Today’s White House press briefing may was the most ridiculous I’ve seen in a very long while. Karinne Jean-Pierre deserves a medal for not blowing up at the bozos in the media who were apparently trying to equate Biden’s COVID diagnosis with Trump’s super spreader events at the height of the pandemic in 2020. It was outrageous.
Here’s a taste:
This is why people on all sides hate the media. It’s ridiculous.
Apparently, some of them think birth control causes more abortions. Which, of course, they do because they are willfully scientifically illiterate and think that many birth control methods are “abortifascient” which is utter nonsense.
Now you know where the Republican Party stands:
One-hundred and ninety five Republicans have voted against a House bill codifying the right to contraceptives into federal law.
The Right to Contraception Act passed the Democrat-controlled House 228-195 on Thursday, and it now faces an uncertain future in the Senate. The bill affirms an individual’s right to access and use contraceptive methods, health care providers’ right to prescribe them, and allows for the Justice Department and individuals harmed by the refusal of contraceptives to seek legal recourse.
The right of married couples to buy and use contraceptives was established by the 1965 supreme court case Griswold v. Connecticut. The understanding of that decision subsequently has been expanded to include unmarried individuals.
Every Democrat and eight Republicans, including Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), voted in favor of the Right to Contraception Act. Two Republicans voted “present.” The vast majority of the party, however, opposed the bill. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) accused its supporters of being a “real piece of work” who are looking to “solve a problem that doesn’t exist” and “allow more abortions.”
It goes without saying that access to contraceptives is one of the most effective methods in reducing rates of unplanned pregnancies.
Four of those eight Republicans are retiring and one of them (Cheney) is almost certain to lose her seat.
This says something. Many of these GOPers probably are against protecting the right to contraception as a matter of principle (Leave it to a bunch of yahoos in the states!!!!) But I have to assume that a whole lot of them don’t want the grief they will get from their rabid right wing evangelical base.
This is a real thing. Don’t kid yourself. It seems crazy but these people are antediluvian throwbacks who truly believe that if women would just accept their natural position as mothers in this world our problems would be solved.
Steve Lopez’s column looks at a new study that shows a whole lot of people think so:
When UC Davis violence researcher Dr. Garen Wintemute queried Americans on political violence, race and threats to democracy, he didn’t know exactly how scary the results would be.
“We expected the findings to be concerning, but these exceed our worst expectations,” said Wintemute, a go-to source of mine for many years on gun violence, which he witnesses firsthand as an emergency room physician in Sacramento.
The report by Wintemute and his team at the Violence Prevention Research Program was released by UC Davis on Wednesday, on the eve of the last round of congressional hearings into the Jan. 6 takeover of the Capitol. The findings were posted by medRXiv.org, a health sciences website that lists works in progress prior to peer review.
Wintemute told me that with midterm elections coming up in a politically divided and frenzied nation that has more firearms than people, he wanted to go public with his findings now rather than wait for peer review, which might not come until after the election.
Most gun-related violence in the United States involves daily assaults that don’t make headlines, but where weaponry and politics intersect, here are some of the highlights — or maybe lowlights is the better word — of what Wintemute and his research team found:
— Slightly more than two-thirds of more than 8,600 survey respondents perceive “a serious threat to our democracy,” and 51.1% believe that “in the next several years, there will be a civil war in the United States.”
— 42.4% said having a “strong leader” is more important than “having a democracy.”
— 41.2% said they believe “native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants.”
— 18.7% said they agree strongly or very strongly with the idea that violence or force are needed to protect democracy “when elected leaders will not.”
Sadly, none of this is surprising. Thanks to political polarization, the culture of distortion, social media saber-rattling and right-wing fanning of replacement-theory flames, millions of delusional Americans believe that Donald Trump is no longer president only because Joe Biden stole the election.
And the fear is that many of them, armed to the teeth, are prepared to storm the gates.
