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Month: November 2019

The Masters of the Universe are as clueless as Trump

Published by digby on November 7, 2019

The Masters of the Universe are as clueless as Trump

by digby

Can you believe anyone would so lacking in self-awareness that he would say something like this:


“If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine. But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over.”

Update: He apparently said after the quote, “I’m just kidding” so he isn’t quite a clueless as I thought. But that doesn’t really mitigate the fact that he’s whining about this wealth tax like it’s really going to cause some kind of suffering for people like him.

You’ll have to excuse me for a couple of minutes while I go and drink a triple shot of Herradura. And it’s only 9 am.

That was one of the richest men in the world whining that if he has to pay $100 billion in taxes he’d have to do some math to figure out how many billions he’d have left!  Do they not hear themselves? Even as a joke?

Anyway, here’s the story:

Wall Street has not been shy in expressing reservations over Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) presidential candidacy — given her desire to install a wealth tax. Now, you can add one of the world’s richest people to the list of those who are less than thrilled by the prospect of a Warren presidency.

Speaking at a forum in New York with New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin, Microsoft founder Bill Gates came off as far from enthusiastic about Warren 2020. Speaking about the wealth tax, Gates said there’s a limit to what he would be willing to pay.

“If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine,” Gates said. “But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over.”

Sorkin asked Gates if he’d consider sitting down with the Massachusetts senator.

“I’m not sure how open minded she is — or that she’d even be willing to sit down with somebody who has large amounts of money,” Gates said.

Then, Sorkin posed a scenario which, for the moment, is a hypothetical — albeit one which appears to have more of a chance of happening by the day. The Times writer asked Gates who he would back in a general election: Warren or President Donald Trump.

And despite being a vocal Trump critic in the past, Gates would not commit to supporting Warren to defeat the president.

They are all a lot more like Donald Trump than they realize, at least when it comes to whining.

He did say he would vote for the most professional which clearly means he would vote for Warren but this whole conversation is disgusting. These rich assholes whining and crying again over how unfair it is to be mean to them makes me sick. While they’ve been busy counting their money, income inequality is destabilizing the whole planet. Maybe they think they can retreat to their beautiful compounds in the Pacific Northwest and it won’t touch them but they have another thing coming. The consequences of their behavior will end up electing more ignoramuses like Trump. I don’t think I need to elaborate on why that’s a very, very bad thing.

These guys should be welcoming Warren’s ideas and working with her to try to mitigate the growing public unrest. But they’re dumb. Obviously. Look at what one of the smartest men in the world just said.

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Watch your back, Andy Beshear by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 7, 2019

Watch your back, Andy Beshear
by Tom Sullivan

The week’s election tumult is not over yet. There is more to come in Louisiana and for Kentucky’s presumptive Gov.-elect, Democrat Andy Beshear.

Aaron Rupar of Vox early this morning posted this from Donald (President of the United States) Trump’s Louisiana rally Wednesday night. He appeared in advance of Saturday’s gubernatorial runoff between Republican Eddie Rispone, a Baton Rouge businessman, and John Bel Edwards, Democratic the incumbent. The two were the top candidates in the state’s Oct. 12 “jungle primary.”

“Does this seem like a person who should be in a position of power to you?” It was a rhetorical question.

Rupar later tweeted, “Minutes after denigrating Louisiana for having the country’s highest murder rate, Trump asks his fans if they’re tired of winning.” Trump posed the question one day after his gubernatorial candidate, incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin, narrowly lost reelection in Kentucky to Attorney General Andy Beshear, and after Democrats won full control of the Virginia legislature. Like Bevin, Rispone “has tried to appeal to voters by fashioning himself in the image of Mr. Trump.” Whether Trump’s appearance will work for Rispone after failing Bevin on Tuesday we will find out Saturday.

Maybe Trump’s shtick is finally wearing thin. If not in Louisiana (with one of the highest poverty rates in the country), then in suburbia:

Across the highest-profile races, Democrats benefited from two trends favoring them in metro areas: high turnout in urban cores that have long been the party’s strongholds, and improved performance in white-collar suburban areas that previously leaned Republican.

