Month: December 2017

This thing is bigger than Alabamaby digby

I wrote about the Alabama race for Salon this morning
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell must have had a strange night on Tuesday. Part of him was obviously relieved that he won’t have to deal with the freak show known as Roy Moore, whose picture would have become the new GOP logo. On the other hand, losing a Senate seat with his narrow margin can’t have been something McConnell felt particularly happy about, even if he gets his holy grail — tax cuts for corporations and millionaires — enacted in the next little while. The challenge of keeping his slim majority after next year just got a lot harder. Nonetheless, McConnell was certainly thrilled to see his nemesis Steve Bannon defeated, particularly after his foul performance down in Alabama during the final month of the campaign.

Roy Moore called Bannon the “Master Strategist” but he is actually an amateur who thinks he can get over the way Donald Trump did by activating national right-wing media and spouting obnoxious insults at rallies. Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, probably spoke for most of the GOP establishment when he told CNN:

This guy does not belong on the national stage. He looks like some disheveled drunk that wandered on to the national stage. He does not represent anything that I stand for. I consider myself a conservative Republican. I consider myself an Irish Catholic, and he sort of parades himself out there with his weird alt-right views that he has and to me it’s demeaning the whole government and political process.

King voted for Trump, of course, so his complaints ring a little bit hollow. But at this point it even appears that Trump’s act may have been a one-hit wonder. His approval rating is down to 32 percent in the latest Monmouth poll.

While McConnell surely had mixed feelings about the outcome, Donald Trump tried to behave as if he knew Moore would lose all along and was just being a good party leader by backing him. He couldn’t help but betray his real feelings, though:

Pres. Trump on Roy Moore's loss: "A lot of Republicans feel differently, they're very happy with the way it turned out—but as the leader of the party, I would have liked to have had the seat." https://t.co/BRuZSDHqmg pic.twitter.com/z3qGKlW6sU— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) December 13, 2017

He can never, ever be dignified and mature in the face of a loss.

But whatever Trump says, that 32 percent number is significant because, according to the exit polls, Doug Jones’ vote among college-educated white voters almost exactly matched the share who disapprove of Trump. Trump won most of those voters handily in 2016. They are defecting in large numbers, particularly the women. Trump has lost 25 points among independent women since September.

This Atlantic piece by Ron Brownstein about the Alabama race breaks it all down. He says that Republicans should be very worried: In spite of the fact that Moore was a uniquely bad candidate, the results in Alabama mirror the results of the recent elections in November, and track with the public’s views of Trump’s disastrous tenure.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

This was the same equation that powered the Democratic victories in the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races. The consistency of these results suggests that Democrats are coalescing a powerful coalition of the very voters that polls have shown are the most disenchanted, even disgusted, by Trump’s performance and behavior as president.

Trump is creating a rabidly loyal following among shrinking demographics, while inflaming those groups that are growing. Brownstein points out that even though Moore is an extremist who gave African-Americans, college-educated whites and younger people plenty of reasons to oppose him, those same voters came out in large numbers in New Jersey and Virginia, where “Democrats won 70% of Millennials and half of college-educated whites, and they enjoyed solid turnout and preponderant margins from nonwhite voters.”

In Alabama the African-American vote was huge and, as usual, formed the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, turning out in even higher numbers than they did for Barack Obama. The organization effort was masterful with black churches, colleges and the NAACP mobilizing hundreds to get out the vote with the support of the Democratic Party on the ground and Democratic donors putting big money into the race. Clearly the fact that Jones had been a U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted members of the KKK who had bombed a Birmingham church in 1963, killing four little girls — after many years of state inaction — was a powerful motivation as well.

Then there were the brave women who came forward to tell their stories about Roy Moore stalking and molesting them when they were teenage girls. That took a lot of guts and undoubtedly made a difference in the race. Women supported Jones by a 57 to 42 percent margin, while men gave Moore almost the identical advantage, 57 to 40 percent.

It’s true that a majority of white women went for the Republican (as a majority of white voters have typically done in recent years), but many more white college-educated women voted for Doug Jones than usual. That demographic is moving rapidly into the Democratic column and there are many reasons for it, most obviously that the Republican Party keeps nominating misogynists for high office and dismissing women who come forward to reveal the truth about their characters.

On Wednesday, when asked what he thought about the women who told the truth about Roy Moore, Doug Jones said, “I commend them for coming forward. I believe them. I believe they have all the credibility in the world. And I think going forward this country has a debt that we owe to women everywhere who have had to endure the kind of treatment at the hands of male counterparts in their workplace or customers or anyone else.”

