GOP voters anyway
But he’s not popular overall. At all:
New Hampshire has very few electoral votes. But in close elections it can make a difference.
"what digby sez..."
Month: March 2023
Newsom reminds businesses that they need to take into account big blue states too
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday the state will not be doing business with Walgreens Boots Alliance over its decision not to dispense an abortion pill.
Last week, the national pharmacy chain said it would not distribute mifepristone in 20 states after conservative attorneys general threatened legal action.MORE: USPS is allowed to continue delivering abortion pills, Justice Department says
In a tweet, Newsom criticized the decision, writing, “California won’t be doing business with Walgreens or any company that cowers to the extremists and puts women’s lives at risk. We’re done.”
In a statement to ABC News, a spokesperson for Newsom said the state was “reviewing” its relationship with Walgreens.
“We will not pursue business with companies that cave to right wing bullies pushing their extremist agenda or companies that put politics above the health of women and girls,” the statement read.
Last month, the group of attorneys general sent a letter to CVS and Walgreens saying that if they sold mifepristone, they would be in violation of the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that makes it illegal to send contraceptives, substances that induce abortion, pornographic content, sex toys and any written material about these items.
Several of the states that signed the letter — including Alaska, Iowa, Kansas and Montana — currently allow abortion access, including abortion medication, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group focusing on sexual and reproductive health.
In a statement to ABC News last week, Walgreens said it sent a letter to each of the attorneys general confirming it would not sell mifepristone in their states
“From the outset, we have made our intentions clear to become a certified pharmacy to distribute mifepristone wherever legally possible,” a spokesperson said about the Newsom decision.
These throwback Republican state governments don’t get to dictate what Democratic states do. it’s bad enough they have an antediluvian Supreme Court taking away rights, now they think they can threaten businesses with the Comstock act if they follow state laws? This is getting ridiculous.
Good for Newsom for standing up for women. If companies like Walgreens are caving to threats from these extremists normal people have no choice but to fight back. Hard.
Dan Pfeiffer has some ideas on how Democrats should respond to the Fox News crisis:
Fox News is fucked.
Rupert Murdoch and his merry band of insurrectionists (Hannity), racists (Tucker), propagandists (Ingraham), and fake journalists (Baier) are in a whole heap of legal trouble.
As I am sure you know by now, Fox News is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for $1.6 billion for defamation. The testimony and text messages released in the court filings have been devastating. Fox News Chairman Rupert Murdoch and his Viet Dinh, the Chief Legal Officer, both admitted under oath that the network failed to meet its responsibility to knowingly stop false information from making it onto the airwaves.
While defamation cases are typically tough to win, the folks at Fox decided to violate the “Stringer Bell” principle and repeatedly text about their culpability in real time. Many legal experts believe Fox will lose the case, and executives and on-air personalities could get the ax to stanch the bleeding.
In some ways, my career in political communications has been defined by the rise of Fox News and the rest of the Right Wing media. For the entirety of the twenty-first century, Fox News has been the most powerful weapon in the Right’s arsenal. From Capitol Hill, the campaign trail, the White House, and now from my perch in progressive media, I watched Fox start wars, beat Democrats into submission, drive reams of mainstream press coverage, and make Donald Trump President. But they have never been more vulnerable. Here’s how Democrats should adjust their approach to Fox News.
1. Treat Fox News Like Breitbart
It’s been ages since any Democrat bought the fiction that Fox News was “fair and balanced” or even a Center Right journalistic entity. No one thinks they are the same as CNN or the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. But the culture of Washington, D.C. still gives Fox and its “journalists” an undeserved legitimacy. Fox News is still part of the White House network pool covering presidential events. They are given access; and their questions are taken seriously and answered by White House and Congressional aides. Journalists from legitimate organizations rush to Fox’s defense when Democrats threaten to treat them like the propaganda network they are. Bret Baier and other Fox “journalists” are regulars on the Beltway social circuit.
This is not an argument to kick Fox out of the White House or prevent them from doing their “job.” The White House and Congressional press corps are filled with Right Wing outlets. When Obama was in the White House, Breitbart, the Washington Examiner, and the Daily Caller positioned representatives in the White House briefing room on a daily basis. These outlets show up to cover events. Democrats don’t interfere with them. When they call Democratic press offices with their loaded questions, no one returns the call.
