Month: June 2019

The Congressional Republicans can defy Trump — when there’s money involved

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

President Trump and his massive family entourage managed to make it through Tuesday on their British visit without a truly terrible gaffe. That’s a major accomplishment. Trump did insult the mayor of London again and stuck his nose into Brexit politics during a press conference with outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May. And yes, he lied and said that there were many people greeting him enthusiastically on the streets and there were just a few small protests, calling all the reports which showed the opposite “fake news.” But all of that is par for the Trump course.

He did say a couple of things that were newsworthy. A British reporter asked him if a post-Brexit unilateral trade deal with the U.S. would mean that Britain’s National Health Service was on the table. He said it would be. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whom Trump refused to meet on this trip, pledged to fight to his last breath to prevent allowing their “precious, wonderful National Health Service” be privatized by American corporations. Trump walked back his comment later, leading some to suggest that he didn’t even know what the NHS was when the question was asked. That’s possible, but U.S. ambassador Woody Johnson had told the BBC just a few days before that the NHS would have to be part of any U.S.-U.K. trade deal, so it seems likely that this is something that’s been discussed inside the Trump administration.

When asked about reports that the Republicans in the Congress were resisting his threatened tariffs on Mexico, which Trump has said he will impose under his elastic definition of “national security,” the president said it would be “foolish” of them to defy him, reminding them that he is very popular with Republican voters. (He lied, as usual, saying that at 94% his popularity among the GOP base is the highest ever. In fact, it’s consistently in the high 80s, and not the highest ever.) His comment was clearly meant as a threat to Republicans who are thinking of breaking with him on his trade war.

We’ll see whether they come through. Even if Republican leaders ultimately capitulate, their little rebellion illustrates the fact that as much as they like to pretend they’re powerless to stand up to Trump because of his stranglehold on the base, they are willing to put up a fuss when it’s something they truly care about. Or, to be precise, when it’s something their big donors care about. This latest front of Trump’s trade war is definitely one of those times.

American business has been fairly sanguine about the tariffs on Chinese goods. They realize that this trade war is being waged very stupidly, but Chinese companies have pushed unfair trade practices for years and business was willing to give Trump some room to maneuver, perhaps thinking that the “madman” theory might just work in this situation. They’ve stood back as Trump abrogated NAFTA and put Canada and Mexico through the wringer for some mild improvements to the deal, even as people suffered for it. He’s threatened Japan and Europe with tariffs if they don’t do what he wants. But Trump’s impulsive threat to slap tariffs on Mexico unless they stop immigration and drugs from coming over the border may have shaken the business community out of its complacency.

Some very powerful Republican interest groups are unhappy about this, and while GOP senators and representatives are undeniably concerned about Trump’s popularity, they are even more concerned about their big-money backers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the National Retail Federation are just a few of the business groups protesting this move. Some of those, led by the Chamber, say they are planning to sue the White House to stop the tariffs on Mexico. Republicans in Congress may not care about children being put in cages or left in vans overnight in the middle of the summer. But they come to attention when the titans of capitalism get upset.

The New York Times reports that White House lawyers came to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to speak to the Senate Republican conference and they got an earful, particularly from the two Republicans from Texas. Sen. Ted Cruz called it a $30 billion tax, while Sen. John Cornyn said, “We’re holding a gun to our own heads.” Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told the Times, “The White House should be concerned about what that vote would result in, because Republicans really don’t like taxing American consumers and businesses.”

Trump somehow believes that the tariff will be paid by Mexico because he is clueless about how this all works. Until now, Republicans have allowed him to pretend that foreign nations will pay for his trade war because nobody they really cared about was complaining. But it seems they can find their voices to oppose the president when they want to, which suggests that otherwise they really don’t have a problem with most of the stuff he does. With the exception of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who openly admits he loves most of what Trump is doing, they don’t even seem to care that he’s creating new executive powers out of thin air. There’s no precedent for using tariffs as a foreign policy tool, or an attempt to curb immigration.

As I said, we don’t know how this one will go. It’s possible that Republicans and the Mexican government can come up with some sort of “deal” that Trump will call a big victory and the whole thing will go away, at least for now. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to think that’s how it will go, telling the press, “Our hope is that the tariffs will be avoided, and we will not have to answer any hypotheticals.” Paul has indicated that the Senate may have the votes to override a potential presidential veto and get rid of these tariffs, if it comes to that. Trump’s new NAFTA agreement would be a likely casualty of this conflict as well.

It’s amazing how Congress can come together to thwart this president when they really want to.

The tariff ultimatum was made against the advice of just about everyone in the Trump administration — except, that is, for Stephen Miller, the president’s hard-line anti-immigrant adviser. The Atlantic reports that White House aides say this all stemmed from Trump’s anger over Robert Mueller’s appearance at the Justice Department last week, quoting an unnamed adviser who said, “Whenever a negative story comes around, his instinct is to pivot to immigration or trade. It’s kind of like his safety blanket.” This was a twofer. Trump felt insecure so he shook up the financial markets and threatened to damage a vast segment of the American economy to make himself feel better. What’s a little economic turmoil — and an unexpected tax on businesses and consumers — when the president needs his blankey?

