Saturday Feb 22 there will be a contest here in Nevada and the media hordes looking for a horse race will descend to the Silver State
like locusts . As a life long resident of Las Vegas there is a lot of good news here and a lot of bad news .
We have 2 women dem senators who are doing very well . We have
3 dem congressman out of 4 congressional districts and a wonderful big D governor . This came with a lot of hard work .
Any discussion that this is no longer a swing state , is insane and
we are not guaranteed at all to keep it this way .
Dean Heller beat Shelley Berkeley
by 11,000 votes in 2012 . Jacky Rosen beat Dean Heller by 49,000
votes in 2018 , these are incredibly
tough heart wrenching races .
All statewide elections here are
tough and campaigns matter .
Full disclosure Jacky Rosen and
Shelley Berkeley are very active in
the Jewish community and they are
very accessible in that community .
Jacky Rosen was our temple president before running for senate . Jacky Rosen ran a smarter
campaign , and I know nobody is
going to like this but she was able
to evade the gun issue . She basically said , there is a lot of
violence , and I certainly pledge to
look into the matter , but that is one of many things as a freshman
senator that I have to get up to
speed . Nevada has one of the
largest gun ownership rates in the
country and if you are painted as anti gun you have no chance .
In 2012 Judge Elizabeth Kadish was
nominated by Harry Reid to be a
federal judge , another great woman from our temple .
Dean Heller was able to stop the
appointment and label her as a
radical gun grabber . She isn’t but it didn’t stop Heller . Shelley Berkeley
came to her defense and it was fatal . This was highlighted at all the debates and Heller won by a razor thin margin . All politics are local and we need a 50 state outreach and we can’t expect all democrats
to act and vote like they are from
san Francisco . Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have done a great job
in getting the vote out in Congress
but if we back losing candidates they can’t do their job .
2020 on the presidential side will
present some unique challenges
but we have to be able to look at
them critically and not emotionally .
First 2020 will be the first election
in the post Harry Reid era . 2018 he was still active , he is out of the picture . Harry Reid brought the bacon home . He is impossible to
replace , it makes our work harder .
This won’t be pleasant for you to
hear , Harry Reid and Jacky Rosen
and Shelley Berkeley are all ardent
Zionists and Aipac superstars .
There are 80,000 Jews in Nevada
and their voter participation rates are near 100% .
Trump is fighting very hard for those votes and the Republican
Jewish coalition of Nevada is growing fast .
Also growing fast is the Russian Jewish population . There are over
1 million Russian Jews in Israel and
our Jewish institutions , like day
schools , community organizations
and synagogues are getting more
Russian by the day . They skew very far to the right . This is definitely creating a lot of cultural clashes in
the Jewish community both here and Nevada and elsewhere as Jews
tend to be a very consistent voting
block , except when they feel they
are not being treated well . We vote
we volunteer , we raise incredible amounts of money , and like any
group they expect a payoff . Carter was the only president who didn’t
win the Jewish vote because Reagan made a big deal about Israel and Carter didn’t respond well . Obama slipped 10 points among Jewish voters between 2008
and 2012 .
Harry Reid made 22 trips to Israel .
He told a group of people from my temple in the Golan Heights one day , what he told all the new senate members .
when you come into my senate and you are not 100% pro Israel , you
have a career expiration light blinking and you will never get committee assignment one or help from the DNC .
Even the largest reform temple in
the state , takes a huge contingent to the Aipac policy conference every year , many at the club and
Congressional levels . After all the
speakers and the breakout sessions , thousands of activists descend on capital hill , and I can
assure you nobody calls in sick that day . Shelley Berkeley used to invite everyone from southern Nevada to her office every year and
had a magnificent spread for everyone . We will not do as well
among the Jewish population in
2020 . I think we can still win 60,000 to 20,000 but if it’s only 48,000 to 32,000 it could be fatal .
There are things the Nevada D party does very well here .
Help legal citizens obtain legal ID
and get very good voter info to
the people . I think sometimes we
spend too much time fighting against voter ID when we could be
using that time to help people secure proper IDs .
we have extensive early voting but
voter ID laws are very strict here .
on the flip side we have had very
close elections here and very little
post election drama .
