Month: August 2020

You know, those timorous shrinking violets. Well, actually they aren’t, as this piece by Ed Kilgore explained:

It’s been fun the last couple of months to monitor the many excuses Trump supporters have marshaled to dismiss the polling trough POTUS has been in for most of the summer. The polls were wrong in 2016! (Not really, unless you forget Trump lost the popular vote by more than two points.) He’s as popular as Obama! (Actually, he’s never come close to the job approval ratings his predecessor had just prior to the 2012 election.) He’s like Harry Truman, the straight-talker who shocked the world! (No, he’s not, for multiple reasons.)

So some spinners rely on a hardy perennial that is hard to rebut because it requires proving a negative: the Shy Trump Voter Theory. It’s borrowed from a legitimate, if sometimes exaggerated, British phenomenon — the Shy Tory Factor, or the reluctance of UK voters to tell pollsters they intend to vote for the Conservative Party. But you can’t just transfer it across the pond and assert it holds true for Republicans generally and Trump fans specifically. Yes, in theory at least, the idea that “social desirability bias” might make some Trump voters reluctant to disclose they plan to vote for a crude and thuggish man like the president is plausible. But on the other hand, doesn’t Trump’s base glory in being “politically incorrect,” and in “owning the libs”? Didn’t Salena Zito teach us that they take Trump “seriously but not literally,” having a good perspective on their warrior-king’s outlandish traits?

Still, the Shy Trump Voter Theory keeps popping up in the agitprop of those who want to dismiss Biden’s lead, such as Republican pollster Robert Cahaly of the Trafalgar Group (per Tom Bevan):

Cahaly’s survey, using the same methodology he employed four years ago but with an enhanced system for targeting likely voters, shows the race in Michigan as extremely competitive. The pollster also continues to see signs of “shy” or “reluctant” Trump voters in the electorate. Known as “social desirability bias,” it refers to the effect of respondents not telling the truth about whom they will vote for because they think their choice will be viewed unfavorably by others, including those conducting the survey. In a phone interview today, Cahaly said the social desirability bias he is seeing is “worse than it was four years ago.” 

Cahaly’s claims notwithstanding, the research on this subject, particularly as conducted by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, is not ambiguous: The Shy Trump Voter may not be entirely a myth, but they’re not numerous enough to fill a Trump rally, much less change an election result or rebut a poll, as Ariel Edwards-Levy reports:

Voters who made up their minds in the last week before the 2016 election, the AAPOR report concludes, broke heavily toward Trump, especially in the key states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. In another survey, when voters were asked both before and after the election whom they supported, those who gave inconsistent answers disproportionately moved toward Trump. Theoretically, that could indicate that many of those supposed late deciders were instead Trump supporters concealing their stance until the last minute. 

But a number of other tests conducted to assess that possibility, the report found, “yielded no evidence to support it.” 

To make a long story short, undecided voters, particularly in the states that won Trump his inside-straight victory in the Electoral College, broke heavily for Trump at the last minute. They weren’t hiding their voting intention; it hadn’t really been formed.

Could that happen again this November? Sure, in theory it could, though typically undecided voters don’t tend to break in favor of universally known incumbents like Trump. Right now the right track/wrong track polling numbers that reflect assessments of the status quo are extremely negative, as one might expect in the middle of a pandemic and a sharp economic contraction. Barring some really massive change in public health and economic conditions, a Trump “surprise” is just not very likely.

Anything can happen, of course. Maybe those delicate flowers who love Trump but are afraid to tell a stranger on the phone because … well, I don’t know … will materialize this time. You have to assume that most of them are male because any woman who loves Trump but lives in a household that doesn’t like him is a rare bird indeed. In fact, logically if there are any shy voters out there, they are white women who can’t stand Trump but don’t want to admit that to their domineering, Trump fanatic, husbands.

But the truth is that this is always the sign of a losing campaign. That they’re doing it so early says something.

