| Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty November 7, 2014 This is the last Morning Jolt until November 17. If you’re going on the National Review Post-Election Cruise, I’ll see you this weekend! Our Vacation from Paying Attention to Ukraine & Russia Just Ended So it turns out Putin thinks he has more flexibility after the election, too: An armoured column including 32 tanks and 30 trucks has crossed into eastern Ukraine from Russia, Kiev says. The trucks were carrying ammunition and fighters, said a military spokesman, but the BBC cannot confirm his report. A fragile ceasefire has been in place since 5 September, although hundreds of people have been killed since then. More than 4,000 people have died since fighting erupted in April after pro-Russian separatists seized control in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. | | Demote Harry Reid This Fall | | | | Surrender, Surrender, But Don’t Give a Seat Away The DSCC abandons Mary Landrieu: The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has canceled its advertising reservations for Sen. Mary Landrieu ahead of the December runoff in Louisiana. The committee canceled all broadcast buys planned from Monday through Dec. 6 in the state’s five major media markets, three sources tracking the air war told POLITICO. That’s about $1.6 million worth of time. The DSCC is in the process of canceling an additional $275,000 in cable placements, according to buyer sources. This is not such a crazy response to Tuesday’s disastrous results for the DSCC. It’s not like control of the Senate is at stake anymore, and she’s got a serious uphill climb. The good news for her is that she was at 40 percent in the polls and finished with 43 percent on Election Day. The bad news is that Republican Bill Cassidy was at 34.5 percent in the polls and finished with 41.9 percent. Republican Bill Manness got 13.7 percent. Inevitably, someone will wonder, as Hugh Hewitt did yesterday, whether the National Republican Senatorial Committee should still spend $2.3 million on broadcast ad time in Louisiana over the next month. They should pull out only if they’re completely confident of victory on December 6 — and they shouldn’t be — and only if they feel like Republicans have too many Senate seats. Ready for a World Where Republicans Have Good Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts? Rick Wilson, back on October 31: It’s simple enough: can the voter turnout tools and techniques developed and deployed with such success by Barack Obama’s team in 2008 and 2012 work for Democrats without the exceptional charisma, presence, media adoration, and generational and racial signifiers that Obama brought to the fight?
It bothers Republicans because, while they rightly believe the technology itself is apolitical, they’re worried. But we lay awake at night thinking, “What if they’re too far ahead? What if they move this targeting and turnout operation all the way down the ballot and start picking electoral locks in places where they shouldn’t win? What if it doesn’t depend on Obama at all? What if he was just the passenger in the machine these genius liberal nerds built?” Keep an eye on data-driven races where the Democrats have deployed the Obama technology and turnout models. Watch the North Carolina, Alaska, Iowa, and Colorado Governor’s races [I think he meant Senate races – Jim] , and particularly the Georgia and Florida gubernatorial races, where a battle of the nerd ninjas on both sides is in full swing. We’ll have more answers then — and one side won’t like it. We have our answer: GOP wins in North Carolina, Iowa, Colorado, Georgia, and Florida, and an 8,000 vote lead in the Alaska Senate race where the final votes are being counted at a glacial pace. Ron Fournier: A review of the RNC's targeting operation (including a preelection sample of specific projections) suggests to me that the GOP has made significant advances on targeting and mobilizing voters. While the Democratic Party may still own the best ground game, GOP Chairman Reince Priebus has narrowed, if not closed, the tech gap. A few Democrats saw this coming. "Our side has underestimated the GOP ground game," Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me Tuesday morning. "Their electorate doesn't look like ours, so we don't recognize or respect what they're doing." . . . Democratic consultant Doug Sosnik, who co-authored "Applebee's America" with Dowd and me, declared Tuesday that the GOP has clawed back into the ground wars. Comparing Republicans to other fast-adapting institutions, Sosnik said, "They don't invent anything, but they can take an invention and make it better, faster, and for less money. That's how technology works."
Credit goes to Priebus and a data team headed by Jesse Kamzol. Last week, Kamzol described how far the world of micro-targeting has progressed. The advances benefit both parties, assuming they're both willing to take advantage. . . . There is just so much more digital data on all of us than there was a decade ago — collected and analyzed in orders of unfathomable magnitude. The RNC had enough data this year to rate each individual registered voter on a scale of 1 to 100 on their likelihood to vote strictly along party lines; to vote for a GOP candidate or a Democratic candidate; to participate in elections; and to cast an early ballot. They also rated each voter's view on Obamacare. One point that can get lost in all this: You can have the most state-of-the-art get-out-the-vote system in the whole wide world, but it won’t help as much if your candidate is a turkey. The John Birch Left and Progressives’ Transference of Their Fears Ed Driscoll offers a new label: The John Birch Left. But just as the Bircher right began to see communists everywhere, the new Bircher left sees racism, sexism, homophobia, and Koch Brothers everywhere. They’re lurking around more corners than Gen. Ripper imagined there were commies lurking inside Burpelson Air Force Base. They’re inside your video games! They own NFL teams! They’ll steal your condoms! Disagree with President Obama? Racist! (That goes for you too, Bill, Hillary, and your Democratic supporters.) Not onboard for gender-neutral bathrooms? Not too thrilled with abortion-obsessed candidates like Wendy Davis and “Mark Uterus”? Sexist! Disagree with using global warming as a cudgel to usher in the brave new world of bankrupt coal companies and $10 a gallon gasoline? Climate denier! And as with the original Birchers, don’t get ‘em started on fluoride.
The original Birchers weren’t bad people, but their Cold War paranoia got the better of them. Similarly, as Charles Krauthammer famously said, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil,” which illustrates how a John Birch-style worldview can cause the modern leftists to take an equally cracked view of his fellow countrymen, to the point of writing off entire states and genders . . . A list of progressives’ fears would offer a mix of the insignificant, the theoretical, the farfetched, and the mundane: “micro-aggressions,” climate change a century from now, the Koch Brothers, insufficient cultural sensitivity in video games, an allegedly imminent Christian theocracy, and so on. New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio is on a crusade to save his city from charter schools and horse-drawn carriages. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fears gun shops within 500 feet of a school, while 367 people have been murdered in the city so far this year. You notice progressives don’t spend a lot of time and energy fearing flights of people from countries with Ebola, an unsecured border, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Vladimir Putin’s aggression, the declining number of two-parent families . . . This may be a bit of psychological transference. When Leftists notice things like ISIS, Putin’s aggression or the collapse of the family, on some level -- perhaps subconsciously — they realize their preferred options are unlikely to be effective. Confronting that fact would force them to reevaluate how they see the world — and sometimes, after a sufficiently dramatic or frightening event such as 9/11, some people actually do change their entire worldview. But a lot of people can’t or won’t overhaul their entire philosophy and understanding of how the world works. So they deny the idea that any of these are real problems or worthy of much attention or discussion -- they reflect GOP scaremongering, others’ paranoia, etc. But all of that fear and anxiety and anger has to go somewhere . . . and thus it gets expressed at much more convenient and much more philosophically aligned targets — i.e., climate change a century from now, the Koch Brothers, insufficient cultural sensitivity in video games, and so on. ADDENDA: My pop culture podcast veers into an election discussion this week, but focusing on how people watch on Election Night — is it better as a social occasion or something to experience in the privacy of your own home? The official announcement of the title of Episode VII, from StarWars.com: 
How the Force actually awakens: 
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