From a current NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll, regarding likely voters:

(Source)

It looks to me that more mobilization is needed. Groups you would think have the highest stakes in this year’s election have low numbers.

Related to potential Kavanaugh effects, from the same poll:

Women are smarter than men, people with college degrees are smarter than those without, younger is smarter than older. Oddly, Independents dislike Kavanaugh to a greater degree than one would expect given the previously graph. (I’m suspicious of the category “Independent,” however.)

Regarding who should control congress, this:

The Republican Party is the party of whites, men, and to some degree older folks, while the Democratic Party is the party of people of color, women, younger folks, and the better educated.

Most critical may be the fact that 50% of likely voters prefer Democrats nation wide, while only 41% of likely voters prefer Republicans.

This will not, however, translate into more Republican members of congress. Local tradition, local campaigning, election rigging, and gerrymandering, determine who wins a given Congressional seat. Sadly. As I’ve suggested before, it is highly unlikely that a Democratic leaning American electorate will actually elect a Democratic majority Congress, in either house.

Expect Mud

This happened. I was sitting on the couch watching a football game (go Vikings!) and a political ad for our local Democratic candidate for Congress, Dean Phillips, came on. It was a positive, informative, up beat ad. Nice. Then, a political ad for the Republican incumbent, the Trump Lapdog Erik Paulsen, came up. It was negative, disgusting, and full of lies.

So the person watching the game with me, asked about why that ad was so horrible and why do the Democrats have such different ads. I said, “The Democrats used to use negative ads too, both parties did. ”

“Why?”

“Because experts told all the campaigns that they worked, and they did seem to work, so everybody did them. But this year, Democrats, at least here, decided to do no negative ads. So you see Republican negative ads, no Democratic negative ads.”

“I think,” he said, “If you have negative ads, some people learn to hate the other candidate so you win, but more people hate the whole idea and just stay home and don’t vote, and that matters more.”‘

“Hmm,” I replied. “Pretty smart for an eight year old, since that is exactly how we lost this race two years ago!”

Here’s the thing. Right now, Republicans are going to double down on negative ads, and they are going to work. Or, just ads that lie. For example, Representative Sarah Anderson, of the Minnesota house, is famous for a) reducing funding for education and b) opposing heath care reform. Her opponent, Ginny Klevorn, is famous for a) being very pro education and also, knowing a lot about how the school systems in her district are run, and b) wanting to link the health care plans state legislators have to the average cost and availability of health plans for all the citizens of the state, so they know exactly what everyone is experiencing (currently, Sarah Anderson and her Republican buddies in the MN Legislature have really great heath care plans!)

The people who live in this district have made it clear that they want more attention paid to, and more money spent on, education, and they want health care reform. So, naturally, anti-education and anti-health care reform Republican Sarah Anderson has put out lies in all her lit and other ads, painting herself as the savior of the education system and the savior of health care. Erik Paulsen is putting out negative, lie-filled, hate ads against Dean Phillips, in the US Congressional race here. The Republican dweeb running for Governor, Jeff Johnson, has been putting out hateful, dishonest ads, in his effort to catch up with Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Time Walz. And so on.

That’s all expected. What concerns me right now is the fact, just reported by the New York Times, that while Democrats have been out raising Republicans in recent weeks, Republicans have way more money to spend on elections, starting now.

Republicans entered the final month of the campaign with more money in the bank than the Democrats, providing them with vital ammunition as they wage a furious effort to hold on to control of Congress.

The most recent round of campaign finance disclosures, filed Saturday, showed that Republican national party committees, candidates in key House and Senate races and their top unlimited-money outside groups, or “super PACs,” had $337 million on hand as of Sept. 30. Their Democratic counterparts had $285 million in the bank on the same date.

What I don’t know is if this is simply more false balance reporting by the New York Times, or good analysis. Democratic superpacs have raised piles of money, a few million more than Republicans, and the superpacs represent more than half of the total campaign budget. But, it could be that Republicans are going to play their usual trick, swamping media markets where they are about to lose with lies, negative campaigning, and fear, and so in the end pull out and win. I would like to hope, but I dare not think, the post 2016 American electorate is not quite so easily manipulated.

Here’s the data from that report:

Send money to a Democrat!

Over the last several days, I went over every one of the US House races. Scan upwards in my post-stream to see the alphabetical treatment.

Looking at every race conservatively, and calling a turnover when it is certain, I count a net of 12 turnovers. That moves the Republican majority from 47 to 23. Respectable, but not world changing.

