Painful Way to Kill Your Political Career, Dean

Oh, while I was surviving MegaCon yesterday, apparently the Democratic Party officially started their Presidential primarying in South Carolina, with incumbent Joe Biden stomping hard on his primary opponents with 95 percent of the vote across the entire state (via Asma Khalid at NPR):

President Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, according to The Associated Press. It is the first official nominating contest for the party, and one that Democrats hope sends a message to Black voters.

As the incumbent president, Biden had been widely expected to carry the primary. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and author Marianne Williamson were also on the ballot...

The Democrats are changing up the order of primaries this cycle, trying to shift away from the small populated states like Iowa and New Hampshire that also don't display the demographic diversity of the party itself. South Carolina isn't a major population state like California, New York, or Illinois - Democratic-leaning states - but it's big enough to matter.

Unwilling to play by the new rules, New Hampshire still held an unsanctioned primary last month allowing write-ins to happen for the Democrats while the Republicans held theirs officially. Biden STILL cleaned up there without campaigning a single day there while his opponents Williamson - you might remember her from last time - and Phillips showed up and begged for votes. 

You might notice I haven't run a Character profile - based on Professor Barber's work - on Dean Phillips even though he threw his hat into the Democratic primaries months ago: Mostly because I viewed Phillips attempts to kneecap the incumbent candidate Biden was doomed to failure. In the modern era of presidential elections - I would say turn of the 20th Century with McKinely (not Teddy!) - there hasn't been a successful challenge against a first-term President within the party. Teddy Roosevelt tried to against his successor Taft but failed (running third-party instead). Truman and LBJ technically quit their campaigns for re-election when they saw the writing on the wall, so we can't be certain how those would have turned out. Thing is, Phillips was in no position - he was a literal unknown backbencher congresscritter with no national profile; he lacks the natural charisma any challenger needs to prevail; and Gods know what he was actually campaigning for - to challenge a well-known relatively popular figure like Biden who isn't quitting any time soon. 

If I can quote from Tori Otten at New Republic:

Phillips is running a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against President Biden. If you’re wondering how that’s going for him, Phillips won just 19.6 percent of votes during New Hampshire’s unofficial Democratic primary on Tuesday. Biden won 55.8 percent—as a write-in candidate.

Following his New Hampshire loss, Phillips revealed Wednesday morning on Fox & Friends that he had attended one of Donald Trump’s rallies to try to connect with far-right voters. When his actions prompted backlash, Phillips spoke out against political divisions...

Phillips then tried to point to the 2016 Electoral College map which shows a lot of Republican Red. But he erred by thinking geography matters instead of actual population density: Online critics hit Phillips by pointing out the Democratic Blue places on the map have more people who actually matter ("Land doesn't vote, people do!")

“There was probably a lane for someone to do reasonably well against Biden,” tweeted Osita Nwanevu, a columnist for The Guardian and contributing editor for The New Republic, “but being maximally annoying to every constituency in the Democratic Party at once wasn’t it, obviously.”

I exaggerated a bit earlier when I said nobody know what Phillips is campaigning for: He's actually campaigning on the belief that Biden is old, and that Biden's too unpopular to both the Democratic voting base and the independent voters overall.

Depending on which poll you're looking at, Biden's popularity isn't as healthy as it ought to be - considering the positive economic news Biden keeps generating over the past year thanks to his Infrastructure Bill efforts - but then again polls this far out from November are unpredictable as hell.

And regarding Biden's popularity with the Democratic voting base, those massive wins in New Hampshire (unofficially) and South Carolina - where Williamson beat out Phillips by a percent - ought to bury that particular narrative right quick.

Democratic voters will support their incumbent candidate, especially considering how Biden seems to be the only candidate who can keep donald trump at bay. It's likely - again, no guarantees - that the Indy voters who turned out against trump in 2020 will do so again in 2024 and vote for Joe. Phillips is essentially committing political suicide doing all this.

How Phillips got talked into thinking he could be a savior candidate to outduel Biden and then defeat trump remains a scandal of its own. Approached by a "political strategist" in Steve Schmidt, a campaign advisor most famous for talking John McCain into taking Sarah Palin as his Veep running mate, who claims he's "worried" about Dems relying on an aging President Biden (as though trump is any healthier three years younger and clearly more physically and mentally unfit). You have to look at who's paying Schmidt - deep-pocket "technocrat" billionaires worried about their tax cuts and Biden's pro-union stances - to get an idea of who's really worried about 2024 (and who they really want to win, which is trump). Schmidt basically went fishing for an egocentric millionaire among the Democratic ranks to be the stalking horse to weaken Biden's standing within the party itself.

Good news is, that's not working.

Bad news is, we're getting a clearer picture of how the real Political Establishment - not just the deep-pocket billionaires paying for everything, but also the "expert consultant" class and the upper-income media punditry - don't view trump as the dictatorial, openly destructive force that he is.

Gods help us. This 2024 election is going to be a war, with disinformation coming from every media outlet "convinced" that Biden can't win... even though Biden is winning the primaries and proving his popularity with actual voters with barely a finger lifted.

Get out the vote, America. Support Biden. Stop trump (and his billionaire buddies).

And let Dean Phillips crawl back to some state college on a guest lecturer gig for the rest of his life. His political career is toast. If he thinks he can make a comeback in 2028 based on his dismal performance this year, he's more delusional that trump.