Meanwhile, white, rural working-class voters and white evangelicals are sticking with the GOP. That is Trump’s base and it’s rapidly becoming all that’s left of the Republican electorate. Brownstein quotes Republican strategist Mike Murphy saying, “We are in a Trump-driven worst-case situation now.”

The fact is, Donald Trump is an albatross around every GOP official’s neck and angry, energized Democratic voters are strangling them with it. So far they’ve shown little instinct for self-preservation.

Delivering for black voters
by Tom Sullivan

Carson Brown tamps down the “black voters are superheroes” narrative coming out of Alabama after Tuesday’s special election win by Democrat Doug Jones. Yes, there was a huge surge in black voters, and 96 percent voted for Jones, she writes at New Republic. But Democrats would be wise not to think they voted for Doug Jones or for Democrats. Black women, especially, voted for themselves:

In Alabama, the stakes for black residents couldn’t be higher. They want more than a fair shake in life: They want the government to do something about the state’s extreme poverty, which has seen a rise in the previously eradicated disease hookworm, bogs of raw sewage, and calamitous effects on health care. Republican attempts to dismember Obamacare have been hugely unpopular with those who rely on the program and Alabama is no exception to the rule. Now, it’s on the Democratic Party to engage meaningfully with black voters, lest it wrongly assumes they will continue to turn out for Democrats out of the good of their hearts.

Watching the election returns Tuesday night and hearing mentions of Alabama’s “Black Belt,” I wondered how many viewers beyond the South had ever heard the term outside of martial arts. It’s holdover from slavery and not just Alabama. In North and South Carolina, the Black Belt tends to lie along I-95 inland from tourist areas along the coast.

That black voters make up such a sizeable proportion of the local electorate gives them considerable clout in statewide elections in the South. Which is why, of course, there are efforts to suppress their votes. But the areas also tend to be poorer, more rural, and with less economic clout and thus less political clout despite the numbers.

Brown’s description of conditions in Alabama are not confined there. But another reason to not place too much stock in the superheroes narrative gets back to politics being local. Ed Kilgore points out one reason outside fear of Roy Moore that black voters came out for Jones:

The robust African-American turnout in Alabama on December 12 was attributable to many factors, including heroic local organizers, nationally prominent black politicians and celebrities, and the powerful antipathy both Trump and Moore aroused among nonwhite voters. But it didn’t hurt that Alabama’s black voters were turning out for a candidate who had performed a significant service to their community by successfully prosecuting the murderers who perpetrated the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, and who gave every indication that he would vote with left-of-center Democrats in the Senate.

Jones’ credibility won’t carry Democrats in other states. Nor can black voters carry them on places they are not.

In the western mountains of North Carolina there are counties with fractional percentages of black voters. The same applies to the entire states of Wyoming or Montana. Democrats fighting for state legislative seats cannot count on turning out black voters that aren’t there. But elsewhere they absolutely should be doing more to strengthen the hands of black voters, especially in historically under-courted voters in “belts” across the South, areas like those that delivered for Doug Jones. Rural and poor, they have been too easy for Democrats to take for granted. Tuesday proved what a mistake that is.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Omarosa, we hardly knew yeby digby

I had never heard of her before Trump ran for president but apparently she was a former reality TV star. Now she’s a former white house official:

Though the official word is that she resigned and was not fired, this marks the fourth time that Omarosa, a contestant on the original The Apprentice, as well as a follow-up season and The Celebrity Apprentice, has been removed from the employ of Donald Trump. It’s unclear how this will affect the day-to-day function of the White House because it was generally unclear what Omarosa did every day. Officially, her title was assistant to the president and director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison, which is in charge of special group outreach intended to further the president’s agenda. For this she made $179,700, the maximum salary for any White House staffer. But the headlines that followed her had more to do with where she kept her shoes (“all over the White House”) and how she was using the headquarters of the executive branch as her wedding-procession backdrop, with a bridesmaid luncheon on St. Patrick’s Day and a photo shoot that could not be released because that would constitute a security breach. She also invited a journalist to trail her in the White House without notifying anyone else on the communications team, and canceled an appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, where she would have promoted her episode of TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress.

Omarosa was one of the few people of color on the president’s employee roster, and the only woman of color. Those among us who are more prone to read meaning into coincidence have noted that her departure fell on the same day that an alleged pedophile, endorsed by Trump, failed to win a seat in the Senate thanks in large part to black-women voters of Alabama. The timing is indeed stunning.