By the way, the Trafalgar Group is the Republican polling outfit that Michael Moore is currently waving around.

I can’t believe this is coming from a president. It’s stunning, even for Trump:

Here’s a US Senator doing the same thing:

They’re not trying to hide their strategy. Incite violence in order to win theelection:

His toadies are helping:

But remember, this is really just one of his greatest hits. It’s a schtick. Last time it was terrorists and Mexican rapists. Now it’s “Blacks and liberals in Democrat cities”

Trump’s out there bragging about some obscure polls that show him up. But this one is real. From ABC/Ipsos:

President Donald Trump‘s efforts to build his appeal and define his opponent at the Republican National Convention, using pageantry and the White House as the backdrop, had little apparent impact on the electorate’s impressions of both him and former Vice President Joe Biden, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds.

Trump’s week of celebration did not improve his favorability, even among his own base, and the country still remains widely critical of his handling of the major crisis of his presidency: 

Less than one-third (31%) of the country has a favorable view of the president in the days after he accepted the Republican nomination for the second time — a stagnant reality for Trump. His favorability rating stood at 32% in the last poll, taken a week earlier, right after the Democratic National Convention.

Trump finds himself in a much different position than his chief rival.

In the new survey, which was conducted using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, Biden’s favorability remains higher than his unfavorability, 46% to 40%, solidifying his improvement in favorability from last week, when attitudes about the Democratic nominee improved to a net positive from his slightly underwater position prior to the convention.

Biden’s favorability ticked up from 40% in an Aug. 13 poll to 45% just after the Democratic convention.

Among Democrats, too, Biden’s favorability climbed seven points after his convention — showing signs that he’s solidified support among his base. But Trump’s favorability dipped slightly — by four points among Republicans in the newest survey.

Trump has slipped to 31% approval for his handling of he coronavirus but his numbers have come up among Republicans and whites (is there any other kind?) on his handling of racial unrest.

Most Americans (62%) view the incident with Blake, which has left him paralyzed from the waist down, as a sign of broader problems in the treatment of African Americans by police. But that number is not as stark as the 74% who said the same in the wake of the killing of Floyd.

The downward trend is driven by a decline across ideological and racial groups, but most sharply among Republicans and white Americans. The last time this question was posed by ABC News/Ipsos was in early June, when 55% of Republicans and 70% of whites said the fatal incident involving Floyd was a sign of a broader problematic pattern.

Now, only 27% of Republicans and 52% of whites say the same, a decrease of 28 and 18 points, respectively.

If Nate Silver is right, Trump’s desperate need to pull stunts around this will backfire on him and he’ll lose some of that support. Again.

In any case, a majority of people still don’t like him. Why would they?

The rest of this poll will be released and we’ll see a bunch of others in short order. We’ll see where we really stand then. ABC’s headline says the race has “stagnated” so stay tuned.

Looks like the president is going right into the belly of the beast to get things going:

President Donald Trump will travel to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, amid fury over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in the back, which left the 29-year-old Black man paralyzed.

White House spokesman Judd Deere told reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday that Trump will be meeting with law enforcement officers and “surveying” some of the damage from recent protests that turned destructive.

The visit is certain to exacerbate tensions in the city, where a crowd of about 1,000 demonstrators gathered outside a courthouse Saturday to denounce police violence.

Trump has been running his reelection campaign on a law-and-order mantle, denouncing protesters as “thugs” while voicing his support for police.

In his acceptance speech during the virtual Republican National Convention, Trump painted the election in hyperbolic terms as a stark choice between peaceful streets and anarchy.

Trump’s opponent for reelection, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his running mate, Kamala Harris, have accused Trump of rooting for violence amid unrest in Wisconsin.

“He views this as a political benefit,” Biden said in an interview on MSNBC. “He’s rooting for more violence, not less. And it’s clear about that.”

He should stay away, but if he goes, he should be trying to calm things down. He’s obviously trying to incite his own people. Today Trump Jr retweeted this:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more irresponsible act by a president. At least since he teargassed protesters for his last photo-op.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect his tiny bump is going to disappear fast.