What If: How 2024 Could Play Out

(Update: Many thanks to Tengrain for including this article on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment below, or Bluesky me at @paulwartenberg or Spoutify me at @paulwartenberg and Tweet me at... at... DAMN YOU MUSK THE X IS TERRIBLE)

So... All things being equal (although they're not) we are looking at a 2024 Presidential decision between the incumbent Joe Biden and the indicted donald trump.

In this day and age, a first-termer like Biden is always going to run for a second term. And with this corrupt Republican Party, a past-termer like trump is going to run again in order to use the legal protections of the Presidency to negate any criminal convictions that might occur from any three four okay it could get as high as five trials facing him between now and November 2024.

The question we face is not "Will an indicted trump survive a competitive primary against a dozen opponents?" -  because that GOP primary won't be competitive: trump is polling above 50 percent among likely primary voters and so the Republicans are stuck with a potential felon as front-runner - the question will be "How will this be any different from 2020?"

We're facing one of the rare repeats in Presidential campaigning, where the same major party candidates face off in back-to-back election years (anything before 1800 will not fit as party tickets did not exist before then). To my knowledge, there's only been John Q. Adams vs. Andrew Jackson (1824 and 1828),  Martin Van Buren vs. William Henry Harrison (1836 and 1840), Benjamin Harrison vs. Grover Cleveland (1888 and 1892), William McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryan (1896 and 1900), and last with Dwight D Eisenhower vs Adali Stevenson (1952 and 1956).

Half of those repeats happened due to unusual circumstances: with shifts in how candidates got on ballot,  to formations of new parties, to extreme failures of Electoral College results that justified a losing candidate (Jackson in 1828, Cleveland in 1892) running again out of a sense of revenge/defending the popular will over the electoral will.

Losing candidates throughout Presidential campaign histories tended to have the good sense to walk away if they lost the popular vote. Occasionally you'll get the Ambitious types - the Clays - or the Ideological obsessives - the Bryans - who can dominate their party well past their expiration dates and keep running until the party had enough (third time losing) and moved on to fresher talent. By the 20th Century as the Democrats and Republicans stabilized and created deep talent pools, most losing candidates were one-and-done, so rematches stopped happening. Until now, with trump unable to admit he ever loses and able to dominate the modern Republican Party to pretty much bully his way back into a remake of the 2020 elections.

By common logic, we ought to project the results for 2024 to reflect the results of 2020 since it's the same candidates - Biden vs. trump - running pretty much the same platforms - Biden's economic policies of job growth, women's rights, and rebuilding manufacturing/infrastructure vs. trump's anti-immigrant, anti-trade, tax-cuts for the rich, "drain the swamp" destruction of a functioning federal government - all over again.

The actual Electoral Map of 2020, despite
what trump claims, via 270towin.com

However, there are noticeable differences this time.

When 2020 happened, we were in the midst of a global COVID pandemic, which required most states to switch - or heavily promote - a mail-in ballot voting process that expanded regular voter turnout. As a result, there were massive gains compared to previous elections - 158 million total voters compared to 136 million in 2016 and 129 million in 2012 - to where we can't be certain if voter turnout will keep going up or drop back to 2016 levels now that the pandemic has shifted (to a tolerable endemic). It all depends on if the 81 million who voted for Biden (which broke the record for most popular votes for a candidate) and the 74 million who voted for trump (which also broke the previous record) decide to vote again if the mail ballot option isn't there.

Another difference has been the ongoing Republican objective of voter suppression to restrict turnout to their favor. Several battleground states that Republicans control - like Georgia and Arizona - are facing efforts to either make it harder to vote or forcing in new and partisan elections officials who will happily override results in 2024 to favor their own. States like Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania were close electoral wins for 2020 Biden: If the Republicans in those states stir up chaos to undo any popular vote wins Biden could reclaim in 2024, there could well be actual 'stolen' electoral votes.

(Other close electoral win states like Michigan and Wisconsin may not be in play this time, as 2022 midterm gains by Dems will reduce the risks of electoral scamming by trump and his ilk)

These are the states at play as things stand in mid-2023.
Those three states mean the difference between
a Biden win or trump chaos.

One thing that happened post-2020 was trump's direct meddling into the election results using - abusing really - the office of the Presidency to try and force several close states to flip Biden's results and just give trump their Electoral wins. trump also staged "Fake Electors" schemes to give those state legislatures an "alternative" to the official Electors going with Biden. It's questionable - possibly unlikely - trump will be in a position to pull those same stunts again, especially as Michigan already issued criminal charges to their fake electors and Georgia (and the other states) are close to charging their fakes (nobody's gonna volunteer for possible jail time should they fail). However, it may not be trump attempting any Fake Elector stunts in 2024, it will be the Republican state legislators who saw where trump screwed up and where they could make it legal.

If there's any good news, it's that most GOP Red states expected to vote Republican (trump) in 2024 won't need to cheat (much) for the Electoral votes: Any voter suppression will only reflect in the Popular vote numbers, but it's unlikely they can suppress enough to overcome the larger voter turnout of Blue states like California, New York, and Illinois. It's only the battleground states - the Red states Biden won - that will be in play for these schemes to defraud the voters.

It then becomes a question of how Biden's administration will handle the potential cheating in those states. Any intervention by the Justice Department will get attacked by Republicans as "Biden meddling just like trump did," even if Biden doesn't call state election officials directly or threaten others with arrest the way trump and his allies really did. If Fake Electors again show up in 2024, the DOJ could find it hard to fight back, especially if a Republican-controlled House of Representatives overstep and accept Fake Electors to favor trump. It may depend on third-party voting rights groups like League of Women Voters or the Brennan Center to step up and defend the popular vote if that vote went Biden.