“When Trump was elected, there was an initial rejection of him in the suburbs,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Virginia-based Democratic strategist. “We are now seeing a full-on realignment.”

In that way, the GOP’s losses again raised the stakes for Republicans heading into 2020. In both message and agenda, Trump has reoriented the Republican Party toward the priorities and grievances of non-college-educated, evangelical, and nonurban white voters. His campaign has already signaled that it will focus its 2020 efforts primarily on turning out more working-class and rural white voters who did not participate in 2016.

That is a vast pool of nonvoters Democrats are also targeting for 2020 turnout efforts. But Trump’s strategy — or should we say affinity for? — mobilizing around white identity politics as a response to the nation’s increasingly diverse population has limits both demographic and geographic. There are only so many rural white voters. They live in hard-to-reach places. The more rural states are, the more likely statewide races hinge on turnout in populations centers where Trump and his MAGA cult are losing ground.

All the more reason Republicans have taken to rigging the game any which way they can. Kentucky’s presumptive Gov.-elect Andy Beshear should watch his back for legislative trickery in the lame duck session before power changes hands. Bevin may take the race to “a showdown in the State Legislature.” We know something about that sort of thing in North Carolina. They know about it in Wisconsin and Michigan too.

After nearly a decade of lost legal battles over state and federal legislative districts, the Republican-controlled legislature in North Carolina is under court order to redraw the state’s congressional districts yet again. A three-judge state panel ruled North Carolina’s voters would not exit the decade having not voted once in constitutional districts. The court issued an injunction last week against using the 2016 congressional map in 2020.

Still, recidivist GOP legislators have yet to “come to Jesus” on respecting popular democracy. Expecting to lose an appeal in the state Supreme Court, Republicans began working on new drafts.

Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections was watching:

Those “crinkly bits” in the NC-3 yellow area probably won’t pass muster in terms of district “compactness” and will likely change. But wherever they can push an undemocratic advantage, the Party of Trump will, then push back against the pushback.

So, watch your back, Andy Beshear.

Still, A Very Low Barr by tristero

Published by tristero on November 7, 2019

Still, A Very Low Barr 

by tristero

Looks like Barr has something resembling limits. Can’t quite say he’s growing a spine when it comes to Trump, more like a congealing of oleaginous excretions:

President Trump wanted Attorney General William P. Barr to hold a news conference declaring that the commander in chief had broken no laws during a phone call in which he pressed his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a political rival, though Barr ultimately declined to do so, people familiar with the matter said. 

The request from Trump traveled from the president to other White House officials and eventually to the Justice Department. The president has mentioned Barr’s declination to associates in recent weeks, saying he wished Barr would have held the news conference, Trump advisers say.

Y’just can’t find good help these days.

When all else fails, the moron defense

Published by digby on November 7, 2019

When all else fails, the moron defense

by digby

It was inevitable because it’s really the only possible defense they have.

I wonder how the Very Stable Genius will take this latest. He really doesn’t like being called an ignoramus. Of course, it’s always possible that he doesn’t know what incoherent means so maybe it was worth the risk.

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Who charges Don Jr and Breitbart for witness tampering? @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on November 6, 2019

Who charges Don Jr. and Breitbart for witness tampering? 

 by Spocko

Wednesday Don Jr. linked to a Breitbart article naming the alleged Whistleblower.

“Don Jr., Thug That He Is, Outs Person He Claims Is Whistleblower“
Following Rand Paul’s lead, Don Jr. decides to tweet out Breitbart’s article identifying the person they *think* is the whistleblower. That puts a target on the person’s back, whistleblower or not.    By Aliza Worthington  Crooks and Liars 

I knew this was coming and it pisses me off. The good news is that most organizations have held off naming the person. But that doesn’t stop the intimidation.

 Aliza Worthington addresses this excellently in this C&L piece, so I’ll repeat it here:

 We won’t link to it here, because WE respect the law. WE recognize that the information might be incorrect. WE don’t want to put the target on the back of either a misidentified person, or a correctly identified whistleblower who is entitled to full legal protection of privacy and personal safety the president’s demon spawn just obliterated.