Marquee races are not the only places to build power this election. Your limited time and money invested into “undervalued gems” can deliver wins that while not high-profile can be high-impact.

Sam Wang, founder of the Princeton Election Consortium recently presented a virtual town hall entitled “Redistricting Moneyball 2020.” Paul Rosenburg examines the approach for Salon:

As with the original “moneyball” concept, made famous by Michael Lewis’ book, the idea is to use smart statistics to identify undervalued prospects as a way of leveraging the power of small donors.

The “moneyball” approach (from baseball) focuses on political races with a high propensity for flipping the U.S. Senate and on down-ballot races with the chance of splitting control of legislatures that will draw new districts in 2021. In states without independent redistricting, ensuring bipartisan control of legislatures minimizes the chances of seeing the sort of heavily skewed districts the Republican REDMAP project delivered in 2011.

“There are Texas State House races that have the potential to influence multiple congressional districts over the next decade,” says Connor Moffatt of the the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

Rosenburg writes:

What’s more, those races overlap considerably with the “Texas Nine” congressional districts that political scientist Rachel Bitecofer has highlighted as prime targets for flipping in her 2020 forecast. That’s not even considering the psychological and strategic impact of accelerating the shift of Texas from solid Republican territory to a purple or even a blue state. Texas, in short, is loaded with undervalued gems in this election cycle. 

PGP uses a statistical approach to identify races with the most “voter power” where a little bit of money and effort can yield influential results, if not high-profile ones. Several tight Senate races have more chance of taking away Mitch McConnell’s power than Amy McGrath’s challenge in Kentucky. A close race in Montana, a state with few residents, has the highest propensity for flipping the Senate to Democrats in the PGP scheme.

Find a list of U.S. Senate races and their relative voter power here, as well as tabs for “Moneyball” states where “a few hundred voters mobilized in the right districts could bring a state bipartisan control of redistricting, leading to fairer districts for a decade.” These include TX, MN, KS, FL, CT, and NC. Voters in those states should examine where their money and effort could do the most good.

Factors include not just how votes can impact individual races, but how close the balance is between the major parties in state legislative chambers. There are several other groups both on the national and state levels offering similar guidance, Rosenberg explains:

The point is, you have options and you can find information. You can decide what battles matter most to you, and prioritize them on your terms, based on much better evidence and better data than hand-waving promises from politicians and misleading media narratives. And we can all count on the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to keep on developing new tools to help citizens fight for fair representation in the next big wave of redistricting battles that’s just ahead.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Last week had the feel of one of the later Harry Potter films. Dark forces are afoot.

But before we burrow into this fall’s election, flash cuts of just how dark politics has become and a more encouraging perspective on where we may be headed.

Another person is dead after a shooting Saturday night in Portland. Details are sketchy at this hour. Police have not said whether the victim is related to street clashes that broke out downtown between “Trump 2020 Cruise Rally in Portland” caravanners and Black Lives Matter counterdemonstrators.

It is as if two oppositely charged worlds are colliding violently. Matter and antimatter.

Police in Kenosha, Wisc. last week charged 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse in the shooting deaths of two men and the wounding of another during protests of police violence. Rittenhouse’s supporters rushed to justify the killings. They viewed videos the rest of the country viewed and declared the rifle-toting teen the real victim. It was self-defense, declared a Christian crowdfunding site after GoFundMe refused to host the campaign:

Kyle Rittenhouse just defended himself from a brutal attack by multiple members of the far-leftist group ANTIFA – the experience was undoubtedly a brutal one, as he was forced to take two lives to defend his own.

Now, Kyle is being unfairly charged with murder 1, by a DA who seems determined only to capitalize on the political angle of the situation. The situation was clearly self-defense, and Kyle and his family will undoubtedly need money to pay for the legal fees.

