Month: November 2020

Steve Bannon once said that the primary goal of the Trump administration was to disassemble the administrative state. Four years of chaos may have accomplished that goal and it’s going to make Biden’s job that much harder.

This piece by Mark Schmidt in the NY Times makes the point that even if there is no lame-duck war, some kind of intervention by the Supreme Court or electoral college gambit, the crisis is still with us:

There’s much more to governing than legislative initiatives. And unlike previous Democratic presidents, with low expectations for legislative breakthroughs, Mr. Biden could hit the ground running with the day-to-day work of administrative governance, and also unlike predecessors such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, he and his core staff have the experience in the executive branch that others needed years to acquire.

But they may have to reassemble a broken government before they can begin to use it for good.

The Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis together have revealed the limits of our capacity to respond to crises that demand basic coordination and resources, limits made far worse by members of the Trump administration but not solely their fault.

In personnel and regulatory rules, the core of the day-to-day business of governing, the next president is likely to encounter a minefield of Trump-era changes; a bureaucracy that’s lost much of its experienced middle tier; and hundreds of officials who have passed the Trump-loyalty tests reportedly organized by the White House personnel director, Johnny McEntee, or cabinet officials like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who asked Mr. Trump to fire his agency’s inspector general in May.

The Trump administration has moved aggressively to alter regulations affecting the environment, workplace health and safety, education policy and programs like Medicaid. This newspaper has documented the completion or advancement of rollbacks of more than 100 environmental rules, some of which went even beyond the wish lists of the companies that will benefit. The Economic Policy Institute found 50 actions that would limit workers’ rights.

Some changes made by executive order can be reversed quickly by the same method, but most will require lengthy rule-making periods of their own, with time for public comment and possible legal challenges.

All these regulatory changes, and the complexity of reversing them, will be like sand in the gears in the implementation of any action on climate, student loans or health care, as well as to the ordinary functioning of government. And they will make enacting an effective medical, economic and social response to the pandemic even more challenging.

The Trump administration’s shocking sabotage of the census adds another complication that will ripple through the management of the more than 130 federal programs, including Medicaid and food stamps, that use census data to allocate funds.

Steve Bannon and other acolytes of Mr. Trump denounced the “administrative state” as if it were a permanent and unchanging feature, but Mr. Trump has effectively used the administrative state to dismantle itself, beginning quickly to drive out experienced midlevel lawyers, scientists and analysts, even devising tactics like moving whole offices far from Washington. Throughout the federal government, political loyalists so inexperienced they have not yet completed college have been installed in key positions. Many are likely to try to “burrow in,” converting political appointments to protected Civil Service positions.

Officials below the cabinet level — with titles such as director of the Bureau of Land Management, or assistant secretary for postsecondary education — will be as important as the higher-profile positions, and filling them quickly (or replacing unqualified people who hold those positions now) with experienced people familiar with the agencies should be a priority.

But Mitch McConnell’s Senate can grind this process to a halt, too, even if it confirms many of Mr. Biden’s top-level nominees.

There are still constructive efforts to prepare for governance in 2021, including by the very nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transitions. Perhaps the most comprehensive catalog of actions a Democratic president could take without support in Congress is the “Day 1 Agenda,” published by the liberal magazine The American Prospect in 2019. It includes ambitious steps to strengthen antitrust enforcement and forgive student loan debt.

But the basic challenge of claiming control of the executive branch and carrying out a public health and economic response to the pandemic requires far more than a day to be ready.

Mr. Biden and his team might also not realize how much has changed, and how many of the basic structures of daily governance have been broken. One value of democratic norms is that they create expectations that allow smooth transitions across administrations or within them. As those norms have been broken in the Trump years, so have those expectations.

People’s direct experience of government and the services and security it provides, or fails to provide, shapes our sense of ourselves as citizens in a democracy as much as, or more than, elections and legislation. Much will depend on the Biden administration’s preparation for what it finds when it finally takes the keys to the White House.

How can you prepare for such a thing? It has been four years of degradation of the executive branch. That was the plan.

Never say Trump didn’t accomplish anything.

The United States is reeling as infections and hospitalizations soar to all-time highs. Outbreaks are emerging from coast to coast.

Which place is the worst off? Our reporters Mitch Smith and Amy Harmon dug into the data and found lots of places that would qualify — depending on the metrics.

The metro area with the most recent cases per capita: Minot, N.D.

North Dakota has the most total cases per capita and the most recent cases per capita, and the Minot area, known for its Air Force base, is doing worse than anywhere else.

The county with the most known cases: Los Angeles County, Calif.

More than 325,000 cases have been identified in Los Angeles County over the course of the pandemic, more than in 44 states — but this figure can be a bit misleading. On a per-capita basis, Los Angeles County has far fewer cases than many other counties in California and elsewhere.

