Month: November 2020

This quote got to me simply because it’s so incredibly puerile.

Don’t let Joe Biden take credit for the vaccine. You know, Joe Biden failed with the swine flu. H1N1. Totally failed with the swine flu. Don’t let him take credit for the vaccines.The vaccines were me and I pushed the people harder than they’ve ever been pushed before. We got that approved and through and nobody’s ever seen anything like it.

Biden has never taken credit for the vaccines. But he has given credit to the scientists and the companies that made it happen in record time which is as it should be. They all had every incentive to get it done as quickly as possible and Trump’s rants had very little, if anything, to do with it. And, as we know, Trump actual performance on the crisis has been deadly.

But once again, I have to ponder why so many people like a leader who both whines incessantly about anything that doesn’t go his way and insists he is solely responsible credit for everything that does. Even setting aside their disinformation stream that may validate many of the things he says, I would assume they could see how childish and self-serving this is after a while. But they don’t. They seem to think his attitude is admirable and to respect all the whining and bragging. I’ll never understand that.

This new “Trump populist” GOP is going to be enough to make me hurl. It was already absurd that Richie Rich Trump was the avatar of down-home Real America but some of the young Turks jumping on the bandwagon is truly sickening:

President-elect Joe Biden, a state-college graduate who was once the poorest man in the U.S. Senate, is facing accusations of elitism from Republicans after defeating a billionaire incumbent with an Ivy League degree — a sign of how the politics of populism have been upended and redefined by President Trump.

In recent days, Republican lawmakers have sought to describe Biden’s early Cabinet selections as well-heeled and well-pedigreed but out of touch with the kinds of problems facing everyday Americans.

After Biden won the presidency in part by claiming a larger share of college-educated suburban voters, some of his GOP foes see his early moves as an opportunity to brand him as an elitist president catering to the nation’s coastal professionals at the expense of its heartland laborers. The burgeoning dynamic underscores how the battle over populism is likely to animate the nation’s politics even after Trump leaves the White House and is replaced by a man who has called himself “Middle Class Joe.”

While Trump’s populism often manifested in style rather than substance, he was able to appeal to a unique coalition of voters that politicians from both parties are now aiming to capture in a post-Trump era, said Amy Walter, national editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

“It’s this us-versus-them mentality — a belief system that there’s a real America, and we’re the only party fighting for it,” Walter said. “I think that’s where Trump was the most successful, and I don’t know how well anyone else is going to be able to do that.”

Biden’s initial Cabinet selections are giving some Republicans with national ambitions a first shot at trying.

His decision to nominate Harvard-educated Antony Blinken for secretary of state, Yale-educated Jake Sullivan for national security adviser and Yale-educated former secretary of state John F. Kerry as the special presidential envoy for climate sparked immediate backlash among Republicans aiming to take up the populist mantle.

“Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote on Twitter. “I support American greatness. And I have no interest in returning to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.”

Oh STFU, Rubio. And these guys are even worse:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) took to Twitter to attack Biden’s preferred Cabinet as “a group of corporatists and war enthusiasts.”

“Take Tony Blinken. He’s backed every endless war since the Iraq invasion,” Hawley, who attended Yale Law School, wrote earlier this week. “Now he works for #BigTech and helps companies break into #China. He has no sense of what working Americans want or need.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) tweeted that Biden was “surrounding himself with panda huggers who will only reinforce his instincts to go soft on China.” Cotton, a Harvard Law graduate, accused another Biden nominee of “selling Green Cards to Chinese nationals on behalf of rich, democratic donors.”

Meanwhile:

In contrast, Trump has boasted about his Ivy League degree from the University of Pennsylvania while mocking Biden for his educational credentials.

“Don’t ever use the word smart with me,” Trump told Biden during the first presidential debate. “Don’t ever use that word. Because you know what? There’s nothing smart about you, Joe.”

