Para Bellum Labs Will Attempt To Make the RNC a Political-Analytics Player

[sofa king]

As per Slashdot:

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/14/02/11/1421243/para-bellum-labs-will-attempt-to-make-the-rnc-a-political-analytics-player

... The GOP has only a few short years to prepare for the next Presidential election cycle, and the party is scrambling to build an analytics system capable of competing against whatever the Democrats deploy onto the field of battle. To that end, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has launched Para Bellum Labs, modeled after a startup, to produce digital platforms for election analytics and voter engagement. Is this a genuine attempt to infuse the GOP's infrastructure with data science, or merely an attempt to show that the organization hasn't fallen behind the Democratic Party when it comes to analytics? ...

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This amuses me to no end. This is probably the usual RNC Potemkin Village project where they bravely pretend to harness the science they hate so much, wave it around for PR for a week, and fold it up in a month.

But if it isn't, if the Republicans are really trying to survey the American landscape, then the hilarity really ensues, because what the labcoats are going to have to tell the criminals is that thirty years of Republican policy have killed off virtually everyone who voted for Ronald Reagan. Perhaps one in ten remains.

My guess is that around half of all white male Republicans who voted for GWB when they were 50 years old are now dead, because Republicanism destroyed the middle class, stole their homes, pushed them into poverty, and never stopped vilifying the impoverished people that Republican policy has created.

Those people either could not afford to remain Republicans, were pushed into cities where their ignorant influence is easily absorbed, or stuck to their guns, traded in their homes to keep the gays down, and died without healthcare or a social safety net. And every day since Barack Obama was elected, Republicans have toiled endlessly to make the newly created Republican Poor die faster, which they have done with more success than anything else they have tried.

Anyway, soon Science is going to tell Republicans that they killed off their base, and their discontent will be both amusing and increasingly harmless, as the GOP sails off to the history books about five elections sooner than anyone would have dared guess when Cheney and Bush first stole it.

I'm not going to lie: I am glad that ignorant Republicans have sacrificed their lives and treasure to keep America evil. Someone had to pay for it, and I can think of nobody more deserving than the people who put belief and hatred above rationalism and empathy. Now the party that exploited and killed them off gets to learn first hand that the list of voters out there is nothing more than a list of enemies who are just waiting for the elephant to fall over so that its corpse can be devoured.

[Kablooie]

1. Their base still holds the house firmly in it's pants ...

and there's no indication that will change.

Also they are feeling more confident that they will win the Senate this fall.

The presidency is pretty far from their grasp but if they own the House and the Senate there's not much a Democratic president can do except stem a right wing pandemic from overrunning the country.

They aren't nearly as weak as we'd like to believe.

[sofa king]

2. I hear ya.

Nope, it ain't over yet and won't be for some time, and if we don't bust our asses we'll never see it at all.

But we will bust our asses, and the change is going to happen sooner than expected and will spread much faster than most anticipate when it does. Not this year, but before the decade ends.

This particularly applies to the House, which was carefully gerrymandered into shape by Republicans using 2010 census data that did not take into account an increasing rate of change. Specifically, Republicans almost certainly did not predict that their voter base would begin dying five to six elections (ten to thirteen years) sooner than the prevailing data (from the Clinton years, ha ha) suggested at the time.

This almost certainly means that the gerrymandering will sag, collapse, and wind up working against the Republican Party before this decade is out. I think it will first be noticeable in state legislatures, so watch for states like Virginia to flip and then pick the following Congressional election to be the one that flips the House.

That didn't happen in Virginia last year, so you are surely correct in the short term.

Much, much more telling was Harry Reid's decision to use the nuclear option last December. That sort of aggressive rule-manipulation really does have its comparisons to nuclear warfare... unless you've guessed that your opponent is never going to regain control of the Senate.

Never. If your opponent is declining and on his way out, that's when you nuke his ass to push him out the door a little faster. That's really the only time when such a maneuver is a viable option, when you are certain that your opponent can never respond in kind, circumstances which can only be guaranteed by changing demographics such as the ones we are seeing now.