We understand these fringe outlets are the opposition — functionally the same as the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign. In fact, most of these outlets are the same people who fund the GOP and Trump. But that’s not how most Democrats treat Fox News. They are treated more seriously. Their questions are often answered. Fox gets called on in press conferences and White House briefings. Because Fox is a cable television network — and a successful one at that — they are too often given an outdated imprimatur of legitimacy. Democrats and reporters consider the people working on the “news” side of Fox to be part of the broader journalistic community. They are considered different from the MAGA-addled hacks at Trump’s favorite digital outlets.
The revelations in the Dominionlawsuit make it clear that even “journalists” like Bret Baier are complicit in the worst behavior at Fox. They are propagandists — nothing more and nothing less. And it is essential that we treat them like political adversaries. Never again, should a Democrat feel a need to accommodate a Fox News reporter, answer their question, or appear on their show out of fairness or duty.
Those days are over. There are no objective journalists at Fox. There are just obvious propagandists writing opinion pieces and, more dangerously, subtle propagandists who pretend to be journalists.
2. Reset the Terms of Engagement
Do the revelations in the Dominion lawsuit mean Democrats should stop appearing on Fox News programs?
Yes… and no.
In recent days, Democratic activists and others suggested that Democrats should stop going on the network.
Even before these revelations, I believed that Democrats going on Fox News to reach persuadable voters was a waste of time. It’s an interview held by a network created to destroy Democrats. The even more nakedly political Fox News digital team often uses the interview to push whatever narrative is most damaging to Democrats. Do the math for a minute; a little more than two million people are watching Special Report with Brett Baier on any given day. That is a very good number by the paltry standards of cable television in the age of cord-cutting. But that is barely more than one percent of the 155 million people who voted in 2020. We also know from countless studies that the Fox News audience is overwhelmingly die-hard Republicans. Let’s be (very) generous and say that 15 percent of Brett Baierviewers are open to voting for a Democrat — that means that we are now talking about only 300,000 people. Let’s say you are a Democratic member of Congress running in a Red or Purple district, what are the odds that one of these 300,000 people lives in your district and is part of the small universe of voters who decide elections? The odds are better than winning the lottery, but not by much.
There may, however, be reasons to go on Fox News. A well-executed appearance on Fox News can send a message about a politician’s skill or their willingness to step into the proverbial lion’s den. Pete Buttigieg mastered this tactic. He often goes on Fox and exposes the hosts for their biases and the stupidity of their questions. Bernie Sanders had similar moments during the 2020 Democratic primary.
The audience in those situations is not the typical Fox News viewership.It’s the people who will see the clip on social media or read a write-up of the exchange on some other news site.
With that in mind, I advise Democrats to stay off Fox News unless you have a plan (and the talent) to go on offense and create a moment that breaks out of the Fox News bubble.
3. Win the Information Wars
If Fox News is so vulnerable, how do we actually take them down and reduce their malignant influence?
There are a number of possible strategies. First, convince Fox News viewers to abandon the network. The Lincoln Project and MoveOn both created ads aimed at Fox viewers. The putative goal is to inform the audience about the scandal that they will never hear about on the network itself. Fox banned its “journalists” and opinion hosts from covering the case — which is yet another piece of evidence that Fox does not engage in journalism.
There are some limits to this approach. It’s unclear how Fox viewers will ever consume these ads (but many liberal donors will undoubtedly smash the RT button). Even if a Fox News viewer saw the ad and decided to abandon the network, they won’t stop watching Hannity and start watching PBS Newshour. The most likely outcome is that these now disillusioned viewers move to another Right Wingoutlet.
Second, there are a series of ongoing efforts to use these revelations and others to hurt Fox News’ bottom line; and to convince advertisers to abandon the network by raising questions about whether brands want to be associated with the bigoted, conspiracy theory-oriented rhetoric that dominates its airwaves. In one sense, these pressure campaigns are successful. You will see almost no ads for blue chip brands during Fox News primetime. It’s all ads for MyPillow, Trump gold coins, other Fox News programs, and virility supplements. The problem is that ads are not where Fox News — or other cable channels — make their money. You and everyone else with cable television fund Fox News — even if you have never watched the channel. Cable companies like Comcast pay Fox News (and all the other channels) to offer the network as part of their cable package. There are efforts to pressure cable providers to ditch Fox News, which would effectively cripple the network. This is an uphill battle because Fox News is extremely successful — and the most watched cable channel for seven consecutive years. The cable industry as a whole is in an inexorable decline. In 2022, only 50 percent of U.S. households were cable subscribers — down from a peak of 90 percent not too long ago. Because the median age of Fox News viewers is 69, they profile as unlikely cord-cutters and are therefore a very valuable audience for cable providers. It’s hard to imagine that cable companies, who are not exactly known for their generosity of spirit, would sacrifice a cash cow out of a sense of patriotism.
