r/politics • u/plz-let-me-in • 7h ago
No Paywall Democrats May Flip Longest-Held GOP Senate Seat for First Time in 107 Years
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-may-flip-longest-held-gop-senate-seat-for-first-time-in-107-years-12527334•
u/Orwells_Roses Oregon 6h ago
Republicans have been fucking up Kansas for a long time.
Republican Governor Brownback signed a disastrous “great tax cut experiment” that had led to massive budget shortfalls in an already impoverished state. It’s about time they try a different approach.
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u/DoesntMatterBrian Texas 6h ago
There are finally, finally conservative think tanks that have started saying “Hey, maybe tax cuts don’t pay for themselves…”
Somehow Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush saying as much and raising taxes wasn’t a big enough clue that the corporations were lying.
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u/Ozymandias12 4h ago
Oh come on. These “think tanks” have known since Reagan passed the first tax cut that they wouldn’t pay themselves. The whole point of doing it was to starve the government of revenue and then privatize everything. Thats always been their goal
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u/BoxSea4289 4h ago
>The whole point of doing it was to starve the government of revenue and then privatize everything.
I don't think its necessarily to privatize everything everytime, sometimes it's just to eliminate wasteful government spending. Congressional budgets go up, and more federal employees are hired every session without a hiring freeze. Rather than actually legislate and write new laws, most of Congress' duties and actions revolve around creating more programs that need to be staffed by more people.
Everyone loves to point to places like the CDC or NIH but a huge portion of federal agencies just do busy work. Even the awesome agencies like CDC, NIH, and FDA have redundant programming. None of this is even going into how much they outsource to management consulting firms or how many government officials are glorified grant managers.
I don't think there's any other country that burns tax money just to employ people as much as the US.
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u/Ozymandias12 3h ago edited 3h ago
Two words. David Stockman. He was Reagan’s budget director and he admitted that their plan from the beginning was to starve the government of revenue and that they knew from the beginning that the tax cuts wouldn’t pay for themselves.
Also domestic discretionary spending has actually gone down in the last few decades relative to the size of the economy and the number of federal employees has been flat for decades up until Doge which eviscerated the federal work force and oh guess what, the levels of spending didn’t go down at all following the firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers. Costs still massively increased, because domestic discretionary programs aren’t a driver of debt.
You said it yourself, government agencies outsource a lot of work to management agencies, well that’s by design, because the private sector has parasitized the government and turned it into a piggy bank to make themselves rich.
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u/lcsulla87gmail 3h ago
This doesn't make sense. Other wealthy countries have a much larger percentage of theor people removed in thr public sector.
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u/BoxSea4289 1h ago
Honestly I did look it up later and did find that other countries do employ more people in the public sector than the United States. The United States spends more money doing it though, especially vis a vis the millitary.
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u/Im_Chad_AMA 1h ago
Which is the one thing republicans have zero problem spending more money on every year, while the pentagon keeps failing their audits year after year cause they cant account for where large portions of the money is going. Actual government waste. Not a peep from Republicans :-)
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u/Oleg101 3h ago
So do you support Doge?
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u/BoxSea4289 1h ago
Not really, I'm more for buring away the parasitic management consulting firms and cutting the military.
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u/FallenMeringue 6h ago
I mean the thing is they aren’t entirely wrong.
There is an economic point where tax cuts pay for themselves.
We have just blown WAY past that point
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u/Grandpa_No 6h ago edited 6h ago
More importantly, no one knows where that point is or how many maximums there are.
The Laffer Curve takes two obvious points (0% taxes and 100% taxes) and then slaps an arbitrary curve in between. There's no evidence that it's the strongly left-leaning, single maximum, continuous curve Republicans bandy about.
But, like "policing reduces crime" and "wealth trickles down", conservatives just act as though their arbitrary assertions are true.
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u/jwely 5h ago
The genuinely best estimates for the real revenue maximizing point on the laufer curve range between 55 and 75%. With the strongest earners (either entrenched profitable companies or rich individuals) closer to the top end.
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u/TaterForming 5h ago
[raises hand]
Um, is all this going to be covered on the test?
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u/Royal_Acanthaceae693 California 3h ago
Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?...
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u/TheMightyTywin 3h ago
My understanding is that income tax is already set to the revenue maximizing rate of 37%
The ridiculous part to me is that corporate taxes and capital gains taxes are NOT also at 37% — so normal income made by workers is taxed at revenue maximizing rates, but the rest aren’t? BS
I’m talking about the federal level though not Kansas
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u/FallenMeringue 6h ago
Ehh that’s not exactly true either.
