(Political Ramblings from a Little Left of Center)
“I’m not a member of any organized political party…. I’m a Democrat.” – Will Rogers, 1935. Some things never change. While Democrats have thus far shown remarkable solidarity in response to the shutdown, there are numerous party battles on the horizon that could make Game of Thrones look like a baby shower competition. There’s the…
I couldn’t bring myself to listen to Trump’s prime-time border diatribe last night, but I did read the transcript. Wow. Numerous media outlets have done a decent job fact-checking the cornucopia of outright lies, so there’s little reason to do that. However, I will add a few thoughts to my previous take on the subject.…
Paging 2020 Democratic presidential candidates: Where the hell are you? The government shutdown over border wall funding should be your opportunity to break out early. This is a slam-dunk, folks. Trump has shuttered part of the government causing paychecks to stop for some 800,000 federal employees …. … over a wall that doesn’t have popular…
Trump recently announced that American troops will immediately withdraw from Syria and will decrease their presence by 50% in Afghanistan. As a proud Army Brat (the self-descriptive term used by those of us who grew up in career Army families), I am perhaps a bit more attentive than most when American troops are deployed into…
Last week, federal prosecutors called Donald Trump a felon. In their sentencing memo for Michael Cohen, Trump’s long-time lawyer, the prosecutors noted that Cohen paid off two women who claim to have had extramarital affairs with Trump. Since the payments were intended to influence the Presidential campaign, they violated campaign finance law when they were…
In the recent elections in Wisconsin, Democrats won every single statewide race. Voters chose a Democratic U.S. Senator, a Democratic Governor, a Democratic Attorney General, a Democratic Treasurer, and a Democratic Secretary of State. In addition, Democrats won 54% of votes cast statewide for the U.S. House and 54% of votes cast statewide for the…
I thought I’d share my current analysis of the Electoral College landscape for the 2020 Presidential election. I’m still collecting data and tweaking algorithms but, since I’ll be doing that for the next couple of years, a work-in-progress snapshot seems appropriate. I find it seriously counter-productive to ignore facts when trying to formulate a game…
Nancy Pelosi is not my favorite Democrat. I think she and Harry Reid missed a golden opportunity in 2009 to reach across the aisle and pick off a few moderate Republicans for some early bipartisan wins when Democrats briefly controlled everything. (Yes, moderate Republicans did once exist.) The pair could have made Obama’s life a…
In partial preparation for an initial analysis of the 2020 Presidential election, some of the first state-level data I gathered related to the Electoral College. That data subset quickly took me down a rabbit hole chasing after a rodent that’s been on my nerves for a very long time. This is why I have a…
I’ve just begun the process of gathering and organizing the necessary data to do some predictive and prescriptive 2020 election analytics. The questionable key word here is “necessary”. As I piece together a data set from a multitude of sources (that are often not easily consumable), I constantly find additional data sets that might also…