Month: October 2021

Nate Cohn had an interesting twitter thread today about the perennial conversation over persuasion vs mobilization and how to target the swing voters:

This article from 2019 seems relevant to some of the conversations in my Twitter feed this morning: swing voters aren’t really disproportionately white working class anymore
I think a lot of the findings in this piece are reflected in the 2020 outcome

And while this poll is two years old now, it is probably the last unbiased battleground polling we had of the 2020 cycle (at least v. the result). I think lots of the lessons from this series are still very worth keeping in mind

I bring all this back up because my ‘interactions’ seem frozen in 2014-2018 debates.
It was plausible to say Ds should focus on turnout after ’14, or focus on reclaiming the Obama-Trump northern, white working class voter after ’16
These cases have gotten a lot worse

By this 2019 polling, I think it’s pretty clear that a lot of the foundations for either the WWC persuasion strategy and the progressive mobilization strategy had really eroded (I also thought that was true based on 18 results). I think that was pretty clear in 2020, too

By winning a group of disproportionately white, college educated, affluent, male voters who often cast ballots for GOP candidates downballot. It’s not what any wing of the Democratic Party wanted

Dumb question but: What's the theory for how Biden won, then? It's some combination of persuasion and mobilization, but of whom?

— Cait (@Cait_Esq) October 4, 2021

For some context on that, it is worth remembering that House Democratic popular vote tallies would have lost the Electoral College / Senate

As an aside, I do think that the approach in this article–several archetypal kinds of self-reported persuadable voters–is more useful than constructing a median voter out of majority/median demographic groups

yes–whites, women, voters over age 50, suburbanites, no college grads–are all ‘majority’ groups, if only narrowly. but that does not mean that white, no college women, over age 50 should dominate in political thinking or something

Originally tweeted by Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) on October 4, 2021.

Yes, all that’s true. But for me, the definitive take on this is still this piece by Chris Hayes from 17 year ago.

Decision Makers

by Chris Hayes

November 17, 2004  ·  The New Republic  ·  Permalink

For those who follow politics, there are few things more mysterious, more inscrutable, more maddening than the mind of the undecided voter. In this year’s election, when the choice was so stark and the differences between the candidates were so obvious, how could any halfway intelligent human remain undecided for long? “These people,” Jonah Goldberg once wrote of undecided voters, on a rare occasion when he probably spoke for the entire political class, “can’t make up their minds, in all likelihood, because either they don’t care or they don’t know anything.”

And that was more or less how I felt before I decided to spend the last seven weeks of the campaign talking to swing voters in Wisconsin. In September, I signed up to work for the League of Conservation Voters’ Environmental Victory Project–a canvassing operation that recruited volunteers in five states to knock on doors in “swing wards” with high concentrations of undecided or persuadable voters. During my time in suburban Dane County, which surrounds Madison, I knocked on more than 1,000 doors and talked to hundreds of Wisconsin residents. Our mission was simple: to identify undecided voters and convince them to vote for John Kerry.

My seven weeks in Wisconsin left me with a number of observations (all of them highly anecdotal, to be sure) about swing voters, which I explain below. But those small observations add up to one overarching contention: that the caricature of undecided voters favored by liberals and conservatives alike doesn’t do justice to the complexity, indeed the oddity, of undecided voters themselves. None of this is to say that undecided voters are completely undeserving of the derision that the political class has heaped on them–just that Jonah Goldberg, and the rest of us, may well be deriding them for the wrong reasons.

Undecided voters aren’t as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We’re giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man’s house, she still couldn’t make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn’t have much luck.

Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don’t enjoy politics. Political junkies tend to assume that undecided voters are undecided because they don’t care enough to make up their minds. But while I found that most undecided voters are, as one Kerry aide put it to The New York Times, “relatively low-information, relatively disengaged,” the lack of engagement wasn’t a sign that they didn’t care. After all, if they truly didn’t care, they wouldn’t have been planning to vote. The undecided voters I talked to did care about politics, or at least judged it to be important; they just didn’t enjoy politics.

The mere fact that you’re reading this article right now suggests that you not only think politics is important, but you actually like it. You read the paper and listen to political radio and talk about politics at parties. In other words, you view politics the way a lot of people view cooking or sports or opera: as a hobby. Most undecided voters, by contrast, seem to view politics the way I view laundry. While I understand that to be a functioning member of society I have to do my laundry, and I always eventually get it done, I’ll never do it before every last piece of clean clothing is dirty, as I find the entire business to be a chore. A significant number of undecided voters, I think, view politics in exactly this way: as a chore, a duty, something that must be done but is altogether unpleasant, and therefore something best put off for as long as possible.

A disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists. In the age of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, pundits agreed that this would be the most foreign policy-oriented election in a generation–and polling throughout the summer seemed to bear that out. In August the Pew Center found that 40 percent of voters were identifying foreign policy and defense as their top issues, the highest level of interest in foreign policy during an election year since 1972.

But just because voters were unusually concerned about foreign policy didn’t mean they had fundamentally shifted their outlook on world affairs. In fact, among undecided voters, I encountered a consistent and surprising isolationism–an isolationism that September 11 was supposed to have made obsolete everywhere but the left and right fringes of the political spectrum. Voters I spoke to were concerned about the Iraq war and about securing American interests, but they seemed entirely unmoved by the argument–accepted, in some form or another, by just about everyone in Washington–that the security of the United States is dependent on the freedom and well-being of the rest of the world.

In fact, there was a disturbing trend among undecided voters–as well as some Kerry supporters–towards an opposition to the Iraq war based largely on the ugliest of rationales. I had one conversation with an undecided, sixtyish, white voter whose wife was voting for Kerry. When I mentioned the “mess in Iraq” he lit up. “We should have gone through Iraq like shit through tinfoil,” he said, leaning hard on the railing of his porch. As I tried to make sense of the mental image this evoked, he continued: “I mean we should have dominated the place; that’s the only thing these people understand. … Teaching democracy to Arabs is like teaching the alphabet to rats.” I didn’t quite know what to do with this comment, so I just thanked him for his time and slipped him some literature. (What were the options? Assure him that a Kerry White House wouldn’t waste tax dollars on literacy classes for rodents?)

That may have been the most explicit articulation I heard of this mindset–but it wasn’t an isolated incident. A few days later, someone told me that he wished we could put Saddam back in power because he “knew how to rule these people.” While Bush’s rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy played well with blue-state liberal hawks and red-state Christian conservatives who are inclined towards a missionary view of world affairs, it seemed to fall flat among the undecided voters I spoke with. This was not merely the view of the odd kook; it was a common theme I heard from all different kinds of undecided voters. Clearly the Kerry campaign had focus groups or polling that supported this, hence its candidate’s frequent–and wince- inducing–America-first rhetoric about opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in the United States.

The worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush. Liberal commentators, and even many conservative ones, assumed, not unreasonably, that the awful situation in Iraq would prove to be the president’s undoing. But I found that the very severity and intractability of the Iraq disaster helped Bush because it induced a kind of fatalism about the possibility of progress. Time after time, undecided voters would agree vociferously with every single critique I offered of Bush’s Iraq policy, but conclude that it really didn’t matter who was elected, since neither candidate would have any chance of making things better. Yeah, but what’s Kerry gonna do? voters would ask me, and when I told them Kerry would bring in allies they would wave their hands and smile with condescension, as if that answer was impossibly naïve. C’mon, they’d say, you don’t really think that’s going to work, do you?

To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry’s promise to bring in allies was a lame idea–after all, many well-informed observers did. But I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds recognized the severity of the situation–but precisely because they understood the severity, they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry’s ability to fix things. Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush’s failures as badly as Bush was.

As a result, undecideds seemed oddly unwilling to hold the president accountable for his previous actions, focusing instead on the practical issue of who would have a better chance of success in the future. Because undecideds seemed uninterested in assessing responsibility for the past, Bush suffered no penalty for having made things so bad; and because undecideds were focused on, but cynical about, the future, the worse things appeared, the less inclined they were to believe that problems could be fixed–thereby nullifying the backbone of Kerry’s case. Needless to say, I found this logic maddening.

Undecided voters don’t think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the “issues.” That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured–a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example–but such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number.

The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn’t name a single issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about it: The “issue” is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns, candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes. It’s what makes up the subheadings on a candidate’s website, it’s what sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it’s what every candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it’s what we always complain we don’t see enough coverage of.

But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. (This was also true of a number of committed voters in both camps–though I’ll risk being partisan here and say that Kerry voters, in my experience, were more likely to name specific issues they cared about than Bush supporters.) At first I thought this was a problem of simple semantics–maybe, I thought, “issue” is a term of art that sounds wonky and intimidating, causing voters to react as if they’re being quizzed on a topic they haven’t studied. So I tried other ways of asking the same question: “Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what’s been happening in the country in the last four years?”

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word “issue”; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the “political.” The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief–not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

To cite one example: I had a conversation with an undecided truck driver who was despondent because he had just hit a woman’s car after having worked a week straight. He didn’t think the accident was his fault and he was angry about being sued. “There’s too many lawsuits these days,” he told me. I was set to have to rebut a “tort reform” argument, but it never came. Even though there was a ready-made connection between what was happening in his life and a campaign issue, he never made the leap. I asked him about the company he worked for and whether it would cover his legal expenses; he said he didn’t think so. I asked him if he was unionized and he said no. “The last job was unionized,” he said. “They would have covered my expenses.” I tried to steer him towards a political discussion about how Kerry would stand up for workers’ rights and protect unions, but it never got anywhere. He didn’t seem to think there was any connection between politics and whether his company would cover his legal costs. Had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of tort reform, it might have benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and remained undecided.

