In yesterday's Hill, I wrote up the Election Day deliverables we need to break their spirits:
Electoral College: Based on poll aggregates at Pollster.com, Obama leads with 320 electoral votes, while another 63 are toss-ups. Can Obama get to 369? That would leave McCain at 169, a crushing 200-electoral-vote margin. An eight-point or greater margin in the popular vote would be gravy, the largest since 1984.
Republican strongholds: People mocked Obama’s primary-era promise to expand the presidential map deep into places like Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, North Carolina and Georgia. Yet those states remain competitive today. Losing states that George W. Bush won big in 2004 would signal a stunning repudiation of the GOP.
Kentucky Senate: Republicans rejoiced at the ouster of then-Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle (S.D.) in 2004. Democrats now have a genuine chance to return the favor, with Bruce Lunsford running a vigorous challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Winning here wouldn’t just get Democrats closer to 60 — the victory would decapitate GOP leadership.
Georgia Senate: Democrats haven’t forgotten how Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss won his seat, shamefully smearing Vietnam hero and triple-amputee Max Cleland. Jim Martin is poised to deliver payback.
North Carolina Senate: Ousting Sen. Elizabeth Dole, one of the highest-profile members of the Senate, would serve notice that no one in GOP ranks is safe, not even their "celebrities." Democrat Kay Hagan leads in the polls.
California Proposition 8: With Connecticut recently joining the ranks of enlightened states allowing same-sex marriage, the march toward equality is making inroads nationwide. Conservatives hope to reverse momentum by eliminating that right in California.
Colorado "right-to-work": Defeating this Republican-backed "right-to-work," or free-rider, referendum would be the first time in over a decade that one of these anti-worker measures was beaten back at the polls.
Arizona 3rd: Rep. John Shadegg was the dogmatic right’s choice for House Republican leader in 2006, garnering support from the Club for Growth, the National Review and conservative bloggers. If challenger Bob Lord has his way, conservatives would lose one of their strongest voices in Congress.
California 4th: California conservative icon Tom McClintock has carpetbagged 400 miles to try and win this heavily Republican open seat. If Charlie Brown wins, it would be the sixth-most conservative district held by a Democrat — a real blow to California Republicans.
Connecticut 4th: Christopher Shays is the last Republican House member from all of New England. Jim Himes aims to make the region pure blue.
Wyoming At-Large and Texas 7th: These districts, once held by Dick Cheney and George H.W. Bush, respectively, are being heavily contested by Democrats Gary Trauner (Wyo.) and Michael Skelly.
Florida 18th, 21st, and 25th: Winning these seats held by Cuban-American Republicans wouldn’t just break the hard-line Cuban stranglehold in the region, but also leave the House Republican Conference 100 percent lily-white.
This is called "raising expectations", because simple victory is not enough. If you want a radical departure from the governments we've suffered the last several decades, we must deliver a whipping the likes Republicans haven't seen in ages.
I realize there are people uncomfortable with aggressive language and action. That's the difference between liberal weenies and movement progressives. Liberal weenies sit around thinking that "the truth" is enough for victory, and that if we simply explain to voters why Democrats are better, why, we can't possibly lose any elections! That's the crowd that wants to keep the "high ground" and doesn't want to go down in the gutters and fight the GOP where they live, lest we get a little muddied ourselves.
Movement progressives realize that we must do everything necessary allowable under the law to win because elections have consequences. This isn't about who is most pure, but about taking the fight to the enemy and aggressively embracing progressivism, offering clear contrasts between us and them, and fighting fire with fire. There's no ambiguity about where I belong.
So to my fellow movement progressives, embrace that killer instinct and let's finish the job. We've got conservatives demoralized and on the run. They are retrenching around their most important voices. So let's pick off those they've left exposed and go after their best defended leaders as well. Let's get rid of John Shadegg and Mitch McConnell and Liddy Dole and the rest of them. Leave them leaderless, and susceptible to takeover by the Evangelical Right that so freaked out Wall Street conservatives during the primaries (when Huckabee was briefly in the lead).
Let's run up Obama's margins in the Blue states and narrow them in the Red states to give Obama a huge, unmistakable national mandate. Let's win states Bush won by 20 points or so in 2004, like Indiana, Montana and North Dakota, to rub salt in their wounds. Let's keep forcing them to go more and more into debt, so that they emerge from the election with their coffers drained, heavily in debt.
Some of these races are featured on our O2B page, most are not. We can only do so much in our little corner of the political world. But there are a lot of people out there fighting the good fight, in a movement that spans online, offline, union and non-union, wealthy and not-so-wealthy, professional and volunteer, black, white, brown, and every shade in between, male and female, in all 50 states and DC.
So if you can give, give to your favorite campaigns. If you can't give, donate an afternoon of your time and help out at the local political office phonebanking or canvassing or however else you can contribute to the cause. If you can do both, do both.
Leave everything on the road.