Month: September 2021

Junior lucked out. Look what happened:

Trump adviser Jason Miller made news on Tuesday when Brazilian authorities allegedly questioned him for hours after he attended CPAC Brasil 2021, held in Brasilia.

Miller, however, wasn’t the only denizen of Trumpworld to attend the conference. Rather, the decision by an as-of-yet unnamed Brazilian authority to question him highlights a series of bizarre links between Brazil’s leader Jair Bolsonaro and the American right.

First off, why is there a CPAC Brasil?

CPAC did not return TPM’s request for comment. CPAC chair Matt Schlapp issued a tweet after the Miller debacle, however, referring to his presence there as part of CPAC’s “delegation” to the conference.

I just talked w our @CPAC delegation chair in Brazil and so far no additional detentions but many are boarding soon. https://t.co/8apRdjUNHf

— Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) September 7, 2021

CPAC appears to have sent more than a “delegation.” The American organization’s website describes the Brazilian gathering as another “CPAC conference,” this time held overseas, and says that it originated from a friendship between Schlapp and Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo.

CPAC Brasil ran Sept. 3-4, with Miller, who also works as CEO of right-wing social network GETTR, delivering a closing speech on Sept. 4. It’s the second time CPAC has supported a conference in Brazil, with the first taking place in 2019.

In addition to Miller, the gathering featured Eduardo Bolsonaro, a member of the Brazilian parliament who spent much of the Trump administration building inroads with the American right.

Eduardo Bolsonaro cultivated a friendship with former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon, agreeing in February 2019 to work for The Movement, a group that Bannon founded during the Trump presidency in a bid to take his far-right ideology global.

It was a pleasure to meet STEVE BANNON,strategist in Donald Trump's presidential campaign.We had a great conversation and we share the same worldview.He said be an enthusiast of Bolsonaro's campaign and we are certainly in touch to join forces,especially against cultural marxism. pic.twitter.com/ceHoui6FH5

— Eduardo Bolsonaro🇧🇷 (@BolsonaroSP) August 4, 2018

It’s not clear exactly when and how the Brazilian president’s son befriended Schlapp, but Eduardo Bolsonaro appeared at CPAC in 2020, and has featured in Schlapp’s own promoting of the events.

CPAC Brasilia 2021 itself featured not only Miller, but also other MAGA glitterati like GOP gubernatorial candidate and macabre driver Charlie Gerow, Rep. Mark Green, and Donald Trump Jr.

Trump Jr. gave a full, 40-minute address to the Brazilian conference, video reviewed by TPM shows. It’s not clear what the circumstances surrounding Trump Jr.’s appearance were or whether he was compensated for his appearance.

It’s not clear why the “delegation” attempted to depart Brazil on Tuesday, when the conference itself seems to have concluded on Sept. 4.

But photos posted to Facebook by Matthew Tyrmand, another member of the CPAC “delegation” and a board member of James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, give a possible clue.

Tyrmand initially wrote on Twitter about the questioning of Miller, before adding later that the group’s plane appeared to be “taxiing back to the USA.”

https://t.co/qxld3GDPFb

BREAKING: being detained at airport in Brasilia. Sitting on tarmac as @GETTRofficial CEO & top Trump advisor @JasonMillerinDC is being interrogated by Supreme Court anti-Bolsonaristas on day of massive pro @jairbolsonaro rally after we met w/Bolsonaros. pic.twitter.com/RHkSxAajgI

— Matthew Tyrmand (@MatthewTyrmand) September 7, 2021

In a Facebook post published on Sunday, Tyrmand said that he, Miller, and others had met with President Bolsonaro while in the country’s capitol.

“I’ve been fortunate to meet many heads of state but JB is like no other (closest parallel of course is DJT and the correlations are numerous),” Tyrmand wrote. “JB is totally humble and down to earth…he puts on no airs and lives to continue the culture and political war battles against the global left looking to subvert the wills and mandates of free peoples who are conservative at heart.”

Bannon wanted a global movement. This is it.