We have been here before, Heather Cox Richardson wrote last week. Each time, the country faced a crisis as reactionary forces fought to maintain a hierarchical past they saw slipping away, one weighted heavily in their favor. But Americans true to its founding principles corrected imbalances in political and economic power and pushed America into the future. Under Abraham Lincoln. Under Theodore Roosevelt. And under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Boston College historian wrote after last week’s RNC spectacle:

Tonight’s event at the White House demonstrated that we are in another great crisis in American history. A reactionary group of older white men look at a global future in which questions of clean energy, climate change, economic fairness, and human equality are uppermost, and their reaction is to cling to a world they control.

But that world is passing, whether they like it or not. Even if Trump wins in 2020, he cannot stop the future from coming. And while the United States will not meet that future with the power we had even four years ago, we will have to meet it nonetheless. It will be no less exciting and offer no fewer opportunities than the dramatic changes of the 1850s, 1890s, and 1930s, and at some point, Americans will want to meet those challenges.

If history is any guide, when that happens, we will restore the principle of equality before the law, and push America into the future.

Much is at stake in this election. Perhaps even the fate of the Republic. Let’s look at what you can do about it.

“If you are a political party, you never want to have a really bad election,” Charlie Cook of the Cook Report once wrote. “But if you’re going to have one, you really don’t want to have it in a year that ends in a zero.” Democrats losing big in North Carolina in 2010 meant a decade of litigation over the most egregious gerrymandering in the country. That was a mid-term election. This year’s includes the presidency, but much more than that:

With both the redistricting process and many of the details of the once-arcane world of election administration becoming increasingly partisan, who is sitting in a governor, state-attorney-general, or secretary-of-state office can matter a lot, to say nothing of who controls the state legislative chambers.

[…]

But beyond the implications of downballot offices for policy, the election process, and redistricting, it should be remembered that a party’s health and future is dependent on the development of a farm team. Far more often than not, those who hold the highest political offices came up the ranks of elective office (Trump is a notable exception). A wipeout or near-wipeout election can cost a party the better part of a generation of future leaders. For Democrats, 1980, 1994, 2010, and 2014 were massacres, just as Republicans took big hits in 1974, 2006, and 2018. Like a farmer losing seed corn, it’s a costly loss.

Rather than focusing on horcruxes and throwing all our resources against Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell, Paul Rosenburg recommends a “Moneyball” approach to rebalancing power based on the famous by Michael Lewis book. There are hidden-gem races out there where your limited money and effort can yield much higher returns than the marquee races. Because it is not enough to defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden. Republicans this year need to suffer a wipeout election.

I’m going to explore that in second post to follow this morning.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

My god:

It was a Sunday in mid-February at the Trump International Hotel. The whole gang was there: Mick Mulvaney, Reince Priebus, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mike Pence, and yes, the Big Man himself. POTUS had flown in from Daytona Beach just in time for the party, hilariously complaining in his toast about having been inconvenienced by the groom, Stephen Miller: “He is the only one who could have a damn wedding in the middle of Presidents’ Day weekend. I’m sure it didn’t affect anybody here.” The rabbi was an adviser to the ambassador to Israel, and there was an Elvis impersonator. This may not have been every girl’s dream wedding, but for the bride, Katie Waldman, it was perfect. Stephen, 34, and Katie, 28, had fallen in love—as young people do—while figuring out how to separate children from their parents at the border. Now, thanks to Katie, Stephen was officially off the market. It didn’t throw her that half the country was blasting him as a white nationalist due to a recent cache of leaked emails, or that one chunk of his family had disowned him. No, this was the “perfect day,” Katie tweeted, and Stephen Miller, “the perfect man.”

To those in the public who didn’t know much about the bride, the whole thing was amazing. Not only had Stephen found a human woman to marry, but Katie, as the pictures showed, was pretty, with a warm, vivacious smile. Stephen, by contrast, cut a villainous figure. Cartoonishly so, like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons—with an orb-like forehead, funneling into a long, pale face; mistrusting, soulless eyes; and a petulant lower lip. Rarely has a face been such an apt illustration of the person inside.