That is the one thing we should expect in the 2024 election results: A Popular vote win favoring Biden. In trump's previous two campaigns he never won the Popular vote, and in most respects he has done nothing to improve his position with voters who are not already part of his MAGA cult. The only way trump and the Republicans can cut into Biden's popularity - ignore the constant polling showing Biden in the low 40s pre-election: By election time those numbers tend to improve for incumbents who remain relatively popular over their opponent - is to drag Biden into the mud with scandalmongering and bad economic trends - which is why "Hunter Biden's Laptop" remains the hot topic on Fox Not-News and why House Republicans still want to nuke the federal budget so that Biden takes the blame. 

Another thing to consider is the consequences of trump's criminal misdeeds finally setting an accountability moment for the voters at large. If trump is found guilty in any of the trials he's facing in the next six-eight months, all the voters - even Republican ones - are going to have to decide if they can truly support a jury-convicted felon.

I know I've said before - a lot of others have observed it too - that Republicans WILL vote for a convicted trump, the issue becomes "how many actually will?" 

I've noted before there are factions within the ranks of the party: The die-hard MAGA true-believers who are actually reveling in trump's criminality, the cynical Republican elitists who will mock trump behind closed doors but openly support every trumpian Big Lie in order to beat back Democratic chances, and the Traditional voters who are hard-wired to vote Republican even when it's against their personal interests. Of those factions, only the MAGA voter base will obviously vote trump: There could well be a possibility that the Traditional GOP voters - the ones who grew up to Ike and Reagan and the lofty ideals of a benign conservative utopia - may recoil from a trump convicted on serious matters of espionage, obstruction, tax fraud, and/or subversion of a lawful election.

There's a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that suggests this possibility of some Republicans refusing to vote for a convicted trump (article by Jason Lange):

About half of Republicans would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a felony, a sign of the severe risks his legal problems pose for his 2024 U.S. presidential bid, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Thursday...

The two-day Reuters/Ipsos poll, which closed before Trump's late-afternoon court appearance, asked respondents if they would vote for Trump for president next year if he were "convicted of a felony crime by a jury." Among Republicans, 45% said they would not vote for him, more than the 35% who said they would. The rest said they didn't know.

Asked if they would vote for Trump if he were "currently serving time in prison," 52% of Republicans said they would not, compared to 28% who said they would...

This is just one poll, and such things are inaccurate projection until real events prove otherwise (polling science has kinda gotten worse since 2012). The poll at least suggests in this moment enough GOP voters still respect the legal process of trial-by-jury, and understand the implications that supporting a jailed candidate reflects badly on their party and on the nation. More polls will likely follow, and differing results may occur. But it's looking like trump's boast of "shooting somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose any voters" isn't holding up to reality.

Elections always matter, and elections rely on voter turnout. If trump is found guilty, if trump becomes the second man in American history to campaign for President from a jail cell (hi, Eugene Debs!), there is a strong chance trump's voter turnout will suffer far greater than anything that could happen to an unconvicted Joe Biden.

...which may explain, again, why House Republicans are desperate to impeach Biden five different times before 2024 rolls around.

All of this could also be moot by 2024 if trump gets convicted on some of the more serious charges, especially if those convictions trigger the 14th Amendment clause disqualifying insurrectionists from public office. That would kick trump off the general election ballots at the least - depending on the timing, it would negate any primary results - and would be great news for the Republican Also-Rans (up yours, DeSantis) vying for the Replacement gig should trump be banned. Personally, it's a result I keenly desire, because in my view trump has been and will be the worst possible human to ever run for the Presidency.

There are some who disagree with that hope, and Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog does bring up a valid point:

I understand why people want to do this, but what's the likely result? It's hard to imagine Trump being pulled off the ballot in any state he could win in the general election. It's hard to imagine him being pulled off primary ballots in enough states to deny him the nomination. Meanwhile, the effort to remove him from the ballot confirms right-wingers' sense that anti-Trump forces are the real threat to democracy. That's a base motivator for the GOP.

Republicans already believe that the Trump indictments are an attempt to prevent them from voting for the candidate of their choice. Since Trump is actually a criminal, I think what's being done right now is the appropriate compromise: We're charging Trump with crimes while also allowing citizens to vote for him. They know he's facing multiple felony counts. They're making an informed choice. Let the democratic process play out...

Steve quotes that Reuters/Ipsos poll and holds out some hope:

Will nearly half of the GOP electorate really abandon Trump if he's found guilty of felonies? I'm skeptical. But this suggests that some Republican voters will.

And that could be an opportunity for the Republican Party. Even if Trump sweeps the primaries, he might seem like damaged goods to a significant segment of the GOP electorate if he's subsequently convicted of crimes. Maybe there'll be an effort to deny him the nomination, or replace him on the ballot between the convention and the general election. Who knows? A significant portion of the party's voters might approve.

Or maybe not. We'll see how GOP voters really feel once Trump has his day(s) in court and the right-wing media is portraying the proceedings as Stalinist show trials. I think most of the party will rally around him. But this poll suggests that he could lose just enough Republicans to be unelectable in November. It's probably best if the angry base isn't deprived of the opportunity to vote for him, and he loses anyway.

It's a nice sentiment, and like him I do hope enough Traditional Republican voters make the sensible move and NOT vote trump (they don't even have to vote Biden, they could even leave the Presidential choice blank while voting straight Republican down the rest of the 2024 ballot). But we've already seen trump never accepts losing - hence the 2020 schemes that has him facing criminal charges - and it's going to be a question of how far into the trumpian Big Lie madness the GOP state officials have fallen.

