News that a missile from the Russia-Ukraine conflict struck Polish soil Tuesday, killing two, sent shudders around the world. First reports blamed Russia which had fired into Ukraine a barrage of at least 85 missiles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said most missiles targeted his country’s power infrastructure. Like many first reports, this one appears to have been wrong (Washington Post):
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday that the explosions in Poland that claimed two lives were probably caused by a Ukrainian missile defending against Russian strikes.
The remark, made following a meeting of NATO ambassadors in Brussels, came after Western leaders urged calm and tried to curtail speculation about the risk of direct hostilities between Russia and NATO.
Stoltenberg said the incident is still being investigated but the blast was most likely due to a Ukrainian antiaircraft missile defending against a Russian cruise missile. Still, he stressed, Russia is to blame.
Polish President Andrzej Duda called the explosion an “unfortunate accident” and dismissed speculation of a direct attack on his country (New York Times):
“We have no evidence at the moment that it was a rocket launched by Russian forces,” Mr. Duda told reporters. “However, there are many indications that it was a missile that was used by Ukraine’s antimissile defense.”
❗️Polish media report the fall of missiles on the territory of Poland
An explosion occurred at a grain drying plant in Przewodow (10 kilometers from the border with Ukraine). According to the fire service, two people were killed. 1/2
Ron Brownstein has a thorough look at the 2022 electorate and I think this is the most salient aspect as we await the “Big Announcement” tonight:
How did Democrats overperform recent historical trends with voters dissatisfied with the economy or the president? Attitudes about the former president, and the party he has reshaped in his image, may largely explain the difference. In the exit poll, nearly three-fifths of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Trump, and more than three-fourths of them voted Democratic this year. Many of the Republican Senate and gubernatorial candidates he helped propel to their nominations also faced negative assessments from voters. And despite predictions from both Republicans and media analysts that abortion had faded as a galvanizing issue, a clear three-fifths majority of all voters in the national exit poll said they believed that the procedure should remain legal in all or most circumstances—and about three-fourths of them voted Democratic. Democrats also won about three-fourths of the voters who said abortion should remain mostly legal in the key Senate states of Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and two-thirds of them in New Hampshire. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer won a stunning four-fifths of the voters who said abortion should remain legal.
These concerns about Trump and abortion rights didn’t completely erase voter discontent over the economy and inflation. Inflation still ranked highest when the exit polls asked voters what issues most concerned them (with abortion a very close second). And Republicans still won most of the voters who expressed the purest “double negative” views—those with unfavorable opinions of both Biden and Trump. But it’s hardly a surprise that the party out of the White House might win most voters who express an unfavorable view of the sitting president, no matter what other attitudes they hold. The notable part was that the exit poll found Democrats holding 40 percent of those double-negative voters—a number that helped them apparently avoid a titanic red wave.
In the past, when midterms have turned decisively against the sitting president’s party, one reason is a backlash among independent voters, who are the most likely to shift allegiance based on current conditions in the country. Each time the president’s party suffered especially large losses in a midterm since the mid-1980s (a list of electoral calamities that includes 1986, 2006, and 2018 for Republicans and 1994, 2010, and 2014 for Democrats), independents have voted by a double-digit margin for House candidates from the other party, according to exit polls. But yesterday’s exit polls showed the two parties splitting independent voters about evenly on a national basis and Democrats winning among them in the Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania Senate races.
Immigrants in a US detention facility endured excessive, unnecessary gynecological procedures, often without consent, according to a bipartisan Senate investigation that offers the starkest details yet of alleged mistreatment.
The probe centers on the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia but raises red flags about inadequate safeguards throughout the immigration detention system, a senior Senate official said in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Government before the release of the findings. […]
The investigation builds on earlier scrutiny of the privately run Georgia facility following allegations from a whistleblower who said a doctor contracted by the detention center had performed gynecological procedures on detainees without their consent. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas halted US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s use of the facility last year.