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Impeach! Just Come Out and Say it!! 

by tristero

The editorial board of the NY Times (and others) have been hinting more and more strongly that they are in favor of impeachment. Today, Ian Prasad Philbrick, described as “on the editorial staff of the Opinion section” published articles of impeachment against Trump based on the Nixon and Clinton impeachment articles. This is not direct enough.

It’s time for Dean Baquet, Marty Baron, and other media leaders to just come out and say it: impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump (and many others in his administration) are more than warranted. Doing a Mueller “wink wink nudge nudge” is simply unacceptable. It implies the problem isn’t as serious as they clearly know it is (but are afraid to say so).

Should the major media come out openly for impeachment, it will surely serve to embolden the unconscionably feckless Democrats who are inching closer to impeachment but so slowly it may be too late before they take action.

And wow, do they ever need more embolden-osity.  Even now, the Democratic leadership truly believes that if they give Trump enough lebensraum he’ll self-destruct. He won’t. The strategy they’re pursuing has a name. It’s called appeasement and appeasement never works:.

When the British first got wind of the new German chancellor, he seemed so vulgar as to be harmless. Described by one British paper as a “stubby little Austrian with a flabby handshake, shifty brown eyes and a Charlie Chaplin mustache,” Hitler cut an uninspiring and ridiculous figure. 

Within a month, he had used a fire in the Reichstag to suspend parts of Germany’s constitution. A month after that, the Nazis announced a boycott of Jewish shops. Germany started to rearm and rebuild its military in ways that were illegal under the provisions of Versailles…

Every time Germany or Mussolini’s Italy upped the ante — becoming ever more demanding and brazen — the British had to ask themselves whether the latest transgression was serious enough to merit a “preventive war...” 

Hitler kept presenting himself as a man of peace, even if “Mein Kampf,” his bellicose, self-aggrandizing autobiography, suggested otherwise. The English translations of the book were expurgated versions, omitting the nastiest passages. “Mein Kampf” had also been published in 1925, years before Hitler had attained the dignified position of chancellor; those who wanted to could simply dismiss the book as intemperate juvenilia. 

Bouverie’s chronological narrative conveys how appeasement transformed over the years: from a reactive, fearful policy to an enthusiastic, idealistic project to what can only be deemed a strenuous exercise in willful denial…

Sincerity typically requires consistency, but somehow Hitler’s volatility worked in his favor. He became so prone to tantrums that even when he talked to the British ambassador in Berlin about “annihilating Poland,” the relative lack of “the usual histrionics” meant that the genocidal comment wasn’t taken as an immediate threat. Hitler was constantly graded on a curve. 

If the Times, the Post, and many others stopped dithering and told what they know is the truth — that this president has to be removed from office before an existential catastrophe occurs — perhaps the Democratic leaders will wake up.

This is very, very serious, folks.

A mile wide and an inch deep — again
by Tom Sullivan

Platte River in central Nebraska. Panorama photo by Jetuusp via Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0.

People’s devotion to American institutions, the very idea of the United States of America, is not as rooted as they believe. Like teenage boys in a high school locker room boasting about sexual romps, those who talk about it the most sometimes do it the least. Boasts about love of country can be like that. Hugging flags by someone who invites foreign interference in American elections is like that.

Patriotism is a secular religion. For all their hands-over-hearts public piety, I have long written many of our conservative countrymen’s faith in their country is a mile wide and an inch deep. But like believers’ faith in Jesus, we can, as 2nd Amendment devotees do, be selective about what parts of the Constitution we believe sacrosanct and which we treat more as suggestions when pressed.

The Week’s Damion Linker examines the religious right’s shift away from considering themselves in the 1980s and 90s a moral majority — allied with social conservatives — to seeing themselves as an embattled minority making a last stand arrayed against “the tyrant state.”

The presidency of George W. Bush with his “faith-based initiatives” cooled their fervor temporarily. But with Sen. John McCain’s loss to Barack Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney’s in 2012, plus the declaration of same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, they flocked to Donald Trump for protection.

“It would be a purely transactional relationship, like the one a businessman struggling with neighborhood crime might enter into with a local mob boss,” Linker writes. If democracy is not giving them the America they demand, social conservatives (a faction, anyway) are prepared to discard it to preserve political control by the religious right:

Maybe its problem isn’t that it’s too weak but that it’s accepted the legitimacy of liberal rules that place it at a competitive disadvantage in its battles with the left. Instead, social conservatives need to fight harder and even be willing to fight dirty, seeking to win at any cost, just as their secular liberal enemies do.