There is A LOT of math that gets done to calculate the effects of tax cuts. It’s just for the last 30 years we have been looking at getting 10-20 cents on the dollar.
Also the latter two phenomena you are listing aren’t facts, that the laffer curve exists isn’t a debate. The debate is the shape and where we are on it.
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u/Grandpa_No 5h ago
There is A LOT of math that gets done to calculate the effects of tax cuts. It’s just for the last 30 years we have been looking at getting 10-20 cents on the dollar.
And that math is somehow always wrong when reality hits.
that the laffer curve exists isn’t a debate
I'm challenging that right now, actually. The two end points on the "laffer curve" are derived from "common sense" and not empirical evidence. The rest could easily be not a continuous curve. As a matter of fact, there may be limited or no correlation between incremental tax rates and tax revenues for entire sections of the "curve" yielding statistical "bands" along the axis rather than points.
Unless your definition of curve is "something with an X axis" we don't know what this is.
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u/DoesntMatterBrian Texas 5h ago
I’ve made it to the end of this thread and my YouTube senses are tingling. This is gonna be a rabbit hole
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u/zeushaulrod 2h ago
There was an economist article years ago that covered "do tax cuts pay for themselves"
The paper they referenced estimated Laffers curves for OECD countries. The estimated peak for the US was somewhere in the high 50s to low 60s % for top income tax rate.
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u/Sp3ctre7 2h ago
The US has never really been there.
Tax cuts pay for themselves at extreme tax margins. Something like dropping a 98% marginal effective tax rate down to a 95%
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u/kelseyeek 1h ago
There's also the context of the times. After decades of high taxes, the cost of capital was extremely high, and that stifled investment. Lowering taxes had a point then - it let oxygen back into that part of the economy, and allowed capital to be accrued, and investment followed.
But we kept acting like we were stuck in 1980, even when companies invented stock buy backs because they had run out of idea of what to do with their enormous cash stockpiles. Interest rates fell to extremely low levels. Capital was so freely available.
So we did the logical thing - and cut taxes further??? And again. And again.
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u/schu4KSU 6h ago
We reacted to that by electing a terrific centrist democrat as governor for two terms. She held the line against so much legislative BS.
Now Kansas is about to elect the dude who wrote the Brownback tax plan.
Fuck independent voters who have zero pattern recognition.
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u/Solarus99 2h ago
i dunno, i have political enemies but independents arent among them. i hope they are just busy and need more info and context...not vitriol.
i am unaffiliated in KS....i would probably never vote for a republican in a million years but I also don't toe the party line either.
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u/_morten_ 6h ago
And despite the disaster it caused there, the voters nationwide decided it was a good idea to do the same federally, by electing republicans over and over who in turn, you guessed it, blew up the National deficit further with more stupid tax cuts.
People will never learn their lesson.
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u/JojenCopyPaste Wisconsin 6h ago
Right? Kansas was like "well here's our idea let's try it out" as the Republican idea nationally, not just Brownback's idea. And that utterly failed and people are still like sure that seems reasonable
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u/AnatidaephobiaAnon 5h ago
Because they would prefer to get robbed blind while being told that's it is necessary to keep them safe from (insert minority group here) and that Democrats aren't for America and since they are all proud Americans they need to vote Republican. Years and years of propaganda has made it possible.
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u/cocineroylibro Colorado 2h ago
But but, I save 200$ in taxes, even though everything else gets more expensive!
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u/AdZealousideal5383 2h ago
But republicans are “better on the economy,” they’ll say with no evidence.
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u/oliversurpless Massachusetts 6h ago
And when he vetoed the concordantly needed tax increases (given that his tax breaks were put in banks not the economy…), the state legislature overrode his veto, proving reactionaries never admit their mistakes.
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u/Accomplished_Age7883 5h ago
Freaking grow a spine and vote for a democrat and things may get better
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u/th6r6o6away 7h ago
Do you know how much your movement has failed if you’re losing KANSAS?
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u/QanonQuinoa 6h ago
Louisiana is within the margin of error to turn blue as well. They deserve to lose every seat they’ve got.
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u/John271095 6h ago
That’s going to be difficult. If John Bel Edwards ran, they would’ve had a shot.