Senate investigators reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of medical records and related documents, and determined immigrants at the Irwin County center were subjected to unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds, contraceptive injections, and dilation and curettage procedures, the Senate official said. The report also highlights repeated failures by detention officials to obtain informed consent from detainees and a failure by ICE to vet medical providers and ensure detainees’ basic human rights, the official said.
According to the report, the doctor at the center of the Irwin County allegations accounted for 6.5% of OB-GYN visits among ICE detainees nationwide during a three-year period but performed more than 90% of the contraceptive injections and more than 82% of the dilation and curettage procedures, which remove uterine lining.
They may have been in this for the money, for the cruelty or maybe just for the kicks. Whatever it is, it’s twisted and gross. But it isn’t the only example of this sort of behavior. DHS had some nuts tracking menstrual cycles of detainees and requiring exams in other places. If you need any more evidence that there’s something deeply sick at the center of the right wing assault on women’s bodily autonomy, look no further.
The state can no longer enforce its ban on abortion that took effect earlier this year, a Fulton County judge said Tuesday, allowing the procedure to be performed again in Georgia after a doctor detects fetal cardiac activity.
A Fulton County judge has overturned Georgia's ban on abortion that begins when a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat, which is as early as six weeks. Here's the ruling: #gapol
Judge McBurney wrote that the restrictions were "plainly unconstitutional when drafted, voted upon and enacted" when lawmakers adopted them in 2019, so they can't be enforced now. No immediate comment from Kemp's office. #gapol
The AG's office plans to pursue an immediate appeal but for now Georgia is enjoined from "seeking to enforce in any manner the post-heartbeat ban on abortion procedures in Georgia because there is no legal basis for them to do that which is not the law of this state." #gapol
The state can no longer enforce its ban on abortion that took effect earlier this year, a Fulton County judge ruled, allowing the procedure to be performed again in Georgia after a doctor detects fetal cardiac activity: #gapol#gasen
The judge left the door open for state lawmakers to revisit the ban, but that would be a risky proposition. The 2019 law passed with just one vote to spare in the Georgia House, and since then the Republican majority in the Legislature has narrowed. #gapol
A footnote says it all, I’m afraid. Dobbs has nothing to do with the Constitution or changing social norms or new information. It’s solely about power. The anti-abortion zealots have it and they wasted no time in using it.
The midterm elections in the United States were a hot topic in Moscow. Convinced that the “red wave” was coming, Russian propagandists rushed to take credit for the anticipated landslide victory that would ensure Republican majority in Congress and Senate.
On Tuesday, Russia’s Tucker Carlson, top propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, greeted his audience by wishing them a “Happy Interference in the U.S. Election Day.” Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s chef,” who was indicted as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference, likewise decided to publicly fess up to the allegations he previously denied.
This plan to discredit the U.S. elections and convince the Republicans that the mighty Kremlin hand covertly helped push them to victory had backfired. On Wednesday, state TV propagandists were scratching their heads about the wave that turned out to be but a trickle. During the broadcast of 60 Minutes, host Olga Skabeeva asked an expert: “How are our guys in America?” Political scientist Vladimir Kornilov clarified with a chuckle: “Our Republicans.”
Dmitry Abzalov, Director of the Center for Strategic Communications, noted that the outcome was much different than the predictions: “Even the Democrats predicted the red wave that will mow everything down, but it turned out to be quite modest.” Political scientist Vladimir Kornilov said, “The worst fears of the Democrats are now behind them. They easily won the states they were most concerned about.”
Co-host of 60 Minutes Evgeny Popov surmised: “Republican triumph or the tsunami did not materialize… Trump is already calling on Americans to protest ballot stuffing and not allowing his opponents to disrupt the elections.”
Russian state TV coverage focused on baseless allegations of various issues supposedly plaguing U.S. elections, featuring the footage of Kari Lake, candidate for governor of Arizona, and former U.S. President Donald J. Trump, complaining that the polling stations were “running out of paper” and experiencing various mishaps.
Skabeeva exclaimed: “Come out [in the streets], Americans! You are being lied to!” Abzalov pointed out that at least January should be “fun,” predicting that Republicans would attempt to impeach U.S. President Joe Biden. Skabeeva complained: “They will impeach but won’t be able to overthrow him. We’ve seen how it went down with our friend, our comrade Donald—and it happened more than once.”