Trump’s Cabinet was the wealthiest in modern history, filled with well-educated secretaries with resumes bearing such names as Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and OneWest Bank Group. While the president touted their pedigrees, calling some of them “killers,” he also embraced a nationalist governing philosophy that resonated with working-class voters who welcomed his brash attacks on Washington’s elites and the ills of globalism.

Right. They “responded” to his shameless hypocrisy, lies and propaganda because he hates who they hate. Let’s not kid ourselves that their loathing of “globalism” had anything to do with ideology. It is racism and xenophobia, pure and simple.

We’ll see if it works as well with prancing hypocrites like Hawley and Cotton. I’m not sure it will. Like all white guy politicians in America with national ambitions they will be running around with guns and trucks and waving the flag trying to appeal to those same people. It’s been that way as long as I can remember. They are the center of the American political universe because the the stupid electoral college and Senate — and it’s completely ridiculous.

In his press conference on Thanksgiving, Trump was asked if he plans to attend the inauguration and he said he knew what he was going to do but didn’t want to talk about it right now. Now we know why. As Tom Sullivan writes below, he wants to counter-program the inauguration with a rally. Seriously. He is that petty.

The Daily Beast article he cites also says this:

In the twilight of his presidency, Donald Trump is discussing different ways to disrupt the impending Joe Biden era, chief among them by announcing another run against him.

According to three people familiar with the conversations, the president, who refuses to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election as he clearly did, has not just talked to close advisers and confidants about a potential 2024 run to reclaim the White House but about the specifics of a campaign launch…The president and some of his closest associates have already started surveying prominent donors to get a sense of who would be with him, or perhaps against him, if he chose to run in the 2024 election. Some top Trump allies have told The Daily Beast that they are doing what they can to stay in the president’s good graces, calculating that doing so will help ensure a seat at the table and a future in the party—in the event he runs again...

On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that during an Oval Office meeting earlier this month between Trump, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the president said he planned on running in 2024, if the 2020 election results were not nullified by Trump’s attorneys.

“If you do that—and I think I speak for everybody in the room—we’re with you 100 percent,” O’Brien told the president, according to the Bloomberg report…Still, various Trump diehards aren’t giving up on the flailing fight—but are keeping their minds open about a 2024 run and how much they’d relish seeing a revival tour.

Here is what I wrote several months ago about this:

This time I think Trump really does want to win, if only to prove that he has a legitimate claim to the White House. (Protecting himself from legal trouble for another four years would be nice too.) But even someone as thick as he is can read the polls, and I would guess that he’s plotting to turn defeat to his advantage if the worst happens.

It would seem that his plan is to sow chaos if possible, challenge the result where he can, and claim that Joe Biden’s victory is illegitimate, regardless of the margin of victory. He can then set himself up as the president in exile, free to make money from speaking fees and books while trying to rehabilitate his tattered “brand.” Perhaps that rumored media empire will finally come to fruition. Most importantly, he’d be able to keep his cult alive with the tantalizing promise of a rematch in 2024.

I have no idea if Trump would actually want to do that — he might want to pass the torch to Don Jr. or Ivanka, and there’s no guarantee Republican voters would play along all over again. But in many ways, losing will offer him the opportunity to do what he loves to do most, and make money while doing it: tweet, shoot the breeze with media sycophants, play golf and bask in the adulation of his adoring fans. Who knows, he might even hold rallies. He could have all that without all the unpleasantness of trying to do a job he has never been able to figure out how to do.

It’s depressing to think that Donald Trump won’t simply fade into obscurity if he’s defeated this fall, I know. But I think he’s going to be like that obnoxious party guest who’s always the last to leave, whether we like it or not. The silver lining is that if he does decide to stay in the game, he’ll be like a lead weight dragging down the Republican Party for another four years. You know he’s going to make their lives even more hellish than the Democrats — and after their cowardly enabling of his monumental failures and criminal misdeeds, it’s exactly what they deserve. 

It’s that last that makes me hope he does launch another run. It will divide the Republicans who, as much as they may have taken advantage of his incompetence and ignorance, do not want him to dominate politics for another four to eight years. They have other people with big ambitions and even as they cynically took advantage of his chaos, they know a cult of personality has a shelf life.