Or so they believe. Certainly, for some time social conservatives have considered themselves the only Real Americans™. All others are pretenders and illegitimate. For decades now, conservatives have trafficked in rumors of rampant voter fraud perpetrated by (non-white) liberal foes, undetected, yet present behind any election loss by champions of the right. To fight these implacable, invisible foes, American true believers needed tougher measures. They would, like Sohrab Ahmari, op-ed editor of the New York Post, question “the legitimacy of a system designed to keep liberals in charge,” Linker argues.

When social conservatives thought they were the moral majority, it made sense for them to dream of exercising real political power. When they recognized that they were a minority, it made sense for them to resign themselves to adopting a defensive posture and preparing to live out their days in a country as dissenters from the reigning liberal consensus.

What makes no sense is for social conservatives to think they can be both weak and strong at the same time — a minority that wields the power of a majority.

Unless, of course, social conservatives no longer care about democracy.

Linker’s column focuses on Ahmari’s minority views among social conservatives. But the view that any president not carrying the Republican brand is illegitimate is long-established. As is superficial piety from people publicly supporting spreading the blessings of democracy to the world while privately undermining democracy here.

NC Policy Watch comments on how the Hofeller documents demonstrate Republican operatives at the highest levels have worked throughout this decade to rig the electoral system in their favor, and now by adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Gerrymandering, Rob Schofield writes, is “much too polite a word to describe what the Trump administration and its Republican Party allies are trying to do to our democracy.” Common Cause of North Carolina director Bob Phillips describes the Hofeller papers as “smoking gun” that reveals the Trump administration plans to rig the census … so Republicans might rig redistricting … so they might rig elections permanently in their favor. And whether or not a majority of voters support them and their policies. GOP vote suppression measures are the chocolate sauce on their dessert.

Speaking to the Hofeller affair’s meaning for the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the census matter, Adam Serwer comments on Justice Scalia’s view that the Voting Rights Act constitutes a black “racial entitlement.” Serwer writes:

Since the rise of Trump, the American right has been offered a stark choice between the democratic ideals it has long claimed to believe in, and the sectarian ethno-nationalism of the president, which privileges white identity and right-wing Christianity over all. Scalia didn’t quite have it right: The fundamental question for American democracy since the founding has indeed been whether it is a “racial entitlement,” but only because of those who have tried for centuries to ensure that white people alone are entitled to it.

A mile wide and an inch deep. The Trump GOP has already abandoned “the pretense of liberal democracy,” Serwer concludes, in favor of securing “white political hegemony over a changing electorate.”

In January 2018, David Frum warned:

Maybe you do not much care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

Frum was late to his own former party.

Now comes a time of testing.

The Grown Ups

by digby

That’s how the Republicans always sold themselves to the public.

Here are the Republican Campaign Committee grown-ups, following the example of their Dear Leader:

Yes, Max Rose is on the short side. Haha.

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Trump’s dull day

by digby

Trump held a press conference with outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May today. It was pretty uneventful. He insulted the London Mayor and the labor leader and inappropriately gave his opinions on UK politics. Nothing unusual in that. And he claimed there were only happy Londoners greeting him and no protests when the truth is that there were very few happy greeters and a large number of protesters in the streets. The sign above is a sampling.

The following, however, might have some real consequences:

a telling moment — Trump's (lack of) response to a policy-related question about the National Health Service (NHS) suggests he's not really familiar with what it is pic.twitter.com/KL0DlqTXmn— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 4, 2019

This follows the Ambassador’s comments over the weekend saying the same thing. Yikes. His Brexit buddies do NOT want this on their agenda.

I did enjoy this …

WOW — huge boos for Ivanka and John Bolton when they emerge for the news conference!

(@kilmeade quickly tries to gaslight and says the boos weren't really for Ivanka) pic.twitter.com/cMl819A9Zg— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 4, 2019

Sure, they were booing Bolton not Ivanka. They know this. Because they know. Somehow…

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Oh my, somebody on the right notices the GOP’s grifter problem

by digby

This is nothing new, of course. Ever since the late 70s when Paul Weyrich and others in the Reagan Revolution/Conservative movement discovered they could make big bucks by bilking little old ladies and guzzling from the billionaire’s trough, it’s been a dominant feature of Republican politics. But the money has gotten huge in recent years (for obvious reasons — there are more billionaires than ever funding their grift) and it’s become something they really can’t avoid talking about anymore.

Here’s Jim Geraghty of National Review:

The Huge Albatross to the Conservative Movement that Few Want to Talk About

Back in 2013, Conservative StrikeForce PAC raised $2.2 million in funds vowing to support Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign for governor in Virginia. Court filings and FEC records showed that the PAC only contributed $10,000 to Cuccinelli’s effort.

Back in 2014, Politico researched 33 political action committees that claimed to be affiliated with the Tea Party and courted small donors with email and direct-mail appeals and found that they “raised $43 million — 74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals, compared to $39.5 million on operating expenses, including $6 million to firms owned or managed by the operatives who run the PACs.”