One other hope is if trump is convicted, and trump is still on the ballot, there's every motivation by Democratic voters (and No-Party voters leaning Center-Left) to show up in droves to ensure a goddamned felon - likely convicted for acts against the United States - gets nowhere near the White House again.

Again. Elections matter, and voter turnout win elections.

Get the vote out, Democrats. Get the vote out, Indy voters, for the Democratic Party. And for the love of GOD and COUNTRY, Republicans, stop supporting a crooked trump.

Update 7/21/24: Welp. This did not age well...

The Numbers That Matter 2020 Edition

If anything keeps me hopeful, it's this: In the 2020 Election cycle trump honestly cannot win.

Some of the things to consider:

trump has done nothing to appeal to a broad range of American voters. Any administrative successes he's had revolve around unpopular actions - a massive tax cut for the super-rich that only benefited Wall Street, an aggressive push to build a border wall against Mexico, a harsh anti-immigration program that has punished families and children especially - or relied on a strong economy that was never that strong in the first place thanks to trump's tariff wars and failures to respond to the current pandemic.

In one of the odder things hurting trump now is the one thing trump relied on to win the Republican primaries and eke out an Electoral College win that November: Racism is now hurting trump at a time it's the only thing he's got. To quote David A. Graham at The Atlantic:

As pollsters are at pains to point out, polls are snapshots and not forecasts; Biden’s lead could dissipate, though this race has been unusually stable so far. Contrary to Trump’s protestations, Biden’s lead as it exists now is real—and given how hard it has been for anything to dent Trump’s carapace, it’s worth examining closely. Stranger still, the impetus appears to be race—something that has been both Trump’s Achilles’ heel and his secret weapon throughout his political career. For some reason, it’s affecting his political standing differently than it has before...

...Polls have consistently shown that Americans disapprove of his response to protests of police violence and believe that he has worsened race relations. In the New York Times/Siena poll, race relations (33 percent) and the protests (29 percent) are the only areas where issue approval lags behind his overall vote preference. In the Harvard/Harris poll, the same two areas earn Trump his worst marks of any issue, though they are still slightly higher than his expected vote.

Voters are right that Trump is worsening race relations and handling the protests poorly. In the past two days alone, the president has retweeted (and then deleted) a video of one of his supporters shouting “White power!” and another of two white supporters pointing guns at black protesters marching past their house...

But why? Perhaps it’s just a matter of what issues are most important to voters right now. There’s always been a sizable contingent of reluctant or conflicted Trump supporters. In 2016 exit polls, only 35 percent of voters said Trump had the temperament to be president, but he won 46 percent of the popular vote. These voters are a familiar staple of news coverage too—the ones who preface their support with “I don’t always like the way he phrases it” or “I wish he would tone it down a little, but …” Until now, these voters may have been able to overlook Trump’s other flaws because he was getting done things they liked. But the pandemic has frozen progress on nearly all of Trump’s policy priorities, insofar as they were still alive anyway. Even if voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, it’s no longer much of a positive benefit. And the profusion of news coverage has made issues of race impossible to ignore.

Alternatively, perhaps voters are shifting not just their priorities but their views. As the political scientist Michael Tesler writes, there’s evidence of real shifts in public opinion on race over the past six weeks or so. While views on policing are moving in response to a wide range of incidents, it’s clear that the Floyd case—brutal, senseless, and captured in excruciating clarity on video—has captured white attention in a way other deaths at the hands of police have not...

trump is losing voters among the groups who looked past his earlier racist antics or thought his being in the White House could temper his views. As trump's behavior worsened, however, it seems to have woken a growing number of those who were on the fence to jump off. Given how trump will continue to attack with racism and division, those numbers should get worse for him.

trump's national polling has always wavered in the low 40s, barely ever reaching 50 percent except in various Far Right trackers (and even then not for long). trump's appeal at a state-by-state level hasn't been on that hot either, and considering he's only in the White House due to a state-focused and broken-as-hell Electoral College system, trump does not have any good numbers at all.

Earlier I wrote the only number that mattered was trump's Republican Base: As long as he was as popular with them (in the high 80s-mid-90s) the party leadership wasn't going to do a thing to rein him in (it did not help the Republicans that they wanted a lot of it done anyway because they personally profited from it all).

Today the dynamic is different. To win a general election across enough states to secure the Electoral College, trump has to appeal to the middle-of-the-road, Independent voters to counter the numerical advantages Democrats have. Again, trump has done NOTHING that would appeal to the moderate middle voter set. Where he beat Hillary among No-Party/Indy voters 46-42 percent in the 2016 exit polls, he's trailing Biden with that voter group by about 21 points in the 2020 polls.

This is the other thing hurting trump: Biden is a genuinely more likable figure. Not just a more likable figure than trump - duh - but also a more likable figure than Hillary back in 2016. Where all the negative press Hillary accrued over 25 years as a public figure hurt her, Biden has no such disadvantage even with having a longer public career (and even with a number of faux pas on Biden's resume).

If we can look to what Stanley Greenberg says at The Atlantic about Biden's chances:

But this moment is very different. To start, during the summer and fall of 2016, Clinton never had the kind of national poll lead that Biden now has. She led by an average of four points four months before the election and the same four points just before Election Day. This year, after Biden effectively clinched the nomination, he moved into an average six-point lead over Trump, which has grown to nearly 10 points after the death of George Floyd and the weeks of protests that have followed. The lingering apprehension among Democrats fails to recognize just how much the political landscape has changed since 2016. We are looking at different polls, a different America, and different campaigns with different leaders...