The state with the highest hospitalization rate: South Dakota.

About 54 of every 100,000 South Dakotans are hospitalized with Covid-19. The testing positivity rate remains sky-high, and there are few signs of progress. On Tuesday, Mayor Paul TenHaken of Sioux Falls cast the tiebreaking vote to strike down a citywide mask mandate, which he has called “simply unenforceable.”

The biggest cluster: Avenal State Prison, Calif.

In the U.S., more than 30 correctional facilities have reported more than 1,000 cases each, but none have more than Avenal State Prison, in the San Joaquin Valley. It has logged more than 3,300 known cases among prisoners and correctional officers.

The state that has unraveled the fastest: Wisconsin.

At the beginning of September, Wisconsin averaged about 700 cases a day. This week, it’s averaging more than 6,000. Hospitals are packed, positivity rates remain high, and testing supplies are strained. More than 300 deaths were reported in the state over the past week, a record.

The big city with the worst death toll: New York City.

More than 24,000 New Yorkers, or one in every 351 city residents, have died from the virus. Still, some rural counties in other parts of the country may have higher death rates.

This review of Obama’s memoir shows how Obama came to see the obstructionism of the GOP as a reaction to the election of the first Black president and how it unleashed the racist beast. But he also sees something else that I think is extremely important: Trump is them and they are him. Does Biden see that too? God, I hope so:

The timeliest reflections, however, come when Obama delves into the politics of Washington, particularly the work he put into negotiations with Republicans like Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell and then House Speaker John Boehner. But that introspection also offers a window into how Obama saw the opposing party change from his 2008 campaign to when he handed over the White House to Trump in 2017

Obama writes that he “wonder(s) sometimes” about whether 2008 Republican nominee John McCain would still have picked Palin if he had known “her spectacular rise and her validation as a candidate would provide a template for future politicians, shifting his party’s center and the country’s politics overall in a direction he abhorred.””I’d like to think that given the chance to do it over again, he might have chosen differently,” Obama writes. “I believe he really did put his country first.”

Obama’s views of his successor come through clearest in his recounting of the period in 2011 when Trump was fanning the racist lie that Obama was not born in the United States.Trump’s antics were seen initially in the White House as a joke. But Obama writes he came to regard Trump’s media ubiquity and characteristic shamelessness as merely an exaggerated version of the Republican Party’s attempts to appeal to White Americans’ anxieties about the first Black president — a sentiment he said “had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center — an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology.Trump, who Obama said phoned the White House in 2010 to offer his assistance helping plug an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (he was turned down), had determined that saying or behaving in ways previously seen as distasteful or unacceptable now earned him constant media attention.

“In that sense, there wasn’t much difference between Trump and Boehner or McConnell. They, too, understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true,” he writes, adding: “In fact, the only difference between Trump’s style of politics and theirs was Trump’s lack of inhibition.“

When Obama, against the advice of his advisers, released his long-form birth certificate during an appearance in the White House briefing room, he said he told young staffers afterward: “We’re better than this.”

Obama’s views on the changing Republican Party are infused into all aspects of the book. When the former president writes about his trip to India in 2010, he links the themes of rising illiberalism in a conversation with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the rise of the Tea Party in the United States.

Domestically, too, Obama writes that the more confrontational Republican Party impacted some of the day-to-day decisions he made as president, especially when it came to dispatching then vice president Joe Biden, now the President-elect, to Capitol Hill to negotiate on his behalf.

“One of the reasons I’d chosen Joe to act as an intermediary — in addition to his Senate experience and legislative acumen — was my awareness that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do,” Obama writes.

Biden often made a hash of those negotiations, you’ll recall and Harry Reid was apoplectic at his intrusion into the 2011 budget talks. He “trusted” Mitch. Let’s hope good old Joe hasn’t forgotten the hard lessons they learned then and now. Republicans will not be his partners.

I’m glad to see that Obama recognizes that there is no daylight between Trump and the Republicans. And since Biden will no doubt be staffing his administration with many Obama veterans (Ron Klain is a superb choice to be the chief of staff) who are very well aware that the GOP has become a malignant, radical faction that they will have to work around.

Kevin McCarthy has reportedly said that the candidates who won house seats this cycle were those who clung to Trump not those who withdrew from him. Trump’s loss has not broken the fever. And that’s because it’s not about Trump. He’s just the living symbol of what they’ve been for a long, long time.

This piece by historian Sean Wilentz is 100% correct. But I’m afraid it’s too late. The Republican collaborators have been holding the reins for four years and they just let him run free for their own pleasure. They became unAmerican a long time ago:

President Donald Trump’s rejection of an orderly transfer of power to Joe Biden, accompanied now by his refusal to concede defeat based on fabricated allegations of electoral fraud, poses a profound threat to American democracy—the most profound yet of his dangerous presidency. That the Republican leadership has supported him in his subversion severely worsens the situation, with dire implications for the future of American politics.

