Dems seek senate salvation with pseudo independents

Around the country, Democrats in close Senate races are suddenly deciding that the Democratic Party is not for them. Some Democrats have jettisoned the national Democrats entirely in order to run as independents, while others are avoiding any association with Obama like he has the Ebola virus.

The allergy to President Obama began in Kansas with billionaire Greg Orman. Orman announced his candidacy in June, running as an independent challenging Republican incumbent Pat Roberts. Three months later, according to the Washington Post, the failing Democratic candidate Chad Taylor withdrew from the race at the behest of national Democrats like Claire McCaskill (D-MO). McCaskill hoped to encourage state Democrats to rally behind Orman, whose background if far from “independent.”

Orman is no independent.

There is a wealth of evidence contradicting Orman’s claims of “independence.” The Washington Post noted that he refuses to say which party he would caucus with if it turns out he’s the deciding vote in the Senate, and Byron York, points out that Orman actually ran as a Democrat as recently as 2008. More damaging than that, York notes that Orman has made campaign contributions to such partisan political lightning rods as Al Franken, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and, of course, the president himself, Barack Obama. But worst of all, perhaps, York provides evidence that contributions are flowing in both directions, with major Democratic donors bankrolling Orman’s current campaign. In fact, the Democrats are so invested in an Orman victory, theyfought all the way to the Kansas Supreme Court to have Taylor’s name removed from the ballot.

Milton Wolf endorses Pat Roberts for Kansas.

Currently, most pundits consider the Kansas race to be a toss-up, but the Practical Politicking Report gives Roberts a slight edge. The GOP incumbent’s primary opponent, Tea Party favorite Milton Wolf, endorsed Roberts late last week saying:

Whatever your opinion of Pat Roberts, his re-election to the United States Senate may be the deciding factor that dethrones Harry Reid and elevates solid constitutional conservatives like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul…

Whether the Democratic strategy prevails in Kansas remains to be seen, but clearly Wolf isn’t buying it. His endorsement sends a clear signal to all voters, independent and Republican, that Orman is a presumptive Democrat, and they would do well to consider their votes carefully with that in mind.

Larry Pressler is playing the independent card in South Dakota too.

In South Dakota, where former Governor Mike Rounds (R) was expected to cruise to victory in the race for the seat being vacated by retiring Democrat Sen. Tim Johnson, Larry Pressler–another pseudo-independent–has upended the race. Pressler, who announced his candidacy in the Huffington Post in February, has been both a Democrat and Republican. He was a registered Democrat in the early 1970s according to the Sioux Falls, SD Argus Leader, who switched his party affiliation to become a Republican member of both the U.S. House of Representatives (1975-79) and Senate (1979-97). Democrat Tim Johnson, the current occupant of the seat, defeated Pressler in 1996.

Pressler seems to have little in common with the party he once represented in Congress. National Review points out that Pressler supports higher taxes, stricter gun control, citizenship for illegal immigrants, and ObamaCare. He also opposes bans on late term abortions. But most important of all, Pressler supported Barack Obama for president in both 2008 and 2012. Even as the campaign moved into October, Pressler claimed to be a “friend of Obama.”

Unlike Taylor in Kansas, the South Dakota Democratic nominee, Rick Weiland, has refused to drop out of the race. In early October, Survey USA found that in a two-way race, Pressler would lead Republican Mike Rounds by 15 points, but Rounds looks certain to come out on top in the three-way race.

Grimes, Nunn, Begich, Shaheen, and Landrieu are also looking to hide from the president.

Obama seems to have few other friends among Democratic candidates in red and purple states this year. First to break ranks was Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic challenger to Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. In an October interview, Grimes refused to say whether she had voted for Obama, whose “war on coal” is particularly unpopular in Kentucky. The Washington Post called the video of Grimes’ evasions “40 painful seconds.” Even earlier, Grimes had declared “I’m not Barack Obama” in an ad that was reminiscent of Christine O’Donnell’s “I’m not a witch” ad from 2010.

The ensuing brouhaha compelled the Wall St. Journal’s James Taranto to pen a limerick for the occasion:

Alison Lundergan Grimes

Is going through difficult times
But in her defense
If she has 10 cents
Per Obama vote, that’s just two dimes

In spite of her denials, Grimes’ loyalties are clear. She is a lifelong Democrat who, as pointed out by The Hill, actually served as an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2012.

The Democratic denials spread from Kentucky to other tossup states. In Georgia, visitors to the website of Michelle Nunn (D) could be excused for thinking Nunn is an independent. There is no mention of her party affiliation on the site. Nunn likewise refused to answer when a conservative camera crew asked about her votes in 2008 and 2012. The video, posted on Youtube, shows Ms. Nunn’s non-reaction to the question. Perhaps she didn’t hear it? She did, however, air an ad responding to the David Perdue (R) campaign ad showing her posing with President Obama. In it, she attempts to distract voters from the picture with Obama by linking her record to Republican President George Herbert Walker Bush.

