Animals can't think and have no emotions.

Humans are superior.

Elephants and cetaceans rival us for intelligence. Dogs and big cats have emotions. Crows are known to drop walnuts at a highway intersection in front of cars stopped for the red light and return to pick out the edible nut-meat left over after the walnut has become 'road-kill' after the next batch of cars is stopped. So much for the 'bird-brained' birds with their small but efficient brains.

Elephants show reverence for their dead, and they are known to take revenge against poachers much as humans take revenge against man-eating big cats.

I suspect that elephants even have religion... and that Ganesh isn't the only god in the form of an elephant. Why would elephants have human-shaped gods? 

I don see why having language makes you a superior species.

Indeed I would rather trust a box turtle than a Nazi or Stalinist.

All in all, Creationism is heavily despised in most of the scientific world, but are there any fields that are more tolerant than others? y contrast, which field is the least tolerant?

I'd say the least tolerant is palentology, but what is the most?

Creationism may be heavily despised by most of the scientific world, but not by science.  Until the scientific world can use a physical process to demonstrate the creation of time, space, matter, and energy...then all science is in agreement with Creationism.

Psychology?

Astronomy establishes the age of the Universe. Paleontology is a farce if one tries to make it fit new-age creationism. Archeology establishes human activity  contrary to an earthly age of 6000 or so years.  Biology on the whole, and especially genetics, tells a different story from Genesis. Geology? Creationists claim that oil-seekers need only memorize such formulas as 'the so-called Carboniferous Era', but one obviously loses something. Chemistry? OK until one starts looking at long-lived isotopes for the ratios of U-238 and Pb-206 or Th-236 and Pb-208.  Physics or mathematics? Both give the tools with which to judge the validity of creationism to the other sciences.

The only way in which to defend creationism is to accuse the Creator of forging a Universe that deceives us into disbelief in Him. God as a forger denies the goodness    

Yes, leftists screeched the same nonsense 3 years ago. Then Corbett administered a big thrashing.

He was new in 2010. He is now known all too well. You hire a charmer in February and by May money is missing (but he has plenty of excuses) and before you know it you have a sexual-harassment lawsuit because he chases anything wearing a skirt except a display mannequin. 

But doesn't Corbett miss something? People clean up their acts to get work, they get the jobs and the steady paychecks, and they then so hate their jobs that they have to use drugs to make the drudgery tolerable.  I can't tell you what it would take to make  retail sales tolerable... after all one can't live only for a week's vacation, which is about all that one can expect.

In 2010 we on the left side of the political spectrum failed to recognize how effective the Hard Right could be in playing mass resentments into political gains right under our noses. The only way in which the Hard Right makes net gains over the next two even-year general elections is if it is capable of allowing employers to direct the votes of their employees, in which case democracy is as doomed in America as it was in Italy in the late 1920s.

The Hard Right tried its formula of success of 2010 in 2012 -- and did badly. 

Any non governor is different from the governorship. Mr. Corbett was less new than his opponent and less new than most non incumbents, and certainly far less new than some dude from Erie County named Tom Ridge back in 1994.

In any case, describing Mr. Corbett as a charmer is quite interesting. The man sounds like a drone. And in any case, the current legislation was elected under a grossly malapportioned map that gives the leftists extra districts. The Republicans will make gains.

The analogy is to the poseur with a resume showing him overqualified for the modest position for which he applies -- and wins by undercutting every other applicant and because an industry that practically fosters one of the hallmarks of sociopathic behavior (charm) falls for it readily  . One finds out quickly enough why he was available so cheaply -- maybe because his "degrees" come from diploma mills, because he is desperate for the money, and because there are plenty of pretty girls the age of his daughter who doesn't speak to him. I'm not saying that he is that bad. I've seen much of it in the industry that I stumbled into soon after graduating from college after being out of work long enough to consider the minimum wage a fair deal if I got opportunity for advancement. The best opportunity for advancement implied quitting once I amassed a good wardrobe for business.

I'm not saying that Governor Corbett is quite that bad; he may scrupulously keep his hands off public assets and the (vulgar pun avoided) of pretty girls, so far as I know. He is apparently awful for very different reasons. The polls show clearly that someone who squeaked by in a great year for right-wing Republicans as stealth candidates who hid their agendas are not so popular after they show themselves experimenting with daring right-wing solutions that people would reject if they knew (trying to give away the public sector to a monopolistic profiteer, eviscerating the rights of workers, and shifting taxes from the rich to the poor). Any one of those can be wildly unpopular.