It is unprecedented for an unsuccessful incumbent President and his leading congressional allies to refuse to acknowledge the results of an election. Since 1800-01—the first time the country experienced anything like a transfer of power from one party to another—defeated presidents have bowed to the will of the people. They have not always done so happily. After his loss in 1800, John Adams wrote bitterly that “we have no Americans in America,” and that “a group of foreign liars, encouraged by a few ambitious native gentlemen have discomfited the education, the talents, the virtues, and the property of the country.” Adams was so disgusted that he refused to attend the inauguration of his successor, Thomas Jefferson. But Adams accepted that, as he wrote, “we federalists” had been “completely and totally routed and defeated.”

In 1828, Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams, was depressed by his loss to Andrew Jackson after a savage campaign on both sides, although he had foreseen the outcome for some time. Like his father, Adams failed to show up for his successor’s inauguration, and a few years later protested when the Harvard Board of Overseers voted to present President Jackson with an honorary degree. (Himself a member of the Board, Adams boycotted that ceremony as well, dejected that “my darling Harvard” would honor “a barbarian who could hardly spell his own name.”) In 1869, the impeached and discredited Andrew Johnson, having been passed over for re-nomination, skipped the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant.

But personal bitterness is one thing; disloyalty to democracy another. Until now, no defeated President has failed to respect the transfer of power, let alone deny the results of the election. There have been two hotly disputed elections, in 1876 and 2000, which produced prolonged wrangling over who won. But even then, once the winner was determined, the loser—first Samuel Tilden, then Al Gore—gave way.

Even on the verge of the Civil War, respect for democracy overcame nasty divisions. Incumbent James Buchanan was not a candidate in 1860, but he strongly opposed the antislavery politics of the new president, Abraham Lincoln, whose election prompted South Carolina and several other Southern states to declare their secession from the Union. Yet Buchanan rode in a carriage with Lincoln to the Capitol from the Willard Hotel near the White House. There, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, whose opinion in the Dred Scott decision in 1857 had effectively declared the platform of the Republican Party unconstitutional, duly administered to Lincoln the oath of office. At the nation’s hour of maximum peril, the defeated acknowledged their defeat—except, of course, the Confederate secessionists who were posing the peril and who would dissolve the Union rather than submit to democracy.

Trump’s denial of the legitimacy of Biden’s election is a renunciation not just of American tradition but of the remaining chords of comity that are fundamental to American democracy. Urging his tens of millions of supporters as well as his congressional backers to reject Biden’s victory creates not simply a fissure but a chasm in the nation’s politics and government. It is one thing for a loser to criticize the new administration, hoping to turn public opinion against those who vanquished him. Herbert Hoover, after a brief decent interval following his defeat in 1932, became an implacable foe of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies, delivering one speech after another attacking the Administration, some of which he collected, four years later, as a book entitled American Ideals Versus the New Deal. Failed presidents may always try to regain the office. Martin Van Buren, an incumbent defeated in 1840, ran again on the third-party Free Soil Party ticket eight years later. Grover Cleveland, beaten in 1888, won the next time in 1892. But for Trump to deny Biden’s legitimacy moves beyond opposition into active betrayal of the constitutional compact, something closer to the Confederate secession, attempting to trash not only the new president but also the democratic process that elected him.

In the short run, of course, the Republican Party could shut down Trump’s assault by disowning it and acknowledging the new Administration as duly elected. Then it could perform as the loyal opposition. But its leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have supported the MAGA fantasy that Trump may well be the victim of a monumental fraud, if only it could be revealed. The damage the Republican leaders have already done to our democracy through their collaboration with Trump is incalculable. But their test today is far greater than whether they once again humor Trump’s reckless delusions for their own cynical ends, starting with winning the Senate runoff elections in Georgia. The larger question is whether the Republican Party wishes to remain a legitimate democratic political party. McConnell and McCarthy have already given their answers. If they and their respective caucuses persist, they will have tainted their party far beyond what Trump already has.

Like me, readers are probably tired of watching Democrats’ early vote leads in the cities evaporate on Election Day when returns come in from dozens of smaller red counties.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) blames it on Democrats’ lack of “core competencies.” She means Democrats at the national level. She should turn her attention to lack of local competencies. An insane amount of money and effort goes into winning races that should go into “party building” so Democrats can win races.

The Washington Post examined what happened to the projected blue wave last week. Political parties in general have “become hollow — top-heavy at the national level, weak at the state and local levels, and lacking a rooted, tangible presence in the lives of voters and engaged activists alike.”

The patronage machines are gone. Mobility, sprawl, and the general “atrophy of civic life in the later 20th century” left local committees, as I’ve said before, with all the institutional vigor of a men’s fraternal organization.