“About a year ago we began following a surge in gun purchasing,” Wintemute told me. “It was unprecedented and started at the beginning of the pandemic … and the surge … appeared to be related to an increase in the size of the violence that followed.”
At the same time, he said, there was ample evidence of an erosion of faith in democratic institutions and elections, and he wanted to study how serious a threat that constituted. (The survey respondents were about evenly split between male and female. Whites made up 62%, Hispanics 17%, Blacks 12%, Asians 5.4%, and the median age was 48).
Just under 43% of survey respondents agreed somewhat, strongly or very strongly with this statement: “Our American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
Nearly 25% agreed that use of force is sometimes, usually or always justified “to stop an election from being stolen.” And just over 25% agreed somewhat, strongly or very strongly that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
Nearly 32% disagreed with this statement: “White people benefit from advantages in society that Black people do not have.”
Almost 23% agreed somewhat, strongly or very strongly with this statement: “The government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
I guess the only way to look at that without buying a one-way ticket to Canada is to remind yourself that three-fourths of the population is at least a bit more grounded.
“These findings deserve Americans’ attention, and they should be taken at face value. They are in keeping with the other data political violence experts are seeing regarding strong support for political violence from a small but still far, far too large — and increasing — portion of the American public,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Daniel Webster of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions agreed with Kleinfeld and said this:
“The Far Right has been seeding the soil to take and keep political power through ‘justified’ violence — claims of stolen elections, pedophilia, promoting militias and folks arming themselves to the teeth and then telling them that their enemies are coming to try to disarm them from their ‘God-given rights.’ Few would take up arms themselves, but many would enable and applaud political violence.”
Webster’s colleague at the Hopkins center, co-director Joshua Horwitz, saw the cracks in the foundation of U.S. democracy many years ago. He co-wrote a book with attorney Casey Anderson, published in 2009 under the title “Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea.”
“I started writing it in 2005 because something was going on that was very unhealthy for our democracy, and I tried to warn people,” said Horwitz, a health advocacy professor at Johns Hopkins, who recalls friends doubting his conclusions.
What concerned him was the rise of the National Rifle Assn. and the rest of the gun lobby as a political force that was flying the flag of the 2nd Amendment, making the argument that men with guns make the rules. Republican lawmakers amplified that rhetoric, Horwitz said, along with some Democrats.
Since that time, Horwitz said, millions of firearms have been produced and private homes are now arsenals of sophisticated and powerful weapons. That’s thanks to unforgivable legislative failure on sensible, lifesaving gun control reforms despite one horrific massacre of innocent people after another.
“Just remember that one AR-15 held back 400 police officers in Uvalde,” Horwitz said of the recent Texas school massacre, warning that 10 people working together with such firepower could wreak devastation we haven’t yet imagined.
In his report, Wintemute said that despite the “continuing alienation from and mistrust of American democratic society … founded in part on false beliefs,” there’s hope.
“A large majority of respondents rejected political violence altogether,” he said, and the challenge is for that majority to recognize the threat and respond to it.
Easier said than done, but worth the effort.
Wintemute said he hopes the Jan. 6 hearings and the findings of his team’s report are a wake-up call. He said we should recognize that some who feel alienated have legitimate grievances about government failures and address them. We need a better mental health care system, he said, and a better way to make counterpoints available to those attracted to extremist views.
And then there’s the obvious need for sensible gun control, and the endless work of trying to convince enough people that the weapons they buy for self-protection actually put them and their loved ones in greater danger.
“We are right now in the middle of a huge national experiment,” Wintemute said. We’re finding out “what happens when you take an angry, polarized society and make guns much more easily available in a real hurry. What happens in that society? We’re living through the answer right now.”
Terrifying…
One day after the last rioter had left the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump’s advisers urged him to give an address to the nation to condemn the violence, demand accountability for those who had stormed the halls of Congress and declare the 2020 election to be decided.