I wrote about Bolsonaro and CPAC 2020 a while back. And CPAC has gone international in recent years. Here’s CPAC Japan. But I think the relationship between Trump and Bolsonaro is something different. Here’s what Eduardo had to say last year:

In October, Eduardo Bolsonaro made a shocking statement. The son of Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right authoritarian president of Brazil, suggested in an interview that his country may need to return to the tactics employed by its former military dictatorship to help crush his father’s enemies on the left. He asserted without evidence that Cuba was behind recent protests in Latin America and Argentina’s election of a moderate Peronist was part of a conspiracy to bring about a new leftist “revolution” in Latin America.

“If the left radicalizes to this extent [in Brazil] we will need to respond, and that response could come via a new AI-5,” he said, referring to the notorious Institutional Act Number Five, a notorious 1968 edict issued by the military government that indefinitely outlawed freedom of expression and assembly and shuttered the National Congress. The act began an era of intense political repression and media censorship. Hundreds of dissidents were tortured, killed and disappeared during the dictatorship, which ended in 1985.

Elected officials in the country quickly denounced Bolsonaro’s comments as “repugnant” and a “serious attack on democracy.” American conservatives, on the other hand, invited Bolsonaro to take the stage at one of DC’s biggest political events of the year, this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). ..

Nothing to see here …

This is right up there with the “legitimate rape” comments by Todd Aiken during the 2012 campaign:

During a Tuesday press conference, Abbott said the law gives rape victims up to six weeks to get abortion and thus “does not do that [force victims to have their assaulter’s child].”

“Let’s be clear: rape is a crime,” Abbott said. “And Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets.”

So rape and incest victims (along with every other woman) has a whole six weeks to determine they are pregnant and then try to find some way to get an abortion in a state that has turned every citizen into a bounty hunter before time runs out. That’s very generous.

And, by the way, there are rapists “in the streets” and there are also rapists “in the home” and they are often raping their own family members. The idea that Texas will “eliminate all rapists” is among the most fatuous comments any politician has ever made.

They clearly want women and girls to bear their rapists children and give birth to their own brothers or sisters. That is how primitive and antediluvian these monsters really are.

Trump may not be on twitter anymore, but he still tweets:

Lol.

But make no mistake, they are listening to Dear Leader:

GOP legislative leaders in key battleground states are increasingly embracing 2020 election investigations that they once held at arm’s length, as Arizona Republicans await a long-delayed final report from their own conspiracy-tinged “audit.”

Top Republicans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have recently thrown their support behind new hunts for fraud or irregularities in the last election. Pennsylvania state Senate President Jake Corman sidelined a prominent Republican backbencher who had tried to lead an investigation and instead empowered a committee chair to launch one with his support. That effort is hiring vendors and scheduling hearings.

There is no mechanism to actually overturn the certified results of the 2020 election. But what these investigations could do is fuel former President Donald Trump’s lies about the election or prompt new efforts to enact state voting restrictions. Corman — who has called for a 2020 election review since November — recently told a conservative radio host that he had spoken with Trump about the efforts, describing the former president as “comfortable where we’re heading.”

It’s the next stage in GOP efforts to export the Republican election review in Arizona elsewhere, after state legislators from around the country made pilgrimages to Arizona to see the Republican state Senate’s process there. Though local Republican officials in Maricopa County, as well as Democrats in the state, have derided the Arizona “audit” as a conspiracy-tinged sham seeking to undermine the 2020 election results, GOP leaders in other states are now giving their blessing to similar investigations, offering significantly more heft than earlier pushes from rank-and-file legislators, including more public funding, more staff time and potentially more legal weight.

“It’s disappointing, because part of the burden of leadership is killing bad ideas that might be popular with the base,” said former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican who has been sharply critical of the Arizona review and other efforts to discredit the 2020 election. “When they put their imprimatur on it, it’s a signal to everybody that they think that this is important.”

That’s right. This is what Trump will use as his primary rationale for running again and the MAGA faithful are all in.