In this context, Bush’s victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed “values” as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn’t the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like “character” and “morals.” Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values–we all know what’s right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don’t even grasp what issues are?

Liberals like to point out that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues, so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win. (This cuts both ways: I met a large number of Bush/Feingold voters whose politics were more in line with the Republican president, but who admired the backbone and gutsiness of their Democratic senator.) But polls that ask people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of issues–a familiarity that may not exist.

As far as I can tell, this leaves Democrats with two options: either abandon “issues” as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary–of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008. But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a majority party again.

The article that Cohn references from 2019 discusses 15% of people (swing voters) who have reasons for voting for Donald Trump but they make no more sense than those undecided voters Hayes was talking about.I don’t know what you do about that.

I think this sort of illogical thinking about politics — actually, everything — is far more common than we think. Tribalism makes it easy for most people not to have to think too hard about any of it. For those few who are independent or contrarian by personality or temperament, this kind of “thinking” in the age of polarization brings on this sort of dissonance.

Two things came to mind while watching the 60 minutes segment on the Facebook whistleblower. That is, two things in addition to the obvious, that FB is a sewer that makes money hand over fist by making everything worse:

The garbage-mouth of Facebook executives. The people who wrote these memos couldn’t formulate a clear thought if it came up and bit ’em on their algorithm — and these are the good guys:

“we estimate that we may action as little as 3-5% of hate…”

“…Colleagues… cannot conscience working for a company that does not do more to mitigate the negative effects of its platform.” 

“Action” and “conscience” are not verbs, dear friends. You mean “respond to” and “countenance.” And those are just two of the more egregious examples.

And then there’s this, from FB’s response to the whistleblower’s allegations:

We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.” 

“If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago.”

Uh huh… In about 10 seconds, I figured out how an “exact solution to [the] complex challenges” faced by Facebook would work and work well. The solution is simple, complete, and permanent:

Shut Facebook down.

This piece by Jonathan Chait is on the money. The political situation has changed. Centrists don’t seem to understand that:

Congress’s failure to hold a vote over the bipartisan infrastructure bill last week set off a wave of media hyperventilation and whining by Democratic centrists. “This far left faction is willing to put the President’s entire agenda, including this historic bipartisan infrastructure package, at risk. They’ve put civility and bipartisan governing at risk,” raged Representative Josh Gottheimer. “Canceling the infrastructure vote,” complained Senator Kyrsten Sinema, “betrays the trust the American people have put in their elected leaders.”

The delay does nothing of the sort. It saves Democrats — all of them, moderates included — from an embarrassing debacle. And it forces the whole party to hold a negotiation that one side, the centrists, was trying to prevent.

The outpouring of emotions stems from the unusual circumstances of this negotiation. In most cases, a party’s centrists hold all the leverage, because walking away from the table with no bill is more acceptable to them than it is to more ideologically pure members. On this issue, however, the left has real leverage. Centrists care inordinately about the success of the bipartisan infrastructure deal, mainly because of its political symbolism: since their political brands are built around working with Republicans, they desperately need the infrastructure bill to be signed into law and be seen as a big deal. Progressives are fine with the bipartisan infrastructure deal, but its failure would hurt them much less than it would hurt the centrists.

That dynamic was clear to me two months ago, when I urged progressives to leverage the infrastructure bill to force centrists to support President Biden’s much larger social spending agenda. That’s what caused a handful of centrists, led by Gottheimer, to try to make their counter-ransom attempt. Their plan was to force the House to vote on infrastructure, which they assumed would pass, stripping progressives of their leverage.

The flaw in this plan was also, I think, immediately evident. Their assumption that the bill would have to pass if it came up for a vote was completely wrong.

That is correct. Their assumption that their good buddies the Republicans would help them pass it was naive in the extreme. Kevin McCarthy was whipping against the bill!

What would have happened if the bill came to the floor is that liberals would have defeated it, and the entire party would have looked terrible. That’s why Nancy Pelosi never brought the bill to a vote. Gottheimer extracted a promise that was not only worthless, but had negative value.

What happens now is the situation Gottheimer was trying, unsuccessfully, to maneuver out of. The centrists have to make a deal on Biden’s Build Back Better agenda that’s large enough to satisfy liberals to vote for infrastructure.

Centrists are responding with indignation at the idea that liberals would treat them so distrustfully in the first place. “It’s a sad day for our nation when a few Members of Congress block much-needed results for the American people, not because they oppose the bill before them, but because they don’t trust members of their own party,” whines a statement from the moderate Blue Dog caucus.

