Page 912 - Midterm News Today

Because we need to do something. do you believe it is something that you can get done in the midterms and you have to gain another 24 seats to regain control. thats a hard thing to do when you dont have a general election with a strong leader delivering that message home nationally and in the smaller districts. >> well, there is always an opening in an off year election. i think i can be that strong leader to take us in the majority because i can do in any congressional district in the entire co...

Advantage when it comes to congressional races. some of it is just political bad luck. for example, i came in as an economy was in free fall. although we took the right steps to save the economy, in my midterm election 2010, people couldnt yet see the recovery. not surprisingly the presidents party got punished. we lost control of a lot of not just congressional seats but gubernatorial seats and state legislative seats. that happened to be the year the census is done and you start doing redistri...

Seats in the house. president obama didnt call that a thumping, he called it a s shellacking, the largest shellacking in 60 years. and in 2014, the next midterm of his second term, they got another shellacking. and overall, since that magical, misty-eyed amazing night for s democrats in 2008, with the exception of braarack obamas re-election, democratic losses have been huge. even before last weeks electoral disaster, democrats under the era of president obama lost 13 senate seats, 69 house seat...

Another eight seats in the senate. they won another 21 seats in the house. they even added another governors seat. on that night in 2008, democrats were flying high. they held huge majorities in both chambers in washington, the country had just elected a massively popular democratic president. there was talk of an emerging democratic majority for years to come. and of course, president obama was the tip of that spear. but once again, for the second wave in two cycles, a lot of the credit went to...

President. there was talk of an emerging democratic majority for years to come. and of course, president obama was the tip of that spear. but once again, for the second wave in two cycles, a lot of the credit went to nancy pelosi, for, again, not just keeping the democratic majority, but expanding it. and then we know what happened, right? that night, november 4th, 2008, that was the top of the mountain. i mean, yes, president obama won re-election four years later, over mitt romney and the demo...

Wave in two cycles, a lot of the credit went to nancy pelosi, for, again, not just keeping the democratic majority, but expanding it. and then we know what happened, right? that night, november 4th, 2008, that was the top of the mountain. i mean, yes, president obama won re-election four years later, over mitt romney and the democrats in congress picked up a few seats in 2012, but that was the exception that proved the rule over the last eight years. in the interim, democrats got their own versi...

Democrats. democrats. i do focus groups with younger minorities and they dont know what a midterm is, right? and they dont understand the importance of midterm. thats not their fault. thats our fault as the democratic party. when i go into north carolina four weeks before the election and i say, you know, show them a criminal justice reform bullet point here, a platform here and its everything they ask for but they dont know where the democratic party is on it and its clintons platform reform th...

>> good. >> it was good. but theres a question about how reproduceable the obama coalition is, the democratic party at the state, local level all the way up now to federal has been hollowed out in the last six years. >> but lets separate the two electorates, its apples to oranges, it looks very different to the on-year electorate. >> but thats a problem for democrats. >> it is a problem for democrats. i do focus groups with younger minorities and they dont know what a midterm is, right? and they...

States in 2012, and hillary looks strong in north carolina. a state obama couldnt anyone 2012. the kind of transition were seeing. >> one more thing to watch beyond the african-american vote is in 2012, north carolina was the state where there was the biggest difference between the way young people voted and the way older people voted. in the 2014 midterm, young people didnt show up. one reason kay hagan, for instance, lost. well see if that part of the obama coalition is showing up. >> and, you...

Last time a democrat did that, 1836. >> brian channeling his inner jeffrey lord. >> wow. but it was the 2008 financial crisis and the approach of it which helped obama eight years ago. and then it was the undertow of it that hurt him and made him such a liability for democrats, you know, in the midterm and challenged him a little bit in 2012. i think were seeing to some extent the upside of it. >> look at these numbers. we live in two americas. there literally is a parallel universe. how are thi...