Daily Beast reports that the soon-to-be-former president thinks he can still keep everyone’s attention focused on him. Sources say he is already considering ways to keep alive talk of a 2024 presidential run, including by scheduling a 2024-related event during inauguration week, and possibly on Inauguration Day.

Is this guy needy or what?

According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, the president has privately bragged that he’d still remain in the spotlight, even if Biden is in the Oval Office, in part because the news media will keep regularly covering him since—as Trump has assessed—he gets the news outlets ratings and those same outlets find Biden “boring.”

If you haven’t noticed, Trump means to sabotage and undermine the incoming administration:

Trump’s refusal to concede has been supplemented by an attempt to make it harder for Biden to reverse his policy achievements. Indeed, even before Election Day 2020, various Trump officials working in the administration were charting paths forward to make it harder for Biden to reenter the Iran nuclear agreement.

The official position of the White House, Trump campaign, and large swaths of the Republican Party’s centers of power is, however, that Trump won—and they’ve dedicated substantial resources and money to propping up this alternate reality. And they are doing this—and raising large sums of money for it—even as the vast majority of these senior officials know that the president’s legal blitz, fronted by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, is doomed and fueled by conspiracy theory.

“Mr. Trump’s reality-denial is not just classless and inflammatory; his childishness may also make it harder for the new administration to hit the ground running in January,” the Washington Post’s Editorial Board wrote within a week of the election.

Classless, childish, he means to trash the place on his way out:

Susie Madrak tweets, “Remember when he said wind power was awful because it killed birds?”

Too bad Warren Zevon is no longer around to tweak Mr. Bad Example.

“No matter how many pork rinds Democrats eat or how many animals they kill or how many times they throw their arms around white policemen and kiss them on the lips — the right wingers will not change their minds because they will not even know about it,” Digby wrote here yesterday. I want to piggyback on that post this morning.

Digby was adding to David Roberts’ (@drvox) tweet thread on the ever-popular hand-wringing over Democrats sucking at messaging. Democrats fail for not supplicating themselves before guys in overalls in red-state diners, etc. Roberts wrote, “Because — stop me if you’ve heard me say this a trillion times — the RW has a giant propaganda machine that carries their messages directly to the ears (& id) of their voters. Dems lob messages out into the MSM & hope for the best.”

As it happens, a new neighbor complained about Democrats’ lousy messaging just yesterday. I agree. Democrats suck at messaging for lot of reasons. But as Roberts said (and I did yesterday), the right wing does indeed have an enormous propaganda machine separate from the Republican Party driving messaging for them. And not funded by it either. That is a structural as much as a messaging advantage.

Progressives complain about messaging endlessly but do not have the ideologue-billionaires willing to make the decades-long financial commitment to constructing such a system on the left. Nor do a big tent full of Democrats have the message discipline to endlessly repeat a single message like a church choir. “Show your creativity,” read a flyer for a D.C. antiwar protest a community college professor once showed me. His biggest concern? What costume he would wear to the march.

There are people on the left like Anat Shenker-Osorio who excel at messaging. Her work has successfully moved the needle on specific issue campaigns here and abroad. But she doesn’t have the throw to rebrand an entire political party. She seems to get more respect and work in Australia than here. Democrats at the national level prefer their pet consultants, many of whom graduated from jobs on Capitol Hill to D.C. consultancies where success depends more on personal connections and campaign experience than on training in marketing and cognitive science.

Plus, as I reminded my neighbor, no magic-bullet slogan will undo thirty years of Rush Limbaugh living inside people’s heads three hours a day, five days a week for 30 years. He started indoctrinating the right wing a decade ahead of Fox News. Restaurants piped his shows into “Rush Rooms” in the early 1990s so people could eat their lunches and not miss out on their daily Two Minutes Hate.