Of course, the tactic of threatening to walk away to gain leverage over your fellow party members is one moderate Democrats have been using forever. They’re using it right now, in fact; a Sinema puff piece announces she is “prepared to walk away” from Biden’s agenda if she doesn’t get her way. Moderate Democrats are so used to holding all the walk away leverage that the novelty of a negotiation where the opposing side also has some leverage strikes them as an intolerable offense.

Their immediate reaction is to insist they will not, on principle, engage in any horse-trading between bills. “No member of Congress, and certainly no member of my own party, has the slightest leverage over my vote. I will do what I believe is in the best interest of my constituents and my country, and what comports with my conscience,” writes an indignant Representative Stephanie Murphy. Sinema adds, “I do not trade my vote for political favors.”

This is obviously silly. Members of Congress trade votes all the time. One reason to do that is because it’s good for your state or district. The centrists are simultaneously claiming the infrastructure bill is absolutely vital for the future of the country, but that they won’t even think about supporting elements of Biden’s domestic agenda in return for it. If the infrastructure bill is truly such a transformative and essential piece of legislation, maybe it’s worth going a few hundred billion dollars over your top line in order to ensure its passage?

Whether or not they believe this sanctimonious refusal to horse-trade, that is the reality they face. Their giant personal investment in the infrastructure bill gives liberals leverage. They’re using it. That’s politics. The centrists like to talk about the cold reality of negotiation and compromise, because those dynamics have generally worked to their advantage. At this moment, they can either stage a tantrum, or accept political reality and work within its confines.

I know it’s hard for the media establishment to understand that the progressives are the adults in the room and the “moderates” are the ones having a tantrum, but that is the case. And Chait is right that this is because of the incentives. With Republicans pretty much taking themselves off the field, that leaves centrists who pride themselves on their bipartisan cred standing alone. This is the new political reality. They’d better get used to playing ball with their own team for a change.

One of the more memorable quotes from the 2020 post-election period was the one in which a Republican insider blithely told a reporter for the Washington Post that there was no harm in letting Trump cry himself out:

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” the official said. “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.”

We all know how that turned out, don’t we?

Today, the congressional Jan. 6 commission continues to subpoena witnesses and demand documents from various players in the post-election saga, and the press keeps reporting new information on exactly what went down during that bizarre period weekly. Last month, the new book from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, “Peril,” revealed the existence of a full-blown coup plot based upon a legal theory advanced by conservative constitutional lawyer John Eastman, formerly of Chapman College and a founder of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank. They actually memorialized what they planned to do in writing.

The idea was to have Mike Pence refuse to acknowledge the electoral votes of certain states whose legislatures might be persuaded to send an alternate slate of electors and then declare Trump the winner based upon the remaining electoral votes. It was a cockamamie scheme, but the concept of Republican state legislatures declaring that the vote was rigged and sending an alternate slate to declare Trump the winner did not come from nowhere. I wrote this in November 2020, just a couple of weeks after the election:

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and “save democracy” from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

Trump’s behavior with all these phony “audits,” even in places like Texas where he won, is explained as an extension of that plan. They are attempting to create so much distrust in the electoral process that in the case of a semi-close election, the default “solution” will be for the (Republican) state legislatures to take over the process and decide the winner. Lest you think the courts would automatically reject such a clearly unconstitutional move, don’t count on it. As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer noted:

Few people noticed at the time, but in … Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors.

Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”

That’s the legal argument. The implementation will require provocateurs to help foment the chaos and distrust on the ground. Enter Trump’s former campaign chairman (and pardoned accused felon) Steve Bannon. You may recall that Bannon was heavily involved in the Jan. 6 planning, urging Trump to “kill the Biden presidency in its crib” and promising listeners of his wildly popular podcast the night before that “all hell will break loose tomorrow. It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”

ProPublica did extensive reporting last month showing that since then Bannon has been pushing a “precinct strategy,” whereby MAGA followers take over the Republican apparatus at the precinct level, which in many states means they have influence over how elections are run, including the choice of poll workers and members of election boards. When Bannon announced this strategy, it “rocketed across far-right media” and suddenly people who had never before been involved in politics were volunteering all over the country, in blue states as well as red states, cities and suburbs and rural areas alike.

This strategy is the brainchild of Arizona activist Daniel J. Schultz, who has been pushing it for several years:

In December, Schultz appeared on Bannon’s podcast to argue that Republican-controlled state legislatures should nullify the election results and throw their state’s Electoral College votes to Trump. If lawmakers failed to do that, Bannon asked, would it be the end of the Republican Party? Not if Trump supporters took over the party by seizing precinct posts, Schultz answered.

