The Sins of Jim Crow Returning

So in-between the time that the Supreme Court ruled to allow more extreme gerrymandering among the Republican-controlled states - you'll notice they stopped Virginia from their own Democratic gerrymander - and my heading off to vacation in Las Vegas to see the Grand Canyon and get my left leg mangled in an e-bike accident (ow ow ow), it shouldn't be too shocking that most of the Southern (Confederate) states controlled by racist Far Right Republicans sped faster than ludicrous speed to redraw their already-skewed congressional maps to erase all Black-majority districts they could (via George Chidi at the Guardian (US)):

The reaction speed of southern states to the US supreme court’s decision last week in Louisiana v Callais has been breathtaking for voting rights activists.

One week after Callais, Louisiana’s governor has ordered the state’s ongoing congressional election to be set aside while state lawmakers redraw maps to eliminate a Democratic-majority – that is, a Black-majority – seat covering Baton Rouge.

Alabama’s Republican-majority legislature is drafting legislation in a special session that will allow it to set aside the results of a completed primary later this year if courts lift an injunction on its redistricting.

Florida was amid a special redistricting session as the ruling was handed down, passing a congressional map for 28 districts that packs Black and brown voters into four districts on the south Florida coast and Orlando, eliminating every other Democratic majority.

DeSantis and the other Republican bastards in Tallahassee as I feared did cleave the Tampa metro to turn everything in those counties into "safe" Republican districts, in spite of the huge Democratic numbers I personally know exist in that region (well okay, maybe not Pasco County...).

The corpse of the Voting Rights Act was still warm as these inheritors of John C. Calhoun and Jeff Davis celebrated their efforts to deny Black voters in their states any representation at all. It's like the conservatives who make up the modern Republican Party in the Deep South - many of whom were Democrats until the great migration to Reagan's GOP in the late 1980s - were waiting for decades to eagerly undo everything back to 1965 1855.

Donald Trump’s demand to tear up political norms has been met by Republican states eager to dust off a segregation-era playbook that maximizes the political power of white voters.

“What’s happening right now is probably the swiftest disenfranchisement of Black folks since Reconstruction, due to disenfranchisement by racist gerrymandering. And they will lie and say that it’s for political purposes,” said the Democratic state representative Justin Pearson of Tennessee, a Memphis legislator running for a congressional district blown into pieces by Republican lawmakers. “They cracked it into three. The district stretches hundreds of miles … it’s completely diluted in thirds almost to the percentage. It’s surgical, how they remove the possibility of Black participation.”

A lot of these maps will get challenged in the courts, but what success could any of them bring when the top court controlled by six Far Right Republican Justices already sided with the segregationists to bring the horrors of Jim Crow back?

Via Paul Blumenthal at HuffPost:

Following the Civil War and the end of slavery, the Republican Congress led an ambitious campaign of Reconstruction to integrate the formerly enslaved into political society and create pluralistic governments in the South. Hundreds of Black men (women still did not have the right to vote) were elected to offices including governor, congressman, senator and on down following the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments. But this was short-lived as white Southerners organized a campaign of violent repression and terrorism known as Redemption to seize back control, while the Supreme Court carved the original intent out of the 14th and 15th amendments and gutted civil rights laws passed by Congress.

These Redeemers imposed new laws and constitutions on the Southern states meant to ensure white rule by eliminating Black political representation and Black voting rights. This push culminated with the enactment of Jim Crow laws across the South as a response to suppress the successful fusion of Black voters with white Populists at the turn of the 20th century. What remained were authoritarian states imposing racial apartheid through legalism and violence...

The former Confederate states would not send another Black congressman to Washington for another 72 years. The Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965 following the historic march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made that possible. That law banned the bread-and-butter of Jim Crow — literacy tests and other subjective discriminatory criteria for voter registration — and created legal mechanisms to challenge laws and district maps as discriminatory...

But the court’s decision in Callais threatens all of this by reversing the 1982 Voting Rights Act reauthorization by stating that challenges brought under the law’s Section 2 to district maps must prove intentional racial discrimination. The decision also requires any challenge to yield to the partisan motives of state legislators, who can now claim they are eliminating Black majority seats simply because they predominantly elect Democrats.

This is the endgame of all that conservative shifting into a Republican Party driven by Culture War racism/sexism that made certain most Blacks would shift over to the Democratic Party, giving the Far Right judges the 'excuse' of "oh, it's okay if the gerrymandering is ONLY partisan in nature," with the full understanding that racism is driving the differences between the two major national parties.