April White, CNN’s White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief, said in a tweet that Omarosa did not go gentle into that good night. She was “vulgar,” allegedly, and “cursed,” and reminded Kelly that she helped get Trump elected. White has heard that she was escorted from campus, though the White House has pushed back against that telling. Regardless of how Omarosa went, though, she will have to find another place to store her shoes.

I love it that Trump doesn’t have the bras to fire anyone himself. He has kelly do the dirty work, even for people he personally brought in from his previous hustles.

April Ryan at URN News has more dirt here.

“She walked over to the residence and tried to get into the residence to see the president, secret service stopped her and she was escorted off campus.”

She made over a $170,000 a year.

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Will Flake, Corker and McCain behave like patriots or sell-outs?by digby

Brian Beutler reminds us of how the Democrats and Republicans behaved when Scott Brown won his Senate seat in the midst of a historic debate about health care just 8 years ago:

Republican leaders are on the brink of losing more than just the Alabama Senate seat. They are, among other things, also poised to break the promises they made to Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) to secure her vote for the corporate tax cut bill. If she or any other Republican defects now, the Alabama senators’ vote will become the decisive vote.

To that end, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is signaling his intent to rush a vote on a final corporate tax cut bill before Jones can be seated.

McConnell is a serial violator of American political norms. His procedural extremism surprises no one. But it’s worth noting, as I did last week, that the norm he’s about to destroy is one he personally fought to uphold just eight years ago.

In January 2010, Democrats were one final roll call vote away from enacting health care reform when Republicans unexpectedly won a special Senate election in Massachusetts. McConnell, who was then the Senate Minority Leader, took great umbrage at the idea that Democrats would let a lame-duck interim senator cast the deciding vote on historic legislation. Once the results of the special election were in, though, Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) headed off the confrontation by pledging not to vote for any health care legislation until Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) had been sworn in.

As of this writing, no Republicans—even ones, like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has claimed to prize regular order, and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) who endorsed Doug Jones—have taken a similar stand.

Remember, Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy except as a weapon to beat Democrats. Democrats refuse to understand this.

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“Be prepared” is a good slogan for boy scouts — and Democratsby digby

A lesson for the ages from Joan Walsh:

The main takeaway is what we learned last month in Virginia: You can’t win if you don’t play. Former GOP senator Jeff Sessions, for now Donald Trump’s attorney general, ran unopposed in 2014. Let that sink in. Doug Jones had to be cajoled to step up, and in his victory speech he thanked his friends and advisers who demanded he run. Let’s hope Democrats commit to a 50-state strategy once again. The party ought to take over the infrastructure of Jones’s winning campaign, and try to use it to bolster its support in the state House and Senate and the US Congress too. Congresswoman Terry Sewell, an indefatigable Jones backer on national television, needs some company in Washington.

After all, you never know when the Republicans are going to run a child molesting extremist when their pussy-grabbing president has a 32% approval rating! Be prepared! Have a good candidate on the ballot and give him or her enough support to take advantage.

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Purge Bannon? Not a chance.by digby

I’m seeing a lot of this today

After Alabama disaster GOP must do right thing and DUMP Steve Bannon. His act is tired, inane and morally vacuous. If we are to Make America Great Again for all Americans, Bannon must go! And go NOW!!— Rep. Pete King (@RepPeteKing) December 13, 2017

It makes sense. Bannon is trouble. He’s trying to destroy the GOP from the inside out for his own purposes and as thrilling as that might seem to Tea party types, it’s not going to end well. There are two parties in this country and the only way to wield real political power is within that system. Bannon wants to destroy their instrument of power and Trump is too narcissistic to understand anything beyond his own ego.

But I will be shocked if Trump completely abandons Bannon. He’s Trump’s conduit to the base he loves and I can’t imagine he’ll feel comfortable making an enemy of him.

Let’s put it this way: it’s not Bannon he’s pissed at today:

Pres. Trump on Roy Moore's loss: "A lot of Republicans feel differently, they're very happy with the way it turned out—but as the leader of the party, I would have liked to have had the seat." https://t.co/BRuZSDHqmg pic.twitter.com/z3qGKlW6sU— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) December 13, 2017

Sinking like a stoneby digby

He’s lost Independent women by 25 points since September.

Only 32% of voters approve of President Trump’s job in office and more than half disapprove, according to the latest poll by Monmouth University. This is the lowest popularity score and the highest disapproval score since Trump took office.

Women’s approval of the President dropped 12 points while disapproval rose 13 points since September, with even Republican women’s approval dropping 9 points. The sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein went public in early October, setting off a series of high-profile accusations of sexual misconduct and the #MeToo movement.