Roberts tweeted:

As Roberts said, stop me if you’ve heard me say this a trillion times, I worked in an office in the mid-1990s where a guy listened to Rush Limbaugh every afternoon on headphones and recorded the show. Using a small FM transmitter, he rebroadcast the show the next morning to fellow dittoheads’ radios in the building so their anger would be primed for Limbaugh’s live broadcast at noon. Their brains marinated in it each day for six hours. People have lost family members to Fox News brainwashing.

This is why instead of trying to fight an unfunded, losing battle against decades of networked propaganda, I advocate trying to improve campaign skills at the local level, 50-state strategy style. This is not a problem Democrats think their way out of. They need better skills at the grassroots level. Examine the map above for the grayed counties where Democrats have no organized committees or zero digital presence. Even a third of Stacey Abrams’ Georgia.

This is not to say better messaging is not important. But I swear, every other new volunteer who walks into our local headquarters wants to be assigned to messaging. Democrats suck at it, right? Unknown and untrained, they want to craft the national messaging campaign that through some undefined mechanism Democrats at the national level will take seriously, budget, and convince red-state Democrats to run with from St. George, Utah to Wise, Virginia.

In places like those across the country Democrats might win or at least shave Republican margins if they can master the basic mechanics of getting out the vote and ensuring the Democrats and leaners they turn out fill out the entire ballot. Under-resourced and under-trained county committees don’t need better messaging as much as to be able to put their pants on one leg at a time and tie their shoes. In that order. I have tried.

Heartlanders (as Roberts calls them) cannot be told Democrats do not worship Satan and have bits of baby between their teeth. They must be shown by more persistent community presence and effective campaign-craft that the caricatures they’ve been sold are lies. People they know personally are the best messengers.

Some good news:

California’s record wildfire season may not be completely over, but the trauma is ending for some of the state’s most vulnerable inhabitants: animals rescued from the blazes.

Several animals found injured during wildfires this year have recovered and will soon be welcomed into new homes.

One happy caregiver welcomed home her “semi-feral” cat, Ned, after he spent three months recovering from burns to his feet, face, ears, hind leg and tail at the hospital at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

The cat was rescued at Linda Kearney’s property in Vacaville, where he escaped from the LNU Lightning Complex fire, according to a UC Davis news release. Kearney managed to save 12 other cats that had been on her property, but one died and another remains missing. She plans to build sheds to house the animals on her property, according to the release.

“Being semi-feral, Ned was not always a cooperative patient,” said Kate Hopper, director of UC Davis’ Small Animal Clinic, in a statement. “His care team did a stellar job powering through that daily adversity to make sure he fully recovered.”

UC Davis treated more than 1,000 animals, both wild and domestic, affected by the LNU Lightning Complex fire, according to its website. Spokesman Rob Warren said the hospital responded to another 1,200-plus victims of the North Complex fire.

Many of the animals evaluated were deemed to be healthy and were moved to evacuation centers or sheltered in place, Warren said. The worst cases were brought to the university hospital for treatment — a total of 97 from both fires, similar to numbers in previous years, Warren said.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife treated fewer than 10 animals for burns this wildfire season, said spokeswoman Kirsten Macintyre.

On the wilder side, a raccoon dubbed Burnie was rescued from the Blue Ridge fire near Anaheim. The raccoon, estimated to be between 2 and 3 years old, arrived at the Wetlands & Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach on Nov. 2 covered in smoke and soot, said executive director Debbie McGuire.

A property owner had hired a trapper to catch another animal, but the raccoon had gotten stuck in it. McGuire couldn’t confirm how long the raccoon had been stuck there, or how close the fire had come to it.

“He was very lucky that he didn’t get burned or [die] because of being trapped, but he was pretty smoky,” McGuire said.

Once the evacuation order for the area was lifted, the trapper went back, discovered the raccoon and turned him over to OC Animal Care, which handed him off to the Wetlands & Wildlife Care Center, according to McGuire.

Burnie suffered first- and second-degree burns on his front legs and paw pads, plus minor abrasions to his nose. When staff conducted X-rays, they found he had also been shot, McGuire said.

“I was like, ‘Great, and on top of everything else, somebody tried to shoot you!’” McGuire said.