I have come to the conclusion that while most DC officials are cynical opportunists, riding the MAGA wave, I think many of these state representatives carrying Trump water in the states are true believers. If you watch them speak they sound just as looney as the most fervent Trump cultists. It’s creepy.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this poll finds that the dip in overall approval has nothing to do with COVID. The media’s hysteria over the Afghanistan withdrawal in August did its work:

Here are some other findings:

And this …. oy:

Yes, it’s Democrats deserting the ship that caused much of the slippage in Biden’s approval rating. So typical. Dan Pfeiffer has some words for elected officials who are tempted to do the same:

Political panic is an unfortunate and frequent attribute among vulnerable Congressional Democrats. At the first sign of political trouble for the president, they tend to run for the wings — looking for opportunities to distance themselves. Some Democrats — like former Senator Mark Udall — will leave their state rather than appear on camera with their president. This sort of behavior is an article of faith to mediocre political consultants who have yet to wake up and adjust their approach or reflect on the fact that the ‘90s are over.

Presidential approval is highly correlated with midterm success. In other words, the more popular the president, the better his party will do in the midterm elections. Therefore, criticizing the president to prove your independence fuels the narrative of a weakened president. Weakness makes our chances of winning reelection worse, not better.

It’s pretty simple — Democrats that want to win reelection need to adopt a strategy that strengthens Biden.

Biden’s approval ratings likely need to be above 50 to give Democrats a fighting shot at keeping the House and expanding our Senate majority. The good news is that raising Biden’s approval is achievable. Per the Navigator poll, the bulk of the drop is coming from Democrats — a group that is looking for a reason to come home.

It’s difficult to think of a better way to please these Democratic voters than passing Joe Biden’s big, bold, popular economic agenda. With control of the House and Senate, there is literally nothing Republicans can do to stop it. Our fate is in our hands. This is why Manchin’s op-ed is so concerning. As Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine:

The danger is that this pause sets off a cycle of failure. Wealthy interests are only belatedly mobilizing against the bill now. As Republican lobbyist Liam Donovan notes, the Democrats’ best chance is to move as fast as possible. Delay creates the impression of dysfunction, making Biden and Congress less popular, in turn reducing the popularity of any bill they pass, in turn making Congress more reluctant to support it. Even if Manchin doesn’t want to destroy Biden’s presidency, he may do so by setting off  a vortex of failure he loses the ability to escape.

There will be intraparty debates about what makes it into the Build Back Better bill — as there should be. But one lesson to take from the passing of the Affordable Care Act is that how a bill passes matters almost as much as if it passes. A series of nasty intraparty fights, special interest giveaways, and side deals will knock some of the sheen off this much-needed victory. If — and hopefully when — Joe Biden signs the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal and a large-scale jobs and families plan it will be a historic policy transformation. A progressive triumph in the works for more than a decade. Let’s rally behind the president and work with a common purpose for our common political interests.

We can’t afford these games right now. If these people don’t use common sense and lose the congress, the Biden agenda is dead and we are probably looking at a second Trump term in 2025. As Biden would say, “come on, man.”

Heckuva job DeSantie:

August was Florida’s deadliest month of the COVID-19 pandemic. With a new batch of delayed COVID-19 deaths reported Monday, Florida lost more than 6,600 people to the coronavirus in August, an average of 213 deaths a day. The newest seven-day average of COVID-19 deaths in Florida, 346, amounts to 23 percent of the 1,498 deaths recorded in the entire U.S. each day, according COVID-19 data compiled by The Washington Post. 

“While Florida’s vaccination rate is slightly higher than the national average, the Sunshine State has an outsize population of elderly people, who are especially vulnerable to the virus; a vibrant party scene; and a Republican governor who has taken a hard line against mask requirements, vaccine passports and business shutdowns,” The Associated Press reports. Florida’s seven-day average of 1.61 deaths per 100,000 residents is the highest in the U.S., where the seven-day average is 0.45 deaths per 100,000 people, the Post reports. 

Heath Mayo, a conservative lawyer and writer, compared Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) pandemic management with that of another Republican governor of a populous state, Charlie Baker in Massachusetts. Baker “has put his head down and made tough calls to keep his state safe,” Mayo tweeted. “He hasn’t been on Fox News, he hasn’t been fundraising in Texas, he hasn’t been spouting off anti-Fauci quips. He’s just been succeeding.” 

Other Republican governors like Larry Hogan of maryland have done well too. It’s really not a mystery. DeSantis is determined to be the Donald Trump of GOP governors and the results are clear.

