The Third Way “‘don’t make trouble'” give the wingnuts what they want” centrists are already out there telling Democrats to jettison their values.
Here come the centrists, saying what they always say. The only way for Democrats to ever win anything (except when they win the popular vote as they have in every presidential election except one in the past 30 years, or when they win huge mid-term victories…) is to be much more conservatives because as everyone knows this is a conservative country. And lord knows, the beltway Villagers love this narrative.
Third Way — a center-left think tank backed by some of the biggest names in Democratic politics — is sounding the alarm about deep-seated party flaws, based on its own new polling from Senate battlegrounds.
Driving the news: “If Democrats manage to hold on to the House and Senate, it will be in spite of the party brand, not because of it,” Third Way writes in a memo synthesizing its conclusions, shared first with Axios.
“Despite a roster of GOP candidates who are extreme by any standard, voters see Democrats as just as extreme, as well as far less concerned about the issues that most worry them.”
Why it matters: Lifelong, respected Democrats are saying the quiet part out loud — that if Republicans have a huge night on Tuesday, as polls are blaring, Democrats must blame “much deeper” problems than simply the “historical trends” that beset the party in power.
Flashback:James Carville, Ruy Teixeira and other Dems have been making this case for more than a year, seizing initially on the embrace of “defund the police” by some progressives.
In a brutal bill of particulars, the Third Way memo says under the headings “Out of Touch on Priorities … Out of Touch Ideologically … Out of Touch on Values”:
“Democrats are underwater on issues voters name as their highest priorities, including the economy, immigration, and crime.”
“While Democrats maintain a lead on handling certain issues like abortion and climate change, voters also rank these issues as lower priorities.”
“[V]oters question whether the party shares essential values like patriotism and the importance of hard work. … Only 43% of voters say Democrats value hard work, compared to 58% for Republicans.”
“[E]ven in the areas where Democrats are trusted more [including education], it is not clear that voters are sold on Democrats’ approach or ability to get things done.”
“Democrats are benefitting from a perception among voters that Republicans are extreme, but they cannot fully reap the gains of this view, as voters think Democrats are extreme as well.”
The bottom line: Democrats need to make major changes to the party brand to avoid another potential wipeout in 2024.
They really seem to think that if only the Democrats would be more like Republicans, voters would flock to them. They’ve been saying this, literally, for years. This is why we have a Supreme Court that just banned abortion — people like this insisted that Democrats should back down because the American people were offended by pro-choice rhetoric. There was zero evidence that was true but they said it for decades and look where we are now.
The country is not polarized because people are yearning for the “third way” in which Democrats concede their own values in the name of winning. It’s polarized because people who vote for the two parties have different values. And I’m here to argue that the Democratic values are far more tied to the traditional American values that we were all brought up with than this extreme freakshow they are rolling out on the GOP side.
So let’s fight it out. I’m willing to bet that there are more decent human beings than crude, ignorant, bigots. I might be wrong but there are some things you just don’t compromise on.
(And, by the way, Democratic politicians NEVER said “defund the police” but centrist Democrats have said it a thousand times. Maybe they should look in the mirror to see why people believe the Democratic party was behind it.)
Truth Social is a cult show. It’s about raising money for Trump, passing around Trump memes and selling My Pillow and toe fungus ads. (Those last are really gross and they pop up all over the feed.) And he has no choice but to stick with it.
The co-founders of former president Donald Trump’s post-presidential start-up, Trump Media & Technology Group, had a name for June 11, 2021: “meltdown day.”
Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, former contestants on Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” had a week earlier traveled with an 11-person entourage to Trump’s palatial golf club in Bedminster, N.J., to show off what they’d worked for months to build: a web of conservative-aimed business ventures, including the Twitter clone Truth Social, that heavily promoted and depended on Trump’s name and brand.
Trump, however, was already considering other ideas. On June 11, Trump met at Bedminster with another suitor: his former aide Jason Miller, who was launching a rival conservative social network, Gettr, and had offered Trump at least $5 million a year and a stake in the company to join.