Back in 2015, RightWingNews reviewed the financial filings of 21 prominent conservative PACs and found the ten 10 groups at the bottom of their list spent $54.3 million only paid out $3.6 million to help get Republicans elected.

Back in 2016, campaign finance lawyer Paul H. Jossey detailed how some of the PACs operated and lamented, “the Tea Party movement is pretty much dead now, but it didn’t die a natural death. It was murdered — and it was an inside job. In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural, poorer Southerners and Midwesterners to bicoastal political operatives.”

In 2016, Roger Stone founded the Committee to Restore America’s Greatness. It raised $587,000 and spent $16,000 on independent expenditures supporting Trump.

In 2016, Great America PAC raised $28.6 million from donors. They donated $30,125 to federal candidates. In 2018, Great America PAC raised $8.3 million from donors. They donated $31,840 to federal candidates.

In 2017, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke said that despite the actions of a PAC that claimed to be raising money for a Clarke bid for U.S. Senate, he was not running. That PAC raised $2 million.

In 2018, a federal indictment declared grassroots conservatives across the country gave $23 million to scam PACs run by William and Robert Tierney from 2014 to 2018, believing they were supporting conservative groups like “Republican Majority Campaign PAC,” “Americans for Law Enforcement PAC,” and “Rightmarch.com PAC.” Only $109,000 went to candidates.

In the 2018 cycle, Tea Party Majority Fund raised $1.67 million and donated $35,000 to federal candidates. That cycle, Conservative Majority Fund raised just over $1 million and donated $7,500 to federal candidates. Conservative Strikeforce raised $258,376 and donated nothing to federal candidates.

Put Vets First PAC raised $3.9 million in the 2018 cycle; they gave $9,000 to federal candidates.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that David Bossie’s group, Presidential Coalition, had raised $18.5 million in 2017 and 2018 to support state and local candidates in furtherance of the Trump agenda. Only $425,442, or 3 percent, went to direct political activity.

Not every non-donation expense is illegitimate; legit political-action committees have to pay for rent, electricity, computers, the phone bill, etcetera. But when such an exceptionally small portion of the money they raise goes to the candidates they’re allegedly designed to support or measurable efforts on their behalf, one can fairly ask what the true purpose of the organization is.

Politico didn’t specify which 33 PACs they reviewed; if their list overlaps entirely with the RightWingNews list, then the total sum listed above would be $127 million; if they don’t overlap at all, it would be $177 million. That is money that could have gone directly to candidates’ campaigns or other actions that would have advanced the conservative cause in recent cycles. But instead it went into more fundraising expenses, more overhead costs, or into the pockets of those running these PACs.

And some folks want us to believe that the problem with the conservative movement is David French?

Why is the conservative movement not as effective as its supporters want it to be? Because day after day, year after year, little old ladies get called on the phone or emailed or sent letters in the mail telling them that the future of the country is at stake and that if they don’t make a donation to groups that might as well be named Make Telemarketers Wealthy Again right now, the country will go to hell in a handbasket. Those little old ladies get out their checkbooks and give what they can spare, convinced that they’re making a difference and helping make the world a better place. What they’re doing is ensuring that the guys running these PACs can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle. Meanwhile, conservative candidates lose, kicking the dirt after primary day or the general election, convinced that if they had just had another $100,000 for get-out-the-vote operations, they might have come out on top.

What’s more, most of these PACs thrive on telling conservative grassroots things that aren’t true. Clarke didn’t want to run for Senate in Wisconsin, Laura Ingraham wasn’t interested in running for Senate in Virginia, and Allen West wasn’t running for Senate in Florida. The PACs propagate a narrative in which they’re the heroic crusaders for conservative values, secure borders and freedom, up against corrupt establishment elites . . . when they’re in fact run by those coastal political operatives and keeping most of the money for their own operations.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Oh, every PAC does this.” Nope. In that RightWingNews study, Club for Growth Action PAC had 88 percent actually went into independent expenditures and direct contributions. Republican Main Street Partnership had 78 percent, and American Crossroads was at 72 percent. That allegedly corrupt “establishment” is way more efficient at using donors’ money than all of these self-proclaimed grassroots conservative groups. Over on the liberal or Democratic side, ActBlue charges a 3.95 percent processing fee when passing along donations to campaigns.

When these individuals get called out for the way they’re spending donors’ money, they revert to a familiar responses of denial, evasion, and blaming the messenger. When asked about how little of the money his group raised was spent on political activity, Bossie’s first response was “this is fake news brought to you by a collaboration of the biased liberal media and unabashed left-wing activists.” Never mind the fact that the criticism was based upon his own group’s periodic reports of contributions and expenditures with the IRS (forms 8872) in addition to annual tax returns (forms 990).