And again, I hate to bring up the obvious, but California also has warm weather, beaches, tourism, young partyers, a large diverse population, some of whom are hard to reach and in traditionally skeptical communities. But we’ve had a better vaccination rate and better results and it’s largely because the government has been willing to enforce mitigation tactics to curb the spread among the unvaccinated. It’s not complicated.

TAP’s Dave Dayen discusses Joe Manchin’s op-ed this weekend in which he wrings his hands about inflation and deficits in the reconciliation package making its way through the congress:

Manchin doesn’t want you to know too much about the bill he’s trying to kill. Or at least, he doesn’t want you to know why he doesn’t like it. Because if Manchin were truly concerned that we’ve let costs for working families run out of control and we must avoid passing a terrible future on to the next generation, he would be the first in line to pass the reconciliation bill.

About the only thing Manchin lets on in his op-ed is that the reconciliation bill would spend $3.5 trillion. (In reality it doesn’t, because there are offsetting tax increases and budget savings, but let’s put that aside for a second.) But if you boil it all down, the bill has two main goals. The first aligns perfectly with Manchin’s aims of controlling inflation.

More than half of the reconciliation bill attempts to take the biggest drivers of the increase in cost of living in American life over the past 40 years—health care, education, and housing—and bring those costs down for working families. These costs in particular have been the greatest hurdle to upward mobility and a sustainable middle-class lifestyle. The bill is singularly oriented toward reducing those costs.

It tries to do this at every stage of the life cycle. It gives subsidies to make child care affordable and establishes universal pre-kindergarten. It makes community colleges tuition-free, thereby creating a public option to cost-prohibitive higher education. It seeks to build two million new housing units, and also lower housing costs through a wide range of programs, from zoning reform to community land trusts. It subsidizes insurance premiums for Obamacare recipients on the exchanges, and converts unpaid family and medical leave to paid, so workers can afford to experience a pregnancy or the care of a parent. For seniors, it cuts costs by expanding Medicare to encompass dental, vision, and hearing, and it negotiates prices on prescription drugs to bring down those costs. And it subsidizes home and community-based services to drastically reduce the cost of living in place at the end of life.

I won’t even go into the various tax breaks and program expansions for working families in the bill, from a bulked-up child nutrition program to extensions of the enhanced Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit. But the goal of those programs is to lift families out of poverty and make their budgets more manageable.

He discusses how the health, eduction and housing portions of the bill are actually deflationary and notes that the coal Senator is predictably hostile to any climate change legislation which is just frightening at this point.

Manchin’s real problem is that he wants to make the bill more inflationary, in the name of preventing inflation.

That’s because the bill pairs spending initiatives with tax reform, aimed at rolling back some of the Trump tax cuts and increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy. We don’t know how many tax increases will be in there—Manchin and his ideological allies inside and outside Congress are resisting those to the degree that the party is considering some level of deficit spending—but it’s a pillar of the legislation. Other savings come from Medicare negotiation with prescription drug companies, which has led to pharma companies enlisting building trades union allies in their opposition.

The thing about these tax reforms and drug price reductions is that they are extremely popular. Adding tax increases makes the various infrastructure bills under consideration more popular, in fact. Manchin and his Republican colleagues made sure that the bipartisan infrastructure bill had no tax changes of any kind. He’s been murmuring about trimming tax reform for months. But now he doesn’t want to make a frontal assault on behalf of the rich people and corporate executives who fund political campaigns. So he talks about deficits and inflation, which have no real application to this legislation, to hide the ball on his real goal.

NObody can say that Manchin is just representing his constituents when he protects wealthy people from taxation. His state is among the poorest in the nation. He doesn’t need the money either. This is a clear cut case of aristocratic ideology. That he would do this while presenting himself as a man of the people is reprehensible.

The truth is that the bill is much less than 3.5 trillion. There are a ton of off-sets and pay-fors (mostly with taxe hikes on the wealthy.) I continue to believe that the best way to handle him and Sinema is to insist on the bill being 3.5 trillion, no matter what even though it isn’t. Then they should go behind closed doors for a few days and come out with the real number giving Manchin and Sinema credit for “cutting” it.