He struggled to do it. Over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over, according to individuals familiar with the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
The public could get its first glimpse of outtakes from that recording Thursday night, when the committee plans to offer a bold conclusion in its eighth hearing: Not only did Trump do nothing despite repeated entreaties by senior aides to help end the violence, but he sat back and enjoyed watching it. He reluctantly condemned it — in a three-minute speech the evening of Jan. 7 — only after the efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed and after aides told him that members of his own Cabinet were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
Oh that does sound interesting. I’ve always wondered about that speech. You could tell it was coerced (just like the first Charlottesville speech…) It will be fascinating to see him fighting it.
“Who led Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and the Overstock guy into the Oval Office for the ‘unhinged’ Dec 18 seize the voting machines/martial law meeting?” tweeted former FBI Counterintelligence Division agent Peter Strzok last night.
“This guy.”
One reason that famous Maya Angelou quote sees such heavy rotation is because it applies so often. Case in point? Yeah, that guy (CNN):
A former Trump White House aide who met with the January 6 committee earlier this week went on a profane and sexist rant on a livestream after his testimony, where he railed against the lawmakers and attacked other witnesses, according to audio posted to his Telegram.
The aide, Garrett Ziegler, met with the House panel on Tuesday. Lawmakers were likely interested in hearing from him because of his ties to one of the most shocking episodes of the 2020 election saga: A White House meeting where then-President Donald Trump’s outside allies tried to convince him to declare martial law and use the military to seize voting machines.
In the 27-minute livestream, Ziegler used vulgar and misogynistic language to attack Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin, two women who worked for the Trump White House but have since publicly broken from the former President and cooperated with the January 6 panel.
Ziegler, a former aide to Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, accused the Jan. 6 investigation of being “a Bolshevistic, anti-white campaign.” He referred to Hutchinson and Griffin as “hoes and thots.” (I had to look up the latter.) In recent Telegram posts, Ziegler still falsely claims the 2020 election was stolen and that the Jan. 6 insurrection “was one of the greatest orchestrated false flags in history.”
Ziegler complains he’s been targeted for questioning for being a “a young Christian who they can try to basically scare.”
By his rhetoric, this “young Christian” is a throwback to the John Birchers of the 1950s and 60s. Tomorrow belongs to him.
Whenever conservatives feel threatened that the world has slipped beyond their control, they predictably round up the usual suspects. Old, familiar enemies are a comforting point of reference in this scary future.
Fifty-five years after the Summer of Love, they’re still looking to punch hippies for wearing long hair, love beads, and for sticking daisies in gun barrels.
Sixty-plus years after the last Red Scare, and three decades after the Berlin Wall fell — when they declared that Saint Ronald of Reagan won the Cold War — American conservatives are still looking for Reds under their beds before they crawl beneath their sheets. They can’t seem to get their heads out of their anti-communism. But they love former communist strongmen.
These are people who believe they are the only ones — and only political party — prepared to lead America forward in the 21st century.
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Getting Donald Trump to repudiate the Jan. 6 violence he so gleefully watched on his West Wing television was like getting an infant to eat his strained vegetables. He fussed and batted away the spoon the next day. Metaphorically. There wasn’t a White House plate handy to throw against the wall as staffers insisted he suck it up and make the statement, responsible adult-style.
The Washington Post reports:
He struggled to do it. Over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over, according to individuals familiar with the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
The public could get its first glimpse of outtakes from that recording Thursday night, when the committee plans to offer a bold conclusion in its eighth hearing: Not only did Trump do nothing despite repeated entreaties by senior aides to help end the violence, but he sat back and enjoyed watching it. He reluctantly condemned it — in a three-minute speech the evening of Jan. 7 — only after the efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed and after aides told him that members of his own Cabinet were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
“This is what he wanted to happen,” Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who is scheduled to lead the questioning Thursday along with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), said in an interview this week. “You might have earlier on said, ‘Was he incompetent? Was he someone who freezes in a moment when they can’t react to something? Or was it exactly what he wanted to have happened?’ And after all of this, I’m convinced that this is exactly what he wanted to have happen.”