A Trump defection would have triggered a disastrous meltdownof everything Litinsky and Moss had created. Trump Media lawyers scrambled to mount a counterattack, according to people familiar with the episode, which has not been previously reported.
Trump ultimately stuck with Truth Social, helping the site attract a modest following. But the billionaire industrialist Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter could put Trump’s commitment to a new test, and some in his orbit wonder whether he’ll be able to stay loyal to a small site that is struggling to gain an audience and faces looming financial threats.
Trump has told his allies that he can’t leave Truth Social, because he’s propping it up, and he doesn’t want a site so closely associated with his brand to collapse, according to people familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this story.
Musk has called Twitter’s ban of Trump, after the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, a mistake and pledged to reinstate Trump’s account, although when that might occur remains unclear. Trump, however, has said he would not return even if he were invited back, saying he wanted to focus his efforts on Truth Social.
“If I choose to run, I will only use Truth” to post his thoughts, Trump told Fox News on the day after Musk’s takeover of Twitter became official. “When I put out a Truth, it is all over the place.” The platform feels “like home,” he said, and he likes “the way it works.” In a Truth Social post, he added, “I LOVE TRUTH!”
But Trump’s 4 million followers on the platform are a small fraction of the 88 million he once had on Twitter, and his dozens of posts — called “truths” — there in recent weeks have received none of the broad engagement and traction he counted on during his presidency.
Trump has asserted in recent Truth Social posts and TV interviews that Truth Social has performed better than the biggest apps on the internet, including Twitter and TikTok. The app debuted at the top of the Google app-store rankings last month when Google added it, but it has plunged in the days since, and it remains outranked by mainstream social networks in every measure.
If you love whining and lies, you probably enjoy it. But for normal people it couldn’t be more boring. It is a loser. Just like all of the very stable genius’s business ventures. It’s good thing he inherited all that money from his daddy and bought Manhattan real estate with it. But then a trained monkey could have done that.
“President Biden and the Democrats are in for a miserable election,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, who conducted this survey with Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt and his team at Hart Research Associates.
“The Democrats have to run way ahead of the president to win a statewide race,” said McInturff. “I would expect to see to see a large number of losses in the House and possibly a switch in control of the Senate.”
Wow, it’s going to be a blow out! The Republicans are such big winners! I can hardly believe it. Everyone should want to be on that awesome winning team, amirite?
Ok. Now read this analysis of the poll and tell me if that opinion lines up with the findings. Maybe I’m crazy but it sure looks to me as if the issues are all over the place and the findings are very inconclusive.
‘Threats to democracy,’ economy rank as top midterm issues
When voters were asked what they consider the nation’s most important issue, 23% answered with “threats to democracy,” 20% said jobs and the economy, and 17% replied with the cost of living — consistent with past NBC News polls.
But when asked which set of issues was more important in deciding their vote, 50% of voters said a candidate’s position on abortion, threats to democracy and addressing the cost of living by raising taxes on corporations (which largely has been the Democratic message).
That’s compared with 44% who picked a candidate’s position on crime, the situation at the border and addressing the cost of living by cutting government spending (largely the Republican message).
And when asked which one issue was more important in deciding their vote — a candidate’s position on the cost of living, or a candidate’s position on abortion — 58% of voters said cost of living, while 38% said abortion.
Independents, swing-state voters down on Biden
The final NBC News poll before the elections shows 44% of registered voters approving of President Biden’s job performance — down 1 point from October.
By contrast, 53% say they disapprove, which is up 1 point from a month ago.
Biden’s 44% approval rating is similar to the standings for former Presidents Barack Obama (45%) and Donald Trump (46%) in the final NBC News/WSJ poll before their first midterm election when their party lost control of at least one chamber of Congress.
Biden enjoys his highest ratings among Black voters (78% approve of his job), Latinos (52%), urban voters (50%) and women (48%).
But his lowest numbers are among suburban voters (43%), men (38%), white voters (37%), rural voters (29%) and independents (28%).
Among voters living in the 2020 presidential swing states, his approval rating is 40%.