Schultz is now a huge right-wing celebrity, has been on Bannon’s show at least eight times and holds weekly Zoom calls with activists around the country. Last July he told his audience, “Make sure everybody’s got a baseball bat. I’m serious about this. Make sure you’ve got people who are armed.”

Bannon isn’t confining himself to trying to destroy the democratic electoral system. NBC News’ Jonathan Allen reported that he’s also planning an assault on the government once he gets Trump back in the White House, as a continuation of his “deconstruction of the administrative state.” To that end, Bannon held a meeting last week with “scores of former Trump political appointees” at the Capitol Hill Club and gave them their marching orders for the hypothetical day when Trump returns to power.

He was invited by a new group called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, which has the goal of having non-confirmable executive branch appointees ready on Day 1 to go in and take over. In practice, that means they would immediately set about systematically dismantling everything put in place under a Democratic president and deregulating everything in sight. Bannon aptly calls them his “shock troops.”

Now maybe all this is just the lunatic fringe acting out and nothing will come of it. Bannon has been flogging this kind of anti-democratic strategy for a long time. But considering how radical the GOP establishment itself has become, it seems foolhardy to make that assumption. Inviting Bannon to address this ambitious new Republican group sends a clear signal that his previously outlandish ideas and strategies have become mainstream conservative thinking.

Salon

Mitch McConnell sent a letter to Biden this morning in which he said:

“We have no list of demands. For two and a half months, we have simply warned that since your party wishes to govern alone, it must handle the debt limit alone as well.”

But he’s filibustering the bill — obstructing it, in other words. There is literally no limit to the man’s chutzpah.

Biden said:

President Biden to Republicans on the debt limit:

“If you don’t wanna help save the country, get out of the way so you don’t destroy it.” pic.twitter.com/8Ff4sjxuAQ

— The Recount (@therecount) October 4, 2021

McConnell wants the Democrats to put the debt ceiling through a reconciliation bill which requires all kinds of hoops and possibly has limits which could spook the markets. McConnell doesn’t care about any of this. He’s just determined to screw up Biden’s agenda any way he can even if he destroys the country in the process. Nothing will deter him from seizing power in 2022 by any mean necessary.

There is one remedy which the Democrats refuse to use: nuke the filibuster. I will never understand why. At this point it’s nothing more than sabotage and they are letting the Republicans do it.

This story about United Airlines’ vaccination mandate program is very gratifying. It shows that companies who take the virus seriously and enact policies to require vaccines not only spare their staff and customers from the disease, they are rewarded by the public as well:

Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, reached a breaking point while vacationing in Croatia this summer: After receiving word that a 57-year-old United pilot had died after contracting the coronavirus, he felt it was time to require all employees to get vaccinated.

He paced for about half an hour and then called two of his top executives. “We concluded enough is enough,” Mr. Kirby said in an interview on Thursday. “People are dying, and we can do something to stop that with United Airlines.”

The company announced its vaccine mandate days later, kicking off a two-month process that ended last Monday. Mr. Kirby’s team had guessed that no more than 70 percent of the airline’s workers were already vaccinated, and the requirement helped convince most of the rest: Nearly all of United’s 67,000 U.S. employees have been vaccinated, in one of the largest and most successful corporate efforts of the kind during the pandemic.

They worried about blowback from the loud anti-vaxers but it turned out there were a lot more people who were grateful for their efforts:

United executives said they were surprised that positive feedback from politicians, customers and the public far outweighed the criticism it received.

Customers thanked the airline, and job applicants said they were excited to join a company that took employee safety seriously. United has received 20,000 applications for about 2,000 flight attendant positions, a much higher ratio than before the pandemic.

There has been some resistance. Last month, six employees sued United, arguing that its plans to put exempt employees on temporary leave — unpaid in many circumstances — are discriminatory. United has delayed that plan for at least a few weeks as it fights the suit.

Still, United’s vaccination rate has continued to improve. There was another rush before the deadline to receive the pay incentive and one more before the final Sept. 27 deadline. Toward the end of September, the company said 593 people had failed to comply. By Friday, the number had dropped below 240.

“I did not appreciate the intensity of support for a vaccine mandate that existed, because you hear that loud anti-vax voice a lot more than you hear the people that want it,” Mr. Kirby said. “But there are more of them. And they’re just as intense.”

I think this point has been under-emphasized. There are a lot more people who believe that people who work with the public should be vaccinated than there are who don’t. Even some number of otherwise daft Trumpers want the country to be vaccinated. This vocal minority of contrarian, conspiracy mongers has killed a couple hundred thousand people and most of the country is appalled by that. There’s not much individuals can do to make them change their minds but the data on these vaccine mandates by employers is very good. They work.

I am personally interested in knowing which businesses are doing it because it will guide my decisions about whether to use them. This story indicates that it may very well be a selling point for many of them.