It's painful that the Southern states are the ones racing to do this, because these states happen to have the largest Black populations across the whole nation. Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina all top the list, with only Maryland up north with a large enough Black population but currently not under the control of racist Republicans threatening to take away their representation (and even their right to vote, and even their citizenship). The only former Confederate state without a sizable Black population - Texas - is currently obsessed with gerrymandering to subdue the Latino vote instead (and also the large Black population in major metros like Houston).

The horrifying thing is how the Republicans in these southern states believe they can get away with gerrymandering black voters out of representation (and political power) with the belief that yes, too many WHITE voters will not turn against these redrawn maps. Even with the risks that the Republicans in these "safe" districts are vulnerable to independent or moderate voters in these regions who could vote for Democratic challengers - especially if they're mad at trump and the whole GOP for tariffs, inflation, oil wars, inflation, immigration raids tearing apart communities, and even more inflation - these wingnuts are convinced enough Whites will vote with their fears and their rage for even more racism.

It would be pretty to think that enough Whites - the ones who aren't conservative, the ones who are still Democratic voters in these redrawn districts, the ones who have a clear idea where all our economic and social ills are coming from (trump and his crooked buddies) - will prove these assholes wrong and refuse to give Republicans the false "majority" control they hope these rigged districts will bring. The Far Right knows, deep down, they really aren't the majority of this nation: otherwise, why would they gerrymander in the first place (and second, why else try to take away voting rights period)?

One of the major reasons to gerrymander is to drive down voter turnout / interest especially by the party getting drawn off the maps. It is high time for Democratic voters - and every No-Party-Affiliated voter - to rise up against these rigged districts and do everything possible to vote Republicans out. 

Fight the corrupt powers of trumpian misrule, America. 

Fight the Far Right assholes trying to take away our power to vote.

Get the goddamn vote out this midterm.

AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN.

The Truth About Republican Obsession With Voter Fraud That DOES NOT EXIST.

In short:

It's not that the Republicans are eager to lie about mass fake voting they can't even prove in the courts.

It's that the Republicans are eager to believe that massive numbers of voters - Blacks, Women, Youth, Non-Christian, essentially anybody registered Democratic Party - are Fake Americans, and will deny those "Fake Americans" their rights so that Republicans can stay in corrupt minority rule.

Every chance that trump's lawyers have had to prove in court that there's any coordinated nationwide effort to commit voter fraud, they've failed to prove that. They're following in the footsteps of Kris Kobach, whose constant court battles over the narrative that there's a conspiracy of fake voters ended in resounded defeats on the simple reality Kobach could never prove a word of it.

And yet, the Republicans will insist on that argument that the election results favoring Biden or ANY Democrat for that matter is fraudulent.

Because they are at the point they can never accept anyone else outside of their tribe as true Americans.

This is how dangerous the current Far Right Narrative has gotten.

A Saturnalia Wish Come True: Some Sanity From the Alabama Special Election

So I just wanna make sure that this is real and that enough Alabama voters turned out to elect Doug Jones over alleged human skeeve Roy Moore:

In a major upset, Democrat Doug Jones won the Alabama Senate special election on Tuesday to fill the seat previously held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The last time Alabama sent a Democrat to the Senate was in 1992.

The Associated Press called the race for Jones just before 10:30 p.m. eastern.

Alabama is a deeply conservative state. But the race unexpectedly became competitive after multiple women came forward to allege that Republican Roy Moore had made advances toward them as teenage girls, including groping and assault. The result was a stunning victory for the Democratic Party, which has been locked out of power in Washington after the 2016 presidential election.

Insert Happy Dance Here.

Some rough observations in the wake of good tidings and cheer:

• Voter turnout remains the thing that Democrats have to work on. For these midterm-type elections outside of the Presidential cycle, turnout is shockingly low. But this election where the turnout was expected to be around 25 percent, the state GOTV efforts bumped the turnout to 38 percent (still bad, but SO MUCH BETTER than expected).
  Jones' victory - pushed by a ground-game that learned from their failures in 2016 and adapted to a more aggressive effort - alongside the earlier results in Virginia and New Jersey proves the 50-State Strategy can (and SHOULD) work.
• Black voters were the major contributors to Jones' win. It helped that the Republican candidate Roy "Banned from the Mall" Moore was an unrepentant scuzbucket on racial and sexism issues. When Moore was caught at a speech praising how "great things were when we had slavery, even for the slaves" that was just one more motivator among African-Americans to GET TEH DAMN VOTE OUT. Most Blacks are, for what I know, very spiritual and religious in that state but NOT evangelical, meaning that they weren't buying the snake oil from the local White Evangelical pastors who proclaimed Moore a perfect God-inspired candidate.
  And this was IN SPITE OF a massive voter suppression effort committed by the State-level Republicans in charge of the electoral process. For every Black voter who had to fight over getting illegally shunted to INACTIVE Voter status, for every Black voter who had to march past county sheriffs parked illegally outside polling places as intimidation tactics, for every Black voter likely lied to about whether their votes mattered... YOUR VOTES MATTERED, and THANK YOU.
  This should also be a reminder to the Democratic Party at the national level that YES, the Black Vote is a key foundation of their support. The ongoing media chatter about "changing" the party message to attract "Working Class Whites" - AKA Racists who flipped to trump - should go away. Democrats need to focus on the voters they HAVE and just need to get to vote, and make themselves attractive to the Independent voters who aren't lost to a haze of racial hatred. You're not getting those trump voters back, Dems. They're lost. Get the voters - the moderates, the pragmatists, the ones who want government to WORK - who matter. The 50-State Model of nationwide campaigning worked in 2006, and it can work in 2018. Jones' win proves it.
• This is a big blow to the Republican election schemes. For the past four decades, they've plotted out a game-plan of winning thanks to Geography and Demographics, using both to carve out Congressional gerrymanders to win the House and then using the small-population (and more conservative) states to garner enough control of the Senate. While a Senate election can't be gerrymandered, the state of Alabama was so Social Conservative for decades that it had become a "Safe" seat for any conservative candidate, effectively gerrymandered for the Senate.
  No more. The Demographics are starting - finally - to turn against the Geography of Elections. Voters under 40 leaned Democrat for Jones and in the earlier off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey the youth voters went Democrat by around 70 percent. That will be the largest voting bloc - bolstered by a Millennial age group that's more politically involved than the slacker Gen-Xers - in the 2018 Midterms.
  And given the large-scale efforts Republicans are attempting to pull with voter suppression, they're failing at that: voter turnout was higher than normal (which sucks) for non-Presidential cycles, and that overwhelms any attempt to deny voters from their access to the ballot box. The GOP running the elections offices can come up with a lot of ways to stop (minority and youthful) voters, but they can't stop all of them.
  Granted, it took a candidate as evil as Moore to shake things up, but when you look at how close the results were the GOP STILL LOST in otherwise "safe" Alabama. If this had been a special election in a state that wasn't normally +30 or more Conservative/Republican, say a state like Florida that leans Democratic but still has Republicans winning by +2 or so, the Democratic candidate could have snagged a larger win percentage.
  There may be "safe" Red States like West Virginia and Utah and Wyoming out there, but given the voter anger there's no guarantee anymore. The unsafe "competitive" Purple states are now going to be massive fights that the Dems can win. And too many states that were once reliable Red States - hi, Texas! hi, Georgia! hi, Kansas - aren't going to be reliable anymore.
• Following on that point, this is why this should bother Republicans: THEY ARE RUNNING OUT OF NOT-EVIL CANDIDATES TO NOMINATE. Their ongoing purging of moderate, centrist candidates in lieu of extremist, ignorant demagogues - who turn out to be crooks, perverts, or worse - is getting to the point where they can't win in "Safe" seats with such candidates. Any attempt to run a rational lower-case conservative is going to get stomped during the Primaries by the Fox Not-News fueled voter base that bought all in on trump and his ilk. Alabama HAD a sane candidate in Luther Strange, but the primary voters choose Roy Moore whose history of inflamed rhetoric, unhinged religious views, and outright anti-Establishment positions appeased the Far Right but horrified everyone else.
  Granted, if the sexual assaults never went public - which tells you how important it is for actual media like the Washington Post to dig up these things - Moore could have eked out a win. But given his nature, SOMETHING else could have come up to make enough general voters recoil in horror. The man was a walking disease.
  And the Republican leadership has to realize that Moore is the only kind of candidate that can win their Primaries anymore. They need to rethink their need for ethical standards in candidates if they hope to retain the "safe" seats they got. But going that route - bringing in more moderate candidates - will outrage their base anyway and they'd get primaried by Moore-type whackos. They've fallen into a particularly nasty Catch-22.
• Speaking of extremist, ignorant demagogues, this election was as much a referendum on trump as it was on the Republican Party.
  The evidence is there: trump is a drag on the GOP. Both times he went into Alabama to campaign for "his" choice - first for Strange, then for Moore - and both times "his" choice lost.
  While trump wasn't noticeably toxic in Alabama - his approval/disapproval balanced out at 48/48 - he still wasn't any help. In other Red States, trump's disapproval is worse.
  Any idea that trump voters will be there for other Republican candidates in the midterms should be laughed off. As of right now, the Republicans are on their own. Bringing in trump to campaign for you might actually lead to your defeat.
  But the Republicans can't ignore trump either. They're stuck, tied to a blowhard liar whose popularity numbers ought to be lower than the 32-33 percent he's at right now. trump may be enormously popular with the Far Right base, giving him control of the Republicans... but the number of self-described Republicans is dropping, meaning at the broader level of GOP-Indy-Dem the GOP is going to be a superminority party by the time 2020 rolls around. We're getting to the point where gerrymandering and fearmongering isn't going to be enough to bully the Republicans to victory.