Skabeeva went on: “We keep worrying about our guys, their results should have been better than this… Apparently, there will be no landslide victory for Republicans in Congress… Still, Donald Trump is planning to celebrate—it isn’t exactly clear what is there to celebrate.”
During the broadcast of a state TV show Who’s Against?, host Dmitry Kulikov noted: “The triumph of the Republicans didn’t happen… After these results, can Trump remain the leader of his party? That is in question… [Ron] DeSantis is rising, Trump will obviously challenge him. The main battles will be taking place within the Republican camp.”
Political editor Maxim Yusin concurred: “Republicans performed much worse than everyone had predicted yesterday… This is because of the Trump factor, this is clearly his fault. He butted into this electoral campaign too overtly and with his odious nature, pushed away those who were on the fence. Against this backdrop, the star of DeSantis is rising. He is only 44 years old. As we see by his surname, he is of a Latino-American descent—and there are more and more of Latino voters. Latinos voted for him in Florida.”
Yusin noted that DeSantis is similar to Trump in his conservative agenda and as a bonus, he does not possess any of Trump’s “weirdness” that “scares people away.” He said that the Democrats secretly want Trump to run for president and speculated that they will pause any legal pursuits to encourage the run of their favored “sparring partner.”
“Things are difficult.”
The guest predicted that if DeSantis is nominated, Republicans will win the presidential elections and get the majority. Kulikov agreed that Trump’s involvement made the battles easier for his opponents: “The Democrats are holding on because of their hysteria about losing democracy to the fascism on the other side. It played a big part. Trump allowed them to lean on that, basing their approach on him as a fascist specimen. The campaign of the Democrats, rooted in saving democracy from this monstrosity, turned out to be very productive.”
In addition to Russia’s mounting disappointments in the electoral battles of the United States, their invasion of Ukraine keeps going from bad to worse. During Tuesday’s broadcast of 60 Minutes, host Olga Skabeeva said, “Things are difficult. Nonetheless, we have to win on our own—it’s official. Republicans can hardly help us to retain the Kherson region or the city of Kherson.” On Wednesday, Russian troops retreated from the area.
Host Vladimir Solovyov started Wednesday’s broadcast of The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov by grimly noting: “We’ve been planning an entirely different program tonight. We were going to talk about American elections, but then we got the news from Kherson.”
Nonetheless, in the minds of the Kremlin’s propagandists, it’s all connected. Solovyov speculated that if the withdrawal was announced just one day earlier, it might have helped Biden and the Democrats: “[The withdrawal] was announced after Nov. 8, on Nov. 9, so it wouldn’t influence the U.S. elections.”
Friendly reminder: this isn’t normal. These people clearly believe that the Republican party are useful idiots for their aims. Now maybe this would have been a huge deal during a period when the Russian government was behaving in a more or less normal fashion. But under Putin’s increasingly autocratic rule they are waging a war against Ukraine and committing war crimes. Whatever beefs they have with NATO (if that happens to sound reasonable to you) pale in comparison to what they have done. That they, with good reason, believe that the US congress is going to withhold funds from Ukraine under GOP leadership is horrific and should be a wake-up call to decent Republicans everywhere. (Or is that an oxymoron? ….)
With this narrow margin in the House only, it is unlikely that the Marjorie Taylor Green faction will be able to get that done as long as Kevin McCarthy can find the cojones to allow votes that include Democrats. It’s going to be a battle all the way.
I lost track of Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s Washington State congressional race in all the election hubbub. Michelle Goldberg revisits WA-03 (R+5) in light of Gluesenkamp Perez’s upset win over Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed election denier. “FiveThirtyEight’s final forecast had given her a mere 2 percent chance of winning,” Goldberg writes. She offers four takeaways:
1. Democrats need to recruit more working-class and rural candidates.
Gluesenkamp Perez is a young mother who owns an auto repair shop with her husband. They live in rural Skamania County, in a hillside house they built themselves when they couldn’t get a mortgage to buy one. On the trail she spoke frequently of bringing her young son to work because they couldn’t find child care. She shares both the cultural signifiers and economic struggles of many of the voters she needed to win over.