It’s worth noting that as of this writing, none of the cable news channels have reported this person’s name, either, even Fox News. (Though, it’s also worth noting that many on Fox News are saying the whistleblower is NOT entitled to privacy OR protection…) But unlike the Trump crime family, cable networks have legal divisions that are concerned with following the law and protecting their institutions from lawsuits and worse, so no mention of the name that has been put out there as the whistleblower’s — correctly or not. (Emphasis mine.)

I’ve written about witness tampering and the whistleblowers recently hoping that some experts will actually go into detail on what it will take to bust people for witness intimidation coming from Trump and his Republicans supporters. Trump threatens whistleblowers and witnesses, isn’t that a crime? #AskPreet Bharara  If they don’t go into detail today I’ll have to call another expert.

 I don’t know why, but when I called and said, “This is Spocko. I write for Hullabaloo, Crooks and Liars and my blog Spocko’s Brain and I’d like to ask you about successful prosecutions of witness tampering cases.” they didn’t return my call. Vulcan discrimination? 

I also would like an expert to remind people that White House lawyers haven’t had a problem going after cable TV shows, news organizations and individual blogs and bloggers for putting up information that they consider defamation. They even went after this blog for linking to a Lawrence O’Donnell story. (Link )  

 Lawrence O’Donnell, publicly retracted his story, and so did we at Hullabaloo in this post We are very, very sorry. Super sorry. Very super-sorry. Legal threats work. Trump and his White House know this.

And, since the whistleblowers lawyers won’t confirm or deny that the person named is their client, they won’t be sending out letters to anyone. But someone should.

 Where is the Department of Justice? They are the ones who are supposed to enforce the witness tampering and whistleblower statutes. I see people on Fox arguing about what the whistleblower laws do or don’t cover. They want to use the person’s background to attack the whistleblower, It’s what they do. They WANT to move the focus to the person instead of the contents of the story.

These discussions of the details of the whistleblower statue ignore the larger point of the witness intimidation. The President does it publicly. It’s still a crime. I’ll link again to the Barb McQuade video from  March 2019 on The Rachel Maddow show, Making the threat is a crime, even if it doesn’t work.

“It’s a crime to knowingly intimidate, threaten or corruptly persuade another person with intent to influence, prevent or delay their testimony. -Barbara McQuade

I believe in the importance of  people remaining publicly Anonymous in cases like this. Trump Senior’s witness intimidation SHOULD be added to his articles of impeachment.

 But Donald Junior is not an elected official. He can be charged with a crime.  He can be sued. The Breitbart organization can be sued. They can go down like Gawker did. (What is NOT ironic is that the lawyer that successfully sued Gawker is the lawyer the White House used to go after Lawrence O’Donnell and this blog and successfully got a retraction.)

Don Jr. really getting into his role as a witch hunter.

I looked at the Justice Department statues on tampering with witnesses and informants and it seems to cover a number of proceedings.
1729. PROTECTION OF GOVERNMENT PROCESSES — TAMPERING WITH VICTIMS, WITNESSES, OR INFORMANTS — 18 U.S.C. 1512  (Link to Justice Dept statue.)

It applies to proceedings before Congress, executive departments, and administrative agencies, and to civil and criminal judicial proceedings, including grand jury proceedings.

I  also looked at who it applies to:

Section 1512 protects potential as well as actual witnesses. With the addition of the words “any person,” it is clear that a witness is “one who knew or was expected to know material facts and was expected to testify to them before pending judicial proceedings.”


 Donald Jr. can be charged with a crime. Who should be charging him? Why won’t they? How will he try and wriggle out of it? What advice will he ignore that will dig him in deeper? Why won’t he be charged then? National Enquirering minds expect Don Jr. will weasel out of charges.

If we had an Attorney General who worked for the people, instead of the President, Don Jr. could go to jail for this. But as they say, “It’s good to be the Prince.”