While a majority of Republican women approve of Trump’s job in office, they are less likely to give the President a positive rating than their male counterparts (67% to 78%).

Only 14% of independent women approve of Trump’s presidency — dropping 25 points since September.

Only 8% of Democratic men and 7% of Democratic women approve of Donald Trump, which has held steady.

I don’t know who those Democrats are but they must be senile.

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Nobody puts Trumpie in the cornerby digby

I wrote about the latest GOP attempts to discredit the Mueller investigation for Salon this morning:

“Unfit to clean toilets in Obama’s presidential library”by digby

Let’s give a round of applause for #themtoo for the satisfying win last night in Alabama. I’m talking about the women who came forward to let people know about the true character of Judge Roy Moore. I’m sure it wasn’t easy. They didn’t seem as if they were having any fun. But it was brave and it was necessary.
Look at the latest hysterical screed from Daily Kos on this issue.

Oh wait, it’s USA Today’s editorial board. USA Today:

A president who’d all but call a senator a whore is unfit to clean toilets in Obama’s presidential library or to shine George W. Bush’s shoes: Our view.

With his latest tweet, clearly implying that a United States senator would trade sexual favors for campaign cash, President Trump has shown he is not fit for office. Rock bottom is no impediment for a president who can always find room for a new low.

Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2017

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday dismissed the president’s smear as a misunderstanding because he used similar language about men. Of course, words used about men and women are different. When candidate Trump said a journalist was bleeding from her “wherever,” he didn’t mean her nose.

And as is the case with all of Trump’s digital provocations, the president’s words were deliberate. He pours the gasoline of sexist language and lights the match gleefully knowing how it will burst into flame in a country reeling from the #MeToo moment.

A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush.

This isn’t about the policy differences we have with all presidents or our disappointment in some of their decisions. Obama and Bush both failed in many ways. They broke promises and told untruths, but the basic decency of each man was never in doubt.

Donald Trump, the man, on the other hand, is uniquely awful. His sickening behavior is corrosive to the enterprise of a shared governance based on common values and the consent of the governed.

It should surprise no one how low he went with Gillibrand. When accused during the campaign of sexually harassing or molesting women in the past, Trump’s response was to belittle the looks of his accusers. Last October, Trump suggested that he never would have groped Jessica Leeds on an airplane decades ago: “Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.” Trump mocked another accuser, former People reporter Natasha Stoynoff, “Check out her Facebook, you’ll understand.” Other celebrities and politicians have denied accusations, but none has stooped as low as suggesting that their accusers weren’t attractive enough to be honored with their gropes.

If recent history is any guide, the unique awfulness of the Trump era in U.S. politics is only going to get worse. Trump’s utter lack of morality, ethics and simple humanity has been underscored during his 11 months in office. Let us count the ways:

He is enthusiastically supporting Alabama’s Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of pursuing — and in one case molesting and in another assaulting — teenagers as young as 14 when Moore was a county prosecutor in his 30s. On Tuesday, Trump summed up his willingness to support a man accused of criminal conduct: “Roy Moore will always vote with us.”

Trump apparently is going for some sort of record for lying while in office. As of mid-November, he had made 1,628 misleading or false statements in 298 days in office. That’s 5.5 false claims per day, according to a count kept by The Washington Post’s fact-checkers.

Trump takes advantage of any occasion — even Monday’s failed terrorist attack in New York — to stir racial, religious or ethnic strife. Congress “must end chain migration,” he said Monday, because the terror suspect “entered our country through extended-family chain migration, which is incompatible with national security.” So because one man — 27-year-old Akayed Ullah, a lawful permanent resident of the U.S. who came from Bangladesh on a family immigrant visa in 2011 — is accused of attacking America, all immigrants brought to this country by family are suspect? Trump might have some credibility if his criticism of immigrants was solely about terrorists. It isn’t. It makes no difference to him if an immigrant is a terrorist or a federal judge. He once smeared an Indiana-born judge whose parents emigrated from Mexico. It’s all the same to this president.

A man who clearly wants to put his stamp on the government, Trump hasn’t even done his job when it comes to filling key government positions that require Senate confirmation. As of last week, Trump had failed to nominate anyone for 60% of 1,200 key positions he can fill to keep the government running smoothly.
Trump has shown contempt for ethical strictures that have bound every president in recent memory. He has refused to release his tax returns, with the absurd excuse that it’s because he is under audit. He has refused to put his multibillion dollar business interests in a blind trust and peddles the fiction that putting them in the hands of his sons does the same thing.