For his part, the former president has endorsed Nunn’s Republican opponent, David Perdue, and his spokespeople have also issued a statement denouncing Nunn’s ad:

Michelle and her team have been clearly, repeatedly and consistently told that President Bush did not want them to use his photo as part of this campaign. Apparently, the Nunn team feels they can repeatedly disregard the former president’s wishes, which is very disappointing because it’s so disrespectful.

After initially suffering from the same selective hearing loss as Nunn, Alaska’s Mark Begich finally admitted to voting for President Obama, but according to the Washington Examiner, called the vote – and the president – “irrelevant.” In a televised debate with challenger Scott Brown in New Hampshire, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D) said, when asked whether she approved of Obama “in some ways I approve and in some things I don’t approve. In North Carolina, Sen. Kay Hagan (D), who is feeling pressure from Republican Thom Tillis, dodged the question of whether Obama is a strong leader during an interview with MSNBC.

And in Louisiana, embattled incumbent Mary Landrieu (D) took a different tack. In a state that depends on oil and gas production, Landrieu took the Obama Administration to task for its offshore drilling moratorium. In an ad, she can be heard saying, “The Administration’s policies are just wrong….” Still, when asked in a debate, Landrieu gave Obama a passing grade. She trails Republican Bill Cassidy in a race that seems destined for a runoff due to the presence of a third Tea Party-backed candidate, Rob Maness.

Don’t take our word for it; even President Obama says they’re still true-blue.

President Obama’s comments on Al Sharpton’s radio show this week should eliminate any doubt that these so-called “independent,” or at least independent-minded (despite the ‘D’ after most of their names) candidates are still loyal to their party, and to him.

“The bottom line,” the president said, “is these are all folks who vote with me, they have supported my agenda in Congress…This isn’t about my feelings being hurt. These are folks who are strong allies and supporters of me and I tell them, you do what you need to win.”

From the looks of it, they’re hoping most voters in their states haven’t heard Sharpton’s show, or read about it here, because they obviously think what they need to win is to convince voters the President is an even bigger liar than they are.

Originally published on Practical Politicking

Independent and third party candidates may spoil Senate races

With control of the Senate coming down to a few seats that are too close to call, independent and third party candidates are positioned to play the spoiler in a number of races. In an unusual development, two independent candidates are making strong campaigns in two states. In several other states, Libertarian candidates are gaining just enough traction to affect the outcome of a close race. One three-way race pits a Tea Party favorite against another Republican and a Democrat.

The biggest outside threat to a race comes in Kansas, where independent Greg Orman is in a statistical tie with Republican incumbent Pat Roberts. The Democratic candidate, Chad Taylor, dropped out under pressure from national Democrats to step aside for Orman, a longtime Democrat supporter according to the Washington Examiner. Orman refuses say which party he would caucus with if he becomes the deciding vote in the Senate.

Another independent candidate is South Dakota’s Larry Pressler. Pressler is a former Republican congressman and Senator who supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Pressler, whose policy agenda closely aligns with Democratic positions these days, polled almost even with Mike Rounds (R), a former governor and the favorite to win the seat in early October. The poll, from Survey USA, also found that Pressler voters preferred Rick Weiland, the Democratic candidate, over Mike Rounds by almost a two-to-one margin.

The Libertarian Party is also positioned to spoil a number of races. The Libertarian website notes that there are Libertarian candidates on the ballot in nearly every battleground Senate race. These include Mark Fish in Alaska, Nathan LaFrane in Arkansas, Gaylon Kent in Colorado, Amanda Swafford in Georgia, Doug Butzier in Iowa, Randall Batson in Kansas, David Patterson in Kentucky, Roger Roots in Montana, and Sean Hough in North Carolina.

These Libertarian candidates have no chance of winning. Most don’t even show up in the polls, but they do have the potential to throw close races to the Democrats. Libertarian candidates often draw support disproportionately from voters who would otherwise support the Republican candidate.  This was the case last year in the Virginia gubernatorial election where a Libertarian candidate helped Democrat Terry McAuliffe eke out a three point victory over Ken Cuccinelli. In the Virginia race, and likely in others as well, Democratic fundraisers bankrolled the Libertarian candidate in order to dilute conservative votes according to campaign finance filings published by The Blaze.

In Georgia and Louisiana, candidates are required to get over 50 percent of the vote to win. If no candidate gets 50 percent, the top two finishers will compete in a runoff election. At this point, no candidate in either state is polling at more than 50 percent.