Here is where Barack Obama blew it:

If any individual can bring order to these unwieldy components, it is the president. Yet paradoxically, the Democratic Party has suffered the most under Democratic presidents. Republican presidents going back to Eisenhower have systematically invested in their party’s organizational capacities at the national, state and local levels: funding local party-building initiatives, assiduously recruiting activists, volunteers, and candidates, teaching campaign techniques, and launching fundraising systems. Democratic presidents, in contrast, have repeatedly emphasized enacting policies over party-building.

As Ocasio-Cortez correctly pointed out, Obama failed to sustain the momentum of his groundbreaking 2008 and 2012 campaigns. He diverted the best talent, data, and analytics into Organizing for America, an outside 501(c)(4) group legally prohibited from coordinating with the Democratic Party. The Democratic National Committee (DNC), for its part, abandoned Howard Dean’s much–admired 50-state strategy. When Hillary Clinton inherited the DNC in 2016, she found it “on the verge of insolvency,” riddled with bad data and riven with internal strife. Before leaving office, Obama acknowledged he failed as a party-builder: “We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.”

The problem is most state parties are underfunded and lack the bandwidth to do grassroots party-building. Party-building is not really the Democratic National Committee’s remit. Nor is it in the portfolio of the DCCC or the DSCC. They are essentially caucus campaign PACs. Anyway, high turnover in those organizations makes long-term planning tenuous at best.

When I first conceived For The Win, a friend formerly with the Clinton White House looped me in with the DNC’s political director, an Obama campaign veteran. He liked the concept and asked to see the finished product. In April 2016, his office called to ask if it could distribute the primer to the 50 states. A few weeks later, however, Hillary Clinton cinched the presidential nomination. Team Obama was out, Team Clinton was in. And that was that. The guide went nowhere. That is why I distribute it to county committees myself. If no-name-me sent it to state parties, it would die in committee.

The Post notes that in Nevada former senator Harry M. Reid “professionalized and grew the state party” there. It has a permanent staff and full-time positions in field work and opposition research, etc. This gives Nevada Democrats the ability to organize over “longer time horizons than the next Election Day.”

The Trump-era “Resistance” brought many new players to party politics, including women who rose quickly to take control of local party committees in those small red counties. (I know of two.) Once in place, they would find few resources and little training for them in coordinating a months-long, get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort. Party “basic training” assumes that by the time someone is running the county, they’ve picked up what they need to know by the seat of their pants over multiple election cycles. Bad assumption.

One state’s 273-page county chair’s guide devotes an entire half page to GOTV planning. It includes such handy advice as “Organize rides to the polls.” It assumes the new chair knows what that is, has seen it done, and has some conception of how to organize it, when to start, how to promote it, how many volunteers it would take to coordinate, etc. Like I said, bad assumption.

There is much work to do.

Republican tactics for securing minority rule read like a version of an old Monty Python sketch. Amongst their weaponry are are such diverse elements as: gerrymandering, vote suppression laws, census rigging…blah blah blah.

Gerrymandering will be on tap once again in 2021 in Republican-controlled state houses across the country. Ari Berman spoke with Slate’s Mary Harris about Democrat’s failure to take control of state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, and Texas.

And North Carolina.

Having failed to regain control of the legislature there last week, Democrats there face another round of Republican gerrymandering and attempts at vote suppression, and another 10 years of litigation.

A three-judge North Carolina state court in September 2019 finally accomplished what the U.S. Supreme Court refused to: it ruled Republican state legislative maps were partisan gerrymanders unconstitutional under the state constitution and ordered them redrawn. With Democrats holding a 6-1 advantage in the state’s Supreme Court, Republicans gave up the fight. But after last week’s elections, that balance has shifted (pending final vote counts). At best, Democrats will retain a 4-3 advantage if they lose the seat now held by Democratic N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley.

For the last ten years, North Carolina Republicans enjoyed the fruits of ill-gotten minority rule. Even with existing court precedents, expect them to try for another 10 years. As I’ve said before, this is their theory of governance:

1. Find the line.
2. Step over it.
3. Dare someone to push you back .
4. No pushback? New line.
5. Repeat.

Berman tells Slate why legislative control matters:

Statehouses are important in a lot of different ways. They control voting laws. They control health care. They control environmental laws. But if you’re talking just about political power, state legislatures, with a few exceptions, are the ones that draw districts both for themselves and also for the House of Representatives. So the districts that these state legislatures are going to draw in 2021—which is when the next redistricting cycle happens—are going to determine who’s in control of these legislatures for the next decade. It’s also going to determine what the House of Representatives looks like for the next decade. State legislatures don’t get a whole lot of attention, but when it comes to how political power is distributed in America, they are incredibly, incredibly important.