After treating his wounds for two and a half weeks, the center’s staff released Burnie back into the wild near where he was found.

A trio of mountain lion cubs have also licked their wounds from the devastating Zogg fire and are headed for a new home in Columbus, Ohio. Firefighters found “Capt. Cal” wandering alone a month and a half ago in Shasta County with singed whiskers and burned paws. He was brought to the Oakland Zoo, where he underwent surgery, hand-feeding and 47 days of round-the-clock care. Soon, twin female mountain lion cubs, estimated to be 5 weeks old when they lost their mother in the Zogg fire, joined him.

The three cubs will take their first flight with zoo officials to Indianapolis, then will travel to the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium. Zoo officials in Ohio hope to eventually introduce the cubs to Jessie, a nearly 17-year-old blind mountain lion who lost her brother Billy earlier this year, according to an Oakland Zoo news release.

“Even with the cubs’ tragic beginning, their story is actually one of survival and hope,” said Tom Stalf, president and chief executive of Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, in a statement. “We remain committed to the cubs’ care, and we will continue to share their important story with others as we work together to protect the future of wildlife and wild places.”

And speaking of Mountain lions:

I contribute money to build this bridge in LA. I don’t know if they will ever get it done …

I like it:

Former President Barack Obama said he believes President Trump garnered more than 73 million votes this election cycle, not because of policy but because some Republicans promote a narrative of “White men are victims.” 

Appearing on the syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club,” Obama said Wednesday, “What’s always interesting to me is the degree to which you’ve seen created in Republican politics the sense that White males are victims.” 

The country’s 44th president continued noting, “They are the ones who are under attack – which obviously doesn’t jive with both history and data and economics. But that’s a sincere belief that’s been internalized, that’s a story that’s being told and how you unwind that is going to be not something that is done right away, it’s going to take some time.”

Obama said during the interview that the Trump administration “has failed miserably in handling just basic looking after the American people and keeping them safe” during the coronavirus pandemic. Still, Trump put up a competitive fight against President-elect Joe Biden, Obama said, because millions felt “under attack” by Democrats. 

“It turns out politics is not just about policy, it’s not just about numbers, it’s about the stories that are being told,” the former president said. 

Later in the show, co-host DJ Envy asked Obama to answer those who said he hadn’t done enough for people of color while in office. Obama blamed congressional hurdles. 

“I understand it because when I was elected there was so much excitement and hope, and I also think we generally view the presidency as almost like a monarchy in the sense of once the president’s there, he can just do whatever needs to get done and if he’s not doing it, it must be because he didn’t want to do it,” Obama responded. 

Envy argued that Trump had behaved that way.

“Because he breaks laws or disregards the Constitution,” Obama replied. 

And let’s face facts. Obama never could have gotten away with what Trump has gotten away with. And we know why. In fact, I’m quite sure no Democrat could get away with that because their own party wouldn’t stand for it. Not because they are such paragons of virtue, of course, but because they are not complete nihilists and understand that democracy is already hanging by a thread.

Obama frustrated me a lot when he was president. And I expect Biden will as well. But right now it’s as if he and Biden are playing a sort of “good cop-bad cop” and I have to say that I find it to be refreshing.

I’m just putting this here for posterity:

For a US president obsessed by size – his hands, his wealth, his crowds – Donald Trump made something of a bold U-turn on Thursday night by addressing the country from a desk seemingly designed for a leprechaun.

Trump said on Thursday he would leave the White House if the electoral college votes for the Democratic president-elect, Joe Biden – the closest he has come to admitting defeat – but his furniture stole the limelight.

While he harangued reporters and repeated unfounded allegations of electoral fraud, the internet zeroed in on his unusually small desk. Some called it symbolic of Trump’s diminished stature, some wondered if it was photoshopped (it wasn’t), most just laughed.

The actor Mark Hamill tweeted: “Maybe if you behave yourself, stop lying to undermine a fair election & start thinking of what’s good for the country instead of whining about how unfairly you are treated, you’ll be invited to sit at the big boy’s table.”