Not to mention calling white supremacists “very fine people,” pardoning a lawless sheriff, firing a respected FBI director, and pushing the Justice Department to investigate his political foes.

It is a shock that only six Democratic senators are calling for our unstable president to resign.

The nation doesn’t seek nor expect perfect presidents, and some have certainly been deeply flawed. But a president who shows such disrespect for the truth, for ethics, for the basic duties of the job and for decency toward others fails at the very essence of what has always made America great.

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A win for sanity
by Tom Sullivan

Graphic:
CNN

Stunning. Thunder clap. Seismic. Shocking. Devastating. To describe Democrat Doug Jones’ narrow 1.5 percent win in Tuesday’s Alabama special election for U.S. Senate, one could easily build a word cloud — not unlike the one Quinnipiac University generated from poll responses about the president. Only much more positive.

Frank Bruni is effusive this morning in the New York Times in his good riddance to Republican Roy Moore:

We saw decency in retreat. We saw common sense in decline. We saw a clique of unabashed plutocrats, Trump foremost among them, brazenly treating the federal government as a branding opportunity or a trough at which they could gorge. We saw a potent strain of authoritarianism jousting with the rule of law.

And we saw many Americans, including most Republican leaders, either endorsing or quietly putting up with this, to a point where we wondered if some corner had been turned forever.

It is early to tell whether America has rediscovered its soul, but the reflection of America a majority of Alabamians saw in Roy Moore was too ugly to endorse. And unnecessary to describe again here and ruin the mood.

For the first time in years, Democrats in Alabama felt they were living in “a battleground state in which their vote mattered.”

The Intercept spoke with Dr. Joe Reed, head of the Alabama Democratic Conference, perhaps “the last true black party boss in the South.” Reed would work on turning out his community. (It did, especially black women.) He’d leave making inroads with white voters to Jones. The day after Jones won the Democratic nomination, Reed outlined the message Jones would need to win:

“Now whatcha gotta do now,” he lectured Jones, “is get out on the road and tell Bubba and Cooter how important the Democratic Party is for them.”

He rattled off the names of long-dead Democratic congressmen and their accomplishments. “If he’s from around Huntsville, he oughta thank John Sparkman every day. If he got a student loan, he oughta thank Carl Elliott,” Reed said. “So go tell ’em what the Democratic Party has meant to them and meant to their parents.”

It is not clear this early in the post mortems how much Jones took that advice. So much attention was lavished on Moore’s sexual proclivities. But it was a reminder that Democrats cannot win by anti-Trumpism alone. Overall, the party still lacks a compelling, accessible narrative for where they want to take the country.

In this race, Democrats had help from a massive black turnout that at 30 percent of all voters topped the Obama elections. But they had help as well from Republicans lacking the stomach to vote send an accused child molester to represent their state in the Senate.

Newsweek reports that write-in votes on Tuesday were larger than Jones’ margin of victory:

With almost all of the votes counted, write-in votes numbered close to 23,000. Jones’ margin of victory, meanwhile, was a little under 21,000. Write-in votes made up just 0.12 percent of the vote when Jeff Sessions won re-election to the U.S. senate from Alabama in 2008 but represented 1.7 percent of the vote Tuesday. Thus, assuming the vast majority of those votes would otherwise have gone for Moore, write-in votes had a decisive impact.

With Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby declaring on Sunday he had written in a Republican other than Moore, and with fellow Alabamian, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, urging people to vote, just not for Moore, the jump in write-ins reflects a strong anyone-but-Moore vote among Republicans.

Moore is a singular figure, Democrats warned, and a phenomenon likely not to be repeated in 2018. Unless Trump supporters regain enough momentum at the urging of former White House advisor Steve Bannon to turn out for candidates as fringe as Moore in spring primaries, cooler heads may draw their party back to saner territory, creating less of a “crisis in the voting booth” for Republican voters in 2018.

On the bright side, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell won’t have to hold a sham ethics investigation for Moore. He won’t have to humiliate his caucus further. The White House will handle that. He may not even have much longer to worry about not-so-Breitbart Steve Bannon. Some Republicans last night were “dancing on his grave.”

“I think Bannon made an ass of himself [tonight],” said Stu Stevens, former top strategist to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

Last night proved Democrats can win anywhere. Right now, potential candidates who might have seen the waters as unfavorable may be reconsidering a 2018 run. Too often, Democratic leaders have played a narrow game of putting all their chips on a few “winnable” races. The criteria for what is winnable got blown wide open last night.

Their biggest obstacle may be just showing up. You must be present to win.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.