Election ‘10: Assessing public’s mood

27 October 2010 |permalink | email article

What are Americans’ views on the midterm elections? A new ABC News/Yahoo News poll asked and the response was there are not enough good choices. [Just] 19 percent of Americans feel there are at least a good amount of candidates available to them who share their view of what the country needs. Forty-six percent instead see few or even no such choices. That leaves 35 percent who don’t know if there are any candidates with whom they agree, a number that’s about as high (30 percent) among registered voters.

California First Lady Maria Shriver’s annual women’s conference Tuesday offered one snapshot of the discontent when gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown were on the hot seat and asked to pull their attack advertising a week before the election. “Today” show host Matt Lauer called for a truce and drew sustained applause.

Brown, the Democrat who initially balked, said, “Let’s be clear, if she takes her negative ads down…I’ll take mine down, no question,” he said to loud applause. Republican Whitman demurred, saying she would take down any ads that could be construed as a personal attack. “But I don’t think we can take down ads that talk about where Gov. Brown stands on the issues.” Her answer prompted loud boos from the largely female audience who initially greeted her arrival with loud cheers.

Five Thirty Eight

Here’s an overnight update from Nate Silver’s Political Calculus in the New York Times: It’s likely that the Democrats will hold the Senate but not the House, although upsets in either chamber remain possible. The necessary and sufficient reason is because only one-third of the Senate is up for re-election every two years. By comparison, in the House, where everyone is up for re-election every two years, Republicans appear most likely to win something like 53 percent of the available seats. But it could be a bit below 50 if the Democrats overperform their polls and hold the House.

Quotable

“Why, in other words, did {Juan} Williams not say about those in Muslim garb: Common sense becomes bigotry when religious attire becomes a formula for figuring out who is a danger to me. Why this extreme double standard? And how dare he use his own record in defending civil rights for African-Americans to justify his bigoted prejudice against devout Muslims? – Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish.

“If the Democrats hold Connecticut and hold West Virginia, that means the rest of the evening Republicans have to run the table, including Washington and California. Winning both of these is an enormous challenge.” – Charlie Cook of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, answering a question from Michael Gerson of the Washington Post.

280