There’s more at the link.

I would just point out that there is one YUGE problem with his article. They have the biggest grifter in US history sitting in the White House. He’s an authentic professional con man. And they love him for it.

Hanging the David Bossies out to dry after all these years is missing the forest for the trees. The president of the United States is selling his brand right out of the Oval Office.

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There were a lot of “party switchers” in 2018

by digby

I’m of the opinion that voters should choose who they believe in primaries and pick the lesser of two evil in a general election. It’s not an optimal situation most of the time because you often end up having to back someone you may not entirely believe in. (I’ve been in that position pretty much all of my adult life.) But that’s how our system is constructed and everyone learns at a certain point in their lives that you need to both advance your preferred agenda and also defend against the agenda of the other side. If the behavior of Trump and the GOP over the past few years hasn’t shown you that then you aren’t paying attention. Politics is both aspirational and defensive.

Anyway, I will be voting for my preferred candidate, whoever that is, in the California primary next year because that’s what I do. The field will be somewhat winnowed by that time I’m sure. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not keenly aware of what it’s going to take to beat Trump and I’ll be watching the candidates over the next few months to see how I feel about that. It will, I’m sure, be a factor in my choices as well. Trump is such an extreme threat that you just have to think about it.

Ron Brownstein has a column on CNN today with the latest data on 2018 that everyone should check out as they think about these things:

President Donald Trump’s political base may not be as impregnable as commonly assumed. And that could have big implications not only for the Democrats’ strategy against Trump in 2020 but also for their choice of a presidential nominee.
Detailed new research by the Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalist found that the party’s big gains in the 2018 congressional election were fueled not only by unusually high turnout among voters sympathetic to the party, but also by larger-than-expected defections from the GOP among voters who had backed Trump two years earlier.

Those findings offer potentially critical evidence as Democrats are debating the best approach to beating Trump in 2020. On one side are progressive activists who say the party should prioritize mobilizing nonvoters, particularly young people and minorities, with an unabashedly liberal agenda. On the other are centrists who say Democrats can’t tilt so far left on issues such as single-payer health care and the Green New Deal that they alienate swing voters who backed Trump in 2016 but may be open to reconsidering now.
Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, most recently at last weekend’s California Democratic convention, have made the former case, while former Vice President Joe Biden, along with several second-tier hopefuls such as former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, have most explicitly identified with the latter argument.

Rather than picking one path, the new Catalist data on 2018 signals that Democrats need to do some of both in 2020. But, on balance, its analysis found that a clear majority of Democrats’ gains from 2016 to 2018 came from voters switching their preference, rather than from changes in the electorate’s composition.

“The number one thing I would say is winning elections isn’t just about mobilization,” said Yair Ghitza, Catalist’s chief scientist, in an interview. “I do think that’s something some people argue, and it’s gained a bit of traction. What I try to point out here is that mobilization is incredibly important. But the idea that there are literally no swing voters left, is, I think, a misreading of a lot of the data that’s out there.”

Catalist analyzes electoral results by studying state voter files on who actually voted in each election. The state files provide precise information on some demographic characteristics of the voting population — particularly gender and age — and Catalist uses advanced statistical techniques to fill in its portrait of data that is available only in some places, such as race and education. Then it combines its turnout data with polling analysis and precinct-level results to produce its estimates of how each group in the electorate voted.

Its approach represents an alternative measure of voting behavior to the more familiar Edison Research exit polls (CNN is a member of the consortium that produces those polls), but for 2018 the two methods produced similar results on voting behavior for the key groups.

In the new analysis, Ghitza sought to quantify how much of the improvement in Democratic performance in 2018 compared with 2016 had resulted from changes in who voted versus shifts in preferences among the voters.
In 2018, Catalist calculated, Democrats won the total popular vote in House elections by 7 seven percentage points (after making projections for uncontested races). That was a gain of about 5 percentage points from Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin over Trump in 2016.

That change derived from three big sources: who left the electorate between 2016 and 2018, who entered it and the changing preferences of voters who participated both times.

Gains from switches by voters

The falloff from voters who participate in the presidential election but then sit out the next midterm has become a huge problem for Democrats as their coalition has grown more dependent on young people and minorities; both of those groups turn out much more reliably in presidential than in midterm elections.

That’s meant that considerably more Democratic than Republican voters typically stay home in the off-year election. That falloff was so severe from then-President Barack Obama’s re-election victory in 2012 to the GOP sweep in 2014, for instance, that Ghitza calculates it cost Democrats fully 6 points in their share of the total vote.

Even comparing 2018 with 2016, more Democrats than Republicans stayed home, Catalist found. But because of the turnout gains among key party constituencies, that drop-off was much less of a problem than it typically is for Democrats. About 40% of all voters who participated in both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections stayed home in the next midterms; but in 2018, only about 27% of 2016 voters sat out, Catalist found.