As in North Carolina, Republicans in Wisconsin used the gerrymander to secure minority rule there and — as with Roy Cooper in North Carolina in 2016 — to strip Democratic Governor Tony Evers of executive powers:

The first thing Republicans did after Evers was elected governor in 2018 was strip him of his power in key respects. They said that he couldn’t do all of these things that previous governors, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, had the power to do. That really set the tone for what Wisconsin was going to look like. All throughout his administration, they have not cooperated with him. They’ve challenged his ability, for example, to get COVID under control. They refused to postpone the presidential primary in April, leading to those disastrous images of people waiting in line for hours. And unfortunately, I think that’s a playbook Republicans are going to try to use against Joe Biden. If you paid attention to how Wisconsin Republicans treated Tony Evers after he won, you should not be at all surprised by the way that Republicans are treating Joe Biden right now: to try to delegitimize his election, not cooperate with him, and do everything they can to try to hamstring his ability to govern once he’s elected.

Berman expects Wisconsin Republicans to attempt stripping Evers of his power to veto new maps. North Carolina governors lack that authority already. In Texas, Republicans may draw new districts based on eligible voters rather than on residents. This will exclude children and immigrant communities, especially in Democratic areas.

Trump’s baseless allegations of voting “irregularities” even in places where Republican retained legislative control could provide a pretext for making voting even harder, Berman warns.

There is not a quick fix for this, he cautions. Democrats “have a red America problem.” Many of the seats they need to flip are “in the redder parts of purple states,” in more conservative suburban and rural areas.

You can’t win if you don’t show up to play. And if you do show up, you’d best have game. Democrats’ underperformance in red areas is not as simple as attitudes, but lack of organization, lack of persistent party infrastructure.

Democrats have a “last mile” problem. Getting voters to the polls is not enough. What they do once they get there means winning or losing for local candidates. Undervotes bite.

Me? I am tired of watching Democrats’ early vote leads in the cities evaporate on Election Day when dozens of red counties turn out in places Democrats write off as not vote-rich enough to organize. Maybe build capacity out there to at least shave Republican margins? Just a thought.

Anyone have a line to Stacey Abrams?

Democrats' last mile problem: GOTV falls short for down-ballot candidates if county committees cannot mobilize to put sample ballots into voters' hands at the polls. Can yours? pic.twitter.com/26SNuWIWKl

— For The Win, 3rd Ed. (@ForTheWin_guide) November 11, 2020

After @BorisJohnson says he spoke with Pres.-elect Joe Biden, @angelaeagle asks, "Does the PM now have any advice for his erstwhile best friend, Pres. Trump, whose continuing refusal to accept the results is both embarrassing for him and dangerous for American Democracy?" pic.twitter.com/JHZJdr3hk6

— CSPAN (@cspan) November 11, 2020

I’d guess Boris isn’t going to get the “friends” break at Turnberry anymore. I doubt it was worth much anyway…

I see a whole lot of people jumping on exit poll data to issue congratulations or recriminations and analyzing the results if it is written in stone. It is not.

After months of campaigning and days of counting ballots, the major news media outlets have projected that former vice president Joe Biden has defeated President Trump.

However, Biden didn’t do as well as public polls projected. Some groups unexpectedly appeared to have shifted toward Trump, such as Latinos. In rushing to understand what happened, some have relied on the National Exit Poll (NEP) conducted by Edison Research to form narratives about what happened and why. But that data source appears to have significant flaws — which could skew those narratives’ conclusions.

Specifically, the NEP’s estimates of who voted — what percentage of voters fall into any given demographic group — appear to be wrong. This kind of problem has plagued the NEP in the past and, apparently, it is an issue again this year. If the NEP’s estimate of who voted is incorrect, then the vote margins — the percent by which each demographic group voted for each candidate — could be incorrect. That can distort our picture of how different groups voted. And if the numbers for how different groups voted Trump/Biden are wrong, they shouldn’t be used to try to explain what happened in this election.

This year the NEP suggests that just 65 percent of voters were White and 34 percent were White without a four-year college degree. These estimates are dramatically smaller than what other research has found during prior elections. For example, the States of Change project — a series of reports that I co-authored with Ruy Teixeira and Bill Frey — found that 74 percent of voters were White in 2016, and 44 percent were White non-college. These estimates are identical to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of a large voter-validated survey.

What can that tell us about this year’s voters? We know that the relative turnout of different groups does not typically change dramatically between elections. If the relative turnout rates of different groups stayed the same, long-term demographic trends would lead us to expect 72 percent of 2020 voters to be White and 41 percent to be Whites without a college degree. For the NEP’s estimates of 65 and 34 percent to be correct, the relative turnout rates of different racial groups would have to have changed substantially and in ways that are not believable.