Therefore, the best way to beat Fox News (and its allies in the MAGA media) is to use this moment to focus time, energy, and resources on building up a progressive media ecosystem to counterbalance what exists on the Right. This includes consumers patronizing the outlets that exist, and smart and well-resourced individuals creating new outlets and platforms that allow Democrats to shape the political conversation and fight back against Fox News.
It may not be as satisfying as crushing Fox News or watching them be forced to turn out the lights, but it is the more productive path. Sometimes we must choose constructive over cathartic.
That last has been part of the conversation as long as I’ve been blogging. We thought the independent media supported by small donors might do the trick but that didn’t pan out. You need rich people to invest for the long term and stay hands off to make it work and the only example we’ve seen is Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, which isn’t explicitly progressive (no matter how much the wingnuts insist it is.)
I’m all for creating that progressive media space, obviously, but I’ve lost hope that it’s going to happen. We’ll have to keep fighting the good fight as a guerrilla war with nothing but the truth and reality as our weapons. Son far, we’re holding our own. But I honestly don’t know if it will last.
The best justice money — and corrupt ideology — can buy:
You would think, based on the flurry of litigation unfolding there, that a lot of drama is going down in Amarillo, Texas.
Of the couple dozen lawsuits Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has filed against the Biden administration, over a third have been funneled through the relatively small city, despite its distance from the state capital.
But it’s got one thing going for it: Trump appointee Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who has already amenably batted down Biden administration policies on immigration, access to contraception and LBGTQ protections. Helpfully for Paxton and other right-wing litigants, Kacsmaryk gets 100 percent of the criminal and civil cases filed in the Amarillo division of the Northern District of Texas.
Kacsmaryk has come under nationwide scrutiny while he mulls a case shopped to him to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, a drug prescribed to induce abortion.
And Texas works out particularly well for judge shoppers — they can get a case into Kacsmaryk’s hands in Amarillo, or maybe into Reed O’Connor’s in Wichita Falls or Drew Tipton’s in Victoria — resting easy in the knowledge that the state is controlled by the ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That leaves as liberals’ greatest hope for intervention…the Supreme Court.
This judge-shopping is a new flavor of an older, and bipartisan, practice. Opponents of Trump administration policies often sued in states governed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, then very liberal. Blue states have also chosen to file in generally friendly district courts — say, San Francisco — but which have an assortment of judges to be randomly assigned.
But the surgical specificity of targeting divisions of district courts overseen by one or two judges is newer. And it’s essentially a win-win proposition. Even if the district judge of choice is overturned at a higher level, he has the power to issue a nationwide injunction, blocking the administration policy not just for the parties on the lawsuit, but for the entire country.
Supporters of the Biden administration and many legal experts have railed against the dynamic, and at least one right-wing Supreme Court judge isn’t thrilled that a single lower court judge can put the brakes on any administration policy that comes before him.
“Talk about ways in which courts can interfere with the processes of government,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said during recent oral arguments on the Biden administration’s student debt plan. “Two individuals in one state who don’t like the program seek and obtain universal relief, barring it for anybody anywhere.”
The Justice Department too has been complaining about this gamesmanship more and more, accusing Paxton of judge shopping through court filings three times this year alone.
Fixes
The problem is not unprecedented, nor is fixing it. Chief Justice John Roberts raised in his 2021 annual report that a district judge in Waco, Texas was openly inviting patent holders to sue in his court — and was consequently overseeing nearly a quarter of all patent cases across the entire country. The chief judge of the Western District of Texas, in response, changed the rules so patent cases are randomly assigned among the 12 judges in the district.
“Every single court could do that,” Katherine Macfarlane, a law professor specializing in federal district courts’ local rules and practices, told TPM. “Really in the interest of fairness, it has to be across the board.”
But aside from court-by-court administrative fixes — “the local chief judge fiddling around with assignments,” as Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond’s school of law, put it — an across-the-board fix would likely require congressional action.
The most popular one in the eyes of experts that study this issue is the three-judge panel: the idea that cases seeking a national injunction of federal agency action would be assigned not to one district judge, but to a panel of three of them.