The Clinton campaign’s worst blunder came in September 2016, when the candidate described “half of Trump’s supporters” as “deplorables” and walked right into the white working-class revolt against elites. Her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders had exposed a lack of enthusiasm for her in white working-class suburbs that Barack Obama had won. Her campaign hoped to make up for the lost votes with landslide wins among women, voters of color, and voters in big cities. White working-class voters noticed the lack of respect, and Trump ran up startling margins with them: He won these men by 48 points and women by 27, according to exit polls...

While Biden has said some gaffe-quality stuff about trump's voting base, the media's attempt to float it as a campaign-breaker went nowhere. For one, it happened far too early in 2020 and for another we've had four years to see that Hillary was right. Back to Greenberg:

But much more important than all of that is the sustained, unwavering, and extremely well-documented opposition of the American people to every element of Donald Trump’s sexist, nativist, and racist vision. Indeed, the public’s deep aversion to Trumpism explains why Biden has such a poll lead...

This is where my evaluation of Biden being a Passive-Positive character is going to be a boon to the Democratic Party. Biden's congenial and likable nature on the national stage can help keep that poll lead well into November.

There's a reason why trump and his Republican allies were so desperate to stir up fake scandals against Biden like forcing Ukraine to lie about investigating Biden's son for business dealings there. They were and still are hoping to swiftboat/mudsling Biden down to trump's level of known corruption and vulgarity.

I also wrote a long time ago about first-termers running for re-election back in 2012 when Obama was doing it. As long as the incumbent is genuinely popular with the majority of voters, the incumbent should win. trump is nowhere near genuine popularity and never has been.

So as I said at the beginning of this article, trump has no honest way to win the election in 2020.

Which is why we have every reason to believe trump and his Republican buddies are gonna cheat like hell. Via David Smith at The Guardian:

(Bill) Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark website and director of the advocacy organisation Defending Democracy Together, said in an interview: “The special circumstances with Trump are his total abandonment of any constraints and even more important, perhaps, his having people around him who’ve abandoned any constraints on the way in which they’ll use the federal government, the executive branch, to say things, do things, pretend to do things.

“Richard Nixon did a little of that in 1972, and of course presidents always tout good news in the months before the election. But this time, it’s the degree to which you could have a real sustained effort to suppress minority voting and not make it easy for young people to vote..."

Voter suppression has haunted US elections for decades but the pandemic presents Trump with new opportunities. States are seeking a massive expansion of mail-in ballots so people do not have risk their health by queuing and voting in person. The president has intensified claims that this will lead to widespread cheating, even though several studies have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare...

His wild words are often backed by organizational muscle and action. The Republican National Committee has devoted $20m to opposing Democratic lawsuits across the country seeking to expand voting. Republicans are also reportedly aiming to recruit up to 50,000 people in 15 key states to serve as poll watchers and challenge the registration of voters they believe are ineligible.

Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York, said: “What we’re seeing in some primary states is the closures of polling places in African American dominated areas and mistaken purging of Democrats from the voter rolls. Some of this is anecdotal, but it is worrying all the same. And it will, no doubt, continue through the general election...”

What the Republicans are bound to do is reduce the turnout and discourage voters from showing at all, which gives the more extremist voters eager to do it - which favors the Far Right - more power at the ballot box. By shutting down polling precincts in poor and clearly minority communities - especially Blacks who vote as a 90-95 percent bloc for Democrats - they're definitely discouraging turnout.

The closer the GOP can make the numbers between trump and Biden, the likelier they can flip the mid-sized battleground states like Michigan (and big ones like Florida) same as they did against Hillary in 2016, and steal another Electoral College "victory" even if Biden gets 50 percent of the popular vote with a 6-8 million advantage over the less-loved trump.

This is where voter turnout is the one big key for Democrats and Left-leaning voters (and the sizabler anti-trump voting bloc that's grown since 2016). The only way to beat voter suppression is to show up and force your vote through. The best way to stop the Republicans from playing their rigged game of demographics and gerrymandering is to give Biden such leads in enough states that there's no way it will get "too close to call." They can't rig the machines enough to undercount or misvote every pro-Biden check that gets plugged in. They can't hide it if 500,000 people vote for Biden and pretend it was 250,000. There's only so much the GOP can do before enough people take notice and do something about it.

Get the damn vote out, America. To every anti-trump out there, this is your chance to throat-punch that Shitgibbon. To every Liberal, every Progressive, time to realize you're in the same damn boat and vote with unity. To every person horrified by trump's hatred and sexism, rise up and be counted, dammit.

Don't let the polls distract you. They should motivate us to show up and fulfill the hopes those polls are asking for. OUR NUMBERS MATTER. Let's do this.

America's Chances in 2020

Okay, so. Seriously.

What ARE trump's chances at winning a second term?

(waits for 65 million Hillary voters and 98 percent of the global population to calm down)

Well, okay, settle down, let's go over what 538 Nate Silver's got on his plate:

In a predictive sense, what it means is less clear. Sometimes — as was the case in 2006, 1974 and 1930 — midterm waves are followed by turnover in the presidency two years later. But most presidents win re-election, including those who endured rough midterms (such as Obama in 2010, Bill Clinton in 1994 and Ronald Reagan in 1982). Nor is there any obvious relationship between how high turnout was at the midterm and how the incumbent president performed two years later. Democrats’ high turnout in 1970 presaged a landslide loss in 1972, when they nominated George McGovern.

