"Baldwin officials said the numbers were not final but that she has taken the lead and the margin is too large for Hovde to make up."

It says here in "Tammy Baldwin declares victory in Wisconsin Senate race in 2024 election over Eric Hovde" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

With 97.3% of the votes counted, Baldwin led Hovde by 49.2% to 48.7% — a margin of nearly 16,000 votes — in a race that drew attention and big bucks from around the country. Absentee ballots had not yet been counted in Racine and Oshkosh and votes had not all been counted in various places in Oshkosh.... The Democratic incumbent outperformed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who was losing to former President Donald Trump by more than 41,000 votes.

Control of the Senate doesn't hinge on this race: "Republicans Clinch Control of the Senate/After picking up seats in West Virginia and Ohio and winning an unexpectedly close race in Nebraska, the G.O.P. had enough for a majority. Tight races in swing states will determine their margin" (NYT).

"I think Wisconsin is very winnable. But it has to be someone that speaks to the issues but also is viewed as rational."

Said Tony Evers, the new Democratic Governor of Wisconsin, quoted in "Rust Belt, Sun Belt or Both?/Democrats Seek the Best Route to the White House" (NYT).

The more serious risk to backing away from the Midwest... is that the party could endanger its newly won House majority and all but concede a long-term Republican majority in the Senate....

“If you can’t make the case to — and you don’t show up for — rural voters, you’re never going to have the Senate, so you’re never going to be able to govern,” said the former agriculture secretary and Iowa governor Tom Vilsack....

[Sherrod] Brown... quick to point out that no Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio.... [said] “I don’t want to wake up the day after the election in 2020 and win the popular vote by 4.5 million and lose the Electoral College.”

ADDED: What, exactly, did Evers mean by "rational"? I think — and I've been living in Wisconsin and watching the politics here for 30+ years — he means reality-based and not caught up in left-wing ideology. And notice that the key is not to be rational but to be "viewed as rational."

A good response to Evers is then how the hell did Trump win Wisconsin? He couldn't have been viewed as rational... or could he??? It's a valuable thought experiment for Democrats: What if Trump won Wisconsin because the people there viewed him as rational? Is that something you can get inside and really imagine?

It's so much easier to think that the people of Wisconsin (and other midwestern places) are just dumb or uneducated or bigoted, and when you think that lazily it's no wonder you're tempted to write off the Midwest and go looking for votes in the south (not that you think the people there are so sharp, just that their dullness slides in your direction).

But if you could get your mind around why Tony is right — and you ought to presume in his favor, because he beat Scott Walker — you might figure out how to reach the minds of the people who live here. Perhaps such mental labors are too tedious for you. Go back to sleep. Here, Scott Walker has a pillow for you....

Look what Tonette got us from @MyPillowUSA (Made in the USA 🇺🇸) pic.twitter.com/FXznbfpHsX

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) February 24, 2019

Why is Sherrod Brown giving us the yellow bird?

It gets your attention and you're likely to laugh and say "what?!"...



... but it's actually very easy to figure it out. My google image search (above) produced an image for "Canary Cast," and clicking, I saw that's the name of Brown's podcast.  That image shows a yellow bird — obviously a canary — in a cage, so even though I want to veer into a joke like "I Know Why the Caged Bird Runs for President," I immediately see that it's the idea of a canary in a coal mine. Brown must see himself as someone who is aware of problems early on, though the canary in a coal mine doesn't really notice and think about problems; its early warning comes in the form of dropping dead, so it doesn't really seem like a good metaphor. But it's Sherrod Brown's metaphor, and he got your attention. From the podcast website:

Brown’s podcast is named Canarycast, a nod to the canary pin Brown wears on his lapel instead of the official Senate pin. An Ohio steelworker gave Brown the pin. He wears it as a reminder of the progress the country has made since the days when the only thing coal miners had to protect them was a canary – and all the work still left to do to ensure American workers are valued.

And... put a bird on it:



ADDED: After writing this post, I read "Sherrod Brown Gives America the Bird/Breaking down Sherrod Brown's canary" (The Bulwark), and it too embeds the "put a bird on it" Portlandia clip. Also:

Sherrod Brown’s logo somehow ignores... all commonly held principles of visual cohesion. He’s attempting to combine a (stale) wordmark with a (vague and enigmatic, but in a bad way) pictorial. The effort toward a logo system is apparent, but it’s the design equivalent of eating the whole wheel of cheese. I’m not even mad. It’s amazing....

 

The canary is not my favorite thing in the world. It’s weak. It’s lifeless. It guarantees that Trump will nickname Brown “Tweety Bird.” Let me amend that: I hate the canary.

But at least it’s an idea. And if you have a visual idea that means something to the product—even if it’s a bad visual idea—then you can use it to anchor a brand.

"What are the US Democrats' big ideas?"

