Corporate ownership by publicly-traded companies like Gannett, Gatehouse, McClatchy and Lee Enterprises (which owns this newspaper) has become the norm. Independent and family-owned newspapers with deep roots in their local communities are disappearing from the landscape.

At the same time, I have watched the autonomy of the local newspaper being eroded day by day and replaced with central planning from remote corporate offices. More and more decisions about your local newspaper — from its national news and feature content to how much you pay for your subscription — are being determined in boardrooms far away.

The column was picked up by a former reporter running a blog in Montana. He thought he noticed something familiar.

[FORD]

Gianfuckface (a billionaire, naturally) talks about retirement and Social Security.....

"There's nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement. And yet it's been an accepted concept in our culture today. Nowhere does it say, 'Well, he was a good and faithful servant, so he went to the beach... The example I think of is Noah. How old was Noah when he built the ark? 600. He wasn't like, cashing Social Security checks, he wasn't hanging out, he was working. So, I think we have an obligation to work. The role we have in work may change over time, but the concept of retirement is not biblical."

Bullshit. Jesus retired at the age of 33. Suck it, Gianfuckface.

[Kristy]

Another day, another Rethuglicon fleeces America.

You know why he lost don't you, slave FORD?

Because master Bernie campaigned for his opponent.

[FORD]

Bernie was the only reason Quist got anywhere close. Otherwise the Hillbot controlled DLC would have ran some useless Repuke "lite" candidate who would have been just as opposed to Social Security & health care as this fascist Trumpsucking billionaire bully.

[Kristy]

Bullshit, maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan

As if Montana isn't lackluster enough, master Bernie put the nails in Quist's coffin.

[FORD]

Cheeto won the state by 30 points. This wretched piece of filth won by 7 - and even that was only due to early voting from people who didn't see first hand what a wretched piece of filth he was before voting.

Who gained those 24 points for Rob Quist? It damn sure wasn't Hillcunt and her sidekick SHAFTA Tommy Perez.

[Kristy]

Maybe it was the BCE? Eh, slave FORD?

[FORD]

The BCE doesn't care about Montana. It's the Kochs who want to rape & pillage that state.

[Terry]

According to Quist, he had essentially zero contact with the DNC and DLC in run up to the election. Which doesn't bode well for a party that, according to Perez, plans to run a Howard Dean 50 State Strategy Redux going forward from the 2016 loss. Quist - much like Sanders - doesn't owe the national democratic party apparatus anything, because the apparatus did nothing for him. Virtually all of Quist's funding was raised in small donations within the state as a result of Quist Campaign solicitations.

One would think the Democratic Party organization would start to consider putting some real weight and resources behind some of these "unwinnable" races, rather than wait for the Republican Party to flounder. Who knows if Quist could have pulled it off if he had the vigorous support of the party behind him? You make a race of it, and you show you actually ARE a competitive force on a national scale. It's the only chance the party has if they're going to recover some of these massive local, state and national level losses over the last 8 years: a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic Congress can only write the laws. It comes down to local politicians to actually implement the ideological agenda.

You go into these heavily republican districts and you campaign vigorously. You still might initially lose more than you win, but you get a foothold and let people there know you cared enough to come and are serious by vividly demonstrating some blood, sweat and tears. And those seedlings can bear fruit down the line.

I mean, isn't it telling that Sanders was the only high-visibility Democrat to give Quist a hand? What the fuck is Perez's excuse if Bernie can drag HIS old ass out to Montana?

All of it sums up the archetypal Democratic mindset: feckless, gutless, will only put money and resources into what the party establishment deems to be sure things, and no long term practical election vision in terms of process. The party establishment are all too content to sit back and reap rewards resulting from the mistakes and missteps they assume Trump, Ryan and McConnell will continue to make. Shades of the campaign last fall, when all they could offer boiled down to Hillary Clinton in essence saying "It's my turn, and I'm not Donald Trump." How did THAT one work out?

[Kristy]

Did you see that, everybody? slave FORD's bait and switch emergency glass break?

Reread the thread again in case you missed it.

[FORD]

http://herb.co/2017/02/27/prevent-memory-loss/

[Nickdfresh]

...rather than wait for the Republican Party to flounder....

At this point that seems like a prettly plausible strategy...

[Kristy]

slave FORD thinks he has a sense of humor.