Tom Ridge, by most accounts, was a fine Governor. 

...Leftists? The best contributors to radical leftist ideologies are those right-wingers who deliver luxury to themselves and their cronies but hardship to everyone else. 
 

Contrast Obama 2012 to Carter 1976, and the two would be almost identical in electoral votes had Obama lost Florida (his weakest state) in 2012. But look how different the results were!



Carter 1976/Obama 2012  131
Ford 1976/Romney   2012    64
Ford 1976/Obama    2012  182
Carter 1976/Romney2012  139 

My count is off (I am using the electoral votes of 2012 here). The states changing sides between 1976 and 2012 account for more than half the electoral votes.


Basically the Presidential election of 1976 is ancient history these days. It has almost no predictive value on how any Democratic win or close election looks like. 

The amazing thing is that Ford actually got about 20% of the black vote.

That was around standard at the time, when there was still some residual black Republicanism. The current numbers are mostly the result of a certain Republican Presidential candidate who started his campaign talking about "states' rights" in Philadelphia, MS.

The interesting thing about the deep south is that Democrats don't need to get anywhere close to winning the white vote in order to win the region. Ford probably won the white vote in every southern state except Georgia but he still won almost every state in the region.

Today, a Democrat could conceivably win Georgia with 25-30% of the white vote, Alabama with around 35%, SC with 35-40% and Mississippi with around 25%

Carter must have won the white vote in Arkansas, since he carried the state by 30%.

Anyway, it seems ironic that a majority of white Southerners probably voted for a moderate Michigan Yankee instead of this "bumpkin" from rural Georgia, and that the African American vote provided the winning margin for the Deep South Governor. 

Take a look at the 1976 map in the South. Carter DID in fact win most of the "redneck" and very rural white areas. The areas that voted for Ford tended to urban and white flight suburban areas, the type of places that probably were still sore over integration and blamed the Democrats, and thought Carter was a wuss on foreign policy or "law and order".

1. America was much less politically polarized in 1976 than today. Just look at the 20% black vote for Ford, which would be impossible for an honest-to-Jesse-Helms rightist. Carter and Ford were both moderates by current standards.

2. There was still a large 'liberal Republican' vote that has since drifted to the Democrats. 

3. It is not so clear that Carter was much more 'liberal' than Ford. I suspect that southern Democrats who voted with Nixon in 1972 turned back to the Democratic Party after elected Southern Democrats like Sam Ervin went after Nixon for dirty partisan tricks.  Ford had the taint of Nixon, but Reagan wouldn't.

4. Only in a few elections is the South decidedly more liberal than the North. The South of the early to middle 1970s had a Democratic coalition based on New Deal Democrats and the comparatively new black vote. Just look at the 1976 electoral map and you see Carter winning several states that no later Democrat has ever won since -- South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas while losing a raft of states that have gone for Democrats in five or six  of the last Presidential elections. The one Southern state that Carter did not win is Virginia -- which has since drifted D strongly enough that Barack Obama won it decisively twice.

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?f=1&off=0&year=1976   

5. It is practically inconceivable that any close Presidential election would look much like that of 1976 for a very long time. It would more likely resemble a near-inversion. I shall create a map to that effect.   

Yes, leftists screeched the same nonsense 3 years ago. Then Corbett administered a big thrashing.

He was new in 2010. He is now known all too well. You hire a charmer in February and by May money is missing (but he has plenty of excuses) and before you know it you have a sexual-harassment lawsuit because he chases anything wearing a skirt except a display mannequin. 

But doesn't Corbett miss something? People clean up their acts to get work, they get the jobs and the steady paychecks, and they then so hate their jobs that they have to use drugs to make the drudgery tolerable.  I can't tell you what it would take to make  retail sales tolerable... after all one can't live only for a week's vacation, which is about all that one can expect.

In 2010 we on the left side of the political spectrum failed to recognize how effective the Hard Right could be in playing mass resentments into political gains right under our noses. The only way in which the Hard Right makes net gains over the next two even-year general elections is if it is capable of allowing employers to direct the votes of their employees, in which case democracy is as doomed in America as it was in Italy in the late 1920s.