To show this, I calculated the turnout rates that are implied by the NEP’s racial composition using several pieces of additional information. I started with estimates on the number of eligible voters in the country from the United States Election Project and combined them with projections about the racial composition of eligible voters from the States of Change project. This gives us a rough estimate for the raw number of eligible voters that fall into different racial groups.

From there, I took the projected final vote counts from the United States Election Project and combined them with the voter composition estimates that have been publicly released by the NEP. This gives us a rough estimate for the raw number of voters that fall into different racial groups.

Divide the raw number of voters in each group by the raw number of eligible voters in each group and you can derive the turnout rate implied by the NEP.

I find that the NEP implies that 66 percent of White Americans turned out in the last election. This is just barely higher than the implied turnout rates of Hispanic Americans (63 percent) and notably lower than the implied turnout rate of Americans who are Asian or belong to another racial and ethnic group (74 percent). That’s out of line with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, widely considered to be one of the best sources of information about the U.S. electorate. The CPS has consistently shown that White citizens cast ballots at rates higher than those groups.

Further, analysis by political scientists Steven Ansolabehere, Bernard Fraga and Brian Schaffner suggests that the Current Population Survey is actually overstating the rate at which non-White voters cast ballots. This makes the NEP’s implied turnout rates — and the vote composition they are derived from — all the more unbelievable.

That means analysts trying to understand who voted how should not rely on the NEP

Let me be clear about my point of view. I am agnostic about the substance of the arguments people are making using the NEP. Maybe a given group did shift toward Trump or Biden and maybe it happened for the reasons being put forward by commentators. But the data source many people are using to make these arguments appears to have flaws that should give them pause.

Although the NEP survey will eventually be recalibrated based on the final election results — a process that may correct some of these issues — the current problems explained here suggest that analysts who wish to understand the 2020 election should find another source of data.

We know the results of the big poll — the election. And that’s going to have to be enough for now. We’re just going to have to wait for other data to try to understand what it all means. I hope people don’t start making assumptions about what the Democrats “need” to do based on incorrect exit polls. A whole lot of people did that last time and it was very destructive to understanding the electorate properly.

Everyone’s got a theory, including me, about why the Republicans are all falling into line behind Trump’s predictable but insane refusal to concede the election. It shouldn’t be a surprise because it’s what they’ve done every step of the way since election day 2016. NBC’s Hayes Brown outlines the top two prevailing theories, which I’ve noted a number of times as well, that they’re just humoring the man-baby so he doesn’t take his GOP and go home and that they want to keep the crazies riled up for those two races in Georgia.

Then he talks about this, which I haven’t seriously entertained but am beginning to think about:

[T]hree: For all the buffoonery and disinformation, this is a serious endeavor from the Republican Party to invalidate the election and keep Trump in office.

Ezra Klein, the founder of Vox.com, has been making that argument for days now, summing up his fears in an article headlined “Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight.”

The “this is a real coup” point of view gained traction Monday night when Attorney General William Barr issued a memo granting federal prosecutors the authority to “pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities” before election results were certified. The instructions went against the Justice Department’s previous guidelines discouraging opening criminal investigations before election results are certified, keeping law enforcement from potentially swaying the results.

Even though it was couched against “fanciful or far-fetched claims,” the memo was enough of a shift to prompt Richard Pilger, who was heading the election crimes division of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, to leave his post. “Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” he wrote, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.”

Meanwhile, Emily Murphy, the once obscure head of the General Services Administration, is in the spotlight for refusing to sign off on documents releasing resources, including millions of dollars in funding and office space, for the president-elect’s transition staff. The White House has made sure that orders not to cooperate yet with the Biden team went out throughout the rest of the government, from the Pentagon to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Biden has yet to begin receiving intelligence briefings for the same reason.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s (joking?) declaration that “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” didn’t do anything to calm the waters.

Neither did a new surge of “acting” appointments at the Defense Department, after Secretary Mike Esper was fired Monday. Key positions, including Esper’s chief of staff and the top defense official for intelligence, have been filled with Trump loyalists — several of whom have previously twisted intelligence to benefit the president.

It looks suspicious, I admit. But there could be simpler political reasons for doing that, namely getting dirt on political opponents, “burrowing” and maybe even getting some “deliverables” to certain political allies. Still:

Now, the first two theories fit together hand in glove, but the third is something of an outlier, more sinister than self-serving. Philadelphia Inquirer opinion columnist Will Bunch did his best to synthesize them into one Grand Unified Theory in this tweet Monday evening:

But here’s where I remain unconvinced: Do we know for sure that all of the players are on the same page? Is there an agreed-upon off-ramp if it’s just posturing? Ten Republican state attorneys general have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the voting rights case sitting before the court. Are all of them also just playing at the politics of this?