So as a result, I think we can guess that Democrats in the Senate, at least, expect to continue winning statewide elections, including Senate, gubernatorial, and Presidential elections, at the same 2 to 1 rate that they have won the last two elections.

Rather than losing the Senate, that puts Democrats in a position to bag a supermajority in the Senate in the next election, still an outside chance but feasible and obviously an important objective of the President himself.

What I am saying, loudly, is that the future is bright and America is saveable. We just have to wait for the holy trinity of Marlboro, Mountain Dew, and Moon Pie to guide Republican voters--not the people who control them--to an early demise.

[Kablooie]

4. I hope you're right about the Senate and the GOP is just stinking up the room with their claims.

I assume Reid knew what he was doing do that is telling.

[Chan790]

3. Ironically, the Senate is further from them than at any point since the 2012 elections.

One of them the other day told me that they had it locked up because there's no way any Democrat will ever win a Senate race in WV and they're not losing any seats. The rest of their predictions were equally absurd.

All Democrats have done for better than 60 years is win statewide races in WV. I may not like the likes of WV Dems...but WV is a one-party state in all but Presidential elections.

Someone better go tell Allison Grimes that the GOP isn't losing any Senate seats...because all she's done for the last month is paste the walls with Mitch McConnell in their Senate race.

I'm reminded of WW I where the average German and Austrian was stupefied to suddenly lose a war they'd been convinced they were winning from the first shot. The GOP can't do much with only the House...and they're stuck with only the House until the day a viable moderate-wing long-knives the tea party and pulls the base center-ward.

[sofa king]

6. I'm right with you there.

Let's put it another way: there are 36 seats up for grabs (all 33 Class 2 plus 3 Class 3 Special Elections), Republicans are already the minority in Class 2 (and Class 1), and in 2012 they lost Senate elections over three to one (23D + 2I versus 8 GOP). Democrats hold the advantage in Class 2, 20 to 13, and the three specials make it 21 to 15.

If Democrats were to carry that same 3:1 momentum into this election (they won't, I know), they would pick up six seats and that supermajority we need. The disaster would certainly propagate into the last Republican bastion of Class 3, which won't be an off-year election like this one. That means to me that if we hit the homer this time, Republicans could be down to 30 seats in the Senate by January, 2017. That's part of the massive and unexpected change I'm talking about.

On the other hand, to maintain their position as a viable minority party, Republicans have to hold on to all 15 of their seats and pick up five more than that to win a majority. West Virginia might be one. Three flyovers have Democratic Senators retiring (Tom Harkin is irreplaceable, and one of those permanent losses we simply have to accept.)

Where is the fifth? And worse than that, this will have to be the first election year, maybe in modern history, that a Republican Senator does not wreck his reelection chances through sexual dalliances, financial crimes, or ignorant public statements. That's gonna fuckin' happen to one or more of them this year--Mitch McConnell looks like he's already headed that way, and the Deep South, a common provider of the self-destructing Republican Senator, is fully in play this time. Southern luminaries at bat include Thad Cochran, Lamar Alexander, Jim Inhofe, and Lindsey Graham.

The writing is on the wall because Republicans are exceedingly dependable in a number of ways: you can count on them to be criminals, you can count on them to say stupid things, and you can count on them to be less in touch with their constituents than the Democratic candidates, and you can count on them to take the position that harms the voters (because harming people is how rich people get richer).

So it's not looking good for them anywhere. Even if Jeb Bush steals it again, he'll be locked down as tight as Harry Reid locked down W. in his last four years. From now on, any Democratic reverse we experience will be mitigated by the fact that we'll only need to wait a year or two for a few more stupid Republicans to die, and then we can fix it.

[PeoViejo]

5. Para Bellum=Prepare for War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem,_para_bellum

[sofa king]

7. It's also the name of a bullet.

Several different types of bullets actually, but since the 9mm parabellum round is one of the most common in the world, the term "parabellum" is usually synonymous for that bullet right now.

It is amusing that the Republicans must view a survey of the people in warlike terms, as if it were a conquest--or a sagging, corrupt empire defending against a revolution.

[PeoViejo]

8. The Bullet was named after the Latin Phrase I cited.

Ipso facto.