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Being shamelessly dishonest and unethical means never having to say you lost

Published by digby on November 6, 2019

Being shamelessly dishonest and unethical means never having to say you lost

by digby

I thought Fox State TV and the RNC were being ridiculous but this takes the cake:

Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers threw another wrench into the state’s razor-thin gubernatorial outcome late Tuesday night, saying that the legislature could decide the race.

Stivers’ comments came shortly after Gov. Matt Bevin refused to concede to Attorney General Andy Beshear, who led by roughly 5,100 votes when all the precincts were counted.

“There’s less than one-half of 1%, as I understand, separating the governor and the attorney general,” Stivers said. “We will follow the letter of the law and what various processes determine.”

Stivers, R-Manchester, said based on his staff’s research, the decision could come before the Republican-controlled state legislature.

Under state law, Bevin has 30 days to formally contest the outcome once it is certified by the State Board of Elections. Candidates typically ask for a re-canvass of voting machines and a recount first.

The last contested governor’s race was the 1899 election of Democrat William Goebel.

Stivers said he thought Bevin’s speech declining to concede to Beshear was “appropriate.” He said believes most of the votes that went to Libertarian John Hicks, who received about 2% of the total vote, would have gone to Bevin and made him the clear winner.

Sure, why not? Just assume that some of the voters who voted for someone else should have voted for you and voila: you win!

Don’t be surprised to hear more of this. They are having to grapple with the fact that even if they get huge turnout they don’t win. Cheating is their only option and they have absolutely no problem doing it openly. Ever since their “win” in 2000, they’ve made that clear.

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Here’s how Bizarro World saw the election last night

Published by digby on November 6, 2019

Here’s how Bizarro World saw the election last night

by digby

You’d think she would be just a tiny bit embarrassed with that ridiculous bit of Trump-fluffing but I doubt she’s capable of it.  The need to constantly spout absurd happy talk about him and his great achievements must be wearing though.

In the real world, Republicans aren’t quite so ecstatic about the election results, but they are still completely addicted to Dear Leader, no matter what:

Democrats’ claim of victory Tuesday in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race, as well as the Democratic takeover of the Virginia state legislature, left Republicans stumbling and increasingly uncertain about their own political fates next year tied to an embattled and unpopular president.

Many allies of President Trump rushed to explain away the poor performance of incumbent Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) as an anomaly, while other GOP veterans expressed alarm about the party’s failure in a state where Trump won by nearly 30 percentage points in 2016 — and where he just campaigned this week.

Although Bevin was controversial and widely disliked, he was also a devotee of the president, embracing Trump’s agenda and his anti-establishment persona. And in the contest’s final days, Bevin sought to cast his candidacy as a bulwark against House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry of Trump.

But Bevin’s attempt to nationalize his cause by stoking conservative grievances about the impeachment process was not enough to overcome his problems nor was Trump’s raucous rally for the governor on Monday — raising questions about Trump’s political strength as he faces a barrage of challenges and a difficult path to reelection.

The outcome — with Democrat Andy Beshear claiming victory with a lead of several thousand votes and Bevin refusing to concede — underscored how Republicans are struggling to navigate choppy political waters as the 2020 campaign now begins in earnest. Trump continues to dominate the party, but many lawmakers are uneasy about their ability to defend his conduct and hold on to suburban support.

Few Republicans, however, are willing to even lightly criticize Trump since they widely believe they will need his voters’ backing and enthusiasm in order to survive next year.

Still, the Kentucky defeat has sparked concern among the party’s donors and many longtime GOP leaders who are worried that the nonstop twists of the House impeachment inquiry and Trump’s growing fury are making it increasingly difficult for Republicans to make a clear and compelling case to voters.

“It was a rough night,” said Scott Reed, the chief political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “The Republican Party is lacking message discipline, and that needs to be addressed. There is a lot of positive news around President Trump’s governing on the economy, on regulations and judges, and it seems to be overwhelmed by the drama.”
[…]
Allies of McConnell, the Senate majority leader, argued that Bevin’s loss did not indicate any looming trouble for him, who is up for reelection in 2020 and is working to hold the Senate GOP together amid the impeachment debate.

