Sunday School 11/4/18

One classroom and only one, I told myself this morning. It was totally random that I picked MTP with Chuck Todd; I honestly scribbled show names on scraps of paper, wadded them up and picked one.

After all, since this is the Sunday before Election Day, the shows were going to pretty much the same anyway - heck, they're pretty  much the same every Sunday, truth be told.

First up was Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who's the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; he was followed by Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, chair of the Republican Governors Association.

Van Hollen was in charge of the DCCC in 2008, when the Dems picked up 21 seats in the House and 8 in the Senate, and in 2010 when they lost 63 seats in the House and another six in the Senate. He was asked to compare the atmosphere between 2010 and today.

There are big differences between the House and Senate seats in this cycle, Chuck because on the one hand you have kind of a wave, a blue wave, although how big it will be, we don't know. But then in the Senate races, we've got a lot of senators who are running in states that Donald Trump won. And for them, they've been very clear from the beginning that their number one job is to stand up for the people of their states. And if that means working with Donald Trump on something that helps their states, they will. If it means opposing him and Republicans, they will also do that, for example, on protecting people with pre-existing health conditions. So it's a very different, sort of, political battlefield in Senate races than House races. 

Interesting answer, there -- not because he didn't answer the question he was asked, really, but more because he actually came out and said that Democrats who are running in purple states are going to do what they're supposed to do, instead of doing what the party leadership says they're supposed to do.

Van Hollen spoke about the narrow path to a Senate majority (holding on to most of their current seats and picking up a few more), but the real issue is voter turnout, he said. Todd then described what he thought would be a good night would be winning one of the races in Missouri, Tennessee, Texas and North Dakota; they'd need two, he said, to even think about a majority. Both of them agreed that going 0-4 would be bad, with Van Hollen saying it wasn't going to happen.

Todd then turned to the Dem's approach, and asked whether it was better to do a Beto O'Rourke in Texas and go so far as to mention impeaching Trump, or to take the Phil Bredesen approach in Tennessee, who's running almost as a label-free centrist. 

Well, Chuck it tells you that the quality of the candidate is really important and their ability to communicate on issues that people in their states care about. And we have candidates in both Texas and Tennessee who are doing exactly that...

It was at this point that Todd asked the question I thought he would have earlier, about Dems running on the promise to be their own person, not a party person,and whether the Dems need new leadership.

Well, those members running, I'm sure, will fulfill their commitments but that doesn't mean that we don't have a strong leadership team in the United States Senate. Look, this is an example of what I as talking about earlier, that what voters want are senators whose number on job is to stick up for their states. And sometimes that means working with their party leadership, sometimes that means working in the opposite direction. But that's very different than, you know, Republican candidates who are simply rubber-stamp Trump supporters...

Haslam was next, asked to define what a good night would be for the Republicans, given there are 36 gubernatorial races up for grabs this year, which is a lot compared to other presidential mid-term years. 10 are shown as toss-ups.

...we feel good about the position we're in but we're not blind to the fact that a president's first midterm when we have this many seats up... that's why at RGA we've worked hard, we've raised a record amount of money this cycle. And we're making certain we're putting all that money to good use here in the last three weeks of the campaign.

Todd honed in on the Midwest as an area where the Rs could be in trouble, that it was possible all of the states touching a Great Lake could have a Democratic governor.  He wondered what it would take to prevent that. Haslam thought that Scott Walker will hang on in Wisconsin, but that Michigan was an uphill battle.

Wisconsin and Michigan are important, you remember, because those are two of the states that Trump won by next to nothing when, honestly, Hillary Clinton thought they were in the bag.

I'm going to give the last word to Tom Brokaw, who was on the panel today.

Well, one of the things that troubles me a lot is when I think of the projected results of this election, we'll end up again with a pudding without a theme. We're going to have Democrats, probably, in the House on the upside. I think the Senate will probably stay the same. And we're just going to have to muddle through for the next two years. 

The country is still going to be deeply, deeply divided.  

But remember - we can fix that. 

See you around campus.