Mr. “Knock the crap out of ’em,” the showman once invested in professional wrestling, loved what he was seeing on Jan. 6. Per former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham:
“All I know about that day was that he was in the dining room, gleefully watching on his TV as he often did, ‘look at all of the people fighting for me,’ hitting rewind, watching it again — that’s what I know,” Grisham told CNN’s “New Day.”
Only after it became clear the insurrection he inspired would fail did Trump issue a call to his “very special” mob to go home, Luria notes.
By then 187 minutes had passed. One rioter had been shot and killed by Capitol security, two others of natural causes, and a third of accidental acute amphetamine intoxication after collapsing amidst the violent assault. Hundreds of police officers were injured, some severely. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick suffered two strokes during the fighting and died the next day.
The House Jan. 6 investigating committee tonight will lay out a minute-by-minute chronicle of what Trump did and did not do that day.
The hearing is also expected to tie together details from prior hearings, including the inflammatory presidential rhetoric that drew thousands to Washington that day, Trump’s willingness to grant audiences to fringe figures peddling fabulist and unconstitutional theories on how he could keep hold of the presidency and the many times he was urged to intervene during the violence but refused to do so.
All of it points to one conclusion, which the committee plans to argue Thursday: Trump wanted the violence, he is responsible for it and his unwillingness to help end it amounts to a dereliction of duty and a violation of his oath of office.
Donald Trump violated his oath the moment he swore it. The only thing Trump swears fealty to is himself.
So looking forward to tonight’s season finale* of Only Coup Plotters in the West Wing.
*Not series finale.
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Oh my, what a lovely gathering of lying hypocrites:
Some House Republicans praised former Vice President Mike Pence for certifying the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021, and encouraged him to run for president in 2024 in a closed-door gathering Wednesday.
During a meeting of the Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus of conservatives in Congress, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, stood up and thanked Pence for his “courage and standing for the Constitution and certifying” President Joe Biden’s election win, according to Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., and two other Republicans who attended the meeting.
Roy’s comments received “sustained applause” in the room, Hill told NBC News. “I commend Vice President Pence for standing for the Constitution and doing his duty under duress,” Hill said.
“Let me just say the vice president is a real moral force. He’s a real true leader and he’s earned the respect of Republicans and other Americans all over this country,” Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., told reporters as he left the meeting at the Capitol Hill Club, near the Capitol complex.
Later in the meeting, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., told Pence he appreciated him engaging with lawmakers and asked if he had any plans to run for the Oval Office in 2024, according to a lawmaker in attendance who discussed the private meeting on condition of anonymity.
Leaving the meeting, Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., told reporters “people were encouraging him in there” to run for president.
Ouch, Donnie! That’s gotta hurt. The Republican Study Committee is a bunch of RINOs too? Wow. You just can’t trust anyone these days, can you?
Who will ask these backstabbing Trumpers about this? I can’t wait to see it.
After months of negotiating, a group of senators announced two proposals Wednesday designed to close gaps in federal law and prevent future candidates from stealing elections.
The measures — called the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act and the Enhanced Election Security and Protection Act — are led by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.
The bills seek to close loopholes in election law that then-President Donald Trump and his allies tried to exploit to keep him in power despite his defeat in the 2020 election. The first bill would clarify the vice president’s role in counting Electoral College votes, raise the bar for members of Congress to object, and try to prevent fake slates of electors from interfering in the process. The second is aimed at protecting election workers.
The bills come as the House’s Jan. 6 committee prepares to holds its last public hearing — at least for the time being — on Thursday outlining evidence it has received in connection to what it calls a plot to overturn the result of the 2020 election.
“Through numerous meetings and debates among our colleagues as well as conversations with a wide variety of election experts and legal scholars, we have developed legislation that establishes clear guidelines for our system of certifying and counting electoral votes for President and Vice President,” Collins, Manchin and the rest of the Senate group said in a joint statement. “We urge our colleagues in both parties to support these simple, commonsense reforms.”