National Republicans have been great at presenting bad faith arguments they know aren’t true, as have Trump administration officials — state lawmakers, however, are more in the habit of getting high on their own supply, so to speak. And given how central they are to the whole process, the way they move forward will have lasting effects.

It’s very hard to know how many of these people have been truly radicalized and how many are just the same old craven opportunists. His own theory is actually the scariest.

Are they driving the train so fast that it can’t be stopped?

Which leads me to theory No. 4, which is my belief: Republicans think they’re taking advantage of the president’s claims while waiting for this all to blow over and Biden to become president.

Wisconsin‘s and Michigan’s legislatures — both of which are controlled by Republicans — have ordered committees with subpoena power to investigate the election results. And Pennsylvania’s Republican House speaker has called for an audit of all ballots, which are still being counted, before the race is certified and the state’s 20 electors are chosen.

Republicans have been great at presenting bad faith arguments they know aren’t true.

Here’s where things get weird: Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., agreed Friday when Fox News host Sean Hannity suggested, like right-wing commentator Mark Levin, that Pennsylvania’s Legislature consider seating its own set of electors. State Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman was quoted in The Atlantic as considering doing just that if the election isn’t decided by the Dec. 8 deadline to name electors. He backtracked in September, and the party now denies that it would ever consider such a thing.

But I can see a world where enough momentum gets built up that it becomes hard to stop the train. So say Pennsylvania’s Legislature does pass a resolution naming a new slate of electors, prompting a similar move from Wisconsin’s and Georgia’s legislators — those slates are challenged, and so the election reaches the Supreme Court after all. As far as I can find, the Supreme Court has ruled on so-called faithless electors but never on the question of whether state legislatures can decide electors when elections can’t be credibly decided. And there’s a small, but nonzero, chance that a majority of the justices opt to say, “Sure, that’s what the Constitution originally said.” Mass chaos ensues.

Even without that scenario, there’s the little problem of what to do about the very agitated base once Jan. 5 is past and the Senate races are over. What happens if these voters still refuse to believe that Biden should be sworn in as president? Is that when the GOP leadership decides it’s a good time to alienate the base?

No. They will “reluctantly” accept Biden as president but nurse this grudge forever. They know very well that the conservative movement has been built on grievance — they will whine about it forever.

But still, are they even remotely in control of this thing? It sure doesn’t look like it to me and the consequences could be dire.

The question then remains: How much of this is shadowboxing for the benefit of a single man’s bruised ego? How much of it is an actual attempt to keep that man in office — versus a way to selfishly harness his supporters’ rage? And how much is this just another Trumpworld scam? Is there even a real difference between these points anymore? And are they prepared for what will happen when they finally have to admit that Biden is going to be president?

The Washington Post quoted an unnamed senior Republican official who showed just how the lines have blurred in their heads:

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

And you know what? Sure. If that’s your honest analysis of the situation, that’s your prerogative. But it’s also honest to say that this is the GOP treating the results of the election as just another hustle. For years we’ve been trying to suss out why the GOP establishment would debase itself to go along with a proven con man like Trump. But it’s pretending now like this is all still a game, a grift against its base that I’m not sure it can control. So I really need Republicans to step up, quit playing dumb for once and act like what they’re doing actually has consequences. I don’t think any of us will like the results if they don’t.

Yes, I think we all need them to stop with the game-playing regardless of their motives. They are playing with fire and the vengeful president has a warehouse full of Trump-branded gasoline.

After 2016, historian Timothy Snyder, an expert on Nazi Germany and authoritarian regimes wrote a book called “On Tyranny” that has guided a lot of us through these last few years as we watched the orange would-be autocrat and his eager sycophants and collaborators break the country.

He makes an important point in this piece about how this insane baby-tantrum/hail-mary strategy is more than just an annoying inconvenience. It’s a threat unto itself:

When you lose, it is good and healthy to know why. In the First World War, the conflict that defined our modern world, the Germans lost because of the overwhelming force assembled by their enemies on the Western Front. After the Americans entered the war, German defeat was a matter of time. Yet German commanders found it convenient instead to speak of a “stab in the back” by leftists and Jews. This big lie was a problem for the new German democracy that was created after the war, since it suggested that the major political party, the Social Democrats, and a national minority, the Jews, were outside the national community. The lie was taken up by the Nazis, and it became a central element of their version of history after they took power. The blame was elsewhere.

It is always tempting to blame defeat on others. Yet for a national leader to do so and to inject a big lie into the system puts democracy at great risk. Excluding others from the national community makes democracy impossible in principle, and refusing to accept defeat makes it impossible in practice. What we face now in the United States is a new, American incarnation of the old falsehood: that Donald Trump’s defeat was not what it seems, that votes were stolen from him by internal enemies — by a left-wing party. “Where it mattered, they stole what they had to steal,” he tweets. He claims that his votes were all “Legal Votes,” as if by definition those for his opponent were not.