These two are Divas. They need attention and desperately want to be seen as powerful mavericks who know how to wield their power. But they aren’t wonks and neither of them really care about any of this. Treat them like the spoiled, petty royals they are and give them their moment in the sun. It’s pathetic but it’s the only way to deal with these people.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has yet to make an impression. Or rather, to make a good one. Perhaps slow and steady is his watchword when it comes to bringing justice to insurrection plotters in and out of government. But he has at least pledged to defend women’s constitutional rights from Texas lawmakers who would deny them.

Sort of (Washington Post):

The Justice Department is exploring “all options” to challenge Texas’s restrictive abortion law, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday, as he vowed to provide support to abortion clinics that are “under attack” in the state and to protect those seeking and providing reproductive health services.

The move by the nation’s top law enforcement official comes just days after the Supreme Court refused to block a Texas abortion statute that bans the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest. The court’s action stands as the most serious threat to Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling establishing a right to abortion, in nearly 50 years.

President Biden, who has sharply criticized the high court’s decision, had asked the Justice Department to explore ways to contest the Texas law. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has pledged to call a vote later this month on legislation that would enshrine the right to an abortion into federal law.

Pelosi can make the gesture, sure, but any such bill she passes in the House will go nowhere in the Senate, with or without the filibuster. As for Garland’s “all options,” get back to us when you decide to exercise a few. As for providing support for clinics “under attack,” Garland seems to mean physical attack:

“We will not tolerate violence against those seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services, physical obstruction or property damage in violation of the Face Act,” said Garland, referring to the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law that prohibits threats to and obstruction of a person seeking reproductive health services or of providers.

Garland said the Justice Department has reached out to U.S. attorneys’ offices and FBI field offices in Texas and across the country to “discuss our enforcement authorities.”

“The department will provide support from federal law enforcement when an abortion clinic or reproductive health center is under attack,” Garland said.

Bu the attack under discussion is political and coming from the Texas Fun House, not from abortion clinic pipe-bombers. For his part, President Biden suggested that the DOJ is looking at options for stopping enforcement of the new Texas abortion law.

“I was told that there are possibilities within the existing law to have the Justice Department look and see whether there are things that can be done that can limit the independent action of individuals in enforcing . . . a state law,” Biden said.

Oh, but forced-birth advocates are terribul offended by even the hint of gummint interference in their interference in women’s constitutionally protected health decisions.

John Seago, legislative director for Texas Right to Life, said, “They are trying to come coerce Texas to follow their interests.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), himself under investigation for possible obstruction of justice in a sex trafficking case, complained, “The DOJ is out of control. This is totalitarian stuff.”

What the right prefers is authoritarian stuff. Get back to us when the DOJ in its slow-and-steady way actually does something.

Yet another couple of anti-maskers making a scene, being generally obnoxious, and deliberately threatening others’ health. In children it’s called “acting out”.

People say a child is “acting out” when they exhibit unrestrained and improper actions. 

Such impulses often result in antisocial or delinquent behaviors. The term is also sometimes used in regard to a psychotherapeutic release of repressed feelings, as occurs in psychodrama.

The term is now used casually by mental health professionals to describe this tendency in teens to express unhappiness through their actions.

This woman was last seen at a Super Saver in Lincoln, Nebraska deliberately coughing on innocent people & spraying her aerosols in the middle of a deadly pandemic. pic.twitter.com/ab0vi2ZojS

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) September 7, 2021

Man in Salt Lake City gets arrested on a plane after having a total meltdown pic.twitter.com/ax7uZuRmwW

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) September 7, 2021

The guy on the plane in Salt Lake City (above) was not acting out like a child, no. He was just showing off his “manly presence.” He has “friends” around the country. And they’re organizing acting out.

There is a school board meeting for Manatee County, FL tomorrow night. This was just put out by a local MAGA group, whose leaders have been trained by national organizers on how to disrupt them. Read especially the highlighted part. This is what they are doing everywhere. pic.twitter.com/KMoRzIgLU2

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 6, 2021

Rob Schofield of NC Policy Watch finds a common thread in random gun violence, vaccine resistance, and climate change denial: “the way Americans have allowed the concept of ‘freedom’ to be perverted and, in effect, dumbed down over the last half century.”