Moreover, the mix of voters who fell off last year was less lopsidedly Democratic than in the past: Republicans also suffered a drop-off, particularly among non-college whites and rural whites, two of Trump’s key groups. Minorities, who usually slip as a share of the midterm vote, represented almost exactly as much of the vote in 2018 as they had in 2016. And while young people still declined as a share of the electorate in 2018, they did not do so nearly as severely as in the previous two midterm elections.
The overall result was voters who sat out the 2018 midterms after voting in 2016 cost the Democrats a manageable 2 percentage points in the total vote last year, only about one-third of their crushing decline in 2014.

And last year, Democrats offset that loss through the other major factor that shifted the electorate’s composition: new voters. Catalist found that about 13% of the 2018 voters, some 14 million people, had not voted in 2016. That was a significantly bigger surge of new voters than in 2010 and 2014, when about 9% of the electorate had not participated in the previous presidential election.

And while the new voters had favored Republicans by 2 percentage points in 2010 and by a solid 7 percentage points in 2014, they provided Democrats a resounding advantage of 21 percentage points last year.

In all, Catalist calculated, new voters swelled the Democrats’ total share of the 2018 vote by about 2.6 percentage points. When combined with their loss of around 2 percentage points from 2016 voters who sat out 2018, that meant changes in the electorate’s composition contributed about half a percentage point to their overall vote gain from the presidential election to the midterm elections. That was a vast improvement from the midterm elections under Obama, when Democrats were hurt by the composition of both the drop-off and new voters.

“There was a massive turnout boost that favored Democrats, at least compared to past midterms,” Ghitza wrote in a recent Medium piece explaining his research.

But by itself, that roughly half-point improvement in the Democratic vote from changes in the electorate’s composition would not have been nearly sufficient to drive the party’s sweeping gains last year.

“If turnout was the only factor, then Democrats would not have seen nearly the gains that they ended up seeing,” Ghitza wrote.
In fact, Catalist calculated that nearly 90% of the Democrats’ increase in their total vote from 2016 to 2018 came from switches among the roughly 99 million people who participated in both elections. Catalist projects that Democrats virtually broke even among those two-time voters in 2016 but won them by about 5 percentage points in 2018.

Vote switching, as opposed to shifts in the electorate’s composition, accounted for about three-fourths or more of the Democrats’ improvement compared with the 2016 presidential results in a wide variety of states, Catalist found. Those included their Senate victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Nevada and Arizona, as well as governor’s victories in Nevada, Michigan and Maine.

Turnout and persuasion both matter

Catalist’s research methods didn’t allow it to estimate how many of the voters who moved to the Democrats in 2018 had switched from voting for Trump in 2016 versus how many switched from supporting one of the third-party candidates, libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein. But Ghitza said that estimates he’s seen in other private Democratic analyses of the election are that Trump voters accounted for about three-fourths of the switchers and former third-party voters about one-fourth.
The overall level of movement from Trump doesn’t signal that his base is cracking. But it does suggest that it’s a mistake to view all of his voters as immovably locked in behind him.

“He got votes from people who aren’t considered his base in 2016,” Ghitza said. “And so this could certainly be consistent … with the idea that he has a floor and those people aren’t leaving him but there are still swing voters out there that could be had.”
These new findings aren’t likely to end the roiling debate among Democrats about whether to emphasize mobilization of base voters or persuasion of swing voters in 2020. Comparing the 2018 vote with the results in 2014, as opposed to 2016, tilts the outcome so that mobilization looks relatively more important, Ghitza notes.

And the likelihood that total turnout could increase significantly in 2020 — Catalist projects that over 15 million more people may vote next year than in 2016 — will also encourage Democrats who want to prioritize mobilization, since many newly eligible voters are young and nonwhite.

The big question for that strategy is whether the Democratic message — and nominee — can inspire more turnout from those groups without becoming so polarizing that they help Trump mobilize his own core supporters, or alienate the swing voters who abandoned him in 2018.

“There’s something to that argument” for mobilization, Ghitza says. “But it’s clear that it is best to both mobilize and persuade, and to find a message that can do both. If the Democratic candidate has a message that only appeals to certain pieces of the country, then those mobilization advantages could end up being counteracted by increasing support for Trump on the other side.”

I don’t think it’s clear that someone like Biden is a slam dunk with the “switchers” any more than I assume someone like Warren is too far left. People choose their candidates based upon a whole bunch of heuristics that go beyond policy. Neither is the base necessarily going to break against the more “centrist” candidates. This is all still being worked out and as people see these candidates more and more and compare them to each other (and to Trump) they’ll start to sort it out.

But I think it’s important to keep in mind that those 2018 party switchers (mostly college-educated white people, a majority of whom were women) were motivated by the total degradation of the GOP and its capitulation to Trump’s extremism. I suspect they are going to be pretty pragmatic in 2020 as well. They know Trump is far worse than anyone the Democrats are going to nominate.