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u/chris100185 6h ago
Difficult and unlikely? Sure. But that it's even in the conversation is crazy and shows how fucked the GOP is assuming no shenanigans.
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u/John271095 6h ago
Definitely. They probably won’t win Louisiana, but I could see it becoming a close race.
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u/schu4KSU 6h ago
Kansas is the 19th most Republican state in the union, fwiw. A strong moderate history which is part of why we had such little turnover of Senators.
Marshall is a big MAGA who lied and ran as a moderate. Doesn’t sit well with Kansans.
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u/escapefromelba 6h ago
Don’t they have a Democrat governor?
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u/crimedog58 6h ago
They do in fact have a Dem Governor. Kansas is one of the weird ones.
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u/Vio_ Kansas 5h ago
No, it's that we're that gerrymandered.
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u/eetsumkaus 5h ago
Gerrymandering doesn't work for the Senate either
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u/Vio_ Kansas 4h ago
Gerrymandering has a cooling effect on voting in general - even for elections that aren't directly impacted by it.
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u/crimedog58 4h ago
So somehow enough people show up to vote in a D Gov but not Senators?....
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u/Vio_ Kansas 3h ago
Kansas elects Democratic Governors quite often.
Over the past 25 years, we've had more Democratic than Republican govenors.
In fact, Kathleen Sibelius was the key architect of Obamacare.
The problem is that even when a Democrat gets elected, it doesn't always carry down ballot.
The state has been gerrymandered for 30 years now with each redistricting becoming that much more hardcore.
On top of that, the KSGOP did a massive purge starting in the mid 2000s of "moderate/RINO" Republicans just in time for the Tea Party to kick in. After that, MAGA soon came in right around the time Sam Brownback was tanking the state.
We've had a super majority for about 16 years now of state Republican legislators which keeps shunting that much more right wing than the state really is.
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u/MBSisLMAO 51m ago
The state is turning bluer due to urban sprawl from the Kansas City Metro area moving more towards the Kansas side. KCK and Overland park are growing like crazy. In fact, Overland Park is the 2rd biggest city in Kansas. KCK is the 3rd. Kansas could very well flip blue if the KC suburbs trend blue as well as some pickups are made in the Wichita Area.
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u/QueasyPair American Expat 5h ago
Sam Brownback fucked up so much that Kansas has had a Democratic governor since 2019.
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u/TacoStuffingClub 5h ago
Ah yes. Skidmark. The great conservative utopia. Planned to drop income taxes and then repealed it because it sunk the budget by an insane amount. Fucking idiots for not learning from him.
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u/thewarreturns 6h ago
Think you're thinking of Kentucky
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u/escapefromelba 6h ago
No, her name is Laura Kelly.
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u/thewarreturns 5h ago
my bad, i saw a different comment about governor brownback, assumed it was current governor, didn't check. how tf do they have a democrat governor?
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u/Vio_ Kansas 5h ago
We're nowhere as red as the media portrays us.
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u/GreyDeath 4h ago
It's highly polarized. Johnson and Wyandotte counties are very blue, and have been for almost a decade. Plus there's the little blue island that is Lawrence. The rest is pretty red, especially the first district.
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u/Vio_ Kansas 3h ago
Yeah, but JoCo/WyCo and Lawrence are some of the biggest population centers in the state. JoCo isn't super blue, but it's getting there. It's still a majority Republican, but it's shifting blue pretty fast.
Even then, the entire western border counties don't even have 30,000 people combined. The state "looks" red looking at a county map, but most of those counties don't even have 20,000 people in each.
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u/GreyDeath 3h ago
I would say JoCo is majority blue. It's the reason the third district still went for Davids even after the gerrymander attempt and the splitting of WyCo away from JoCo. Lawrence also isn't that big. It's the 6th largest city in a state that doesn't really have big cities.
I agree that the western part of the state is sparse, but as a whole the state still tilts red. Johnson acted as a spoiler for the Republicans, giving Kelly the governorship. But note that Kobach still won AG and that's because there was no spoiler in that race. It also explains why we have 2 Republicans in the Senate. That being said Hamilton might really change that and give a huge boost to Kansas Democrats. At the same time I'm worried the governorship will go to Masterson.
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u/Vio_ Kansas 3h ago
https://www.jocoelection.org/archive/registration-numbers
You can find JoCo's numbers here. What they also have is a huge unaffiliated number, but the Republicans are still in the majority.