Proper ID is a bipartisan issue here
it polls well with older voters here
even Democrats .
I know many of the part time and
full time staff of many of the key
people who work for our politicians
locally or for the state party and we
are constantly told what people are
calling about .
impeachment calls were near zero .
No reason to re-litigate this and I’m
glad it happened , but it didn’t help us .
we also have to stop whining about
everything .
one of my pet peeves is crying
about the electoral college .
california and New. York and New England are a lot bluer and contain
a lot more electoral votes then red states do . Virginia ,New Mexico ,
colorado , and Nevada were reliably red till they weren’t . Texas
can be flipped and so can Georgia , not today or tomorrow but a lot
sooner than New York and California .
Trump won 306 electoral votes ,
he won every place he campaigned
except New Hampshire .
306/310 .
politically he ran an almost perfect
campaign . Many people in very red states don’t vote because they
know they are going to win . There are also very conservative pockets
in huge blue states like New York and California and if popular votes mattered , I’m not certain that Trump couldn’t run up some vote
totals in those places .
Now as far as places like Wyoming
getting 2 senators and California getting 2 senators , I don’t like that
but that’s another diary .
From what I hear from some of the
staff people is that we are really a
few years behind where we should be .
Bill Clinton was great at this , one of his greatest strengths as a politician , after all midterms or key
elections he would always appear at different functions and on TV
talking about what the results mean and dealing with them .
we have not done this . Even if
the Russians did this and Comey
did that and 6 other things happened on Facebook , 2016 was
not a good election for us and we
have not done the soul searching
we needed to .
I am hopeful that in this accelerated news cycle , we can do
this faster . I welcome the fights between moderates and progressives . It needs to be fought
Fairly and out in the open . I think If a moderate wins , they should pick
a progressive veep and if Sanders wins he should pick a moderate one .
As a party we need to do a lot more
listening to the people who know how to win elections from Obama’s
brilliant team . Axelrod and Plouffe
are political geniuses and their opinions are widely aired . They are
on CNN and Msnbc and do numerous podcasts , I suggest to
everyone they should listen . Axelrod says his team would never
make the mistakeS that many democrats make Today .
Axelrod absolute golden rule is
if you allow Trump to be the star of
a reality show , you are not going to
beat him . Doesn’t mean you can’t
fight for things you believe in but
you have to let a lot go . Plouffe says that we do too many things for
Trump and we have to stop it .
The media doesn’t help either and
we can’t do too much about that
but there are a lot of self inflicted
wounds in the Trump era . Obama
droned many radical Islamists . When Trump killed the Iranian general we should have let it go .
You can debate whether it was wise
or not , but There is certainly an
argument to be made . That’s the kind of thing a president does that’s why we need to win , so our next president has an agenda that’s
more in line with our beliefs .
president Obama on PBS was asked what he thought his biggest
domestic failure was and his
answer surprised many .( God I miss how thoughtful and insightful he was , and can’t wait to read his
memoirs ) He said he couldn’t stop or even slow the countless deaths due to drugs .
Obama is the 3rd president and Trump is the fourth who is wrestling with calling the Mexican
cartels terrorists . Obama admitted
that he never could do it , he didn’t
think he could hold his coalition together and perhaps only a republican could be able to do it .
its controversial , but it’s something
that every president has considered . If Trump does something like this , are we going to be sympathetic to these killers ?
the middle of the country will not
be sorry about their demise .
lastly watching what is going on
in elections around the world , we
are still stumbling on immigration .
Axelrod Says American voters can
understand the truth when they
hear it .
Brexit is the perfect example . It was about immigration . People want control of who comes into their countries . They are not all
bigots .
if we want a generous immigration
policy , let’s spell it out .
we want Daca we want 30 million
a year , whatever our candidates want they should enunciate clearly .
when you stumble and fumble every immigration question or
default back to comprehensive reform it’s bullshit . Open borders
or free healthcare to illegals are
absolute losers . If we took Trumps
major issue away it would do us a lot of good .
Anyway look forward to seeing a lot
of new faces as Nevada Caucuses are less than 2 weeks away .