There really isn’t any comparison.

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One party listens to their base. The other … doesn’t.

by digby

One of the most important distinctions between the GOP and the Democratic Party is that the Republicans almost fetishize their base while the Democrats make a sport of kicking theirs in the face. They have very different political coalition theories. The GOP believes their base needs to be respected lest they decide to stay home while the Democrats always assume their voters will stick with them because they have nowhere else to go. (I’d ask Ross Perot, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein voters about that but, whatever…) And also, Republicans just have confidence in their agenda and the Democrats are clearly terrified of theirs.

The bottom line is that the Democrats really don’t give a damn what their base thinks. The NY Times’ Michelle Goldberg points out that nonetheless, Democratic voters are making themselves very clear on the issue of impeachment. Their representatives need to start listening:

Until quite recently, Democratic House leaders justified their refusal to begin an inquiry into impeaching Donald Trump by saying that it wasn’t something their rank-and-file voters cared about. “I can tell you I never hear somebody bring up the Mueller report,” Representative Cheri Bustos, chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in Chicago last month.

After the Memorial Day recess, that argument is no longer tenable. Across the country, Democratic voters have begun demanding that their representatives take a position on impeachment. “At virtually every town hall, round table, or even, today, a kaffeeklatsch at a senior center, people want to know what we are going to do about this guy,” Mary Gay Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania, told me. Scanlon is vice chairwoman of the Judiciary Committee, which would oversee an impeachment inquiry, and two weeks ago she came out in favor of starting the process.

“There’s been a shift,” said Madeleine Dean, a freshman Democrat from Pennsylvania who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, and also wants to begin an impeachment inquiry. At a town hall last week, one of the first questions she was asked was about impeachment. When she visited local stores and barbershops, she told me, constituents approached her and said, of Trump, “You cannot let the behavior stand.”

On Friday, Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that he’d come around to supporting an impeachment inquiry after speaking to people in his district: “To the person, everybody said, ‘What are you all going to do about President Trump?’” Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told me, “I had about a dozen events this weekend, and there was an overwhelming sense that we have been presented with abundant evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors and we need to launch an inquiry.”

According to a CNN poll conducted last week, 76 percent of Democrats favor impeachment. (The poll did not ask about simply beginning an impeachment investigation, which is what some House Democrats are calling for.) Impeachment is favored by 41 percent of voters overall, not a majority, but far more than supported impeachment at the beginning of the Watergate hearings.

It’s no wonder so many Democrats want their representatives to take a more aggressive approach to the president. It has now been five months since the party took control of the House of Representatives, a month and a half since the redacted report by the special counsel Robert Mueller was released, and almost a week since Mueller stood before the nation and all but asked Congress to hold a lawless president accountable.

Yet Democrats have largely failed to even begin presenting a cohesive case to the public about Trump’s corruption and criminality. That could start to change next week, when the Judiciary Committee launches hearings into the Mueller report, but no blockbuster witnesses are yet lined up. The actual contents of the Mueller report should have been devastating for Trump. Instead, thanks to Bill Barr, an attorney general who acts more like a Fox News pundit, the administration has managed to obscure Mueller’s findings, and then go on the offense against the investigation itself.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

Resisting calls to open an impeachment inquiry, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has argued that various congressional committees need to continue their investigations. Yet many of these investigations have been stymied, particularly in the Judiciary Committee. “The president’s wholesale defiance of Congress, and orders to not participate in our investigation, have created an untenable situation,” said Raskin. “The members are just livid about this categorical defiance of congressional power.”

Barr refused to show up for a hearing last month. In April, the House subpoenaed the unredacted Mueller report and underlying evidence, demanding that it be turned over by May 1. It has not been. The former White House counsel Don McGahn, a major source in the Mueller report, refused to comply with a congressional subpoena, and the House has yet to move to hold him in contempt of Congress or to go to court to have its subpoena enforced. Mueller himself has said he doesn’t want to testify, and the House is still deciding whether to compel him.

As this drags on, it will be ever more difficult for Democrats to corral public attention. Opening a formal impeachment inquiry would put the question of Trump’s lawbreaking at the center of national life, and could give the House an edge in court. “It is very likely that the courts will regard our investigative powers as being at their zenith in the middle of an impeachment investigation,” said Raskin, who was a constitutional law professor before he got to Congress.

Pelosi is a formidable person and, as she herself once said, a master legislator, so it’s tempting to imagine that she has some sort of plan for curbing Trump’s abuses of power. In Michael Wolff’s new book, “Siege: Trump Under Fire,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, suggests that Pelosi has been waiting for the president to self-destruct ever since he was inaugurated. “Pelosi, Bannon felt, saw the greater truth: The Trump administration would undo itself,” Wolff wrote.