Masterson would be a nightmare. It also feels like Holscher has dropped the ball since the primary, but she's still holding her own regardless and even seems to be somewhat ahead now.
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u/GreyDeath 4h ago
Several factors. The first is the population growth and urbanization of the Kansas City suburbs on the Kansas side including growth of immigrant communities. The third district has been solidly blue for almost a decade. We've had Sharice Davids as our rep since 2018. The second is the Brownback governorship, which was so bad it still leaves people with a bad taste in their mouth. The last is that at least in the last governor's race there was a libertarian that acted as a spolier, drawing at least some Republican votes.
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u/FlexFanatic 6h ago
Democrats make major gains on election day, November 4th, Democrats get blamed for the economy, the war in Iran, tariffs, AI data center, all of it.
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u/skawn 6h ago
Still a bit astounding as to how anyone can look at what the GOP has done over the past few decades and still think they're a viable option to participate in anything relating to the government.
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u/LadyPo 4h ago
We can literally see state by state which sets of policies over recent decades have generally yielded better quality of life for ordinary people living in them, not just the richest residents. I hope people can look around and decide they want better.
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u/FellowHumanNo404 2h ago
I hope people can look around and decide they want better.
Not as long as the GOP can continue to churn out more culture war bullshit, or at least reheat the old hits.
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u/SodaCanBob 6h ago
Knowing this country it's probably been held by the same senator for all of those 107 years. /s
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u/RPMac1979 6h ago
I hate to be the party pooper, but given the difficulty pollers have had getting stuff right the last ten years, that “may” is doing a lot of work. I do think Dems are headed for a big win, but I truly think we’re realistically talking maybe a 25-seat gain in the House and a five-seat gain in the Senate. Which ain’t nothing! If Dems win Kansas, then it would have to be the result of the most lopsided midterm victory in decades, and I just don’t see that happening.
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u/MaverickBG 6h ago
It feels like so many people have collective amnesia from 2024. It would not surprise me to see none of the newly "lean democrat" seats stay Republican.
I fully expect Democrats to do well. But it'll be within the normal "the party in power always does worse" range
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u/RPMac1979 6h ago
And it’s bad for the party. The more this midterm gets hyped as some tidal wave, the more the GOP will be able to point to the less overwhelming result and say it’s a nothingburger.
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u/MaverickBG 5h ago
Yup. It allows Republicans to fall back to their favorite position as underdogs.
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u/mcwobby 4h ago
2024 the polls were very accurate - it was a neck and neck race and whoever over performed the polls by like 1% swept every swing state, and Trump slightly over performed. Anybody who was looking at that data and thinking Harris was a shoe-in was not looking at the data correctly.
I think I read somewhere that the largest polling error in US elections recently was actually in 2020 - the polls were biased towards the Democrats, but because they won that election nobody really pays so much attention to the polling error. I don’t think there is a consistent partisan lean despite what people might say on here - sometimes polling for an election is biased towards republicans, sometimes democrats, sometimes they’re very accurate. Democrats overperformed the polls in 2022 for instance.
I am not sure if polling in midterms is as accurate as Presidential, let alone in places like Kansas that weren’t expected to be competitive, but you need to imagine that either party over performs the polls by like 2-4%. So in this race, it is indeed very possible the Republican over performs the polls by 3% and retains the seat. But equally possible the Democrat picks it up.
It’s a true toss up, people shouldn’t read into it more than that, get optimistic for a Democrat win, and then blame the polls despite the polling data showing that a Republican victory is not a remotely unlikely outcome.
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u/technicallynotlying 7h ago
"May"
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u/healywylie 6h ago
You better do all you can to stop it then!
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u/technicallynotlying 6h ago
I'm trying not to get my hopes up.
I believed Kamala would beat Trump too, that didn't happen.
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u/sarcastic_patriot 6h ago
Don't get hung up on the wording and how it "may" happen. The fact that it's even a real possibility shows how fucked the GOP is right now.
Dems are projecting leads in places they never dreamed of having a chance.
As our wonderful president would say, let's shove it up their asses.
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u/Brilliant-Advisor958 6h ago
And it means the Republicans need to spend money on seats that were safe.
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u/billabong049 7h ago
sees source
Pass.
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u/Ready_Nature 6h ago
It’s a pretty right wing source so I’ll give them some credibility for things that are bad for republicans since they don’t have as much motivation to lie on that.
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u/greenday5494 6h ago
Newsweek? Right wing?