Preventing fake electors
The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act would overhaul the 1887 Electoral Count Act by making clear that the vice president’s role in confirming an election result is “solely ministerial” — that she or he doesn’t have unilateral power to reject electors. It would also raise the threshold for forcing a vote on objecting to electors — from one House and Senate member to one-fifth of each chamber, the authors said.
In all, 147 Republicans, including eight senators, objected to certifying electors on Jan. 6, 2021.
The bill would also amend the Presidential Transition Act of 1963 to ensure that candidates of both parties receive resources to aid the transition, in limited circumstances “when the outcome of an election is reasonably in doubt,” according to a summary.
One of the thorniest issues for the group was how to make sure the correct electors for the winning candidate are counted. The legislation would identify the state’s governor unless otherwise specified by the state, as the person responsible for submitting the election result — an attempt to avoid dealing with competing slates of electors. The Jan. 6 committee has outlined how Trump’s team organized groups of fake electors in multiple states to try to overturn the 2020 election result in his favor; nearly a dozen false electors in Georgia have been hit with subpoenas in a criminal investigation into election interference in the state.
The bill would also provide a process for expedited judicial review, featuring a three-judge panel and the possibility to directly appeal to the Supreme Court if a candidate wants to challenge the submitted electors. “This accelerated process is available only for aggrieved presidential candidates and allows for challenges made under existing federal law and the U.S. Constitution to be resolved more quickly,” says the summary of the legislation.
And the legislation would eliminate “a provision of an archaic 1845 law that could be used by state legislatures to override the popular vote,” the summary continued.
The second bill, the Enhanced Election Security and Protection Act, would double penalties under federal law for people “who threaten or intimidate election officials, poll watchers, voters, or candidates,” the summary of the proposals said.
It would also add Postal Service guidance to improve the processes for mail-in ballots, reauthorize the Election Assistance Commission for five years and make clear that electronic election records must be preserved.
All that sounds great. Here’s the list of Senators:
Apart from Manchin and Collins, other members of the group include Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio; Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.; Mitt Romney, R-Utah; Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; Mark Warner, D-Va.; Thom Tillis, R-N.C.; Chris Murphy, D-Conn.; Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.; Ben Cardin, D-Md.; Todd Young, R-Ind.; Chris Coons, D-Del.’ and Ben Sasse, R-Neb., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
I don’t mean to be pessimistic but that’s only seven Republicans. And of those, only some of them are sponsoring each of the bills. Will they get 10 GOPers on both bills to break the filibuster? I’m skeptical that their once and future king (and his subjects) will allow that.
But god help us if they don’t. This is super important.
Congress got access to some Trump administration documents:
The documents’ release, along with a new report by the House oversight committee, comes as Congress considers a House bill that could help shield upcoming national head counts from the kind of interference that saddled the 2020 census during the Trump administration.
“Today’s Committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the Trump Administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals,” says Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York, who chairs the House oversight committee and introduced the bill, in a statement. “It is clear that legislative reforms are needed to prevent any future illegal or unconstitutional efforts to interfere with the census and chip away at our democracy.”
A memo focused on congressional apportionment
Multiple drafts of a newly released memo from 2017 show that in the months before the March 2018 announcement of then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ decision to add a citizenship question, Trump officials were particularly focused on who specifically should be included in the census numbers used to reapportion congressional seats and electoral votes among the states once a decade.
Both U.S. citizens and noncitizens, regardless of their immigration status, have been part of those official numbers since the country’s first national head count in 1790. Despite the 14th Amendment’s requirement to include the “whole number of persons in each state,” however, Trump officials were searching for a way to exclude unauthorized immigrants.
In the version of the memo presented in August 2017 to Ross, who oversaw the Census Bureau, a key section referring to the Constitution’s instructions for divvying up congressional seats is titled: “The Apportionment Clauses Do Not Address the Exclusion of Noncitizens or Illegal Aliens From the Population When Apportioning United States Representatives.”
Then-Commerce Department attorney James Uthmeier wrote the memo at the request of Earl Comstock, another Trump appointee who was under pressure from Ross to figure out how to get a citizenship question onto the 2020 census forms.
An earlier draft by Uthmeier appeared to be skeptical of the administration’s ambitions. “Over two hundred years of precedent, along with substantially convincing historical and textual arguments suggest that citizenship data likely cannot be used for purposes of apportioning representatives,” wrote Uthmeier, who is now chief of staff to Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
But after multiple revisions following Comstock’s feedback, the revised memo sent to Ross claimed, without citing any evidence, that “there are bases for legal arguments that the Founding Fathers intended for the apportionment count to be based on legal inhabitants.”
In an email sharing that revised memo with another Trump appointee in the Commerce Department, Uthmeier noted: “Feel free to let me know if this is sugar coating the analysis too much.”
Uthmeier, Ross and Comstock did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A handwritten note suggested using the Voting Rights Act as cover
In fall 2017, Uthmeier hand-delivered the memo and a handwritten cover note to John Gore, a Trump appointee at the Justice Department who ghostwrote a letter that Ross used to publicly justify his decision to add a citizenship question.
Ross repeatedly testified in Congress that his decision to add the question was in response “solely” to that Justice Department letter, which requested more detailed U.S. citizenship data that could be used to enforce Voting Rights Act protections for racial and language minorities.
But the handwritten note obtained by the House oversight committee shows that Ross helped to orchestrate that DOJ request. “Sec Ross has reviewed concerns and thinks DOJ would have a legitimate use of data for VRA purposes,” Uthmeier wrote to Gore by hand.
Months before the DOJ submitted its request in December 2017, Uthmeier also followed up on a request from Ross by researching which states have used citizenship data in redistricting for Voting Rights Act enforcement, according to emails from September 2017.
One of those emails emphasized that the work should be kept quiet.
“Ultimately, everyone is in agreement with our approach to move slowly, carefully, and deliberately so as to not expose us to litigation risk,” Uthmeier wrote to Comstock and other Trump appointees at the Commerce Department, adding that they were “not yet discussing our analysis with outside parties that may take our discussions public.”
“Only the best people ….”
There is not one scintilla of integrity in 98% of Trump’s political appointees. And note that the lawyer in question is now DeSantis’ Chief of Staff. I think that says it all.
There’s a lot of talk right now about how the Democrats are helping the lunatic Trumpers win in various races under the logic that the crazy Trumpers are too crazy to win a statewide race so it gives Democrats an advantage if they win their primaries. But everyone is sounding the alarm that these Trumpers may just win in which case it will be all the fault of Democrats.
There are good reasons for Democrats to spend their money elsewhere and I can see both sides. I think it depends on the race and the state. But come on. Nobody’s forcing Republicans to vote for these nutcases and it is certainly Republicans who are doing it. There may be a few crossovers but it’s not significant. The GOP loves these freaks and that’s not the fault of Democrats.
JV last at the Bulwark takes this on first suggesting that it’s immoral for Democrats to ever cross over and vote for anyone but a “good” Republican but then goes on to make the case that this whole argument is bogus anyway:
Okay. With all of that out of the way: What’s with the “Democrats are making Republicans nominate dangerous candidates with all of their ads!”
We saw this with Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania:
And now we’re seeing it with Dan Cox in Maryland:
I won’t bother linking to the tweets. You’ll have to take my word that this is a line of argument that a certain species of Republican is very interested in.
But there are a few problems with it.
(1) In general, we’re seeing similar results in most R primaries, whether or not Dems have “meddled.”
In Massachusetts, Republicans pushed aside one of the most popular governors in America so that they could go ultra-MAGA. The Democrats weren’t running any boosting ads. In Wyoming, Republicans are going to kick Liz Cheney to the curb even as Democrats rally to try and support her. Look across the map and the two spots where normie Republicans have whipped MAGA are Colorado and Georgia. But those are the outliers.