[…]

But to those who knew Waldman, the union wasn’t surprising. As a college classmate from the University of Florida puts it, “The only thing she loves or values in this world is power. Anyone she attaches to in her life is simply a pawn to feed her addiction to it.” After all, even Goebbels was a ladies’ man. Accounts from her high school and college years bring into focus a woman with charm and energy—she had YOLO tattooed inside her lower lip—but it was always trained toward power. These people recall how Waldman cut corners, employed dirty, even illegal tricks, and laughed as she got away with it. Accounts from more recent colleagues add detail to the portrait—one not of a counterbalance to Miller, but rather of a powerful reinforcement. A Washington media flack who’s rapidly ascended—from Capitol Hill to the Department of Homeland Security to the vice president’s office—she can display a bright, even friendly manner, but behind the scenes, acquaintances say she can be ruthless and underhanded, and at times has seemed callous about the suffering of others.

In some way, Mr. and Mrs. Miller are emblematic of young Washington, circa Trump: arrogant and gleefully pugnacious. They have few close friends outside the administration. They don’t hang out much in public because they tend to get harassed. They recently traded D.C. for the more secluded Arlington, Virginia. Outside of Jared and Ivanka, and Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, they are perhaps the city’s most powerful couple under 50. Their influence reaches beyond immigration policy into the two most pressing issues of the day: civil unrest around systemic racism, and the pandemic. He plays a key role in Trump’s messaging, decrying the removal of Confederate monuments and the threats to American “heritage.” She, as the spokesperson for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, is a poster child for its disastrously bungled response. The Millers’ respective issues dovetail in a single phenomenon: harm to immigrant communities and people of color. And given the new couple’s knack for pulling the levers of power, and the Trump administration’s control over the judicial and legislative branches, they may be with us for a long time to come.

I’m still blinking at “after all, Goebbles was a ladies man.” Wow, that’s awelcome embrace of reality, right there. Good for Vanity Fair.

But this couple is a truly evil portent of what’s to come if the US can’t kill the GOP beast. It simply must be done. We can see what it’s become and we know where it’s going.

By the way, Waldman works for that nice Christian fellow, Mike Pence.

Masha Gessen at The New Yorker:

On Thursday night, Donald Trump stood on the South Lawn of the White House and spoke for more than an hour. Nominally, this was the final speech of the Republican National Convention, during which Trump accepted the Party’s nomination for a second term as President. (He mangled this procedural line, saying that he accepted the nomination “profoundly,” rather than “proudly,” as his script indicated.) But Trump looked less like a candidate than like a king standing in front of his castle, flanked by members of his dynasty, warning of an insurgency at the gate. The entire four-day spectacle of the Convention seemed designed to assert the existence not of a government, which begins and ends with elections, but of a Trump regime, born of a revolution and challenged by what Trump called “anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters, and flag-burners.”

Trump’s use of the White House, where he appeared every day of the Convention; the Washington Monument, illuminated by fireworks at the Convention’s finale; Fort McHenry, where Vice-President Mike Pence delivered his speech on Wednesday; and the U.S. government-owned Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where most of the Convention speeches were delivered, is, on the face of it, a violation of the Hatch Act, which bans the use of federal property for campaign purposes. It is also an assertion of impunity: violations of the Hatch Act are punishable by removal from office, but Trump shows that he can get away with this just as he gets away with using the Presidency for personal profit and rejecting congressional authority during impeachment proceedings. It is also a territorial claim. Toward the end of his speech, Trump went on an apparently unscripted riff about the White House: “The fact is, I’m here. What’s the name of that building? But I’ll say it differently, the fact is, we’re here, and they’re not. To me, one of the most beautiful buildings anywhere in the world, and it’s not a building, it’s a home, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not even a house, it is a home.” It is his home, he seemed to say, and the “socialists,” as Democrats were repeatedly—and inaccurately—branded throughout the Convention, are trying to divest him of his property.