Additionally, the poll finds a whopping 72% of voters believing the country is headed in the wrong direction, versus just 21% who think it’s on the right track.
And a combined 81% of voters say they are either “very” dissatisfied (50%) or “somewhat” dissatisfied (31%) with the state of the economy, while a combined 19% are either “very” satisfied (3%) or “somewhat” satisfied (16%).
Other findings
38% of all voters say they’ve already voted, either by mail (19%) or early in person (19%), another 13% say they plan to vote early, and 45% say they will be voting at the polls on Election Day.
Former President Barack Obama is the most popular figure measured in the poll (at 51% positive, 37% negative) — followed by President Biden (42% positive, 50% negative), the Democratic Party (38% positive, 47% negative), the Republican Party (35% positive, 48% negative) and former President Donald Trump (35% positive, 55% negative).
This is the one that gets me:
And voters are divided on their choice of the bigger concern about the upcoming election — 47% are more concerned that Republicans will take control of Congress and make the wrong kinds of changes, versus 45% who are more concerned that Democrats will continue to control Congress and not make enough change.
How that points to a clear GOP rout is beyond me.
McInturff is doing what GOP pollsters always do and they have no shame at all in doing it. He’s pimping the bandwagon effect. There is nothing in his poll that shows an inevitable GOP sweep. It could happen of course. But it could go the other way too. And he knows it.
The media should have learned not to listed to them long ago
Right. That Red Wave sure is obvious, isn’t it?
One more day until the voting is done. Hallelujah! When the polls are so tight and the campaigning so intense you reach a point where you almost don’t care who wins anymore and just want it to be over. But of course you do care, as we all must in this age of authoritarian right-wing, lunacy.
I wrote on Friday that nobody really knows anything about this election. It could go either way. It might be a close result or one side could sweep both houses of Congress with big wins. But if you just read the headlines and listen to the pundits and strategists on TV, you’d think the evidence showed clearly that Republicans were running away with it. There’s a reason for that: Republicans plant this notion in the press and the sad-sack Democrats play into it by prematurely assembling the circular firing squad whenever a race is close.
Maybe it’s all true. Maybe it will turn out that Democrats have blown the election (even though all the fundamentals and historical precedents suggest defeat was more or less preordained) and maybe the Republicans played a masterful hand (in winning an election everyone assumed was already in the bag). We will see. But let’s not kid ourselves about what is going on in these final days. Republicans are playing the press for chumps, as they do every single time. Of course they may win, but this election is close and they’re not soothsayers. It’s a deliberate strategy.
Let’s not kid ourselves about what is going on in these final days. Republicans are playing the press for chumps, as they do every single time. It’s a deliberate strategy.
The most famous purveyor of this strategy was Karl Rove, also known as “Bush’s Brain,” the strategist who eked out a history-changing victory for his guy in 2000. Rove was a big believer in the “bandwagon effect,” which assumed that a significant chunk of the voting public wlli go with those they perceive as winners. So when a race is close you put on a big show to pretend that you’re confident of winning, in the hopes of getting any last-minute wobblers or people who might not otherwise vote to get behind your team. It’s fun to win! In close races, Rove reasoned, this strategy might just make the difference. But it’s not scientific and nobody should take a GOP strategist’s word for anything in the final days of a campaign. They’re just spinning.
Rove even went so far as to send George W. Bush to California in the final days of the 2000 campaign, to convince the press that they were so confident of a blowout that they were hoping to expand the map into deep blue states. The New York Times blared, “A Confident Bush Says He Can Win California’s Vote.” As it turned out, Al Gore won the state by double digits, leading observers to wonder whether Rove should have sent Bush to Florida instead, the state he ended up “winning” by only 537 (disputed) votes. They did the same thing four years later by sending Dick Cheney to Hawaii, and the Los Angeles Times dutifully reported, “Aloha State Has Become a Surprise Campaign Battleground.” Um, no. It hadn’t. Democrats won Hawaii by nine points, as per usual.