These courts were created in 1910 for cases where people were seeking to enjoin enforcement of state laws (and, by 1937, federal laws) on federal constitutional grounds. Faced with concerns similar to those raised by the Texas judge-shopping today, Congress wanted to make these injunctions harder to obtain, to curtail the power of a single district judge and to increase the chances that such an injunction would result from a better-reasoned decision.
This process was ended in 1976 except for redistricting challenges, which continue to be decided by three-judge panels.
“It became so burdensome that they rescinded it,” Tobias said. “It was very resource intensive.”
At least one of those burdens has decreased significantly, though. With the three-judge panels, the next step in judicial review was appeal to the Supreme Court, not the usual appellate court circuit. But the Supreme Court has dramatically lessened its caseload in recent decades, reducing the risk of overwhelming the highest court with these appeals.
Still, the political environment remains charged. And this remedy, while right-wing litigants are gleefully and routinely having great success in blocking Biden administration policies they don’t like, would likely be a hard sell in the Republican House.
“Congress could come in here — but given its present composition, that’s not gonna happen,” Tobias said.
Corruption is the defining feature of the right at the moment. Ideology is nothing more than grievance mongering in service of the grift.
Modern conservatives love to own the libs by supporting people who claim they’ve been “canceled.” Yet Kyle Rittenhouse can’t seem to draw a crowd, no matter how many times he gets shut down.
In January, Rittenhouse headlined the Rally Against Censorship in Conroe, Texas, an event you’d expect to draw a healthy turnout in a Texas county that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. But when I arrived, only about six people had lined up for the early-access VIP snaps with Rittenhouse, mostly paunchy older white men in black button-down shirts, black jeans, and cowboy hats.
In 2020, Rittenhouse, then 17, shot three people, killing two of them, during protests over police violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He became a household name. Prosecutors charged him with multiple felonies. During his trial, Rittenhouse testified that he’d acted in self-defense. The jury acquitted him of all charges in November 2021.
At first, Rittenhouse espoused a hope for a new life. Four days after his not-guilty verdict, he told NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield that he was considering changing his name, growing a beard, and losing some weight so people wouldn’t recognize him in public. “I just want to be a normal 18-year-old college student trying to better my future and get into a career in nursing,” he said, explaining that he didn’t like fans asking him for selfies. “I just don’t want to be taking pictures with people I don’t know.”
Yet there he was in Conroe, more than a year later, sporting not a beard but a suit and tie and mugging for photos with strangers who’d paid the $275 VIP fee to meet him. Rather than slink off into anonymity after his acquittal, Rittenhouse has spent the past year trying to rebrand himself as a free speech and gun-rights activist. Following the siren song of the right-wing industrial complex, Rittenhouse, now 20, spends his time going on podcasts, attending conventions, and taking selfies with fans. He tends to stick to safe spaces: Zoom interviews from his bedroom with sympathetic B-list right-wing media—Sebastian Gorka, fringy YouTubers—or the occasional star turn at scripted conventions hosted by the conservative youth group Turning Point USA. He risks few public appearances outside that cozy bubble.
The Rally Against Censorship—sponsored by Defiance Press, a publishing house that has put out books by controversial figures such as noted Islamaphobe Frank Gaffney and infamous Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio—should have been a hot ticket. Indeed, at least 1,000 people had registered for the event online. But as the night wore on, fewer than half of the 450 white chairs I counted ever filled up, even though general admission was free. The empty seats were a stark indicator that Rittenhouse’s quest for conservative influencer status isn’t winning many converts, even as it’s destroying whatever second chance his acquittal might have promised for a normal life.
Defiance had originally planned to host the rally at the local Southern Star brewery. When word spread on social media that Rittenhouse would be there, the brewery pulled out, prompting a wave of furor among conservatives and a barrage of death threats against the brewery owners. A week after the brewery cancellation, Rittenhouse was in Las Vegas during the Shot Show, the gun industry’s biggest trade show. He was scheduled to headline a private event sponsored by the National Association for Gun Rights at a Venetian hotel restaurant. But the hotel, located only two miles down the Strip from where a gunman slaughtered 60 people in 2017, pulled the plug on the event at the last minute, saying that it “did not align with our property’s core event guidelines.”
In an editorial in the Washington Times, Rittenhouse complained that he’d been “stripped of my right of expression at establishments in Texas and Las Vegas” by “far-left trolls.” Not to worry, however, Rittenhouse declared that he would never give up. “I’m sure left-wingers will continue to try to pressure venues to cancel my events,” he wrote. “I’m not deterred. I’m used to firing back.”