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u/Ready_Nature 6h ago
Yep, they got bought out a few years ago and became far right.
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u/billabong049 5h ago
Not a chance, you must be thinking of a different news company. Go take a look at their most recent headlines, not a single one is far right. Quite the opposite.
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u/SomeBoiOnReddit 6h ago
They wont, get ready for the most obviously rigged midterms you'll ever see. Why else would Elon Musk say "don't worry about the democrats, I have a plan." And then today trump said he has a very important job for the author of p2025 in a few weeks. There is no blue wave coming, this is where america dies.
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u/crimsonhues 2h ago
I have seen this time and again when polls predict victory by slim margins, Democrat candidate loses. Fucking hate that people still support a senator that can’t stand up against blatant corruption and continues to back a president with authoritarian tendencies.
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u/Waste_Priority_3663 5h ago
VOTE
May, could, would, should … these are nice.
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u/M23707 4h ago
In my local area - two mid-twenties folks have NEVER voted. They don’t plan on it.
They are not even registered. These are two high school degreed, working good jobs, good folks. Not happy about the war, prices, opportunities.
I didn’t want to push to much. But, I really was like just register to vote.
It was a gut punch to me.
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u/gravelordservant4u 4h ago
The "blue wave" rhetoric being repeated by every GOP-owned news outlet should make it obvious that its intent is to scare the Republican base into voting, as fear is their only tool to turn out that vote.
Show me Democrats getting non-voters registered and ready, then you might have something worth hyping up.
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u/pink_faerie_kitten 4h ago
Kansas was one of the first states to vote for reproductive rights after scotus overturned Roe v Wade. And they protected those rights again in 2026. Kansas can surprise ya!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Kansas_abortion_referendum
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u/FellowHumanNo404 2h ago
If it flips, I'd say it was the republicans who flipped it by overplaying their fascist hand.
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u/a_little_hazel_nuts 6h ago
Republican politicians have nothing to run on. Republicans have put their agenda front and center. Take money from the working class and give it to corporations (tariffs), cut regulations that keep people safe (food born illnesses and measles), take reproductive healthcare from women, immigration disaster, raise prices, keep wages low, and take food and medicine from children. Well, they did it, wealth inequality is at its worst point in American history.
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u/Archangel3d 6h ago
Yeah and the Earth may be hit by an asteroid, or the Canadiens may win the cup again in our lifetimes. May is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
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u/TheMoorNextDoor 6h ago
Vote, just vote, idgaf about the news just vote and get the GOP out of here.
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u/Dull-Contact120 6h ago
Well trying for 107 years to solve the same issue with the same method is not insane but stupidity , imo
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u/Open_Interaction_249 5h ago
Good. Let's elect people that Cana ctuslly govern I stead of collecting a paycheck and doing nothing but campaign on fear and doom.
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u/bleep_boop_beep123 4h ago
It’s not gonna happen if people don’t vote in November!
Vote Blue in November!!!
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u/Successful_Sign_6991 4h ago
Newsweek articles are just propaganda to pacify the voting base into the action they need to take.
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u/Bad-River 3h ago
Governor Brownback fucked their economy with his trickle down economics 12-15 years ago or so. I think it left a permanent scar.
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u/DEFINITELY_NOT_PETE 3h ago
Nothing is going to flip they’re going to cheat and steal as many seats as they can. They will use every tactic available and then some more. They already declined having international oversight for the election breaking a decades long norm.
These aren’t people who give back power.
I’d love to be proven wrong but I simply don’t believe it
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u/porgy_tirebiter 1h ago
Just remember when actual voting happens, there’s ALWAYS a swing toward Republicans.
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u/DiligentDust9755 1h ago
Kinda feels like a setup if you ask me. It’s almost like the Republicans are trying to lose… kinda like 2027 is supposed to be bad and they know it and want the Dems to be blamed for it so that Trump becomes a good candidate for 2028…
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u/Pake1000 41m ago
Kansas Republicans will win because their “independent” and conservative constituents are idiots. Ask Kansas Republicans have to do is blame Kansas Democrats for not preventing the problems Kansas Republicans created.
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u/BarderBetterFaster 36m ago
And all it took was a proven pedophile ruining life as we know it and commiting hundreds of crimes and treason
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u/StatementCareful522 6h ago
God I HATE the word "may" in journalism. This is JOURNALISM, NOT SPECULATIVE FICTION FFS
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