Rove didn’t just deploy this strategy for election campaigns. As Bush’s senior adviser, he played the same game with public opinion over the war with Iraq:
In shaping their message, White House officials have drawn on the work of Duke University political scientists Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on Iraq and previous conflicts. Feaver, who served on the staff of the National Security Council in the early years of the Clinton administration, joined the Bush NSC staff about a month ago as special adviser for strategic planning and institutional reform.
Feaver and Gelpi categorized people on the basis of two questions: “Was the decision to go to war in Iraq right or wrong?” and “Can the United States ultimately win?” In their analysis, the key issue now is how people feel about the prospect of winning. They concluded that many of the questions asked in public opinion polls — such as whether going to war was worth it and whether casualties are at an unacceptable level — are far less relevant now in gauging public tolerance or patience for the road ahead than the question of whether people believe the war is winnable.
That helps explain the infamous 2003 Bush gaffe with “Mission Accomplished.” That didn’t work out in the long run because Republicans couldn’t deny reality forever as the Iraq war began to go south shortly after that. But the press was gullible enough, and the public stayed on board long enough, for the Bush team to win re-election and support the “surge” that prolonged the war. It’s simple enough: If you call yourself a winner, people will believe it (at least for a while) and will act accordingly.
We’re in a new landscape these days with election denial prominently featured on the menu. (Karl Rove is actually getting booed as a RINO sellout at GOP rallies.) The bandwagon effect is still in play but they now have a back-up: the Big Lie. It’s not overly cynical to suspect that a whole lot of the happy talk coming from Republican strategists whispering in reporters’ ears about how great their private polling looks is just a set-up for the possibility that they won’t do as well as they would like. As we already know, their voters are fully indoctrinated to believe that Democrats can only win if they cheat, and Republicans have created a full-scale election denial operation to challenge any negative results they don’t like. In some instances, they have challenged election systems in counties Trump won by double digits! Election denial has become the party’s primary organizing principle.
All of this has been aided and betted by Republican pollsters flooding the zone this cycle and right-leaning aggregators like Real Clear Politics which have helped to set sky-high Republican expectations. As the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein quipped on Twitter:
RCP is simply a component of the R messaging machine, no more no less https://t.co/4aGcoCak4K
None of this is accident or coincidence. The strategy is clear: In a close race, pretend you’re winning in hopes of enticing voters to jump on board. If that doesn’t work, claim the election was stolen and deny the legitimacy of your opponent’s victory. This is just what they do. Why the press allows itself to be manipulated this way, year after year, is another question. Media folks can’t possibly fail to understand what’s going on, after all this time. On some level, they fall for it because they like it.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton has decided that he won’t run for president in 2024 — making him the first big-name Republican to step aside as former President Donald Trump and others make moves toward running.
The senator has been reaching out to donors, supporters and senior Republicans over the last few days to inform them of his plans, according to two people familiar with his deliberations. Cotton has attributed his decision to family concerns, saying that a national campaign would take him away from his two young sons, who are seven and five years old.
Cotton’s decision kicks off a critical period in the 2024 presidential election cycle. After this week’s midterm election, potential candidates — including Trump, some of his Cabinet officials and prominent Republican governors and senators — are set to face more urgent questions about whether they will enter the race after spending the last two years making preparations.
Until this week, Cotton was one of those looking at a national campaign. He has spent much of the last two years campaigning across the country for Republican midterm candidates, using local races as an opportunity to introduce himself to voters. He has taken a series of trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, which host the party’s first two presidential nominating contests. And he raised $8 million that could have seeded a presidential campaign account.
Cotton also bolstered his national profile by releasing a book on military history, and he recently expanded his political operation, moving one of his top advisers, Brian Colas, from his Senate office to a role with his political action committee. Cotton also invited top donors to a post-midterm fundraising retreat at the Salamander Resort & Spa in Middleburg, Va., which was seen as a precursor to the launch of a national campaign.