“Republicans won every office on the ballot except [Bevin’s],” Scott Jennings, a longtime McConnell adviser, wrote on Twitter. “Some unique candidate problems. GOP brand was fine elsewhere.”

[…]
Trump’s campaigning fared better in deep-red Mississippi, where Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves (R) defeated Democratic attorney general Jim Hood on Tuesday in that state’s governor’s race.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said in an interview prior to the race being called that campaigns in the Deep South, including the Mississippi gubernatorial contest, have drawn attention because both parties are giving them serious attention and fielding candidates with the ability to win statewide.

In late 2017, Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) won a special election for U.S. Senate, giving Democrats hope of a comeback in similar states.

“We had two statewide officials running against each other and we haven’t had that in years,” Wicker said. He dismissed the suggestion that Trump’s standing could diminish. “If this race was about Trump, it’d be a 60-40 race” in Republicans’ favor.
[…]
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), reflecting the views of several Senate Republicans on Tuesday, said he did not see Kentucky as a bellwether for 2020 even if the president was making it sound that way during his remarks at Monday’s rally.

“It’s not a national race except in the sense the president wants to make it about him,” Cornyn said. “Nobody likes to lose, but I wouldn’t call it a bellwether for 2020. Look, if the Democrats elect Elizabeth Warren as their nominee, I think it’s going to come at a price for them.”

“Bevin’s got his own problems,” Cornyn said. “That’s unrelated to national politics.”

Yeah, it’s unrelated to national politics. Trump isn’t a problem at all. The suburbs turning blue all over the country is a total coincidence. Keep telling yourselves that.

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The right loves the Deep State’s covert ops but they hate analysis that doesn’t back their goals.

Published by digby on November 6, 2019

The right has always railed against State and CIA

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Transcripts of testimony in the impeachment inquiry have been coming fast and furious this week and they have been electrifying. EU ambassador Gordon Sondland even made a late addendum in which he admitted to presenting the Ukrainians with the quid-pro-quo deal that Donald Trump denies ever happened.

But after first demanding to see the transcripts and complaining they’ve been left out of the process, Republicans have now decided to hold their breath until they turn blue.

One of the most important revelations in these depositions is the fact that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr are up to their necks in this mess. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent notes, this story shows the remarkable “degree to which this whole scheme is corrupting multiple government agencies and effectively placing them at the disposal of Trump’s reelection effort.”

The New York Times took a long look at Pompeo’s involvement, making the important point that he had accepted the CIA’s conclusion on Russian interference when he was the director of that agency, but since he became secretary of state he’s acted as an accomplice to Trump and Giuliani’s addled conspiracy theory and has thrown one career State Department employee after another under the bus. As Sargent puts it, Pompeo is “a secretary of state who is essentially perverting the State Department and subverting the national interest to carry out Trump’s sordid political project.”

Meanwhile, we have Barr running all over the world also trying to prove Trump’s daft Ukraine conspiracy theory and show that the FBI and intelligence agencies went rogue and infiltrated the Trump campaign without good reason. One would have thought the Mueller report had dispatched such concerns, but Barr is apparently determined to prove that investigation was tainted as well.

Many people are wringing their hands and scratching their heads, wondering how the once staunch defenders of law and order in the GOP have suddenly turned into bleeding-heart libertarians, railing against the Deep State, standing up for the rights of the poor lone individual, Donald J. Trump. What happened to the Republican Party?

Well, as with everything else in this strange political era, the truth is that none of this is exactly unprecedented. Much of what is happening is just a funhouse-mirror version of Republican politics over the past 50 years.

Take, for instance, Mike Pompeo’s obvious disregard for the career diplomats and foreign service personnel at the State Department. I wrote the other day about Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on Gen. George Marshall and his hearings about alleged Soviet infiltration of the U.S. military. But the opening salvo of his Red Scare was against the State Department. In his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy said that he had a list with the names of more than 200 members of the Department of State who were “known communists.”