Schofield adds:

A half century ago, the idea of mass resistance to public health vaccinations was largely unthinkable and rightfully dismissed by most Americans as akin to the paranoid claims of the lunatic fringe in equating water fluoridation with totalitarianism.

This acceptance did not arise because vaccination was risk-free. While most people were thankful for the personal health benefits they and their children would likely enjoy from vaccination, there was also a common understanding that vaccination was a public duty – a small sacrifice that one made as an act of citizenship in a free society.

Today, after decades of well-funded, anti-government propaganda from the far right, a sizable chunk of the population rejects the citizenship component of freedom and our morgues and hospital ICU’s offer stark testimony to the impact of the shift.

Schofield cites historian Will Durant’s warning that “when liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.”

Even now, we are just a few elections (or a handful of votes) away from the lunatics running the asylum.

Do more than clicktivism, cyber-people.

The GOP “frontrunner”in the California recall (at 25%) is teeing up the Big Lie for the California Recall. Of course he is:

Larry Elder charges that the 2020 presidential election was full of “shenanigans” and says he worried about potential voting irregularities in the Sept. 14 California recall election of embattled Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.

That’s why Elder, a conservative talk radio host and the polling front runner among the California gubernatorial replacement candidates, is urging supporters to report to his campaign anything they think is suspicious.

“The 2020 election, in my opinion, was full of shenanigans. And my fear is they’re going to try that in this election right here and recall. So I’m urging people to go to ElectElder.com. Whenever you see anything, hear anything suspicious, go to my website. We have a battery of lawyers. We’re going to file a lawsuit in a timely fashion this time,” Elder said Sunday in an exclusive interview on Fox News “Media Buzz.”

He’s just great, isn’t he?

He really doesn’t have to prompt the California Trumpers. They’re already there:

Looking to oust the governor? Ed Brown has just the right merch for you.

Camouflage Recall Newsom hats and Recall Newsom masks. He’s gotRecall Newsom yard signs. A stack of Recall Newsom pamphlets.

But just days before California voters decide whether to push Democrat Gavin Newsom from office, the trailer off Golden Chain Highway was mostly a shrine to former President Trump.

“As far as I’m concerned, Trump is the president,” said Brown, 67.ADVERTISING

And as for the recall election?

“They’ll probably do something to cheat,” he said of Newsom’s supporters, adding that he will vote for Larry Elder because “he’s more like Trump; he’s for the people.”

The Republican-backed recall election could not be more consequential for California. Set amid a deadly wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with record-breaking wildfires and a relentless drought drying fields and faucets, it gives the GOP its best shot in over a decade at governing the nation’s most populous state.

And if there’s a symbolic heart of recall mania, it may be here in Amador County in the Sierra foothills, where about 1 in 5 registered voters signed petitions to give Newsom the boot. That’s the highest concentration in California.

The most fervent support for the recall has come from Northern California, where rural conservatives say that their voices are drowned out in Sacramento by urban Democrats and that they would be better off seceding to form their own state called Jefferson.

Conservatives talk about the recall effort through the lens of Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election. By and large, they refuse to cast their ballots by mail, believing his false claims that mail-in voting leads to rampant voter fraud. If Newsom prevails, many won’t trust the results — just as they didn’t after Trump lost.

In Newsom, they have found an avatar for the Democratic Party and everything they hate about it — a political entity in opposition to many of the things they hold dear, including (and sometimes especially) Trump.

“In many ways, the recall was never really about Gavin Newsom in particular,” said Kim Nalder, a political science professor at Cal State Sacramento.

Rather, she said, recall supporters are fueled by a “laundry list of complaints that Republicans had about liberals.”

No, it was the same cynical, opportunistic use of undemocratic tactics to seize power when the vast majority of people don’t agree with you that Republicans are doing all over the country. Republicans simply no longer believe they have to accept the results of elections they don’t like and they are willing to use any means at their disposal to turn them around.

Gavin Newsom is up for reelection next year. Instead they have made the state pay almost 300 million dollars for this ridiculous recall. It’s not impossible that they can unseat Newsom if Democrats fail to mail in their ballots but either way, it’s a win. If they lose they get to claim that the vote was rigged and further the Big Lie.