The hashtag #DiaperDon swiftly trended on Twitter, with people mocking the president as an infant banished to the children’s table for Thanksgiving.

“Thought this pic was photoshopped, but nope, just hilariously symbolic! Mini desk. Tiny hands. Infinitesimally small soul,” tweeted Adam Lasnik.

Trump later sent a blizzard of tweets accusing the media of misreporting his comments and Twitter of making up “negative stuff” for its trending section.

The thing is that he is still the president and that press conference was one of the worst he’s ever held. It would be nice to simply ignore him except for the fact that at least 50 million people think he is telling the truth, maybe more. That’s a LOT of people.

Here it is in all its glory. Fox carried it live.

And by the way:

According to data from Ergonomics Center of North Carolina, the average American male’s hand is 7.61 inches long. Trump’s hand sits at the 15^th percentile mark. That is, 85 percent of American men have larger hands than Trump. As do a third of women.

But bear in mind, that is the 15^th percentile among all American men. Trump is tall – about 6-foot-3, half a foot taller than the 5-foot-9 average among American men, according to the Center for Disease Control. If Trump were compared to men of his stature rather than the public at large, his hands would comparatively be even smaller.

I was going to write about Maureen Dowd and her brother’s idiotic column, but just couldn’t find it in myself to do it. Luckily David Roberts offered up a pithy twitter thread that got the job done.

This is such horseshit.

Among the many reasons this is horseshit, this whole genre of liberal-scolding rests on the premise that the offended heartlanders are responding to what Dems actually say — the intramural debates in which people like Dowd are involved. They’re not!

By & large, Trump’s base has no idea what Dems actually say or do. They are responding to a ludicrous caricature they see on RW media (& RW social media). They are responding to lies & conspiracy theories. Dems changing how they talk *won’t change any of that*.

It’s very weird how America’s elite journalists/pundits/etc. wring their hands over “post-truth politics” & the problem of misinformation, but then turn around & treat the things voters do as a direct response to Dem “messaging.” Voters rarely HEAR Dem messaging.

Because — stop me if you’ve heard me say this a trillion times — the RW has a giant propaganda machine that carries their messages directly to the ears (& id) of their voters. Dems lob messages out into the MSM & hope for the best.

Originally tweeted by David Roberts (@drvox) on November 27, 2020.

Thank you. This constant whimpering about how mean everyone is from the “Fuck your Feelings” crowd is enough to make me want to break things.

No matter how many pork rinds Democrats eat or how many animals they kill or how many times they throw their arms around white policemen and kiss them on the lips — the right wingers will not change their minds because they will not even know about it. They only know what their media and their Facebook feeds are telling them and they have become addicted to more and more extreme, absurd nonsense. I mean, millions of them believe that the Democratic Party is run by a bunch of cannibal pedophiles and Trump and JFK Jr (who is actually still dead) has a secret plot to stop it. Millions. They’ve elected a bunch of other believers in that swill to the US Congress! Right now, Fox News is hemorrhaging viewers to Newsmax and OAN because it’s telling them that Trump didn’t actually win.

They. Are. Brainwashed.

This problem is way too complex for “Democratic messaging” to have any effect. It’s going to take years of deprogramming.

I’m very skeptical of the exit polls, especially this year. After last time when we spent years dealing with the myth that Trump’s voters were suffering from “economic anxiety” (they were not) it’s behooves us to take a more cautious approach to the knee jerk explanations about voters’ motivations. They will be able to sort out a lot of it over time but for right now it’s mostly people just using whatever data they can find to reinforce their priors.

However, the numbers are the numbers and it’s fair to take a look at those and speculate, particularly since the Democrats lost a dozen seats in the House and failed to take any state legislatures. Considering the gigantic turnout, it at least speaks to the idea that turnout alone isn’t the answer for Democrats.