Apparently, not all killers can be right wing stars. I’m surprised.
No Labels joins the Republicans
They say they are going to do a “unity” ticket but in fact it is a third party ticket that will put Trump back in the White House. They aren’t idiots. I have to assume they know this.
Here’s Tim Miller from a few months ago on this topic:
Starting a new third party is all the rage these days, especially out here in Never Trumpistan.
The Yang Gang is teaming up with some future former Republicans for the Forward Party. Rich people have
burnedgiven power couple Mark Penn and Nancy Jacobson $50 million to try and make a No Labels ticket happen. My friend Juleanna Glover made a (fairly serious) case for a Jon Stewart candidacy. Say the phrase “unity ticket” and clap three times and Bill Kristol might show up in your living room. The third party question is raised at all my book-tour stops. (Coming to a city near you!) And it is the subtext of every conversation with a lonely, politically homeless soul wondering What Are We Going to Do.During the Trump era I have often been the rain cloud that washes away the luminescent longings of the third-party dreamers, which isn’t a job I enjoy since many are friends or mentors or folks whose courage in the face of Trumpism I deeply admire.
But I soldier on anyway. Trying to convince them they are actually Red Dog Democrats. Or explaining why their idea might accidentally bring about a fascism even though they have nice arms and nicer intentions.
But given the boom cycle of new parties, clearly that message is not getting through. So today I wanted to offer another exercise.
I want to focus on the positive for a change! Be supportive!
Let’s imagine that I did share the passion for a third party and wanted to offer guidance on how it might achieve success.
What would be the necessary ingredients to make this new party something that might conceivably work as a political entity, not a networking club for sad people longing to find a political home?
The way I see it there are two basic steps for determining viability for a new party in the Trump era.
Step One: Answer this question: Does your party offer something that will attract a substantial portion of real-world Trump voters?
This might seem obvious, but I think it is important to spell out.
For a new party to win national elections, it would have to attract voters from both of the two major parties. To give you a baseline, in 1992 Ross Perot took 17 percent of Republicans and 13 percent of Democrats according to the exit polls. That still left him well short of taking even a single electoral vote.
If the new third party you are creating isn’t capable of garnering a greater chunk from both existing parties than Perot did, it isn’t going to work. And if it pulls overwhelmingly from one party with only a small percentage coming from the other party then it isn’t really a third party at all, but a faction of the first party. As such it will either cannibalize or displace that party’s vote. And we wouldn’t want to do that if the party we are cannibalizing is the only thing standing between us and an insane madman who is an existential threat to the nation. (A third party which cannibalized the authoritarian-curious party might be okay. But that’s not what any of my friends are talking about.)
Given that this is such an important part of the process, I think we should pressure-test this question a little bit.
Everyone thinks they can attract disaffected voters from both sides. They hear from them constantly! Nobody’s happy! Right?
Back in 2019 I received a few phone calls from rich guys and influential consultants thinking about various third-party runs, especially when it seemed as if Sanders or Warren might be the Democratic nominee. In each case I listened to their pitch and then told them that their message would not appeal to the median Republican but instead was uniquely attractive to other rich globalists at the club who don’t like taxes or AOC, but other than that, had very little in common with real-world Trump voters. As a result, their effort was likely to attract very few Trump voters but had the potential to win over a significant share of people who might otherwise have voted for the Democrat. Not good.
So in order to make sure that this new party can pass step one, let’s take a look at the profile of the voter it will have to attract. Who are they? And who are they not?
They are NOT people who voted for Evan McMullin in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020: This should be self-evident based on the “real-world Trump voter” language that is right there in the question but it is necessary to be specific on this point since it seems as if most of the people pushing for a third party fit into this category. These voters are Democrats for all practical purposes, but some of them don’t want to admit it. I get it! Democrats can be annoying. Changing identities is hard. I wrote a book about it! But no matter what these folks want to call themselves, they are Biden voters, not Trump voters. And they are not sufficient for the creation of a new party.
They are NOT the people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but not in 2020: I realize this is a tautology but just want to be extra-certain you are following me here. People who did not vote for Trump in 2020 are not Trump voters.
They ARE people who actually like Donald Trump: Now this is going to be a tough one for some people to stomach. Trump voters like Trump. He consistently had a 90+ percent approval rating among Republicans during his presidency. In 2020, exit polls showed nearly all of those who voted for him viewed him favorably. Appealing to the tiny percentage of Trump voters who don’t really like Donald Trump is critical in a two-way general election but far, far short of the Perot baseline that is the minimum required to be anywhere close to viable in a three-way race.