The Hard Right tried its formula of success of 2010 in 2012 -- and did badly. 

I really dislike Toomey's political stances, but when someone does something I feel is the right thing, I'll offer them kudos. I even sent a letter to his Senate office detailing how I was a strong Joe Sestak supporter and was greatly disappointed at his election, however, I feel he did the right thing for the nation by working in a bipartisan manner with Joe Manchin to actually accomplish something. I give him credit for that.

The rarity of this is all the more astonishing. Gun control fits the traditionally-conservative concept of law and order. But most Republicans seem to be operating on the principle of "Don't let Obama get any successes". They ignore (1) that good government is a good idea, and (2) that Democrats might get the same idea if they get an electoral result inverting that of 2010 in 2018 with a Republican President. There might be a nasty recession for us to get out of, or there might be a nasty war going badly. Besides, we could get into a vicious cycle of one Party getting complete control of the Executive and Legislative branches and voting as directed in some Party conference with the first priority of Congress at all such times to undo everything done a few years earlier.   

Eighty years later the partisan identity of the New Deal has no relevance. 

This is all quite interesting, and idea that 90% was some magic fixed percentage with universal sweep, like the speed of light, never impressed me, because nations are all different. What worries me more, is loss of confidence in the US currency at some point, because of concern about ability to repay the debt. I don't know what that percentage to GDP number is, but one thing I do know, is that the percentage will be lower if and when interest rates go up from negative real rates to positive real rates, say from 1% to 4%, and the cost of debt carry quadruples.  So the issue is not so much having chronic emphysema, where everything slows down on the growth front, and more about a major artery to the heart suddenly bursting, and it all falls apart at warp speed, circa the Lehman Bros affair.

In short, folks grabbing onto the exposure of the flaws in this study as some sort of get out of jail free card, and we can just keep doing what we are doing, what me worry, are doing the equivalent of getting into a life boat that leaks, because the seams in its hull are coming apart.

Just the opinion of a dessicated old lawyer of course. Folks would probably be happier just to put me on ignore.

Austerity depends upon  the assumption that shrinking the overall economy to pay off public debt solves the problem of public debt more than it hurts the economy. Debt is not a bad thing in itself if it creates or brings countervailing assets or allows one to generate more income. All giant enterprises are huge borrowers, and until they fail due to incompetence or obsolescence of their product they get away with it. An entity that can borrow a billion dollars at 3% and get a rate of return of 7% is adding 40 million dollars to its pre-tax profit.

Of course the federal government does not simply get an overt return on its expenditure. But it can fund the building of highways and tax the increased net savings on fuel, vehicle degradation, and labor costs. It can crack down on crime and save millions to insurers.   

At what point does spending get troublesome? If the quality of the expenditures are inappropriate, then deficits soar and tax revenue shrinks. Such would apply to public corruption that, nobody can deny, squeezes out the private sector or allows monopolists to squeeze out competitors. If it builds public investment or human capital then one does not have such a problem.

Could there be a maximal level of expenditure with a declining rate of return on investment? Sure. We would get few good effects from sending people with IQs around 90 to grad school or building a bridge across any of the Great Lakes. But determining where the optimal level of government spending is difficult. Too many people have ideological axes to grind.     

Rushed judgment on behalf of partisan causes invites huge judicial error.

Four year of Al Gore would have probably led to eight years of a Republican Presidency other than that of George Worthless Bush. I'm figuring that Al Gore would have presided over a recession that he was unwilling to end fast enough because he was unwilling to support a corrupt and destructive boom in real estate. At the least Al Gore has paid attention to intel and has hit the roof at the White House after the CIA warns him of a plot to hijack some aircraft and crash them into important buildings -- and he sets the FBI and the INS on the plotters. Of course because he has done so the plotters end up in a high-altitude location (ADX Florence, Colorado) and some famously high-rise buildings remain standing in the Manhattan skyline.

Maybe we end up with someone like George Voinovich or Richard Lugar as President, and we still end up with a nasty recession around 2010 that brings us President Barack Obama, who is just starting his Presidency after winning 54% of the popular vote against Rick Santorum. America is less polarized, especially after the 44th President has told Karl Rove and Grover Norquist to take a hike on the Appalachian Trail just like Mark Sanford.   