Greg Sargent spoke with the Cook Report’s Dave Wasserman about all this:

This [loss] has given rise to a lot of infighting and a thousand explanations: Democrats suffered the taint of “the Squad” of leftists in Congress and the “defund the police” movement; they lost because squishy centrists talked only to suburban Whites; they faltered as their standing with non-college Whites grew more dire.

But what if there’s also another, more structural explanation, one rooted in realities about high turnout on both sides and already-built-in incentives for many GOP-leaning swing voters?

This idea emerged from my conversation about what happened with David Wasserman, the analyst of House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. An edited and condensed transcript follows.

Greg Sargent: Why did these losses happen?

David Wasserman: Republicans did a complete 180 on recruitment. This year all 12 Republicans who picked up Democratic seats so far were women or minorities. Republicans nominated candidates who looked like their districts, and didn’t necessarily sound like [President] Trump.

Sargent: Wasn’t it in some respects inevitable that turnout would be higher on the Republican side, relative to 2018? In 2018 Democratic turnout was lopsidedly high. And in 2020 it wasn’t, because Republicans also turned out. Right?

Wasserman: That’s true. Trump helped Republicans down-ballot in two ways. He drove out millions of low-propensity conservatives who would never vote for their average Republican Joe in a midterm. But he also allowed Republican candidates to pick up voters who could not stomach Trump.

In 2018, when he wasn’t on the ballot, the only opportunity for independent voters, especially suburban women, to vent their anger at Trump was by voting against a Republican congressional candidate. This time around, those voters could do so directly, but vote for a more conventional Republican down-ballot.

Sargent: The big story that everybody missed was the amount of low-propensity Trump base turnout that Trump would inspire, and how that would impact House races?

Wasserman: Right — even in highly college educated suburbs.

Sargent: The whole explanation then becomes a lot more structural. The big story is that incredibly juiced-up Trump-base turnout allowed down-ballot Republicans to get lifted by that tide, and pocket all those votes, and then just add Republican-leaning swing voters who voted against Trump but for their Republican congressional candidate.

Wasserman: I couldn’t have said it better.

Sargent: Another narrative is that Democratic down-ballot losses reflect the idea that the non-college White vote spread got even worse for Democrats, as David Shor said to Eric Levitz.

I have trouble squaring that with some data we’re seeing. The New York Times county-by-county analysis showed that Biden added 11 percent to 2016 totals in counties with a lot of non-college Whites, while Trump added 15 percent in those counties relative to 2016. The story I take from that is Biden added blue-collar Whites to the Democratic column, but Trump added some more.

It’s not simply Democrats losing more ground with them; it’s Democrats gaining ground but not as much Trump did. Your thoughts?

Wasserman: I’m in the camp that it’s amazing Biden held the line in those places and didn’t lose vote share relative to Hillary Clinton. Democrats’ trajectory has been downward in these places for quite a while now. The fact that Biden held on to what remains of support for Democrats is a testament to his biography, and the comfort level those voters have with him.

Sargent: It’s not just bio, right? Biden tried to articulate a somewhat more populist line than one would have expected from someone with his centrist past, talking about reshoring jobs and industrial policy, and even moving toward Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren populism in some respects. That had to have played some role.

Wasserman: Definitely. Instead of running a campaign entirely about Trump and his temperament, Biden ran a campaign focused on populist themes. That is marginally more effective in blue collar America.

Sargent: How does this translate back to the down-ballot losses? The voters we’re talking about that cost Democrats House seats — slightly Republican leaning, couldn’t stomach Trump, wanted to vote for a conventional Republican down-ballot — those are likely not in the main blue collar whites, are they?

Wasserman: I think they’re predominantly suburban. Remember when Trump settled on the message that Biden is a Trojan Horse for the radical left? In retrospect the message those voters might have taken away was that Biden doesn’t sound that bad, but congressional Democrats are about to drive the country off a socialist cliff.

It’s possible that voters priced that into their choice for Congress.

It could have been that they weren’t hearing enough from Democratic candidates on why they weren’t radical leftists.

A lot of voters have no idea where Democratic candidates stand on police funding. Because Democrats never mentioned it in their ads.

