How are these insane nuts winning elections?

[diabeticman]

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/arkansas-republican-says-hell-shoot-you-if-you-ask-him-about-his-job-in-public/

Arkansas Republican says he’ll shoot you if you ask him about his job in public

A Republican state senator from Arkansas boasted on Twitter that he is prepared to shoot to kill if people do not approach him with proper amount of respect as he goes about his daily business.

According to the Arkansas Times blog, Sen. Jason Rapert was out at Lowe’s hardware recently when constituent Lance White approached him to ask a question about public policy.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

[VanillaRhapsody]

1. White Fear...

aka racism....

[smirkymonkey]

2. Yep, hate will overcome logic everytime.

We are in such big trouble.

[meow2u3]

3. Extreme gerrymandering

The repuke gerrymandering scheme all but guarantees safe seats for repunks, especially in rural and exurban areas. These unhinged, unstable, and dangerous types could not be elected dogcatcher in a fair election.

[longship]

4. It's worse than that.

These kooks have:

* a majority in a majority of the state legislatures
* a majority of the governorships
* a majority in the US House of Representatives
* a majority in the US Senate
* a thread thin majority in the USS Supreme Court

We hold the White House, which does little good if that is all one has.

Granted, the state legislatures and the US House can be Gerrymandered. But that does not explain the governors or the US Senate.

We are in deep shit to the crazies. We have work to do. Meanwhile we infight here on DU over who is going to win the Democratic presidential primary. Sorry! Wrong battle, people.

We are being played. We need to elect Democrats to these other positions so that when a Democratic president is elected in. 2016, he or she will have something to work with. Otherwise, we are utterly screwed. Eventually they will win the White House -- it could even happen in 2016 if the infighting continues.

Turn out is EVERYTHING. And Democrats do not do well in that metric.

Get to work, people.

[Person 2713]

5. What you said ^^ + they have the airwaves and print cheering them on

[liberal N proud]

6. They bring the insane nuts out of the woodwork to vote for them.

[valerief]

7. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, electronic vote flipping, and racism. nt

[Stevepol]

8. Check the initial exit polls before they get "adjusted"

It used to be possible to check the presumed results of the election and then compare that result with the "unadjusted" exit polls. There was always a "red shift" that meant that the final result was always tilted Right from the exit polls.

Because of that, the polling companies,not wanting to lose money by supposedly bad polling that didn't match the results, began tweaking the exit polls based on the assumption that Republicans were more reluctant to talk to the exit pollsters. No evidence for this assumption, just the "fact" that the results were consistently to the right of the polls.

So nowadays it's usually not possible to make any comparison like that.

The rigging takes place more often down ballot and in the races that are "competitive." If the race is non-competitive, the results is usually pretty close to the result. This according to studies reported by Jon Simon in CODE RED, an excellent book about how the machines have been tilting the results for years. The evidence, I think, is overwhelming. This to me is the obvious reason for the nuts that are in Congress now. The owners of the voting machine companies are bigger right-wing nuts than the candidates.