What now, mad cow?

Right now, trump is behaving like he never really backed Moore in the first place. his ire towards the rest of the GOP making him look bad is going to create greater divide between him and the party leadership.

Right now, there's a large number of Alabama voters quietly taking their Roy Moore bumper stickers off their coal-roller trucks. There may be a lot of hard Right voters who'll still proudly claim their bona fides, but even they have to feel some shame in having sided with a goddamn pedophile.

Right now, the Congressional Republicans are trying to finish up their conference tax cut bill before their own internal deadlines and before Jones can show up to become a bigger stumbling block. They didn't have much room to maneuver their massively unpopular tax cut for the rich bill before, to where three Republican Senators could say "no" to a bad bill like they did to stop the "Kill Obamacare" bill. Now they're down to two GOP Senators who can say "no"... and there are enough Senators in vulnerable elections who may be more interested in saving their own skins with voters back home (or have already pledged to retire and thus have nothing to lose).

Right now, the Democrats need to take the strategies they had for winning in Alabama and weaponize it. They need to go back to the Fifty-State Strategy that worked so well in 2006 and 2008. They need to push a unifying Get-Out-The-Vote effort to ensure large turnouts that benefit them. If they can win in Alabama (albeit in bizarre circumstances) they can win ANYWHERE.

Know hope.

On Polling: What Should We Be Looking For?

Now that we're past both nominating conventions and that we're going to be getting away from the post-con bounces both Presidential nominees get, what should we be looking for among the polls - check here, check here, and follow up with Sober Nate Silver there - during the months of August and September?

1) Keep an eye on women. Where most polling focused during previous election cycles on ethnic blocs - White, Black, Hispanic, Asian and Other - the real split this 2016 is happening with the Men-Women vote.

As noted earlier, Silver and his fellow stat checkers at 538.com documented the severe hatred women have towards Trump. This is a key demographic as A) more women historically show up to vote than men and B) we're talking about ALL women including White voters who would normally be voting Republican.

White voters in 2012 voted around 60 percent for Romney (R), which had to include a high number of women among men. This HuffPo poll from 2012 results showed Romney won White Women voters 56 percent. Even with that number - considering Whites vote in greater overall numbers than all other ethnic groups combined - Romney still LOST. Trump in 2016 has to perform higher than that... but if White Women break away from White Men, Trump can't do that.

According to this 2016 Pew Research poll, Trump is only polling 35 percent to Clinton's 53 percent with Women overall. Among White Women Trump is getting 42 percent. Note the difference between 56 percent White Women in 2012 for Mitt to 42 percent White Women currently for Trump. That's a minus-14 point drop. Trump is not getting 60 percent of overall White voters this year, he just isn't...

2) Remember that the non-White voting blocs are so currently opposed to the Republican Party and so opposed to Trump that those groups are not going to flip to the GOP in significant numbers to help Republicans.

Black voters are likely to stay near 95-98 percent in favor of the Democrats. Hispanic voters are likely to be above 80 percent in favor of Dems by Election Day. Asian voters are reportedly getting close to being close to 80 percent for Dems as well.

While the total number of each voting bloc can't equal White Voters overall, the advantage to the Democrats having minority voters entirely with their party is that it reduces the odds of Blue and battleground states from flipping to Red/Republican. Consider them a firewall.

These are no longer elections fought by issues or ideology. We are now in elections fought over demographics (which explains why Republicans are so desperate to suppress voting rights for minorities).

3) Hispanic voters are the wild card this election cycle.

It's because polling for Hispanic voters is harder to do than for the other voting blocs, over communication - few polling units use Spanish-language surveys - and overall unwillingness to answer those surveys. So there's little idea how the turnout of that group - which is close to surpassing registration numbers for Black voters - is actually going to happen.

There's solid evidence Hispanic voters are registering in larger numbers than before, and they've got a good incentive to vote this time as Trump's illegal immigration policies are a direct threat to themselves (even as legal citizens, Hispanic-Americans know exactly what can happen in a mass round-up of anyone even looking remotely Latino). The problem - as always - remains turnout. If overall turnout of Hispanic voters gets above 50 percent - and remains around 80 percent Democrat - that will be good news for Hillary's camp.

Is there anything else we should be looking for?

Oh, right.

GET THE VOTE OUT, PEOPLE. Polling may be one thing but what MATTERS is the actual DAMN TURNOUT!