Both Biden and Democratic congressional candidates failed to highlight support from law enforcement.

Sargent: It sounds like the key distinction here is between blaming the losses on the existence of the left and “defund the police” on the one hand, and not rebutting Republican attacks on the other. The first is less of an explanation, and the second is more of one.

Wasserman: This is not a situation where “The Squad” bear responsibility. It’s that Democrats in swing districts didn’t do enough to communicate where they actually stood. And I would put Biden in that category.

I had a conversation with a Biden pollster in September, and he sympathized with the view that Biden should feature at least some law enforcement in his ads. But he told me that the process of scripting these ads was akin to a sausage factory, and that he didn’t believe that could ever make it through, given the need to not offend the left.

It was more a failure to rebut Republican attacks than a reflection of where “the Squad” actually stands.

Sargent: If the voters who voted against Trump but for down-ballot Republican congressional candidates aren’t really blue collar whites, then is there any sense in which the Democrats’ blue collar white problem explains these losses?

Wasserman: Democrats clearly lost districts with large blue collar populations — MN-07, IA-01 — and came close to losing WI-03, IL-17. So clearly there was movement against Democrats since 2018 in several blue collar districts, in part because the electorates in those districts got more blue collar.

Sargent: Where does that leave us on the question of whether the Democrats’ blue collar white problem is responsible for the losses?

Wasserman: I would say it’s not the driving factor, but it’s a factor.

Sargent: What does this all tell us about what’s next for Democrats in the 2022 midterms?

Wasserman: The traditional rules might not apply to 2022. Midterm electorates tend to draw out a more college educated electorate. This current alignment may offset the expected advantage for the out-party in a first term midterm.

Sargent: If I understand you correctly, the college educated white shift to Democrats could play to their advantage in the midterms, creating a situation not like 2010.

Back in 2010, the tea party wave, there were probably a lot of college educated whites who were more Republican. Whereas in 2018 Trump had alienated them and now we saw in 2020 the advantage for Democrats among educated whites had solidified, that could end up helping Democrats in 2022.

Wasserman: That could mitigate the typical backlash to first-term presidents. It’s also not clear the backlash will be as large, because Democrats do not have unified control of Congress.

Sargent: In 2018 and 2010, there was unified control.

Wasserman: And in 1994.

Sargent: So what’s the upshot?

Wasserman: It’s going to be a very unique midterm. And we’re probably going to be in the dark for quite a while about what it will look like.

Honestly, I don’t see that as being anything new. There was a time when the House Democratic coalition had a bunch of Blue Dogs — conservative Democrats who voted with the Republicans a good part of the time, particularly on fiscal matters and national security. As the parties polarized ideologically, Republicans just started voting for Republicans in those districts, which are predominantly blue collar and culturally conservative. And at the same time the college-educated, suburban types, especially women, have been moving away from the Republicans. It didn’t start with Trump and evidently, the trend is still ongoing.

I suspect that the ticket splitters were among those people who are still feeling some trepidation about identifying as Democrats and thought they were being practical. And frankly, I don’t think it’s the fault of the candidates failing to separate themselves from the progressives, it’s the fault of the party at large for failing to tie the GOP establishment to Trump and fully illustrate the fact that they were instigators and collaborators in everything Trump did.

I understand why Biden didn’t do that. He needed to figure out a way to eke out a win under these structural difficulties and the unity theme probably helped him with those people. But I think the national party should have been running against the GOP accomplices from the beginning — making it clear that there was no daylight between Trump and McConnell and aiming that argument right at the suburbs.

But what do I know? This country’s institutions are divided in ways that favor the rural, conservative minority that is getting smaller by the day and the strain is becoming overwhelming. I don’t think it’s sustainable that the Republicans can continue to dominate the vast majority of the population in this way but it’s going to be very difficult to change it. And it’s always possible that they could become even more successful by appealing to parts of the Democratic coalition with a nationalist, authoritarian, faux-populist, message as seems may have happened with some male racial and ethnic minorities this time. There’s no guarantee this won’t go the wrong way.