In Georgia, the most recent poll, by Landmark Communications, shows David Perdue (R) and Michelle Nunn (D) in a dead heat with 47 percent each. Amanda Swafford, the Libertarian candidate is at three percent and two percent are undecided. With Swafford in the race, it is likely that Perdue and Nunn will face each other in a runoff in January.

In Lousiana, incumbent Mary Landrieu (D) faces two Republicans. The Real Clear Politics average shows Landrieu with a slight lead over her two opponents, but falling far short of the necessary 50 percent. The leading Republican, Bill Cassidy, trails Landrieu by three points while Rob Maness, the Tea Party favorite, is a distant third with eight percent. Polling shows that Cassidy leads Landrieu in a two-way race and should and should have an edge in the runoff in December.

In both cases, a runoff would favor Republicans says analyst Dick Morris. Republican voters tend to be more motivated to vote in runoff elections and the absence of the third candidate would likely shift more votes to the GOP candidates. Additionally, Morris speculates that momentum after the Nov. 4 general election will likely favor Republicans, especially if the party captures the necessary six seats to control the Senate in the first round of elections.

In every race, with the sole exception of Kansas, the final victor is certain to be either a Democrat or a Republican. The question is whether enough voters will vote for independent and third party candidates to affect the outcome of the other races and perhaps the balance of the Senate.

Read the full article on Examiner.com

Why the Tea Party fizzled in 2014

2010 was the year of the Tea Party. It seems now that the movement’s impact was a flash in the pan, however. The once mighty grassroots effort flopped in 2012 and continued to slide toward irrelevance in 2014. How did the spontaneous uprising against President Obama’s liberal policies fizzle so quickly, especially since President Obama himself is more unpopular than ever?

In 2010, it seemed that the grass roots conservative movement would shake the nation and upend the Obama Administration. That year saw the Democrats take a “shellacking” as Republicans took control the House of Representatives in a landslide of historic proportions. The Republican class of 2010 included such notable names as Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

In the wake of 2010, many conservatives expected the Tea Party sweep to continue into 2012 and beyond. The Tea Party’s winning streak would end only two years later in 2012, however. That year began for conservatives with high hopes for not only unseating President Obama, but for winning control of the Senate as well. In the final tally, Republicans not only lost the presidential election but two additional Senate seats as well.

While the targeting of Tea Party groups by President Obama’s IRS had an impact on the election, a number of the 2012 losses can be directly attributed to the unforced errors and amateurish campaigns of poorly vetted Tea Party candidates. The names of Christine O’Donnell, Todd Aiken, and Richard Mourdock will live in infamy among conservatives. The roots of the Tea Party’s 2014 losses can be found in these failures of 2012.

The Tea Party’s biggest mistake of the 2014 cycle was pitting itself against the Republican establishment rather than maintaining a focus on unseating Democrats and fielding primary candidates for open seats. In 2014, the highest profile Tea Party candidates were fielded against Republican incumbents, many with sterling conservative voting records. There was Matt Bevin who ran against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, Steve Sterling who tried to unseat John Cornyn in Texas, Milton Wolf who challenged Pat Roberts in Kansas and Chris McDaniel who ran a strong campaign against Thad Cochran in Mississippi. All of these candidates lost in hotly contested races in spite of being heavily supported by Tea Party groups.

These Tea Partiers failed to unseat the incumbent Republicans for largely the same reasons that 2012 Tea Partiers failed against the Democrats. There was poor vetting in the case of Milton Wolf, who, as it was revealed late in the campaign, liked to post graphic x-ray pictures of serious injuries on Facebook and joke about them, and Chris McDaniel, whose talk radio recordings proved a treasure trove of embarrassing comments. There were unforced errors such as Matt Bevin’s appearance at a rally to legalize cockfighting. Steve Stockman, who Christopher Hooks of Politico called “the Lone Star state’s weirdest lawmaker,” ran a campaign that may not have included a single public appearance.

It seems that Republican primary voters have learned to stop casting aside perfectly good candidates for the flavor-of-the-month just because they have an established and successful career in politics. When in a life-or-death struggle with liberal Democrats, experience in Washington can be a good thing. This is especially true when the incumbents have strong conservative voting records as McConnell, Cornyn and Roberts do.

The value of experience may have been driven home to Republican voters in October 2013 with the defund debacle. The attempt to defund Obamacare last year was led by Tea Party favorites Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). The pair browbeat reticent Republicans into falling in line with their plan to defund the Affordable Care Act, which had, in reality, included its own funding.