A column at BBC news (by Anthony Zurcher) based on an "Ideas Confererence" put on the Center for American Progress. The conference seems to reflect an awareness that Democrats are politically vulnerable because they are defined by what they are against and not what they are for. But reading this column, I wonder if they downplay what they are for because it isn't politically popular.

For example, under the heading "Minimum wage and 'freeloader fees'":

Sherrod Brown... pushed what he calls a "corporate freeloader fee" - imposing a penalty on companies with more than $100,000 in payroll taxes that do not pay their workers high enough wages to keep them off public assistance programmes.

Mr Brown and other Democrats also mentioned raising the federal minimum wage from its current $7.15 an hour level, which was set in 2009. Some states have passed much higher minimum-wage levels.

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said the federal government should guarantee Americans a job if they want one, which he said was not a "radical idea".

"Why not invest on the front-end with secure jobs so that you're not seeing negative impacts that come with low-employment or unemployment like foreclosures and evictions?" he asked.

The other headings are "Expanding public schooling" ("Who said that public education should be a right for everybody between [the ages of] five and 18, but not for those either before five or after 18?"), "Ethics, reform and oversight," "Dismantling the oligarchy" ("a 'substantial' increase of the estate tax"), and "Guns, the environment and healthcare."

Trump is trying to figure out who's going to run against him in 2020.

It's really hard to figure out.*

Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, asked consultants to scour the backgrounds of four outspoken Democrats — Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, two sources close to the administration said....

The White House believes both Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren are “too old” to mount a serious campaign three years from now, sources said....

“Elizabeth Warren is 100 years old....” the second source said....

She's 67.

Trump’s political team is also counting out [NY Governor Andrew] Cuomo and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, because they’ve been tainted by corruption probes....

[Kirsten] Gillibrand, 50, has been raising her profile thanks to a series of “no” votes on Trump’s Cabinet picks, but White House officials view her as “too young” and believe she lacks the network in the party to run a nationwide campaign, the sources said.

So 67 is too old and 50 is too young. Noted.
______________________

* I'm steeling myself for all the born-lame jokes about how hard it is to see in 2020. The headline at the link is "Trump’s White House eyes potential foes in 2020 election." Did they write "eyes" because it will be 2020? No 20/20 jokes. I'm pre-banning them. It's bad enough to have to plunge back into another campaign season.

"At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders."

From "Inside the bitter last days of Bernie's revolution/For better and for worse, Sanders made all the big decisions" at Politico.

Convinced as Sanders is that he’s realizing his lifelong dream of being the catalyst for remaking American politics—aides say he takes credit for a Harvard Kennedy School study in April showing young people getting more liberal, and he takes personal offense every time Clinton just dismisses the possibility of picking him as her running mate—his guiding principle under attack has basically boiled down to a feeling that multiple aides sum up as: “Screw me? No, screw you.”...

"I don't think it's an automatic yes, I think you have to think through what does he think the job involves."

Said Newt Gingrich, asked on "Fox News Sunday" if he'd accept an offer to serve as Trump's running mate.

If he can convince Callista and me that it's doable and that it’s serious and we would, in fact, contribute I think we would be very hard pressed not to say yes. 

Chris Wallace nudged him to do it because the Vice President residence "isn't bad."

Speaking of VP prospects on the Sunday shows, there was also Sherrod Brown on "State of the Union." He was hilariously blindsided. Jake Tapper played a clip from an ad he put out in his 2012  campaign for reelection to the Senate:

Senators who find it hard to explain why they didn't stand with Rand.

HuffPo inquires:

"I don't know, there's a lot of debates I don't join that I agree -- I've got stuff to do and was doing a lot of other things," Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told HuffPost when asked about his whereabouts the day before. "I think the question should be answered. I think [Sen.] Paul was generally right on it."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) [said] "I'm working right now on many, many, other issues... Presumably you go down on the floor because you believe in something"... though he argued that the method Paul used to raise his questions and his timing weren't "particularly constructive."

Weak.

Sherrod Brown 46%, Josh Mandel 46%.

Wow.

Ohio now shifts back from Safe Democrat to a Toss-up in the Rasmussen Reports Senate Balance of Power rankings.  With the addition of Ohio, seven Senate races nationwide are Toss-Ups, but at this point it still appears likely that Democrats will retain control of the Senate.

President Obama holds a one-point lead in Ohio – 50% to 49% - in the first post-debate survey of the presidential contest there.

Which party will take the Senate in 2012?

Control of the Senate is crucial, perhaps more important than the Presidency. The NYT has assembled the information about the different races very clearly on this page, though I suspect the estimates are skewed in favor of the Democrats. There are 30 Democratic seats and 37  Republican seats that are not up for reelection, so there's no skewing there. But the NYT counts 11 Democratic seats and only 7 Republican seats as "solid," which puts the teams at 41 and 44, and then it has 5 seats as "leaning" Democratic and only 2 "leaning" Republican, which — lo and behold — puts them even at 46-46. Hmm.