But over the last few weeks, Cotton began cooling on the idea. This week, he began calling allies to tell them that he wouldn’t be running, citing the concerns about his family. During the calls, however, Cotton made clear that he would be open to serving in a future Republican presidential administration. Cotton — an Afghanistan and Iraq war veteran — was mentioned as a potential nominee for CIA director during the Trump administration.
It appears that the young guys may be having second thoughts. DeSantis is said to be wondering if it makes sense to go now, which makes sense. (His ego is almost as big as Trump’s so he may just do it anyway.) Josh Hawley and Ben Sasse too. Why go through the Trump meat grinder when they will still be young in five years and can battle it out without as stupid nickname?
Cotton as CIA director? Jesus. If there’s a better reason to vote for the Democrats in 2024, I can’t think of one.
If the pollsters and handicappers end up being spectacularly wrong on Election Night, there’s one group that won’t be too surprised: the pollsters and handicappers themselves.
The 2022 midterms could go exactly as modeled—a 20-some-odd-seat pickup for Republicans in the House and maybe a 51-49 GOP Senate—but the people who watch these races the closest are also warning they might be wrong in decisive ways. In either direction.
“We’re down to 1 percent of people on a good day who are willing to talk to a pollster for free,” Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report tells The Beast. “Response rates suck.”
Wasserman, perhaps the top handicapper of U.S. House races, said everyone was trying different ways to solve for “partisan non-response bias”—essentially a measure of how a poll isn’t representative of the actual population—but that means every pollster was making “a different assumption about who’s going to show up on Nov. 8 that may or may not be accurate.”
Republican voters distrustul of pretty much everything won’t answer polls or will give false answers to screw with “the media,” “the system,” or whatever.
“We are, in many respects, stumbling through the dark with headlamps and flashlights,” Wasserman told The Beast. “And we have a vague understanding of where these races stand, but there are bound to be surprises.”
Oh, we’ve been surprised before. Unpleasantly. There was no way, I told myself and others in 2016, that there were enough Americans like Talks To The Sky crazy enough to elect Donald J. Trump. In fact, there were more where she came from.
Plus polling firms paid to produce Republican-friendly results, as The Times’ Nate Cohn wrote on Saturday:
“There has been a wave of polls by firms like the Trafalgar Group, Rasmussen Reports, Insider Advantage and others that have tended to produce much more Republican-friendly results than the traditional pollsters,” Cohn wrote. “None adhere to industry standards for transparency or data collection. In some states, nearly all of the recent polls were conducted by Republican-leaning firms.”
Posts in my space will be brief the next couple of days.
If you have not, please, please, get your butts (and/or your ballots) to the polls tomorrow. There is much to do and a better tomorrow to secure locally and nationally. One with a fairer economy, a stronger social safety net, better health care, and a healthier environment.
People worried about the prospects for violence during early voting, but there is nothing to report from my county. The usual hiccups, but nothing much more than last-minute lines on Saturday. Good to see, better late, etc.
“This is not a normal election,” The Washington Post’s lead editorial declares.
No kidding? Early vote totals already exceed the 2018 midterms. Things could go either way for Democrats.
Do you think Democrats will hold the state Supreme Court, a local judge asked me on Saturday. It depends not only on how many vote, but on how. If voters come out of the polling place after five minutes, they didn’t vote all the down-ballot races. If they come out after 15, they likely did.
The Washington Post Editorial Board reports in a new poll that people are worried about the prospects of more political violence in our future. “Nearly 9 in 10 reported they are somewhat or very concerned. Federal authorities warned last week that a broad range of potential targets, such as ideological opponents and election workers, might be at risk following the vote, particularly if losing candidates claim election fraud.”
Republicans are sure to do so. Their asymmetric war on the foundations of the republic proceeds apace.
Democrats warn that a raft of governmental features that make America America are on the 2022 ballot tomorrow. In fact, the 2024 election is on the ballot tomorrow:
There is no need to overstate the threat; widespread early voting has so far proceeded mostly without incident, and it is imperative that Americans are not scared away from the polls. That requires leaders at all levels of government to assure that voting and vote-counting proceed smoothly — and for voters themselves to recognize that this election matters, more than many others in the past, and to be sure to show up.
