Daily Toics - Wednesday December 3rd, 2014

Join Thom in our chatroom during the program!
Be sure to check out our new videos: CARBON, LAST HOURS & GREEN WORLD RISING - narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio
Hour One: Who's really manipulating the new world order?
Hour Two: The secret ALEC conference you need to know about - Jane Carter, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
Hour Three: Thom Hartmann University Book Club - Dan Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800
Comments


British laws such as the Magna Carta and the 1660 Bill of Rights make up what the British call their Constitution, but that's a more colloquial meaning. It's not a single and founding document. These laws also do not make up the common law, which is by definition not statutory, but is made up of judicial decisions.

We Democrats have some strategizing to do. I was wondering how Colorado's voter turnout differed from those of other states, since we have all mail-in ballots here now. I found this website: http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/11/05/midterm-turnout-decreased-in-all-but-12-states
It turns out that voter turnout was up in those states where incumbent Democrats lost senate seats. In a comparison between 2014 and 2010, the previous mid-term election, LA, AR, AK, NC & CO were in the top 8 of states with senate elections. (I have to discount MS, because the senate election in 2010 was unopposed, showing 0% turnout.) Now, NH was also up, and MI, the only state where a non-incumbent Democrat won, was above the median in relative turnout, so this isn't an absolute. But it looks like Republicans benefitted from increases in turnout. These 5 losers plus NH, had the 6 greatest increases in turnout among the 15 states with an incumbent Democrat in the Senate race. States that flipped from blue to red without an incumbent Democrat saw no correlation with turnout. So it looks like Republicans made sure to show up against vulnerable incumbents, whereas Democrats didn't. Democrats cannot legitimately blame generally low turnout. Not one running incumbent Republican Senator lost, and one even ran unopposed.
The states where incumbent Democrats lost were also all states that didn't have a senate race in 2012, but had one in 2010. Though again, so was NH. I don't know what that might mean.



Uh-oh, it says "Toics"