Harry Enten notices that there are many fewer polls than there were during the first 8 months of the Trump administration and analyzes how this may be distorting our view of Biden’s success and failure:

The polling industry has taken its shots following the 2016 and 2020 election when former President Donald Trump was underestimated.It’s not surprising. Polling can help shape a narrative about where the country is and where it is going. When polling is wrong, people can be misled and the stories being told about the electorate may have been flat out incorrect.

But therein lies why it is so important that we have good polling: it’s one of the few ways we know whether anecdotes people hear are a true representation of the public at large. It shapes not just election coverage, but also strategies for dealing with areas such as getting more people vaccinated against Covid-19.

Unfortunately, it seems that we do have fewer polls right now to help us do that during President Joe Biden‘s administration compared with the Trump administration.

We can see this by looking at the number of polls asking about Biden’s job approval rating. There have been about 750 of those polls published, so it’s not like we don’t have any data.

A closer look reveals, however, how inflated that number is. More than 60% of those are from Morning Consult and Rasmussen Reports alone. The latter has a record of overestimating Republican candidates, and neither meets CNN polling standards.

Four years ago, there were about 1,070 polls released at this point on Trump’s approval rating. That’s 300 more approval polls than we’ve had about Biden at this point. The two pollsters who made up the most number of polls in this average were Ipsos and YouGov, and they accounted for just a little bit more than 40% of all the surveys about Trump’s approval rating. This is significantly less than the two top pollsters are making up of all the polls today.

The fact that we have a smaller number of pollsters making up the lion’s share of polls coming out puts them in a powerful position. When that occurs, they can drive the narrative of where the country is standing on issues to a greater degree. If they’re accurate, this isn’t a big problem. If these pollsters are not accurate, the public and the press may be misled.Judging whether a poll is accurate or not isn’t so easy.

One way to do this is to see how close a pollster’s final surveys are to the election results like FiveThirtyEight does. Using FiveThirtyEight’s polling scores (one of many ways we can judge accuracy), we can see that there are fewer pollsters who have done well in the past that are publishing polls now.

By my count, there have been a little more than 40 polls published about Biden’s approval rating that have come from companies rated some form of an A (i.e. A+, A, A- or A/B). At this point four years ago, there were a little less than 70 polls rated in this top tier.When you expand out to pollsters rated a B+, the difference is even more stark. There were about 540 polls rated in the A or B+ category at this point in the Trump administration. There have been only about 140 at this point in the Biden administration. In 2017, this was driven a lot by the non-partisan Gallup tracking poll and YouGov. Gallup no longer publishes a tracking poll.

Of course for some people, the most important thing about polling is it tells you who is up and who is down in the horse race. The media often makes judgments about races from the polls, and plenty of people decide who and how to donate to candidates.

The first tea leaves of what 2022 will look like come from the generic congressional ballot. It was one of the first signs in 2017 that Trump’s unpopularity was transferring to House Republicans.There were nearly 200 generic congressional ballot polls published at this point in the 2018 cycle. Many of those did belong to the Ipsos tracking poll. Eliminating those, you still have about 90 generic ballot polls.This year there have been only a little more than 60 congressional ballot polls published.

Again though, it’s not just the number. It’s the quality of the poll.Using the same FiveThirtyEight system, there were 29 polls through early September 2017 that were rated somewhere in the A range. Through early September 2021, there have been only 4 polls in the A range.

A lot of the generic ballot polls produced also come from pollsters who poll for candidates, such as Change Research and McLaughlin & Associates. While most of these polls released aren’t for candidates and may very well be accurate representations of the electorate at this point, it’s something to keep in mind for both this data and for what types of polls may be published in the lead up to next year’s midterms.

In total, there have only been about 35 generic ballot polls published by non-partisan groups this cycle. The majority of those come from YouGov. Last cycle, excluding the Ipsos tracking poll, there were double the number of generic ballot polls from non-partisan groups at this point.

I assume that the polls are correctly showing trends. But Enten makes a good point that the least reliable polls are doing the most polling right now which isn’t good at all. And I have to wonder why. They polled Trump constantly … and the polling never really changed. Now we’re getting sporadic polling and Biden looks like he’s cratering in the polls. Huh…