“I hope that people see that this as a model,” she told me on Monday. “We need to recruit different kinds of candidates. We need to be listening more closely to the districts — people want a Congress that looks like America.”
I’d noticed Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign because another young woman who owns an auto repair shop with her husband ran in the NC-11 (R+8) Democratic primary this year. Katie Dean lost the primary to Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a Harvard-educated county commissioner and LGBTQ rights advocate from Asheville. Beach-Ferrara performed in the red district far better than any Democratic candidate since Heath Shuler retired. She still failed to win the seat vacated by Rep. Madison Cawthorn (and by Rep. Mark Meadows before him).
“2. Voters can see the link between abortion bans and authoritarianism,” Goldberg observes next. Gluesenkamp Perez linked her experience with a miscarriage with her district’s libertarian lean on reproductive and gun rights. She made “protect our freedoms” a campaign promise.
Perhaps voters prefer candidates who live outside ideological bubbles. But this election that knock against liberals cut against conservatives. “3. MAGA Republicans are stuck in a media echo chamber,” Goldberg writes. Kent seemed to live in his own. He appeared to “normies” as if he was into “weird ideological shit” alien to middle America. Gluesenkamp Perez felt Kent “spent too much time ‘operating in the chat rooms’” and not enough time around the Biden-voting majority.
Finally:
4. Data isn’t everything.
As FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich acknowledged on Twitter, the site’s model didn’t take into account Kent’s personal weaknesses, and included only one post-Labor Day poll. An overreliance on a few data points made Gluesenkamp Perez’s position look weaker than it really was. Democrats I spoke to in Washington State — as well as some Republicans — believed she had a decent shot, but national Democrats seem to have remained unconvinced. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gave her no financial support.
[…]
“You’ve got a Trump cult-of-personality acolyte, and everybody writes off the district,” Brian Baird, a Democrat who represented the Third District from 1999 to 2011, told me in September. “But up steps this young, feisty, bright, moderate woman, with a young child, trying to run a small business, and she says, ‘I’m not going to put up with this.’” Sometimes stories tell you what statistics can’t.
That’s what anyone exposed to young, presidential-campaign staffers can tell you. Fresh off primary races and with visions of West Wing jobs dancing in their heads, they are all about data. Data is how superiors evaluate their job performance. How many volunteers, how many calls, how many knocks today? Get those 9 p.m. numbers filed on time. Whether or not those numbers are meaningful. In 2008, Obama’s staffers were measuring supporter engagement. In 2016, Team Clinton was overconfidently measuring measuring. It was a disaster.
Data is no substitute for reading the room. Too often, the DCCC can’t read.
“My campaign isn’t dead yet, even though my camera filter makes it look like I’m in heaven.” SNL lampoons Kari Lake.
“Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?” President George W. Bush asked famously. Like many statements originating with his party, it says more about the speaker than external reality.*
What will Republicans learn from 2022? The wrong lessons, if any.
Numbers don’t lie, Digby pointed out Monday. Trumpism has not served Republicans well. Or the United States. But for a party enamored of martinets posing as patriots, doubling down on mistakes is now muscle memory (ABC News):
Former President Donald Trump is expected to announce Tuesday night that he is running for president in 2024, marking his third bid for the White House.
Speaking at a rally in Ohio last week, Trump told supporters, “I’m going to be making a very big announcement on Tuesday, November 15, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.”
The announcement, which Trump has been hinting at for months, would come as the embattled former president faces multiple criminal and civil investigations and as his party is grappling with a worse-than-expected showing in the midterm elections, raising questions about the former president’s power over the GOP.
Election denier, former news anchor, and “new face of the MAGA movement” Kari Lake lost her bid for the Arizona governorship Monday to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Trump viewed a Gov. Kari Lake as a “straight out of Central Casting‘” pick for a 2024 running mate. “Now he is stuck with Stefanik or Noem as a running mate,” former Republican state official Ron Filipkowski tweeted after the announcement of Lake’s defeat.
