Fasten your seat belts, Kansas voters ....Well, SurveyUSA has a new gubernatorial poll out and for anyone interested in Kansas elections, this one should be taken very seriously, because the likely voters they surveyed are almost exactly who will probably vote in November: 56 percent Republican, 28 percent Democrat, 16 percent unaffiliated. The poll shows Davis at 47 percent, Brownback at 41 percent, Libertarian Keen Umbehr at 5 percent and 7 percent undecided. The margin of error was +/- 3 percent. To answer my own question from 2013: Is he (Brownback) really vulnerable? Yes. .............. .............. Expect the Kochs to really ramp up ad spending.
In Kansas, a Democrat makes hay on Brownback's budget woes http://news.yahoo.com/kansas-democrat-makes-hay-brownbacks-budget-woes-181942724.html Paul Davis has emerged as the potential wrecker of red state politics. The 42-year-old Democratic nominee for governor in Kansas, one of the nation's reddest states, was a long shot when he announced his candidacy. Nearly a year later his moderate platform is drawing enough support from voters disenchanted with the Republican candidate, incumbent Governor Sam Brownback, and the state's flagging economy that Davis is threatening to upend the race. Support for Davis, the Kansas House minority leader, has climbed in recent weeks as Brownback's policies have coincided with a drastic decline in state revenue and mounting fears about funding shortfalls for schools. (More at above url) Bottom line: When the basic math of your economic policy does not add up then you are going to be voted out of office and mocked. The Tea Party needs to learn some serious lessons from the Kansas debacle.
Conservative Experiment Faces Revolt in Reliably Red Kansas http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/u...faces-revolt-in-reliably-red-kansas.html?_r=0 The same thing is happening in North Carolina. The tea party policies have been so destructive to our state that the mainstream Republicans are revolting. Kansas is only months ahead of us.
Just curious, but why is this the tea party's fault? Sounds to me like it's just stupid politics. The Tea Party isn't just against cutting taxes, but cutting spending and then cutting taxes. Somehow it's Tea Party principles if some idiot politician decides he wants to cut taxes to gain popular approval, but not cut the spending that goes with it. Stupid politicians can be seen making absurd financial decisions in Illinois and California, New York and Massachusetts. Is that Tea Party fault, too? You folks boggle the mind.
Similar to Kansas, North Carolina has served as a test laboratory for the policies of the tea party and conservative organizations. The Republican moderation (which they ran on) went by the wayside as Gov. McCrory and the conservative majorities in the Legislature drove swiftly down the path of tea party and conservative organizations - undoing many decades of improvement in our state, destroying public education, chasing away businesses from re-locating to our state, failing to balance the budget, taxing the bottom 90% more while providing tax cuts to the top 10%, having Duke dump coal ash in many rivers unhindered, creating the weakest fracking polices in the nation, pushing absurd social issue agendas, and not understanding basic economics. The path has been so destructive that the North Carolina Republicans can no longer get support from most mainstream business organizations and in-state moderate Republicans - only their gerrymandering of the districts (from 2010) will keep them in power in the legislature for while (and even this will not last). Keep in mind that the North Carolina legislature has been dominated by business-friendly Democrats for over 100 years until 2010. The Democrats were generally moderates - in the North most would be considered "Republicans" based on their views. The Democrats were only voted out of office recently because so many of them proved to be corrupt and were indicted by the Feds - this brought the Republicans to power when the people in our state could no longer abide of the crooks. I had high-hopes for some reasonable improvements in our state when the Republicans were first elected (and yes, I voted for them) --- instead they swiftly turned our state into a smoking ruin.
Tax and spending cuts so severe that even business, theoretically in competition with government for the dollars, cannot support.
Ok, but I didn't ask you about NC. I'm not familiar enough to comment on what is going on in NC. But what is going on in Kansas is not Tea Party policy. The candidates might have run on Tea Party platforms, but they aren't executing policy that way. You can't simply cut taxes with spending untouched. So it's not exactly shocking that they're running out of money in Kansas. But to place this as fault in Tea Party policies is just ignorant. It would be like blaming Obama for socialism when, in fact, he's only a socialist in what he claims he's about. You have to look at actions for accuracy. I suspect that if I looked in NC closer, I'd not see an execution of the Tea Party platform either. It's probably more of a case of stupid politicians (redundant term, I know).
But in TP and lib theory, you can cut taxes without cutting spending, because the economy will then (what's jem's term?) take off and the consequent rising revenues from taxation will... wait, nm.