(waits for a fresh bout of panic to calm down) Okay, back to Silver:

This year’s results do serve as a warning to Trump in one important sense, however: His base alone will not be enough to win a second term. Throughout the stretch run of the 2018 midterm campaign, Trump and Republicans highlighted highly charged partisan issues, from the Central American migrant caravan to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. And Republican voters did indeed turn out in very high numbers: GOP candidates for the House received more than 50 million votes, more than the roughly 45 million they got in 2010.

But it wasn’t enough, or even close to enough. Problem No. 1 is that Republicans lost among swing voters: Independent voters went for Democrats by a 12-point margin, and voters who voted for a third-party candidate in 2016 went to Democrats by 13 points.

This is a key thing I am pinning a lot of hope on. In 2016, trump eked out non-Party voters 46-42 over Hillary. The way trump has been performing - alienating vast swaths of non-MAGA people on his suicidal course of high tariffs, wall-building, and diminishing tax refunds for Middle America - should guarantee trump and the Republicans have lost enough Indy voters to outperform Democrats in 2020. There looks to be a 12-point shift right now in Indy voters from 46-42 to what should be 40-48 favoring Democrats, which should add onto what Silver offers as second point:

Trump and Republicans also have Problem No. 2, however: Their base is smaller than the Democratic one. This isn’t quite as much of a disadvantage as it might seem; the Democratic base is less cohesive and therefore harder to govern. Democratic voters are sometimes less likely to turn out, although that wasn’t a problem this year...

I don’t want to go too far out on a limb in terms of any sort of prediction for 2020. In fact, lest you think that the midterms were the first step toward an inevitable one-term Trump presidency, several facts bear repeating: Most incumbent presidents win re-election...

(waits for third round of massive panic to subside) Sigh:

...and although Democrats had a strong midterm this year, midterm election results aren’t strongly correlated with what happens in the presidential election two years later. Moreover, presidential approval numbers can shift significantly over two years, so while Trump would probably lose an election today on the basis of his approval ratings, his ratings today aren’t strongly predictive of what they’ll be in November 2020.

But presidents such as Reagan, Clinton and Obama, who recovered to win re-election after difficult midterms, didn’t do it without making some adjustments. Both Reagan and Clinton took a more explicitly bipartisan approach after their midterm losses. Obama at least acknowledged the scope of his defeat, owning up to his “shellacking” after 2010, although an initially bipartisan tone in 2011 had given way to a more combative approach by 2012...

Okay, here's what I have.

As Silver points out, there's still a lot of days on the calendar for trump to shift his positions and work towards a more bipartisan agenda, which would go a long way towards mollifying Indy voters (and maybe creating rifts among Democrats that would otherwise be more united against a partisan trump).

But that will honestly be a day when pigs fly. trump can no more change his nature - insulting, divisive, greedy, destructive - than a tiger can change his stripes. There is NOTHING trump can do right now to change his approval ratings: People who love him will keep his polling numbers from sinking below 32 percent, but the People who HATE him will keep his polling numbers from rising above 42 percent...

One thing I noted in 2012 - discussing Obama's chances at re-election - is that incumbents tend to win as long as they are popular. I said this:

when you look back on the history of one-term Presidents, the consistent pattern between most of them is that they were unpopular, at least unpopular enough within their own party to be snubbed by the power-brokers in the backrooms when the next election rolled around...

Part of this doesn't directly apply to trump: the power-brokers in the backrooms arguably hate trump and the damage he's done to their internal organization, but they're unable to position a challenger due to trump's insanely high intra-party popularity with the rabid base.

So the other part is the unpopularity with the overall voting base, and the thing that makes me hopeful there is the established polling of the past two years where trump never got higher than 45 percent overall approval. trump is consistently unpopular, and has done little to counter it because he's too eager to pander to a Far Right extreme rather than to a moderate stance that could bring ambivalent voters back to his fold.

This is where it all matters who the Democratic Party finally picks to challenge in 2020. As long as the Dems select someone with better than 50 percent approval, trump is toast.

I have to admit my earlier assumptions about 2016 being wrong. Back then, I thought Hillary had a chance to win enough votes to secure a clean victory.

I knew Hillary was hated, especially by the Republican Party who hated her more than her husband. But I was caught off balance by the Beltway media's hatred of her: Their willingness to kick her and her campaign was at ten times the focus they ever gave trump, while granting THAT Shitgibbon - even at trump's worst - almost a free pass. All that bad coverage - including the last-minute bomb of "her emails" that may have scared away wavering voters - resulted in Hillary losing just enough voters in the Midwest to let trump eke out an Electoral College win. I was right that Hillary was less hated (she got 45 percent over trump's 42 percent of the popular vote), but I was wrong that Hillary would do better than that 45 percent...

The good news for Democrats is that the fresh batch of challengers - from Kamala Harris to Elizabeth Warren to Cory Booker and to even the unannounced like Bernie and Biden and Beto - all beat trump in the popularity contests. As long as the Democratic voters and agitators all agree to back the winner - as long as there are no splits among the ranks like there was between Hillary and Bernie - the Democrats can beat an unpopular incumbent with a popular winner.

I won't be at all surprised that the Republicans will try - again - to dirty up every Democratic challenger because it's basically the ONLY attack they have left. But if the next Democratic candidate is closer to Obama's style and personality and charisma, those attacks aren't going to work.

Just remember to get the damn vote out, America. Turnout beats every dirty trick the GOP has.