In fact, Cold War hawks were always suspicious of the State Department because they saw diplomacy as soft at best and traitorous at worst, and often took the opportunity to blame that department for foreign policy failures, periodically purging the department of people they suspected of not holding “Americanist” values. (Today they are accused of being “globalists.”) As recently as the Bush administration there was a move to “reform” the State Department in the wake of 9/11, led by none other than Newt Gingrich. He gave speeches and wrote articles in 2003 attacking “The Rogue State Department” for having produced honest intelligence assessments in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

That attitude also explains a strange dichotomy with respect to how the right and left view the CIA. A couple of weeks ago Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir wrote a piece reminding people on the left about the CIA’s history of undemocratic and underhanded activities over the years, so we don’t lose perspective as we watch this Trump debacle unfold. He was right, of course. The left has traditionally been rightfully skeptical of CIA activities, particularly after the revelations of the 1970s showing that it had essentially operated as a shadow government, carrying out assassinations and interfering in domestic political matters. Along with the FBI, the CIA was shown to have operated illegally and unethically for decades, behavior that hawks in both parties endorsed as necessary to fight “the evil empire.” The reforms of the Church Commission in the 1970s, among others, were enacted to rein in the agency. But our experience with Central America in the 1980s and the torture, black sites and rendition programs of the War on Terror made clear that those reforms were only as good as a government that believed in them.

But there was another side to that story. During the 1970s, the CIA was also producing analysis showing that the Soviet military was a much less formidable threat than was being portrayed. This information was rejected by Cold War hawks who persuaded Gerald Ford to bring in “outside experts,” including people like two-time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who naturally found that the CIA’s estimates were all wrong and the Soviets were on the verge of taking over the world. For years the hawks created a series of “alternate” analyses under the auspices of groups with names like “Team B” and Committee on the Present Danger. History has shown that the CIA analysis was much closer to the truth.

The right’s unwillingness to accept the findings of actual intelligence continued all the way to the Iraq war, when Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director George Tenet refused to accept the conclusion that Saddam Hussein likely did not possess weapons of mass destruction, and almost certainly had no nuclear weapons. Instead, they “stovepiped” only the intelligence that would back up their desired goal to invade Iraq. We know how that worked out too.

All the way back to the 1970s, even as the left was rightly skeptical of CIA covert activity, it has accepted that the CIA’s analysis of various threats was far more reliable, if imperfect, than anything that came out of the right-wing hawks’ mouths. We find ourselves in a similar position today. The intelligence community’s analysis of the 2016 election interference appears to be backed up by many foreign allies, press accounts and personal testimony, while the right’s absurd counter-narrative is once again made up out of whole cloth.

So supposed pillars of the GOP establishment, like Mike Pompeo trashing his own State Department and Bill Barr running around the world trying to discredit intelligence analysis is not nearly as strange as people think. They are following a well-worn path. The only difference is that this time they’re not doing it for any recognizable ideological or geopolitical purpose. They are doing what they always do, they’re just putting it in service of Donald Trump’s massive ego.

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Jamie Dimon is pouting again

Published by digby on November 6, 2019

Jamie Dimon is pouting again

by digby

Jesus. Visions of 2009 once again when all the Masters of the Universe couldn’t stop whining about how unfaaaair everyone was being. “President Obama called us fatcats! Whaaaa!

Dimon on Sen. Warren: “She uses some pretty harsh words, you know, some would say vilifies successful people,” he said. “I don’t like vilifying anybody. I think we should applaud successful people.”

Right we peasants should applaud Jamie Dimon whenever he enters a room like the noble aristocrat he obviously believes he is.

These people are BEGGING for pitchforks with this stuff. They never learn.

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When you’ve lost the suburbs… by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 6, 2019

When you’ve lost the suburbs…
by Tom Sullivan


“If you lose, it sends a really bad message,” Trump told his Kentucky rally. “You can’t let that happen to me!” They did.

Virginia Democrats have a lot to crow about this morning. Elsewhere, some interesting results too. Too many to capture this morning, but let’s have a go with some headlines.