The Trump regime represents a break with the past. Unlike at the Democratic National Convention, no past Presidents spoke at the Republicans’ gathering; every night was anchored by Trump’s family members. The Republican Party dispensed with a platform this year, and its entire agenda could be summed up on a single sheet of paper: the Party supports Trump. Most speakers at the Convention talked of Trump as having wrought revolutionary change, ushering in a new political era—indicating, again, that Trumpism is not merely the governing philosophy of another Republican Administration. It is a new system entirely.

Trump’s regime broadcast an image of itself as solid, established. Speakers appeared framed by the imperial architecture of Washington, D.C. The Democratic National Convention, pulled together from dozens of prerecorded clips and live streams, had an out-of-space, out-of-time quality to it. Like many of us these days, D.N.C. speakers seemed to inhabit spaces that are nowhere and everywhere at the same time, rooms that consist only of what is in front of a laptop camera. One got the sense that the Democrats’ cameras were angled so no one could see the bed (or the child or the mess) behind the speaker. The Republicans’ camera, on the other hand, showed the pillars and grand vault of the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where speakers made grand stage entrances even though, apparently, they addressed an empty room; most of them were in one place: Washington, D.C. On the last night, at the White House, the cameras showed a bank of American flags and, during the finale, lingered on the raised platforms, a red-carpeted arrangement that Trump apparently favors for the grandest of his grand appearances. (After he spoke from a similar structure during the militarized festivities on July 4, 2019, he incessantly tweeted aerial shots of it.)

To call things what they are, the Republicans adopted a fascist aesthetic for this year’s Convention. It was in the pillars and the flags; the military-style outfit that Melania Trump wore to deliver her speech, on the second night; the screaming fervor with which many of the speeches were delivered; the repeated references to “law and order”; and phrases like “weakness is provocative,” which the Republican senator Tom Cotton offered on the final evening. The aesthetic—and the rhetoric—held out the carrot of greatness, of what Hannah Arendt, explaining the appeal of totalitarian movements, called “victory and success as such,” the prize of being on the winning side, whatever that side is.

Gessen sees the two conventions as “Greatness vs Goodness” and wonders whether or not people will choose greatness” in a time of anxiety, which she seems to think is a natural reaction.

I’m not so sure. Americans have a great reserve of self-regard in the “greatness” category. It’s”goodness” that’s in question and having Trump as president makes it impossible to achieve. He is, obviously, a very bad person. Maybe the “greatness” people like that but I remain hopeful that a healthy majority of Americans don’t. We have a very checkered history, some of which is coming to a head as we speak. But I think that most Americans still want America to be a good country. Trump is promising something very different.

12 years ago, this was an actual headline on CNN: “Obama as witch doctor: Racist or satirical?”

The posters, showing Obama wearing a feather headdress and a bone through his nose, have been popping up in e-mails, on Web sites and at Tea Party protests for weeks.

The image has stoked debate and cast attention on the rallies, which have drawn people Tea Party organizers describe as on the fringe and not representative of the overall movement. Their general viewpoint, leaders say, is that there’s been too much federal government intervention, particularly concerning health care and taxes.

The witch doctor imagery is blatantly racist, critics contend.

Others remind that presidents get made fun off all the time, and the election of a black president has only made racially charged political satire more sensitive.

While not denying the crudeness of the image, Tea Party organizers stressed that those who carry the signs are a few “bad apples.” 

“That [witch doctor] image is not representative at all of what this movement is about,” said Joe Wierzbicki, a coordinator of the Tea Party Express, a three-week series of protests across the country.

There was a lot of argument at the time about this but, as you can see, the Tea Party people themselves knew very well it was racist. There were a lot of people in the media, however, who bent over backwards to excuse them.

Of course it was racist. We knew it, they knew it. It was the media that kept “asking” if it was.