Everything You Need To Know About Republican Priorities: Day One 2017 (w/ Update)

See the Updates below:

So, the Republicans have full control of Congress, and incoming control of the Presidency, and pretty soon control of the Supreme Court.

So what's the first thing they do in 2017? On the Monday before their session of Congress is set to start?

Do the Republicans repeal Obamacare as they've threatened to do for the past six years? No.

Do the Republicans appeal to their pro-fetus voting base by defunding Planned Parenthood or outlawing abortion? No.

Do the Republicans gleefully pass a resolution slashing taxes on the rich, such an easy no-brainer thing they've been itching to do to fulfill their Randian Drown-Government-in-Grover's-Bathtub dreams? No.

Do the Republicans do something sensible like issue a confirmation of Obama's sanctions on a Russian government that directly meddled in our own nation's elections? No.

This is the first thing the Republicans did in full awareness that they were in charge of the whole circus (via Washington Post):

Defying the wishes of their top leaders, House Republicans voted behind closed doors Monday night to rein in the independent ethics office created eight years ago in the wake of a series of embarrassing congressional scandals.

The 119-to-74 vote during a GOP conference meeting means that the House rules package expected to be adopted Tuesday, the first day of the 115th Congress, would rename the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) as the Office of Congressional Complaint Review and place it under the oversight of the House Ethics Committee.

Under the proposed new rules, the office could not employ a spokesperson, investigate anonymous tips or refer criminal wrongdoing to prosecutors without the express consent of the Ethics Committee, which would gain the power to summarily end any OCE probe.

Not only does the Ethics Committee, made up of the Congresscritters that should be under scruntiny, gain control to shut down any inquiry, they can force people to shut up about it. Hush-hush, keep it on the down low, as it were.

The OCE was created in 2008 to address concerns that the Ethics Committee had been too timid in pursuing allegations of wrongdoing by House members. Under the current House ethics regime, the OCE is empowered to release a public report of its findings even if the Ethics Committee chooses not to take further action against a member.

That was back when Democrats were in charge of Congress (2006-2010), in response to a number of Congressional scandals - remember Jack Abramoff? remember Duke Cunningham? - that were exposing how intertwined with lobbyists that the then-GOP Congress had become (K Street Project, anyone?).

An OCE spokeswoman declined to comment Monday. Because Monday’s vote was taken in a private party meeting, there is no public tally of how members voted on the proposal.

That's because these Republicans know that what they're going to do is not going to sit too well with the general population. It will, of course, mean nothing to the Republican voters who keep sending these corrupt incumbents back to the WORST. CONGRESS. EVER, over and over and over, all because these incumbents say the pretty and angry things those Republican voters love to hear. They'll turn a blind eye to the corruption because it's THEIR Party being corrupt and they'll never believe a word of it.

This was their top priority, America. This Republican Congress is driven not to serve the needs of The People but to serve their own corruption.

To the 62 million Americans who voted for this party, this is what you gave us. With all the gerrymandering, with all the partisan appeals, with all the blind self-serving rage that drives you to back these crooks again and again because they're your crooks. This is all on you.

Update: Norm Ornstein, who worked on the creation of this office, is livid:

I have rarely been more angry or dismayed at the conduct of Congress than I was Monday night with the unconscionable, deplorable, underhanded move by Representative Bob Goodlatte to eviscerate and undermine the Office of Congressional Ethics. When House Speaker Paul Ryan and his counterpart Nancy Pelosi indicated weeks ago that they would continue OCE, the reform community—left and right—breathed a sigh of relief. Ryan, like his predecessor John Boehner, had seen the value to the integrity of the House of the office, which has been a stalwart of bipartisan and nonpartisan comity and independence. That makes this bait-and-switch action even more outrageous...

...For more than two decades, I had pushed to create an independent office, with involvement from former members who understand the nature of ethics in a political body, to be the first step in judging the conduct of members...

...But the years leading up to 2008 were anything but the best of times. First came the ethics wars, led by Newt Gingrich in the years leading up to 1994, using the ethics process for partisan leverage, criminalizing policy differences. After Gingrich became speaker, the backlash hit him directly, in a tit for tat. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert and his henchman Tom DeLay, it got worse. The nadir came in 2004 when an honest ethics panel, chaired by conservative Republican Joel Hefley of Colorado did its duty and recommended sanctions against DeLay for unethical conduct. Hastert responded by firing Hefley and removing two standup Republican members, Kenny Hulshof of Missouri and the late Steve LaTourette of Ohio...

When Democrats recaptured the House in 2006, the new speaker, Nancy Pelosi, began a process to clean the House, choosing Massachusetts Democrat Michael Capuano to lead the effort via a bipartisan select panel.  Through a lengthy, arduous process, with deep opposition from nearly all Republicans and real reluctance on the part of many Democrats, Capuano, working closely with me and Tom Mann and a small group of other reformers, pieced together a balanced plan that respected and preserved the constitutional requirement that the House be the judge of its own members, kept intact the ethics committee, but created a way to build larger credibility that the ethics process would be honest and fair whatever the political currents or partisan pressures...

The OCE members spanned the political spectrum, and had a thankless task, but responded just the way we had hoped—every decision they made was balanced, careful, and importantly, unanimous. The body took plenty of potshots, from aggrieved members of both parties, which have continued since its creation.  Reformers have feared at the beginning of each Congress since then that the leadership would try to remove it or weaken it. But Pelosi stood firm and Boehner, to his great credit, did so as well. Now this...