She makes money by putting outrageous stuff in her poison-pen books readable only to people who read little. You know the types -- they have huge numbers of books by right-wing American polemicists but no Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Forster...

Consider her recent absurdity a 'free sample' offered to remind people that she has another tome appearing at the Wal*Mart, whose 'book' section includes no Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Forster... 

Why is PA a different shade of orange than the other orange states? Is it because the numbers are tied?

Yes -- the poll showed a tie. That is the first tie that I have shown on this map. I like pastel shades, and the gradation pink> orange> yellow> aqua > pale blue seems natural.

 

[cautious]

Four years later we get this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States

Warning -- this is a Wikipedia article, and it will not go unchanged. Events, better or worse between now and January 20, 2017, will shape the image of this President. It is not professional, but it seems neutral enough. 

My take:

So far he is probably above average. He obviously can't compare to George Washington for defining the Presidency; any comparison to Lincoln or FDR requires a crisis as severe as World War II or the Civil War, neither of which is likely to happen. He will likely get much credit for adept stewardship of the economy because an economic meltdown that began to look like the start of the Great Depression ended in the equivalent of the spring of 1931 instead of the autumn of 1932. He has nation-changing legislation to his credit -- Obamacare -- like it or not. Sure it could be repealed, but it had better have a satisfactory replacement attached because he will veto anything that is not an improvement. Big reforms are always subject to subsequent reforms. He disposed of the most dangerous terrorist in American history.

Dubya, in contrast, is recognized as the worst President of at the least the twentieth century except for Warren G. Harding. Dubya gets the rap for two wars, one badly bungled and one that should have never happened but would not have happened except for his dishonesty -- and for a speculative boom that went awry with the potential of starting another Great Depression. Dubya may outrank Warren G. Harding because the Teapot Dome Scandal was the cornerstone of the short Harding Administration. Dubya had Enron, to which he had stronger and more personal ties.     

Barack Obama has established what he is as President. One of his arch-rivals (Karl Rove) acknowledges that President Obama is cautious.  After Dubya, that is quite a necessary change. He is a stickler for protocol and precedent; he collaborates closely with intelligence agencies (contrast Jimmy Carter). He has run a squeaky-clean administration.

“If we believed PPP polls,” Flake told The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis, “I wouldn’t be here at all.”

Flake added that PPP's "only accurate poll" is the survey conducted right before the election so that, as the junior Arizona senator put it, "they can do well in terms of how they're rated."

“But prior to that,” Flake said, “take it with a grain of salt.”

Tom Jensen, director of PPP, quickly fired back on Twitter, pointing to a survey in February of last year that showed Flake up by 11 points and one right before the election that showed the Republican up by 5. Flake ultimately defeated Democrat Richard Carmona by 3 percentage points.

The usual self-defense of a blundering politician: disparage the poll in question. Barely elected, he took the unpopular side on a heated issue and can't explain after he does so why he did. The gun lobby which supports a sleazy activity in Arizona (supplying firearms to smugglers for subsequent sale in Mexico contrary to Mexican law) got its way with him.  

Reality: Arizona is on the fringe of being a swing state, and quality matters. He has five and a half years to recover from this political blunder, in which time the gun legislation may be offered anew. If he gets a second chance and handles it well he might save his political career in 2018.

[green]

Q, Pennsylvania:


Pennsylvania voters disapprove 47 - 38 percent of the job Gov. Corbett is doing, continuing a four-month string of negative scores in surveys by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University

http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes--centers/polling-institute/pennsylvania/release-detail?ReleaseID=1889



tie white
1-3%       20% saturation
4-7%       40% saturation
8%-20%  60% saturation
over 20% 80% saturation

Behind, yellow the colors to green for Republicans  and orange for Democrats. Dark shades of orange are really brown.  Ties are yellow.


Qualification: The lowest level of saturation  (20%) now applies for any incumbent Governor whose positive margin of  approval is under 8% but whose approval rating is under 50%. The second-lowest level of saturation (40%) now applies to any Governor whose approval rating is under 50% but whose margin of difference is 8% or higher. No change applies to any Governor whose approval is lower than disapproval. A governor is not in a strong position until he has at least 50% approval. The rationale is to avoid giving a recently-elected Governor credit for a "honeymoon".


Governors who die, resign, are defeated in bids for re-election, retire at the end of their terms, or are impeached and removed from office will be whited out. Independent governor or no governor -- white.