Perhaps he will, but meanwhile, Trump is undoing American governance. Greg Stanton, a Democrat from a swing district in Arizona, is a member of the Judiciary Committee, and might seem like the sort of freshman who needs to be protected from taking a tough vote on impeachment. Last week, he came out for starting an inquiry. “I think there’s been an over-analysis of the politics of it,” he told me. “I think there should be more focus on simply asking everyone what you think the right thing to do is.”

The moment demands it, and so do the people who put Democrats in charge.

The congress believes that these voters sent them there to pass symbolic votes that will never be taken up by the Senate or signed by Donald Trump. Democratic voters aren’t that stupid. They know how the government works. They want all those things on the Democratic agenda but they know very, very well that they won’t get them with Donald Trump in office. They sent the Democrats to Washington to stop Trump and his agenda. And since he’s defying congressional oversight and taking ridiculous unilateral actions as if he’s a King, they expect their leaders to take drastic action. Now.

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The political arguments for impeachment are very strong


by digby

Former Harry Reid staffer Adam Jentleson explains in this excellent GQ essay that the Democrats were complacent about the Garland nomination, assuming that Clinton would be elected and everything would work out. We know what happened. And he thinks the Democrats are making the same mistake now.

 Why crap stats about gun free zones must be called out 

 by Spocko

Gun humpers love to spread crap data. Their go to guy is John Lott. Even though his data has been debunked and is crap, it works for the believers and it sucks in unaware people too.  Why is that?

Because normal people don’t want to argue with gun humpers. Who wants to argue with assholes? But gun humpers want to argue with you! Usually using their own rules, data and assumptions.

If nobody is constantly challenging their data and bullshit ideas like “more people with guns will save the day!” they get laws passed where more people have guns in more places. And they don’t save the day.

Here’s the research on mass shooting in Gun Free Zones, in case anyone wants to see it. But like the Mueller Report, the people who should read it, won’t.

Mass Shootings in the United States: 2009-2016 -Study April 11, 2017  Everytown Research

I also got a lot of solid information on other research like the FBI studies in this great article  by Evan Defilippis and Devin Hughes ·June 18, 2015,

Commentary: Gun-Rights Advocates Say Places That Ban Guns Attract Mass Shooters. The Data Says They’re Wrong. Debunking the myths about gun-free zones. 

And here’s another thing about arguing with gun humpers, when you show some people they are using bad data and there is no evidence leading to their unsupported conclusion, they don’t stop spouting it. They just find someone else to tell it to, someone who doesn’t have the knowledge, energy or inclination to challenge them.

Here is an example from March 2018, at a Kansas legislation hearing. The Republican Senator, Ty Masterson, said “98% of Mass shootings happen in Gun Free Zones.”
That’s wrong. It’s only 13%.
The senator was corrected by the Democrat Representative. Brett Parker*. But will Masterson stop repeating the crap stat? Doubtful.

The next problem is the conclusion this crap data leads to gun people to believe. People getting shot in gun free zones?! Give them guns! Why? Because gun humpers think average citizens could stop would-be mass shootings if only gun-free zones didn’t stand in their way. That’s wrong too.

Based on extensive FBI analysis from 2000-2013, there is no evidence that lawful gun owners have been able to intervene to stop these attacks.

The most recent mass shooting in Virginia has John Lott suggesting if only there were people with guns in the building, they could have stopped the shooter before more people were killed. BULLSHIT.

You know what stopped one of the suspect’s bullets from killing someone? A bullet proof vest. A cop, with a gun, was going after the shooter on the 2nd floor when he was shot in the chest. But the VEST stopped the bullet. I listened to the audio of the police during the shooting. That vest saved his life, not the gun in his hand.

Here is a cop reporting how the bullet proof vest saved a life. Audio link

Here is a cop calling for heavy shields and vests. Audio link

You want to be safe from bad guys with guns? Get and wear a bullet proof vest all the time, even at home. Why at home? Because 70% of mass shootings happen in homes.

https://everytownresearch.org/reports/mass-shootings-analysis/

From the opening page of the 2015 study.

Everytown For Gun Safety conducted a comprehensive analysis of every mass shooting between January 2009 and July 2015 that was identifiable through FBI data and media reports. This report describes the 133 MASS SHOOTINGS – ALMOST TWO PER MONTH THAT OCCURRED IN 39 STATES in the nearly seven-year period. Each description includes the location of the shooting, number of people killed and/or injured, and information on the shooter, gun(s), ammunition, and gun purchase, where available. The FBI defines “mass shooting” as any incident where at least four people were murdered with a gun. Everytown For Gun Safety reviewed mass shootings in the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports from 2009-2012 and searched the media for further details about these incidents as well as for mass shootings that occurred in 2013– 2015. This survey includes every shooting we identified in which at least four people were murdered with a gun. And the findings reveal a different portrait of mass shootings in America than conventional wisdom might suggest.

The video was created with Powtoons, here is a direct link to the video if the YouTube version doesn’t work.

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain.