Tag: Campaign 2014

The Fight’s Not About Health Care

Buck Banks

So what are we fighting about? How smoothly the law operates, and how many customers it manages to enroll by the end of Obama’s term, are open questions. Likewise up for debate is whether Obama’s approval ratings will recover. But these are not fundamentally questions about the life or death of Obamacare. They’re about how much political pain Democrats in Congress must endure. We’re not fighting over health care policy. We’re fighting about the midterm elections.

— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.

3 Things to Know About Florida Politics Now

Trish
  1. Former Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist is running for governor in 2014 as a Democrat. The official announcement was made in Crist’s hometown of St. Petersburg, and puts an end, not to speculation that Crist would run, but to when the campaign would begin. It’s on.
  2. Alex Sink (D), former state chief financial officer, who lost to Gov. Rick Scott (GOP/Tea) in 2010 by 1% in a campaign where Scott provided $75 million of his own money, announced she is running for Congress to fill the seat of U.S. Rep. Bill Young (R), who died in October. Sink claims a fundraising headstart, and if successful, will help chip away at the Republican majority in the House. Dist. 13, where Sink is running, is 37.7% Republican, 35.2% Democratic, 23.2% independent, and the rest “other.”
  3. Republicans are already gunning for both Crist and Sink. This promoted tweet from the Florida GOP went up as Crist was delivering his announcement:

Cook: 2014 Is a Make-or-Break Year for Senate Republicans

Buck Banks

The reason next year is so make-or-break for Senate Republicans is because in 2016, when all of the seats they won in 2010 come up — they netted a six-seat net gain that year — there will be 24 GOP seats up, compared with only 10 for Democrats, leading to some serious Republican overexposure. Seven of the 24 GOP senators up are hailing from states that Obama carried in 2012. After having had plentiful Democratic targets in 2012 and 2014, it will be Republicans in 2016 who will have the most incumbents in the crosshairs.

— Charlie Cook, noting the 2014 midterm elections may the the GOP’s last chance to take back control of the Senate for years.

Cumulative Polling on Congresional Approval Ratings Reveals GOP Vulnerability

Jon Ponder

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

I put together this image charting the results from a new national Quinnipiac poll, which shows Democrats taking a nine-point lead over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot — an advantage that’s steadily grown in recent months.

There is simply no good news for the GOP in the Quinnipiac results. Significant majorities oppose Republicans using a shutdown to go after the Affordable Care Act, trust President Obama over the GOP on most national issues, and blame Republicans for gridlock. In all, 74% of Americans disapprove of congressional Republican lawmakers — their lowest score ever in a Quinnipiac poll.

Even Seniors Are Starting to Dislike Republicans

Trish

Remember when Republicans held their noses and voted for Mitt Romney in 2012? The results showed that really, really hating Candidate A isn’t enough to overcome feeling pretty meh about Candidate B.

A new poll, from a Democratic polling group, shows the same scenario heading into 2014.

Just 28 percent of voters 65 and older had a favorable view of the Republican Party in a national survey conducted last month by the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, versus 40 percent who had a positive view of the Democrats. That’s a reversal from a poll Greenberg conducted in early 2011, when 43 percent of seniors saw Republicans favorably and 37 percent saw Democrats that way.

“It is now strikingly clear that [seniors] have turned sharply against the GOP,” Erica Seifert, a senior associate at Greenberg’s firm, wrote on the company’s website this week. “We have seen other voters pull back from the GOP, but among no group has this shift been as sharp as it is among senior citizens.”

And yet, seniors still say they will vote Republican. For now.

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