“The Democratic Party on Thursday announced it was impaneling a team tasked with examining why the party got pounded in last month’s midterm elections,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Unlike Republicans, who after losing the 2012 presidential election commenced an ‘autopsy’ to determine why the party lost, the committee is framing its panel as one that will focus on what the party does well.”
“Here’s how lopsided Louisiana’s Senate runoff is: Bill Cassidy is so far ahead that he’s not in the state campaigning. Two days before the election,” Politico reports.
“While Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu hustles across the Bayou State ahead of Saturday’s runoff, the Republican congressman is in Washington this week, voting on legislation and debating how to keep the government from shutting down. His press operation appears to be nonexistent.”
Roll Call: 3 things to know about the Louisiana Senate runoff
Beleaguered Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) warned Louisiana voters that her defeat would elevate an advocate of “windmills” to a powerful position on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports.
Said Landrieu: “If I don’t get back there as a senior member of the committee, we’re gonna have a woman who I like very much (but) I’m not sure Louisiana is going to think very much of a senator from Washington state who’s all for windmills and alternative energy, and doesn’t support the oil and gas industry.”
“She was speaking about Democratic colleague Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), who just then was sending out an email appeal to raise money for Landrieu.”
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) “lobbed a barb at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Tuesday, saying they effectively abandoned her after the Nov. 4 midterm election,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Landrieu: “I am extremely disappointed in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. I’ve said that. You know, they just walked away from this race.”
“Short of treason by Cassidy in the next 72 hours, I just don’t see it. The issue is she voted with Barack Obama. Whether you like it or not it’s the big issue that’s killing her.”
— Pollster Bernie Pinsonat, quoted by the Daily Beast, on Sen. Mary Landrieu’s chances to win Louisina’s U.S. Senate runoff on Saturday.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told the Wall Street Journal that President Obama has lurched to the left since suffering a “butt-kicking” during November’s midterm elections.
Said McConnell: “By any objective standard the president got crushed in this election. So I’ve been perplexed by the reaction since the election, the sort of in your face dramatic move to the left. I don’t know what we can expect in terms of reaching bipartisan agreement.”
[speech_bubble type=”std” subtype=”a” icon=”pwdome.jpg” name=””]I wonder if Obama was perplexed when McConnell said his only goal was making him a one-term president. [/speech_bubble]
Stu Rothenberg looks at the best and worst of the 2014 midterm election campaign.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) finished his re-election campaign with $9.2 million in the bank, Capital New York reports.
“It’s unclear what Cuomo will do with his war chest, particularly if he does not opt to seek a third term. A good-government advocate has said that it could seed a Cuomo-themed super PAC should he choose to become a national candidate. New York law does not have special restrictions on leftover funds in campaign accounts that belong to politicians who decline to seek office again, or die.”
Another new ad from Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) says that challenger Bill Cassidy (R) “has endorsed a documentary which claims slavery was better for black folks than welfare,” according to BuzzFeed.
The ad goes on: “But worse than that, Cassidy and Jindal are trying to impeach our President.”
A new radio ad for Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) features Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) saying Republicans will impeach President Obama if Bill Cassidy (R) wins the U.S. Senate runoff on Saturday, BuzzFeed reports.
[speech_bubble type=”std” subtype=”a” icon=”pwdome.jpg” name=””]Landrieu, of course, says she “approves this message.” [/speech_bubble]
“After yet another defeat blamed on low voter turnout, some Florida Democrats want to change the rules and elect the governor in the same year voters pick the president — when turnout is always much higher,” the Miami Herald reports.
“The 2014 election was the first Florida midterm in which 6 million people cast ballots, but that figure pales in comparison to the 8.5 million who voted in the 2012 presidential election in Florida. For Democrats, the call for change is an admission that they can no longer compete with Republicans in statewide races for governor and three down-ballot, powerful Cabinet seats.”
“As Republicans took control of an unprecedented 69 of 99 statehouse chambers in the midterm elections, they did not rely solely on a bench of older white men. Key races hinged on the strategic recruitment of women and minorities, many of them first-time candidates who are now learning the ropes and joining the pool of prospects for higher office,” the New York Times reports.
“The wins, by candidates carefully chosen to challenge the traditional notion of the Democratic base, bode well for Republicans in future elections. They had a net gain of 59 women in state legislatures; Democrats lost 63 women. Republicans added 10 Latinos; Democrats lost five. Republicans reported 17 newly elected blacks; a comparable figure for Democrats was not available. In 2008, only about 31 percent of women in state legislatures were Republicans; in 2015, that figure will rise by eight percentage points.”
Bloomberg: “Landrieu is struggling through the final days of the runoff election, set for Dec. 6. Early balloting trends suggest a spike in interest among white voters and Republicans, while blacks—who nearly universally support the incumbent—are proportionally making up a smaller part of the vote. The first four days of voting in Louisiana show that whites made up about 72 percent of the early electorate. That’s above the 65 percent of whites who voted early before the Nov. 4 election.”
Bloomberg: “The 2014 election accelerated a trend of straight-ticket voting, the phenomenon of people voting for the same party for Congress as they did for president. With the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans growing bigger than ever, the result is a Congress sharply divided along party lines, with a shrinking bloc of centrists more open to compromise.”
“It might have been the neatest political trick of this election season — Gov. Jerry Brown’s ‘non-campaign’ for a historic fourth term that wasn’t really a non-campaign at all, yet managed to hide all the trappings of a traditional political run,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
“From Brown’s TV spots for a pair of Mom-and-apple-pie ballot measures to his lone, low-key debate with Republican opponent Neel Kashkari, the plan by a team of veteran San Francisco strategists was to push the governor as ‘the reasonable father figure’ rising above the divisive politics that engulfed the rest of the nation.”
Molly Ball: “There’s a predictable debate after every election, as the losing partisans cycle through rationalizations for why they lost. This time, it’s the Democrats, who were slaughtered at an unexpected scale on November 4 and now must reckon with what went wrong and how to move forward.”
“When Republicans went through this two years ago, they were heckled constantly—by both the media and many of their own — about the need to moderate their positions if they ever wanted to win another election. But Democrats today are convinced there’s nothing wrong with what they stand for — if anything, they just need to stand for it louder and more aggressively.”
“Why come out and vote for the Democratic Party? There was no message to say: Here’s what we’ve done. I wish the party or whoever had done a national media campaign and say, here’s what you get when you elect Democrats. But there was no — what was the message out of ’14? I’m asking you rhetorically — do you know? No. What was it?”
— Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), quoted by Politico.
[speech_bubble type=”std” subtype=”a” icon=”pwdome.jpg” name=””]Rhetorical or not, it’s a pretty good question. [/speech_bubble]
“Election night was bad for Democrats all over the country, but arguably there were few states where it was worse for their future — and better for Republicans — than in West Virginia,” the New York Times reports.
“Democrats in the state, long accustomed to controlling virtually every part of the government, lost a Senate race and two competitive House races. They secured a majority in the state legislature’s lower house for the first time in eight decades, and after a postelection party switch gave up control of the state Senate as well. Come January, Republicans will hold all of West Virginia’s congressional House seats for the first time since 1921. They even elected the nation’s youngest legislator, 18-year-old Saira Blair, to the state house.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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