The Right Wing’s Worst Nightmare: Master Stroke That Turns Red States Blue (Warren as 2016 Veep)
Putting Warren on the ticket in 2016 — as vice president — would help Democrats take maximum advantage. And that’s not just my own pet theory. We have a solid set of polling data from 2008 to support this view (presented and analyzed here), polling data showing John Edwards — the most populist candidate in the field — giving candidate Obama a substantial boost from the V.P. slot against any of the GOP tickets he was tested against, a boost unmatched by any other V.P. candidate tested. Indeed, the boost was so significant that based on polling data in early July, an Obama/Edwards ticket put Georgia, Texas, both Carolinas and Mississippi into the toss-up category, while putting Montana and North Dakota into “lean Obama.” You want a “map-changer”? Edwards was the very definition of one — and Warren could be one, too. Perhaps most dramatically, Edwards expanded Obama’s lead in safe state electoral votes from just over 2-1 (207-90) to over 5-1 (286-52) , an electoral map change so profound it could not help having profound implications for House and Senate races as well.
There’s a strong probability that Hillary Clinton will be elected president in 2016. The GOP field is a mess, and the media’s desperate attempts to revive corpses like Chris Christie and Rick Perry only makes the picture even clearer. But the attacks on Clinton will surely escalate exponentially, putting the prospects of a landslide in doubt, no matter how inadequate the GOP candidate turns out to be. The Edwards record from 2008 strongly suggests that Warren as V.P. could help to ensure that landslide — and with it, a workable Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, even despite the intense GOP gerrymandering that currently has the House paralyzed. What happens after that will be crucial, of course. If, like Obama and her husband before her, Clinton tries to “move to the center” and spurn her party base, then the 2018 midterms will be yet another disaster, and political gridlock and dysfunction will continue in the years ahead. The Ron Brownsteins of the world will be “vindicated.” But if Elizabeth Warren does have some influence, if Clinton does learn from past Democratic mistakes, then maybe, just maybe, we could see America break with its recent history of almost 50 years dominated by divided government and return to a more traditional, more functional political pattern, in which one party — and its vision — dominates for a period of decades, and the other party survives by adapting to the world that the dominant party has created. The raw numbers tell us this is the direction America wants to go in. Elizabeth Warren could be the key to getting us there. Otherwise, it’s endless deadlock, as far as the eye can see. http://www.salon.com/2014/07/27/right_wings_worst_nightmare_the_master_stroke_that_turns_red_states_blue/
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