Manchin’s “latest” (apparently signaled last summer but we just didn’t know about it) is 1.5 trillion. But when you look at his statements over the 9 months, it shows that instead of negotiating in good faith and trying to come to a compromise, every time the White House and the Democrats lower their request to meet his, he lowers his again:

In January, Manchin said he’d back up to $4 trillion in infrastructure spending, as then-president-elect Joe Biden laid out his plans for office.

“The most important thing? Do infrastructure. Spend $2, $3, $4 trillion over a 10-year period on infrastructure,” Manchin told Inside West Virginia Politics in January.

He reaffirmed his support for a larger package in April, as Senate Republicans readied their own much smaller infrastructure package.

“We’re going to do whatever it takes. If it takes $4 trillion, I’d do $4 trillion, but we have to pay for it,” Manchin told reporters at the time, saying that he would go big if the situation warranted it.

The document obtained by Politico is dated July 28, meaning that it came about two weeks after Senate Democrats announced their $3.5 trillion reconciliation deal. Ahead of that deal, Manchin said any Democratic-only plan would need to be fully paid for, and not require borrowing money.

After Manchin presented his proposals to Schumer, all 50 Senate Democrats voted to advance the $3.5 trillion blueprint and send it to the House. That unanimous support is now on the ropes.

No kidding. Manchin has consistently been shifting the goalposts. Apparently, the fact that he already voted for the 3.5 trillion dollar package is meaningless. Sinema too! What changed?

This has been bad faith all around. There’s not much the Democrats can do about it but it’s a sad comment on our system that this kind of thing can just happen without any real ability to push back. A tiny handful of Americans voted for these two. It’s just not right.

Abolish the senate. What a mistake it was to ever create out own “house of Lords.” The British successfully cut them out of the governing and so should we.

God help me, I’m living in a Cohen Brothers film slowly working its way to the inevitable denouement.

I’ve said forever that Republicans’ conspicuous patriotism is so much Potemkinish facade. The base might believe it, but the elected Barnums behind the sideshows perform patriotism just to sucker the rubes out of their loose change.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern this morning outline the nihilism driving the GOP to drop all pretenses of believing in democracy and to reconfigure the United States as rapidly as possible as a one-party state immune to it. The Republican Party has become antimatter to popular sovereignty.

Yes, Texas’ S.B. 8 bounty-hunter scheme for eliminating abortion services there is unpopular. Republicans know that and they don’t care. They don’t have to care. State legislatures, the pair explain, “are beginning to govern as though majorities of the electorate either cannot vote or won’t even bother.”  And if majorities do vote against them, it won’t matter. They’ll see to it.

Election suppression laws are old news. The GOP has moved on to election subversion:

In the months since Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, the voting rights fight has moved—as our colleague Rick Hasen has been trying to explain—from voter suppression to election subversion. This problem can’t be resolved by simple get-out-the-vote efforts, Hasen argues. Republicans envision a future in which they can steal entire presidential elections, an idea gaining traction in some state legislatures right now. Welcome to the new GOP—the post-voting party.

Laughable election audits exist just to sucker the rubes. Republicans already don’t believe in elections they do not win. “Fraudits” in Arizona and in states Donald Trump won in 2020 exist to reinforce that belief for 2022 and beyond. Rumors of fraud provide the pretext for new laws allowing Republican-controlled legislatures to overturn election results themselves. Add to election suppression, manipulation of census date, partisan gerrymandering, and court-packing the ability to overturn elections, and it becomes impossible ever for a majority of non-Republicans to turn minority Republicans out of office.

The people who are churning out wildly unpopular laws are doing it because they believe they are immune from electoral consequences. One reason the Texas Legislature simply doesn’t care about backlash against its radical 2021 measures is because the Texas Legislature has no intention of honoring the outcome of elections going forward. That includes presidential elections, which decide judicial appointments.

So, yes, it’s important to organize around abortion and state legislatures passing wildly unpopular laws like S.B. 8 that are wholly out of line with public sentiment. But the problem is that they know people will be upset about abortion, and they are already taking the steps to ensure that does not affect their hold on power. Which is why absolutely nothing else we do will be as imperative as ensuring that we have free and fair elections whose results are honored. Hasen built a road map last week to achieve some of that. The path to restoring reproductive rights in Texas, and around the country, begins, as it always has, with forcing ourselves to care about local canvassing board members and secretaries of state. Otherwise, the GOP will continue to run the table, merely because it can.

Progressives and their donors need to get their heads out of their asses when it comes to where the real action is in elections. Republicans have long targeted school boards for a reason, several reasons. They want to undermine public schools and divert public funds to private religious schools, but they also see election to school boards as springboards to higher office. First local, then state, then national.

Walter Sobchak: Nihilists! F*** me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.