Virginia

Democrats gained full control of the state government for the first time in a generation, flipping at least two seats in the state Senate and at least five in the House of Delegates. They were aided in part by strong turnout and by court-ordered redrawing of state House districts earlier this year. Republicans have not won a statewide race in Virginia since 2009.

An upset in suburban Richmond makes Ghazala Hashmi, a former college literature professor, the first Muslim woman to win a seat in the state Senate:

“I didn’t know if I actually had a home in this country,” she said in an interview before the voting. “My anxiety was caused by wondering if other people would speak up and support the assault we were seeing on civil liberties.” She decided to speak up and represent herself.

Other notable winners on Tuesday included Shelly Simonds, a Democrat who lost a House race in 2017 in a random drawing after the votes produced a dead tie. In a rematch, Ms. Simonds defeated the Republican incumbent, David Yancey.

Last night Simonds won the seat in Newport News by 18 points.

Juli Briskman, the cyclist who two years ago lost her job after flipping off Donald Trump’s motorcade, won a seat on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. She defeated an eight-year Republican incumbent.

Kentucky

Democrat Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s sitting attorney general, narrowly defeated unpopular Republican Gov. Matt Bevin by a mere 5,100 votes (0.4%) in a state President Donald Trump carried in 2016 by 30 points:

Bevin, elected governor in 2015, is a deeply unpopular figure in Kentucky. He has faced backlash for seeking to undercut the state’s Medicaid expansion and calling teachers “selfish” and accusing them of a “thug mentality” when they protested after he threatened to cut their pensions.

Still, Democrats’ victory in a state that Trump carried by 30 percentage points in the 2016 election could be seen as an ominous sign for the President heading into his 2020 reelection bid. The result showed that Trump wasn’t able to carry his preferred candidate over the finish line. It was also a potential sign that Democrats’ start of impeachment proceedings against Trump has not yet triggered enough anger within the GOP base, or backlash among independents and moderates, to benefit Republicans.

Or it simply could be Trump, like Bevin (who campaigned on his close connection to Trump), has worn out his welcome even in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state, and the effects of the impeachment have already begun to eat into Trump’s base. Bevin has not conceded. He has several options for contesting Tuesday’s results.

Mississippi

Republican Tate Reeves handily defeated the state’s attorney general, Democrat Jim Hood, to win the governor’s race in Mississippi. Republicans maintain their control of the governor’s mansion and majorities in both legislative chambers.

Pennsylvania

“The blue wave crashes down on Pennsylvania again,” blares the Philadelphia Inquirer headline:

The political forces that shaped last year’s midterm elections showed no signs of abating Tuesday, as voters turned on Republicans and establishment Democrats alike in races from Philadelphia and Scranton to the suburbs of Delaware and Chester Counties.

Blogger Susie Madrak wanted to make sure the significance of Democrats’ “comfortable leads” in these local elections in the swing state of Pennsylvania don’t get lost in the other election news:

Delaware County in suburban Philadelphia has been under Republican control since the Civil War:

Democrats declared victory in three races Tuesday night for Delaware County’s five-member council, sweeping Republicans entirely from what had been an all-Republican panel just a couple years ago.

Working Families Party candidate Kendra Brooks won an at-large seat on Philadelphia City Council in a historic victory, taking a seat held by Republicans for the last 70 years, the Inquirer reports:

“We broke the GOP,” Brooks said at a victory party in North Philadelphia. “We beat the Democratic establishment. … They said a black single mom from North Philly wasn’t the right person but we have shown them that we are bigger than them.”

Democratic turnout in the suburbs in 2018 and 2019 could spell trouble for Trump in 2020:

Democratic pickups in Virginia occurred in Washington, D.C., and Richmond suburbs that already had trended in the party’s direction in recent years. In Kentucky, Beshear gained considerable ground on Bevin in Kentucky’s suburban Cincinnati, Ohio, counties that had helped propel the Republican to office four years ago. Other statewide GOP candidates in Kentucky won by comfortable margins. But the dip at the top of the ticket still offered another example in the Trump era of suburban voters’ willingness to abandon established Republican loyalties – even with the president making a personal appeal on behalf of a GOP standard-bearer.

One can hope.