[Clinton]

Clinton vs. Rubio





Clinton vs. Ryan



Clinton vs. Christie

CO, NH, NC added. 

This is what comes with electing "young" presidents.

I don't expect BHO to fall off the face of the planet on January 21, 2017.

He is going to be "President Emeritus" so long as he is able. Would he run for Governor of Illinois or US Senator from Illinois?  Would he be appointed to the Supreme Court? The latter might put him out of partisan politics.

Gore would not have had 90% approval ratings after 9/11. 

Assuming that just about anyone other than Dubya would have paid attention to the intel and thwarted the attack by sending law enforcement against any plotters in America... Gore would not get 91% approval immediately after a non-event. But I would say the same about any other imaginable person as President.

[floor]

Guys, guys.  If you actually look at the exit polls, Romney actually defeated Obama's negative tactics in this race.   He did better with whites than any Republican candidate since Reagan in 1984.  He was good to excellent in the Presidential debates and changed a lot of swing voters' perceptions about him.  There was nobody, either in the the 2012 primaries or who declined (Huckabee, Thune, Daniels, etc.), who could have done better than Romney did among whites.

The negative campaign against Mitt Romney simply devoured time. When one is ahead in a timed sport a time-devouring strategy works. Just think of the nickel defense that Tom Landry used so readily in his winning seasons with the Dallas Cowboys.  He typically typically got a large early lead and conceded much of it in the best years of the Cowboys -- but not enough to lose. An opposing team could slowly gain yards, perhaps getting into field goal position. But if it got frustrated with its progress the team behind had to take high-risk gambles that led to an interception that eventually gave the Cowboys a chance to run down the clock on defense even if it didn't lead to a Cowboys score that might put the game out of reach. So an opposing team could look good losing or lose by a huge margin. What a choice!

In 2008 John McCain gambled to pick off Pennsylvania with late efforts in the state -- at the expense of efforts to win states that he had to win.  The Obama campaign could put the heat on in such states as Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, Colorado, Florida, Virginia, and Missouri, winning six of them. In 2012 the Republican Party practically abandoned Romney so that it could hold the House of Representatives. Romney probably saw no way to win.   

The problem is Obama had 90% of the Blacks, 65% of Latinos and 65% of Asians locked up before the race even began.  The only polling models that gave Romney a chance were fantasies that these people didn't exist.

...which raises the question of why 65% of Latinos and Asians voted for Obama, who is neither. One could easily understand Blacks voting so heavily for him. Latinos and Asians are increasingly becoming middle class, and that traditionally indicates a likely drift toward the Republican Party. Not this time.  I suspect that the anti-intellectualism of the GOP that now goes beyond campus leftists like Noam Chomsky now attacks such people as schoolteachers and scientists, and that hits people who see education as the only reliable route out of poverty or the means by which they got out of poverty. The Latino vote surely decided Colorado and Florida, neither of which Romney could afford to lose. Virginia and Pennsylvania might have been close enough for the Latino vote to make a difference.

What isn't so well remembered is a dreadful eleventh-hour Spanish-language ad appearing largely in Florida that attempted to link President Obama to  Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.  Until the last weekend in the 2008 campaign I predicted that Romney would win Florida... until I saw that despicable ad.

The 51-47 win was Obama's floor.   The result of poor debate performances.   If he had done extremely well and REALLY painted Romney as aloof and won 44-45% of whites, he would have won by an even bigger margin.

Romney cheated in that debate by bullying the moderator. In a standard high school or college debate such would result in sanctions upon his team that could go so far as a forfeit. Jim Lehrer let him get away with that because he was ill-prepared for that, but Candy Crowley didn't. Romney lost that debate and never recovered.
 

Obama's sub-50 approvals were always disenfranchised liberals.   He was never unpopular.  He always had 51% of Americans who were going to vote in 2012 firmly in his column.

More precisely, somewhat-disaffected liberals. Romney had nothing to offer liberals, and there was no meaningful third-party alternative to Obama. The sub-50% approvals were less than ideal, but they were consistently above 44%, the threshold of an even chance of victory and defeat. Why 44%? Because a challenger can carp at will at an incumbent running for re-election. Once campaign season begins the incumbent who has even near-50% approval (if not higher) shows why he won in the previous election, and the challenger must then sound reasonable.  (An appointed incumbent needs 50% approval with which to win because he has yet to show that he can win the office. Think of Gerald Ford in 1976.)