Progressives who pour all their political investment into federal elections are forfeiting local and state platforms to opponents more than happy to exploit the undefended, open field to run up the score for their side. Control of state legislatures means control of redistricting, influence in appointment (or election) of judges, the ability to hamstring governance in Democratic-led cities, the ability to cut taxes and services, making government seem more dysfunctional and cities that much more fertile for right-wing populism and nihilism.

Granted, much of the election-rigging underway in red-state capitols now is driven by a desire to return Donald Trump to the White House in 2024. But the long-term goal goes far beyond that to remaking the United States a mockery of its beacon-of-democracy branding.

Say what you like about the former Republican Party, Dude, at least it had an ethos.

Update: Fixed some formatting of Slate paragraphs.

A pair of posts this morning have me hearing that head shake sound effect from Warner Brothers cartoons. In the first, Judd Legum at Popular Information exposes more on how Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is fouling up the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) core mission to serve the public:

This month, DeJoy will begin implementing a plan that will fundamentally alter the core mission of the United States Postal Service (USPS) — the rapid delivery of first-class mail. Many of the letters, bills, small parcels, and other documents sent through first-class mail will take much longer to arrive at their destination. 

Prior to October 1, all domestic first-class mail was supposed to arrive at its destination in one to three days. Under the new standard, 31 percent of first-class mail is now subject to a new standard of four to five days. Only mail sent to locations within a three-hour drive is expected to arrive within two days. 

For some people, this won’t be an issue. They’ve already shifted much of their essential communication online. But many people have not. People “in rural areas, the disabled and the elderly” will be hit especially hard. While everything in the world keeps getting faster, essential aspects of their lives will now slow down. 

A related effort by DeJoy that slowed down mail in 2020 “snarled everything from prescription medication to election ballots.” Slow mail can result in “delayed checks, credit card penalties, …missed court appearances” and other issues. It also makes mail-in voting, which Trump has falsely asserted is a vehicle for significant election fraud, more difficult to execute.

DeJoy, the live-action cartoon villain, has been shifty since taking control of the agency under Donald Trump. He came in as a Trump fundraiser with no experience with USPS, conflicts of interest, and that run-it-like-a-business sensibility that gets office employees sprucing up resume the way talk of “shareholder value” does.

DeJoy plans to cut costs by limiting the use of planes to move the mail. The former trucking company executive likes trucks the way Brett Kavanaugh likes beer. Slowing down the mail will save the agency $169.5 million annually, “less than a quarter of one percent of the total FY 2020 operating expenses of $82 billion.” (The Postal Regulatory Commission adjudges that estimate inflated.) DeJoy will make the service less useful for the public but, you know, more efficient while not improving its baseline financial situation. That was undermined by the 2006 decision by Congress to require USPS to pre-fund 75 years of retiree benefits.

DeJoy wants to “participate more fully in the strengthening U.S. market for package delivery services.” Legum writes that DeJoy means to put more emphasis on the more lucrative package-delivery market as though USPS is a commercial service not a public service.

The head shake

The second post regarding USPS comes from David Dayen at The American Prospect:

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has taken the most dramatic step in a half-century to re-establish a postal banking system in America. In four pilot cities, customers can now cash payroll or business checks of up to $500 at post office locations, and have the money put onto a single-use gift card. It’s the most far-reaching executive action that the Biden administration has taken since Inauguration Day.

The move puts the USPS in direct competition with the multibillion-dollar check-cashing industry, which operates storefronts to allow unbanked or underbanked residents to cash their paychecks.

According to USPS spokesperson Tatiana Roy, the pilot launched on September 13 in four locations: Washington, D.C.; Falls Church, Virginia; Baltimore; and the Bronx, New York.

While limited for now, the resurrection of postal banking (shut down in 1967 after 56 years, Dayen explains) could eventually put USPS in direct competition with Walmart and commercial check-cashing services while enhancing USPA revenues. Postal banking could but access to financial services within reach of millions in every ZIP code in the country via USPS’s 31,000 facilities:

More surprising is that DeJoy is rolling out the pilot program in concert with the postal union:

“Offering new products and services that are affordable, convenient and secure aligns with the Postal Service’s Delivering for America 10-year plan to achieve financial sustainability and service excellence,” said USPS spokesperson Roy in a statement to the Prospect. “This pilot, which is in collaboration with the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), is an example of how the Postal Service is leveraging its vast retail footprint and resources to innovate.”

THAT COLLABORATION, and the USPS rolling out a key financial-inclusion product that progressives have championed for years, is what makes the announcement so staggering. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has become a high-profile villain to liberals since taking over last May, condemned for almost immediately causing significant slowdowns of mail, as well as ethical concerns surrounding the USPS awarding contracts to the company he previously ran. DeJoy’s ten-year plan, rolled out this year, would cement this dysfunction by permanently slowing target delivery times and raising prices for some first-class mail, particularly around the holidays.