In general, we’re seeing the same results in state after state, regardless of whether or not Democrats boost bad-guy candidates.
(2) In the specific cases of Pennsylvania and Maryland, the Democratic boosting does not seem to have made a significant difference.
I showed my work on the Mastriano race here. Recap: Dems spent very little money and spent it very late; Mastriano was endorsed by Trump; Mastriano had already separated himself from the pack by the time the Ds got into the race; the only real alternative was also MAGA-friendly.
Except for the MAGA-friendly alternative part, most of that holds true for Dan Cox’s victory last night in the Maryland gubernatorial primary.
-The DGA spent relatively little money boosting Cox—only about $1.2 million.
-Cox was endorsed by the most important Republican in America: Donald Trump.
-Cox already had a healthy lead in polling.
-Cox seems to have won by a significant margin.
Dan Cox didn’t win because the DGA put him over the top. He won because Maryland Republicans prefered him.
(3) Republican voters of have agency.
Ad spending does not create electoral success. Ask Jeb Bush, Jon Huntsman, Steve Forbes, David McCormick, et al. That’s because voters have agency. They find candidates they like.
There is a certain threshold for viability that needs to be crossed in politics: You need enough money so that voters know who you are and what you’re selling. But once you cross that line, the marginal utility of each dollar declines. Making the sale is in the hands of the candidate and the voters.
What’s important to understand about the boosting Dems did for Mastriano and Cox is that they weren’t hiding the football and making the candidates out to be more acceptable than they are. They were highlighting how deplorable the candidates were.
This is Republican state senator Doug Mastriano. He’s the Republican who’s ahead in the polls for governor. He wants to outlaw abortion. It’s Mastriano who wrote the heartbeat bill in Pennsylvania and he’s one of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters. He wants to end vote by mail and he led the fight to audit the 2020 election. If Mastriano wins, it’s a win for what Donald Trump stands for. Is that what we want in Pennsylvania?
Meet Dan Cox, Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate for Maryland governor. Cox worked with Trump trying to prove the last election was a fraud. 100% pro life, he’s fighting to end abortion in Maryland and Cox will protect the Second Amendment at all costs, refusing to support any federal restrictions on guns. Even pushing to put armed guards in every school. Dan Cox: Too close to Trump; too conservative for Maryland.
Let’s pretend that you make Coxonium and this product is poison.
I decide to run ads promoting Coxonium that say,
Coxonium is good for your health! Tastes great, goes down smooth, and cures whatever ails you!
If people buy Coxonium, maybe that is my fault? I have lied to them about Coxonium and what it does. Sure, maybe they should have done their own research. Not relied on a single ad. Checked the news to see if anyone had died from Coxonium. But whatever. I’ve still got some culpability. I was selling people a bill of goods.
But what if I run Coxonium ads like this:
Coxonium is poison. Real, genuine poison. If you take it, you will probably die. Do not buy Coxonium because it will kill you.
And what if people who see this ad say, “Well shit, Lurleen. I been fixin’ to git myselfs some poison and damned if that Coxonium don’t look like the finest poison there is. Let’s buy it!”
Is that really on me and the ad?
Because it seems to me like the culpability lies with the guy who loves poison and can’t wait to buy it, even after being told what it does.
Here is the real reason Republican elites and members of Conservatism Inc. are so wrapped around the axle about Democrats boosting their crazy candidates:
They need to blame someone for the outcomes they don’t like. But they can’t blame Republican voters.
Because if you acknowledge that we are living in a moment where some very large portion of Republican voters are illiberal, then you are forced into some uncomfortable choices. You can either:
-Make your own accommodation with illiberalism; or
-Start supporting Democrats, however imperfect they may be.
You can, perhaps, understand why this choice so vexes many people who have the Republican party and/or Conservatism deeply entrenched in their personal identity.
For them, it’s easier to throw their hands in the air and insist that real Republicans aren’t as bad as Mastriano and Cox—it’s just that the Democrats made them do it.