This is why the Republicans need to change course and do better with non-whites.  If they continue to look like the white racist party then those Latinos, those Blacks, those Asians will not only be voting against the GOP, they'll being voting for the Democrats.   Once they officially convert, they're Democrats for life and they won't be swayed to vote for anybody Republican.

White populations rift severely in their vote outside of the Deep South, and poor whites do not follow the lead of middle-class whites. But middle-class blacks, Asians, and Latinos have influence over poor blacks, Asians, and Latinos. I don't know about 'for life', as Republicans will eventually learn from Barack Obama once they quit disparaging him for being 'less American' than they. Republicans can win big in 2016 except in the Senate (just holding onto many of the contested Senate seats in 2016 will be a severe challenge) if President Obama faces economic calamity, presides over a military or diplomatic debacle, or endures a scandal. Republicans may become a default for running against corrupt local pols or where the Democratic Party is locked up for a vulnerable incumbent -- or very right-wing districts. There will be times in which the Republican can win on personality or a war record but not on personality.   

Example: Eisenhower won 55% of the popular vote and 442 electoral votes in 1952 and 57% of the popular vote and 457 electoral votes in 1956.

Republicans need to recognize that Barack Obama got about 4% less of the popular vote because he is black. Add 4% of the popular vote to the totals for Barack Obama in 2008 and he wins about like Eisenhower in 1956 and do the same in 2012 and he wins about like Eisenhower in 1952. That is not enough to change enough states on its own, but most of the difference would be in the South, so such would result in bigger margins in electoral votes.

They need to realize that President Obama is probably above average as a President, that one learns from him or loses, and that all that he has gotten away with is being black. I can imagine far, far worse.

As late as 1996 they had gone twice for Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton has been shown leading such luminaries as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio in two of those states

Correct. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been leading them. Wait until reality kicks in in about a year or two.

No point in arguing the rest. I've probably been over it literally five hundred times around here.

And dead wrong literally 498 times.

Indeed it is usually hard to predict what sort of reality will kick in a year, two, or especially three. Even the actuarial concerns kick in. 

Why is it that Americans today are rejecting social conservatism much more readily and much quicker than economic conservatism?

It seems like economic conservatism would collapse much quicker, because there's a lot more poor people than rich people.

Don't get me wrong: I think both social and economic conservatism should collapse. But I find it strange that the economic right-wingers aren't falling apart first.

The economic 'conservatism' (I put it in quotes because it is too destructive to conserve anything worthy of conservation) has more money behind it. Social conservatism usually attempts to preserve a dying ethos -- one doomed because its core constituencies are aging into either oblivion or irrelevance.

When I was at (urban college not named) in the 1970s, many of us students walked around, at least off campus, with keys jutting out from between our fingers in one of our hands. The other hand might be on a large textbook. College textbooks make good blunt objects for pummeling a would-be rapist or mugger. We also went in groups and stayed along well-lighted paths. Violent crime happened, but somehow college students experienced little of it. Maybe the crooks figured it out after a bad experience, like getting hit multiple times with a physics textbook that could give a hard lesson in physics to someone who 'needed' a fix.

The Republicans have nothing to offer the young adults but heavy debt as a price for joining or staying in the occupationally-defined middle class, low wages for working people, harsh management, wars for profit, pseudoscience, fundamentalist religion, and sexual repression. Note well that those young adults who have been instrumental in the Obama campaign have learned their political lessons well from a masterful pol, and that many will start political careers. Most will be liberals. The Republicans have nothing like that. Obama supporters who start political careers have the prospect of being the core support of the Democratic Party and form the coalition analogous to the New Deal coalition powerful in American politics until the 1980s.

 

Illinois is going to be much closer in 2016 than in 2012, barring a D blowout. The Favorite Son effect is huge for getting out the vote and establishing familiarity. It went 58-41 for Obama and take out the Favorite Son effect it is more like Michigan or Wisconsin.

McCain won Texas by about 10% less than did Dubya, and Dubya won Texas by about 10% more than did Dole. It works both ways. Look also at Georgia between 1972 and 1984. 

Next Democratic landslide. That requires a populist swing in the South that puts it to the left of America as a whole, as in the 1970s.