The APWU has consistently criticized DeJoy. Last Thursday, union president Mark Dimondstein criticized the changes to service standards, saying: “The people deserve the prompt, reliable and efficient mail service promised under the law … We believe management’s response to months of poor performance should be to improve service and regain the public’s trust, instead of this focus on moving the goalposts and slowing service standards.”

Few would have named DeJoy as the official who would set in motion the most consequential executive action of President Biden’s first term. And even fewer would have correctly pegged that he would do it in cooperation with the APWU, one of his biggest antagonists. But the union has been laser-focused on getting postal leadership to embrace banking for many years, seeing it as an attractive product to bring in customers and promote financial inclusion.

Dayen has more details on how the cards would work. But for now, DeJoy is helping Biden expand services the administration has identified that require no additional authority from Congress. I’m glad to see it and look forward to its spread.

But I’m not ready to trust the Trumpist in charge of it.

This is very important exchange.

It is why opponents of the reconciliation bill DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT WHAT'S IN THE BILL

Because what's in the bill is very popular

Instead, they prefer to refer to the bill as a NUMBER which abstracts the actual policy https://t.co/LQYv0HDeqs

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) October 3, 2021

(And, btw, Manchin and Sinema are helping them do this by constantly ragging on the numbers.)

This interview between Chris Wallace and hardcore wingnut Senator from Wyoming, John Barrasso (a medical doctor, btw) illustrates the essential nihilism of the GOP. Barrasso can’t deny that Biden’s agenda will help his constituents. He just doesn’t think it’s important to do that. In fact, he is openly hostile to helping people.

…Wallace wondered aloud if this was all a political game for the Wyoming lawmaker and his GOP cohorts.

“As you point out, 19 of your fellow Republican senators voted for the bipartisan infrastructure plan in the Senate. You did not. You called the reconciliation bill a freight train to socialism. You and all of the Republicans were refusing the normal course—the bipartisan passage of raising the debt limit. So I guess the question to you and a lot of Republicans is are you viewing these issues on the merits or are you just playing partisan politics?”

Barrasso, for his part, said he supported a lot of what’s in the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal but feels “it spent too much” and he was concerned “with the gimmicks that were used to fund it.” He also claimed that Republicans opposed the reconciliation package because they “want to grow the economy” while Democrats want to “grow the government.”

Turning his attention to the reconciliation bill, the Fox anchor noted that it contains an extension and increase of the child tax credit that Barrasso himself supported when he voted for former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts in 2017.

“Your state of Wyoming is one of the states that benefits most from the increase in the child tax credit. Why oppose that?” Wallace asked.

After the conservative senator began complaining about the spending bill’s current $3.5 trillion price tag, the Fox News Sunday moderator cut him off, pushing him on the specific details of the child tax credit.

“I guess part of the question is could you have worked with them on this child tax credit which you voted for in 2017? That’s one of the things you are voting against right now,” Wallace continued. “Why oppose that program?”

Dodging the question, Barrasso insisted you had to look at the “entire balance” of the bill before complaining that the package calls for more stringent IRS auditing procedures.

“This is an invasion of privacy,” the senator exclaimed. “Every senator’s hearing about this. That is included as well.”

Moving past the child tax credit, Wallace then brought up another item of the spending bill that would help Barasso’s home state quite a bit.

“You talk about things you don’t like—like the added IRS agents and added IRS intrusion,” the veteran anchor declared. “Let’s talk about another part of the bill which is universal Pre-K.”

He added: “In the state of Wyoming, less than one-quarter of children 3-4, who would be covered in the bill, are enrolled in publicly funded preschool. Less than a quarter. Wouldn’t a lot of Wyoming families benefit from universal Pre-K?”

Barrasso, however, couldn’t bring himself to give credit to the president for anything.

“There’s a number of things that would help Wyoming,” he groused. “Overall, Joe Biden’s policies have been hurting the people of Wyoming.”

The Republican senator then grumbled that while progressives want to provide free community college, Pre-K, and daycare to Americans, it is “not the way our country has been founded.”

This isn’t a new thing, of course. Right wingers have fought against all policies that benefit anyone other than the wealthiest among us. That’s why they have to deploy culture war rhetoric to appease their voters. They literally have nothing else to offer them. (Not that their voters are unhappy about this. They have been persuaded that their interests are best served by denying themselves benefits in order to prevent the people they hate from getting them.

You’ve got to hand it to the wingnuts. They have an excellent insight into what their people really care about — their grievances toward anyone who doesn’t look like them or agree with them.

Still, it’s important to note that Trump handled this very differently. He didn’t play to that denial of self interest at all. He just lied, telling them they could have all the benefits and that he would deny them to the people they hate. No wonder they loved him so much. That’s exactly what they have always wanted to hear.