Rules packages get up or down votes, and are top priority for the majority leadership. They are not rejected by the majority party. The package is put together by the leadership; nothing gets included or excluded without the say-so of the speaker. Make no mistake about it: Despite public reports loudly proclaiming his opposition, it’s hard to believe this would have happened had Paul Ryan really tried to stop it. And do not believe Goodlatte’s risable assurance that this strengthens OCE. It has been muzzled and hamstrung, defenestrated and castrated...

Ornstein is rightly pissed. We all should be. But I doubt it. The Far Right is going to pretend they're the heroes of this Narrative and look away from the graft, kickbacks, and brutality of their own party. The rest of us are just going to have to suffer for their sins.

Revision to the Update 1/3/2017: Word now out that the Congresscritters' phone lines were jammed with angry people this morning and that the House GOP has decided to shelve the Goodlatte amendment (for now).

This is only encouraging in that the people are actually paying attention to this shit and holding their representatives accountable. But don't rest just yet: these crooks are going to try and kill every oversight in the rulebook. This is how the House Republicans roll, son...

Incumbency

This is something that I've wanted to post for awhile, decided to get around to it today.  I'm not sure if anyone else has ever thought up this observation, but:

A first-term President who's popular with the general voting public tends to get re-elected to a second term.

I mean, when you look back on the history of one-term Presidents, the consistent pattern between most of them is that they were unpopular, at least unpopular enough within their own party to be snubbed by the power-brokers in the backrooms when the next election rolled around.

John Adams?  Wasn't as well-liked as Thomas Jefferson.  John Quincy Adams?  He actually lost the popular vote, but won in the runoff in the House of Representatives... essentially riling up Andrew Jackson and his supporters to turn out in droves the next election.  Van Buren?  First sitting President to suffer a major economic panic, so yeah pretty much unpopular.  The Whigs are especially screwy one-termers: each Whig winner - Harrison and Taylor - DIED in office, leaving their unpopular Veeps - Tyler and Fillmore - serving out those terms.  Both Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan were one-termers due to the ongoing slavery issue that made any Democrat sitting in the White House hugely unpopular in the North.  Lincoln won re-election even in a divisive war because he stood on a more popular platform - Finish the War - than his opponent.

The next one-termer was Chester A. Arthur - fitting in for the assassinated James Garfield - who actually was well-liked (and not too bad a President) but wasn't the guy the party bosses wanted anymore.  Grover Cleveland is an interesting case.  He won the popular vote on his re-election effort but lost the Electoral vote, which almost makes his violate this hypothesis: except that he ran again and won a separate second term, the only President to do so.  So he still fits.

Teddy Roosevelt really does prove my case (twice).  Before him, Veeps who assumed the Presidency on the death of the President - poor McKinley, who was popular enough to win two terms - tended to be unpopular with either their party bosses or the electorate.  Roosevelt became so popular with the voters - and so effective in shutting down his bosses - that he won his own term, the first to do so.  The second time he proves my case is with Taft, his successor: not too happy with his administration, Roosevelt ran on a third ticket, effectively splitting the Republican vote... while Taft finished third.

Coolidge was popular enough to win his own term of office replacing Harding.  Herbert Hoover was a one-termer for a very obvious reason: the Great Depression.  FDR basically ran against Hoover three of the four times he ran for office, which should tell you how unpopular poor Herbert was.  FDR's successor Truman ran a surprisingly effective campaign against an unpopular Congress and reticent Dewey, leading to the biggest electoral upset in American politics.  When Truman's own popularity tanked during the Korean War, he quickly figured out he couldn't run for re-election and opted not to.

Eisenhower was the inverse of Hoover: incredibly well-liked, incredibly popular.  Even having Nixon on his ticket didn't put a damper on things.  Kennedy was more likeable than Nixon in 1960.  Johnson was more likeable (believe it or not) than Goldwater and was running off of JFK's legacy.  By 1968, Nixon was more likeable (I know, scary) than LBJ's replacement Humphrey (if the Dems stuck with Eugene McCarthy, they could have eked out a win) and Wallace.  By 1972 it didn't matter who was running as the more popular candidate because Nixon's crew was sabotaging the Democratic primaries (hello, Watergate).

Carter was more likeable than Ford.  Carter's unfavorables by 1980 hurt him compared to the well-liked Reagan.  Reagan was still well-liked in 1984 when Mondale ran against him (which is one of the reasons Mondale only won Minnesota and DC in the Electoral votes).  Bush the Elder's re-election efforts in 1992 were hurt by a hard recession, making him vulnerable to the smooth styling of Clinton (and Perot's third party vote losses).  Bush the Lesser was still riding off of his huge popularity boost after 9/11 to eke out a win in 2004 over the stiff Kerry.

So where is this going?

Well, we're in a re-election year for Obama, coming off a rough first term.  How do his re-election chances stack up?

Pretty good, actually.  More people are hopeful about the economy now than they were in 2008.  A current poll shows Obama with a 13 point lead over Romney, even as that poll shows Obama getting low marks for handling the economy.  One thing to note in that article: Look at Romney's favorable-to-unfavorable numbers.  Romney is 39 percent favorable to 48 percent UNfavorable.  Being that un-liked a candidate bodes ill.

As long as Obama keeps his favorable numbers above Romney's, Obama has a good chance of winning re-election.  Which is probably why we should expect a hurricane Category 5-level amount of mudslinging negative ads from now until DECEMBER 2016 for God's sake by the Republicans in order to drag Obama's favorables down.

So remember, Stay Sane and Vote Obama...