The flaw in the Cruz-Lee plan was that the Republicans did not hold a Senate majority, let alone one that could override an Obama veto. Compounding their error, the pair made no attempt to swing the support of vulnerable Democrats to their cause. When the Democrats predictably refused to defund their pet project, the Republicans eventually were forced to cave on their demands to prevent a federal default. Because Obamacare was self-funded, it was implemented on schedule even as national parks were closed. To add insult to injury, the government shutdown distracted the media from the story of Obamacare’s disastrous rollout.

Ironically, the biggest Tea Party successes of 2014 had little support from national Tea Party groups. Dave Brat, the insurgent candidate who unseated Eric Cantor in the largest upset of the Republican primary season, was not funded or backed by national Tea Party groups until after he won. Another so-called Tea Party candidate, Ben Sasse, who won the Republican Senate nomination for a vacant seat in Nebraska, was actually supported by both “establishment” and Tea Party Republicans according to The Atlantic. Sasse was the second choice of Tea Party groups and was attacked by FreedomWorks before the group changed its mind and supported him.

Polling by Gallup shows that that in its early days, the Tea Party found strong support among Republicans. Between 2010 and 2014, Tea Party support among Republicans fell by 20 points (to 41 percent) and opponents doubled (to 11 percent).

Among Americans at large, the story is much the same. The Tea Party had the support of about one in three Americans in 2010. Opposition surged ahead of the 2012 elections and again in late 2013 in the wake of the government shutdown. Going into the 2014 election season, Tea Party opponents outnumbered supporters by 27-23 percent according to Gallup. An even larger segment of the population simply does not care about the Tea Party.

The Tea Party fizzled for two reasons. First, the group tried to take on not one, but both, parties with candidates of poor quality. Second, the group faced a backlash because of the poor strategy involved in the attempt to defund Obamacare. The Tea Party alienated its natural consistency in the Republican Party by attacking party stalwarts with the label of “RINO” and nearly killing the party’s chances in 2014 with the government shutdown.

At this point, with only 41 percent approval in the GOP, the Tea Party label is not necessarily helpful to Republicans even among the party base. With only 23 percent approval among voters, it may well be toxic in a general election. Successful Tea Party candidates must follow the Ben Sasse model and appeal to both factions of the GOP.

Nevertheless, the Tea Party is not dead and will likely live on as a faction of the Republican Party. As Michael Tanner pointed out in National Review, the Tea Party is doing what it set out to do even without any of its candidates winning. The Tea Party has forced the Republican Party back to the right after years of Bush-era spending. The knowledge that they will face a Tea Party challenge from the right if they drift too far toward the center will hold the feet of Republican incumbents to the fire for years to come.

Read the full article on Examiner.com

Kansas senator warns US is ‘headed for socialism’

An incumbent Republican senator has said on two occasions that the United States is “headed for national socialism.” The Washington Times reported on Sept. 24. Sen. Pat Roberts made the initial comments were made last week at a town hall meeting in Dodge City, Kan. Roberts reiterated his to a reporter the next day.

In a Youtube video of the press conference, Sen. Roberts can be seen telling attendees, “There’s a palpable fear among Kansans all across the state that the America that we love and cherish will not be the same America for our kids and grandkids, and that’s wrong. One of the reasons that I’m running is to change that. There’s an easy way to do it. I’ll let you figure it out. But at any rate, we have to change course because our country is headed for national socialism. That’s not right. It’s changing our culture. It’s changing what we’re all about.”

Roberts apparently intended allude to socialism on a national scale and not to invoke Nazis, which were officially called the National Socialist Party.

The Washington Post also reported on Sept. 24 that Roberts had confirmed his fear that the country was becoming socialist the next day when responding to a reporter. “I believe that the direction he is heading the country is more like a European socialistic state,” Roberts answered. “You can’t tell me anything that he [Obama] has not tried to nationalize.”

Roberts, a senator since 1997, is in the midst of a close reelection battle against Greg Orman, a lifelong Democrat who is ostensibly an independent. Real Clear Politics rates the race as a tossup, but Roberts has trailed Orman in several recent polls.

Roberts handily defeated Milton Wolf in the 2014 Kansas Republican primary earlier this year. The race had been close until Wolf, a radiologist, was revealed to have posted and joked about x-ray images of injuries and gunshot wounds on his Facebook page.

Allegations that Roberts is no longer a resident of Kansas have also proved troublesome for his campaign. According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, Roberts’ house is Kansas is rented out and the senator rents a room in a supporter’s house. A recent revelation is that Roberts’ mortgage documents show his house in Virginia as his principle residence.

The Republican quest for a Senate majority may come down to Kansas. Republicans need to gain six seats to gain control of the Senate. Kansas is one of the few states in which the Democrats have a chance to pick off a Republican incumbent.

Read the full story on Elections Examiner