Underestimating Donald Trump is a mistake that people should not go on making. Laughing at him will not make him go away. If it did, he would have vanished decades ago. Nor will longstanding norms about how presidents behave make him go away. He is an actor and will stick to his lines: It was all a fraud, and he won “by a lot.” He was never defeated, goes the story; he was a victim of a conspiracy. This stab-in-the-back myth could become a permanent feature of American politics, so long as Trump has a bullhorn, be it on Fox or on RT (formerly Russia Today) — or, though Democrats might find this unthinkable, as an unelected president remaining in power.

After all, a claim that an election was illegitimate is a claim to remaining in power. A coup is under way, and the number of participants is not shrinking but growing. Few leading Republicans have acknowledged that the race is over. Important ones, such as Mitch McConnell and Mike Pompeo, appear to be on the side of the coup. We might like to think that this is all some strategy to find the president an exit ramp. But perhaps that is wishful thinking. The transition office refuses to begin its work. The secretary of defense, who did not want the army attacking civilians, was fired. The Department of Justice, exceeding its traditional mandate, has authorized investigations of the vote count. The talk shows on Fox this week contradict the news released by Fox last week. Republican lawmakers find ever new verbal formulations that directly or indirectly support Trump’s claims. The longer this goes on, the greater the danger to the Republic.

What Trump is saying is false, and Republican politicians know it. If the votes against the president were fraudulent, then Republican wins in the House and Senate were also fraudulent: The votes were on the same ballots. Yet conspiracy theories, such as the stab in the back, have a force that goes beyond logic. They push away from a world of evidence and toward a world of fears. Psychological research suggests that citizens are especially vulnerable to conspiracy theories at the time of elections. Trump understands this, which is why his delivery of conspiracy theory is full of capital letters and bereft of facts. He knows better than to try to prove anything. His ally Newt Gingrich reaches for the worst when he blames a wealthy Jew for something that did not happen in the first place.

History shows where this can go. If people believe an election has been stolen, that makes the new president a usurper. In Poland in 1922, a close election brought a centrist candidate to the presidency. Decried by the right in the press as an agent of the Jews, he was assassinated after two weeks in office. Even if the effect is not so immediate, the lingering effect of a myth of victimhood, of the idea of a stab in the back, can be profound. The German myth of a stab in the back did not doom German democracy immediately. But the conspiracy theory did help Nazis make their case that some Germans were not truly members of the nation and that a truly national government could not be democratic.

Democracy can be buried in a big lie. Of course, the end of democracy in America would take an American form. In 2020 Trump acknowledged openly what has been increasingly clear for decades: The Republican Party aims not so much to win elections as to game them. This strategy has its temptations: The more you care about suppressing votes, the less you care about what voters want. And the less you care about voters want, the closer you move to authoritarianism. Trump has taken the next logical step: Try to disenfranchise voters not only before but after elections.

The results of the 2020 elections could be read to mean that Republicans can fight and win on the issues. Reading the results as fraudulent instead will take Republicans, and the country, on a very different journey, through a cloud of magical thinking toward violence.

If you have been stabbed in the back, then everything is permitted. Claiming that a fair election was foul is preparation for an election that is foul. If you convince your voters that the other side has cheated, you are promising them that you yourself will cheat next time. Having bent the rules, you then have to break them. History shows the danger in the familiar example of Hitler. When politicians break democracy, as conservatives in Weimar Germany did in the early 1930s, they are wrong to think that they will control what happens next. Someone else will emerge who is better adapted to the chaos and who will wield it in ways that they neither want nor expect. The myth of victimhood comes home and claims its victims.

This is no time to mince words. In the interest of the Republic and of their own party, Republicans should accept the results.

Delegitimizing a president is a GOP tactic from way back. In 1960 they said it was stolen and in 1992 they said “He is not MY president.” The birther conspiracy was all about delegitimizing Obama’s presidency. So this is nothing new. But Trump, as always, takes it to the next level. He personally wants payback for the Russia investigation (and may even be under pressure from outside forces, as Emptywheel surmises.)

Republicans do not believe it is ever legitimate for their enemies to govern. But this time, they are even more invested in this narrative because they see the writing on the wall and recognize that they have lost the popular vote in this country all but one presidential election since 1988. They have a problem with a shrinking base that’s only going to get worse.

If there’s one thing Trump has taught them it’s that there are very few guardrails in our system is someone is willing to discard any respect for rules, norms and laws. Power has a life of its own, and they are increasingly willing to exercise it even in the face of a majority of Americans not only disapproving but voting against them. And they are training their own minority of voters to believe this is necessary to “save” the country.

The assault on democracy we are witnessing is not something Democrats can afford to sweep under the rug so they can “move on” and get back to those “kitchen table” issues. This is a crisis and they need to see it that way.