There are probably three or four races that people will be able to make strong arguments about that I chose not to count as turnovers. And, for every one I count as a turnover, there is approximately 1.5 races that are close enough that a magical and very powerful blue wave would push into the Dem column. So, I could take my 12 turnovers, make it 15, then add that times 150%. That would be VERY optimistic. It would rsult in Democrats having about 11 more seats than Republicans. This is extremely unlikely.

Indeed, even though chances of the Democrats winning the Senate are very low, they might be, in my opinion, higher than the chances of the Democrats winning the house.

We need to win both. We are likely to win neither. There is a very small chance we’ll win one. Nearly zero chance we’ll win both.

Keep in mind that is has almost always true for every race in recent decades, the Republicans pull 2 or three points out of their hats at the last second, I believe not counting voter suppression. This just has to do with how people poll, vote, and act. It is actually possible that my estimate of 12 turnovers will turn out to be too large a number.

The document filed in the US District Court for DC is HERE.

This appears to be a key but closely circumscribed moment in the Mueller investigation. No Americans are knowingly doing anything bad here. This is just the Russian campaign to manipulate social media etc. to shape an election, which we apparently believe they are continuing to do for 2018. This looks more or less like the end-game for that particular problem (though that does not mean that there won’t be more indictments.)

I have no idea, and I think this is generally the case, if an of these individuals or entities are in the US and/or can be actually arrested.

Some paraphrasing from the document, referring mainly to the first two counts, which are the big deal counts with all the jucy information in them, to give you an idea:

One of the entities is the “Internet Research Agency”, a Russian oranization engaged in political and election interference. They created fictitious bots and were highly organized. This organization carred out “information warfare against the USA” (in their own words) which included creating fictitious characters on social media, in order to spread disinformation.

The other defendants include a long list of Russians. They “knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other (and persons known and unknown to the grand jury) to defraud the US by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the US political and electoral process, including the presidential election of 2016”

A group called “Concord Management and Consulting” and “Concord Catering” appear to be the other entities involved. They are Russian entities with “various Russian government contacts.” Concord may have been mainly a funding source.

An example of an act: “on or about May 29, 2016 … [they] arranged for a real US person to stand in front of the White House in the District of COlumbia under false pretenses to hold a sign that read “Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss.” The meaning of this is not clear to me.

The conspiracies are said to have started ca 2014, when these individuals and groups began to study and collect data on US social media sites. They traveled in some cases to the US under false pretenses to do some of this. They posed as US citizens and as such engaged with US poliical and social activists. For example, they duped a Texas based grassroots organization.

You really need to read through the papers. It is like a first draft of a Tom Clancy Op Center novel.

They bought into a fair amount of US based computer infrastructure in order to do this, servers in such. They used stolen ID’s.

Some of the hashtags they used were “#Trump2016, #TrumpTrain, #MAGA, #IWontProtectHillary, and #Hillary4Prison.

They created “March for Trump” (a Twitter site) and “Clinton FRAUDation” and “TrumpstersUnited” on Facebook.

They worked closely with unwitting members of the Trump campaigns in local outreach, and the Trump campaigners distributed the Russian’s material through their accounts.

They encouraged minority groups to not vote in the election, or to vote for a third party candidate. This involved the “Woke Blacks” account on Instagram posting “A particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”

Sound familiar?

I’m pretty sure a colleague of mine and I identified one of these operations back in October. See this.

They bought ads. The indictment provides this table of ads put on social media:

They staged political rallies.

These appeared to be grassroots rallies. This is illegal, by the way, because they were not properly registered.

This included a rally using the facebook group “United Muslims of America” to stage “Support Hillary. Save American Muslims” in DC (July).

They staged a bunch of march for Trump rallies as well.

After the election, they continued with the rallies, staging both pro and anti-Trump rallies.

The indictment provides a list of “Over acts” which begins with this:

… and continues on for several pages.

Have you encountered “Matt Skiber”? He’s a false persona they created.

Many of their acts involved linking Clinton to “saving Muslims” or otherwise supporting Muslims.

By the way, it should be clear that these Russian attackers were in no way “disrupting” the election. They were vigorously working towards a specific controlled outcome: Trump wins, Clinton loses.

All of the above is basically a summary of the first two counts. The remaining counts are more specific and detailed and have to do with specific financial acts that had to do with the above, but that involve specific laws. In other words, the “Capone” counts.