In deciding whether and how to vote, Americans should keep the fundamentals in mind, supporting candidates committed to the democratic system and the peaceful transfer of power, and opposing those who have tried to profit from toxic lies about election integrity. Otherwise, those who stoke unfounded suspicions and widen divisions might prevail. This would encourage others to mimic them. It would also hand over critical elements of the machinery of democracy to election deniers in advance of the 2024 presidential race.
It’s important to understand that this election, in these times, is not normal.
The stakes are higher than where the top marginal tax rate might end up, what kinds of judges get confirmed or even the size of government. The past two elections have not been normal, and this one is not, either.
The Post found nearly 300 election deniers on the ballot in 48 of 50 states. That is, Republicans who once pitched hissy fits about flag pins and salutes now are simply going through the motions of elections to offices they plan to declare theirs, whatever voters decide, as if by divine right. They pledge their allegiance to a republic for which their party cult no longer stands. They will get their way, or else.
Nice republic ya got there. A shame if you couldn’t keep it.
You may have read about a physical political attack on a Marco Rubio canvasser a few days back. It sounds pretty bad. The guy was handing out leaflets when he was allegedly attacked by violent Democrats who beat him mercilessly because he was a Republican. Then we found out that he was a Proud Boy who was fighting at Charlottesville. Now we find out that the whole thing is a sham.
Cellphone videos of the incident have now emerged (seemingly from the assailants’ defense attorneys) which undermine the political attack storyline and actually show one of the assailants (just before the attack) telling Christopher Monzon to go about his business and keep canvassing.
It appears that the brawl was triggered by one of the assailants thinking Monzon was looking too closely at his girlfriend. The big picture looks to be one of a group of young violent idiots thumping their chests and things spinning out of control.
No one should think the assailants here are somehow the good guys. Both have lengthy criminal records, including for assault and violent conduct. (So does Monzon for that matter, though his criminal record seems like connected to his political activism – assault, incitement to riot, etc.)
It wasn’t about politics at all. But that didn’t stop Rubio and the entire right wing turning this guy into a martyr and sadly, I’m not sure that the truth of this will penetrate at all. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this guy join Kyle Rittenhouse with his own Youtube channel and a full-blown right wing media career.
Here are some Proud Boys, pretending they care about political violence to troll the libs:
About three-dozen people gathered outside John F. Kennedy Library in Hialeah Saturday to rally in support of Christopher Monzon, the GOP canvasser brutally beaten earlier this week about a mile away — an attack that Monzon’s family and Sen. Marco Rubio said was politically motivated.
The protest on Saturday morning, held as voters filed into an early voting site steps away, was organized by people with past or present links to the Proud Boys, a national white supremacist organization. They handed out door hangers with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political platform and prepared to canvass nearby homes, a symbolic gesture to finish knocking on the doors Monzon did not get to before he was assaulted.
Protesters waved American flags and Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Ron DeSantis gear, and held large, blown-up photos of Monzon lying injured in a hospital bed. Several wore T-shirts and hats marked with Proud Boy insignia. Some covered their faces with Proud Boy bandannas. They laid the blame for the attack squarely on Democrats. “Chris cannot walk today because of the rhetoric of Joe Biden,” Gabe Carrera, one of the organizers, told the crowd.
Rick Scott says they will accept the results of elections (if they win.)
“Absolutely. But what we’re also going to do is do everything we can to make sure they’re free and fair, and if there’s any shenanigans, we are ready to make sure,” Scott told Todd. “We support our candidates to make sure that these elections are fair and every ballot is counted the right way.”
Basically, “free and fair” means that Republicans win. Period. They are preparing to contest all losses. Some of them will even contest double digit defeats. In fact, some of them will contest the ones they won!
Their strategy is to pimp their win in advance in the hopes of getting their voters out to join the party. And if they fail, they’ll say it’s because the Democrats stole it and they’ll collect vast sums of money and gain tons of grassroots energy. If they’re lucky there will be riots. Win, win.