Jeremy Stahl ‘s (Slate) post-mortem on the election rejects the notion that Jan. 6 was atop voters’ concerns going into Nov. 8. Instead, it was “the overall sense that MAGA candidates from coast-to-coast could destroy future elections and American democracy itself if given the chance.” Lake lost, as well as “the entire election-denying slate of secretary of state candidates in swing states across the country.”
That is not likely to stop Trump from announcing another run for the presidency. Nor will it stop a MAGA-whipped Republican leadership class from dutifully genuflecting, at least in public. Trumpism may not be dead. But its adherents may be political dead men walking.
What the punditocracy and pols across the spectrum were blind to going into this election was their own perceptual bubbles, suggests Christopher Federico, Professor of Political Science and Psychology and Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. All is not culture war for “normies,” i.e., not us:
This is crucial: the average person does not like weird ideological shit. Commentators have become so invested in the polarization narrative and their own sense of difference from middle America that they have missed the possibility that lots of GOP stuff is weird.
Perseverating on stuff that is hyper-salient to the engaged (quickly changing gender norms, debates over how to talk about race), they have missed how little of this language-virus stuff trickles down or registers at the mass level at all.
Federico notes that “much or more right-wing as liberal stuff comes off as scary or weird to normies.” Pundits, pollsters, and Republican leaders missed that. Election denialism was on the ballot.
Jan 6 was scary. Election denial is a few steps removed from thinking the moon landing was faked. The idea that school administrators are putting out litterboxes for cat-identifying kids is tinfoil hat shit to normal people.
NOPE, said normies across the country. Especially in races where candidates ran expressly on election denialism. A distressed Republican, a Democrat, and an independent speaking to one of our poll greeters all said they were, for the first time in their lives, voting against every Republican on the ballot more than for Democrats.
Election law expert Rick Hasen is “a bit less terrified” than he was earlier in the cycle. Why?
“The same election deniers that pleased Trump and the Republican base repelled enough sane Republicans who oppose stolen elections to hold back their votes,” Hasen writes at Slate:
Across the ballot, in the places where it mattered, Democrats, Republicans, and others poured money into defeating election-denying candidates. The message was that if these people were willing to say, against all reliable evidence, that the last election was stolen, how could you trust them to run the next one? Democracy was on the line. This time, the line held.
The Republican Party may not. They have not simply propagandized themselves, Trumpized themselves, into a corner. They’ve gerrymandered themselves into one. For now, gerrymandering in multiple states appears to have handed them a Republican House. If they can keep it.
"What if I told you that the Republicans had won the fight for the House of Representatives before a single vote was cast?"
My @MehdiHasanShow monologue tonight on the anti-democratic travesty that is *gerrymandering*, especially this year!
They’ll have help from Republican judges in keeping their gerrymanders. But last week they were supposed to have help from historical trends in easily flipping both houses of Congress. Losing narrowly will not have the salutary effect to affect a change in attitude.
Party zealots are most likely to vote in primaries in those safe districts Republicans have drawn for themselves. Incumbents who get even a bit squishy on the MAGA faith may draw a primary challenge that unseats them. Normies may reject election denialism, but it’s not them Republican incumbents must placate during primary season. In the general election, however, normies have more sway.
Last week, normies of all political persuasions told them no.
Hasen is not popping a champagne cork. Republicans are not likely to respond to rejection by reinforcing democratic norms. “So long as election denialism spreads, our democracy is not safe,” Hasen adds. Finally, whatever Trump announces, MAGAism is not subsiding quite yet. “We cannot exclude the possibility of more extreme tactics next time around.” As I already observed, whenever I think the GOP has run out of angles for suppressing Democratic votes and rigging elections, they find another. Republicans put more energy into that than into improving their voters’ lives.
The Republican Party may be dead, but it’s still walking.
* Democrats have their own issues with learning, but that’s for another day.