They ARE people who are in lock-step with Fox & Friends in the right-wing culture war: This is critical. The preponderance of Trump voters support “Don’t Say Gay” and the Big Beautiful Wall; share the flabby-armed former president’s antipathy towards transgender athletes participating in women’s supports; thought DeSantis did a heckuva job on COVID; do not trust anyone who wants to take their guns; are still mad at Colin Kaepernick; and will be repulsed if you let your kid pick their own pronouns. Within the party there remains a very small minority of college-educated, wealthy Republicans who are aligned on economic issues while maintaining only a light antipathy towards the progressive elites based on what they have read on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Picking off this group alone does not get you to the 17 percent Perot baseline.
In review, the voters you need to attract:
-Voted For Trump. Like Trump.
-Hate Never Trump Republican Traitors.
-Hate “Woke” Culture.
-Are mad at people who drive a Prius with a “Coexist” sticker while drinking their coffee coolattas.
Now lets move to step two:
Step Two: Answer this question again: Does your party offer something that will attract a substantial portion of real-world Trump voters?
As it turns out I lied when I said there was a two-part test. It is really only a one-part test but it’s so daunting that I wanted to give it a little bit of time to settle in the ol’ brainy brain.
Tucker’s attempting to white-wash Jan 6, Trump and DeSantis have a thing against prosecutors, Kari…
Given what we know about Trump voters, what would a party that passes this test look like? It’s clear that an organization that only includes Andrew Yang and a bunch of squishy Never Trumpers doesn’t fit the bill. They fall squarely in category one—people who are in the Biden coalition, but don’t want to identify that way.
So who might that group team up with in order to pass our two-part test?
The names that come immediately to mind share one trait. They all appeal to Trumpers because liberals find them problematic (hence the Third Party Paradox in These Polarized Times).
Here are some of those names: Joe Rogan, Dave Portnoy, Dave Chappelle. These guys are all entertainers who have audiences that include real-world Trump supporters, as well as people in the Biden coalition.
A Morning Consult poll showed that 46 percent of Rogan “fans” were Republican, while 23 percent were Democrats. Among “non-fans” the numbers were basically reversed. That’s about the profile you would want if you were a Never Trumper looking to partner with someone who might be viable as a third-party candidate, but would pull more from Trump than the Democratic nominee if things went south.
So. . . how does the Rogan presidency sound?
Among existing politicians, it’s pretty hard to find someone who would fit this bill. Anti-Trump Republicans are out. So, the closest I can come up with would be the one and only Broadway Joe Manchin. He has consistently maintained an approval between 40 percent and 60 percent among both Republicans and Democrats, waxing and waning based on whom he angered last.
There are a lot of things about Manchin’s candidate skills that would make him a terrible presidential contender. But he’s about right for the type of ideological profile you’re looking for: An anti-PC, lib-triggering, economic populist who wants to stick it to the bankers is the ballpark of what might conceivably work. Forgive me for presuming, but Manchin is not generally the person people seem to have in mind when they ask me for a moderate who can win in the Tattered Cover queue.
But that’s the point of this exercise right? Trying to identify a candidate that could marshal a coalition that could conceivably win? Even if you can’t always get what you want?
Given the nature of the threat, I would hope so. That’s why I’m here to help!
Otherwise . . . what would the point be?
A third party run is exactly what the doctor ordered for the GOP. They can’t get a real majority. If they can siphon off the same number of votes that went to Jill Stein in 2016, they’ve got it done. The left isn’t going to do that again. In American politics these days they are the mature adults. (The right is batshit and these centrist meddlers are acting like stupid teenagers.) Please don’t do this No Labels Please don’t.
May yet have reason to wet his pants
It’s tough being a propagandist. Even on the nation’s premiere propaganda network.
BBC soft-pedals it for less-engaged readers across the pond:
Senate Republicans and Capitol police have criticised Fox News after one of its hosts aired previously unseen clips of the riot two years ago at Congress, and played down the violent disorder.
Host Tucker Carlson showed the video on Monday night, arguing it “does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress”, but rather “mostly peaceful chaos”.
A top congressional Republican gave Mr Carlson exclusive access to the video.
That would be Republicans’ spineless Speaker of the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy.
Carlson showed Capitol surveillance clips from areas where no violence was taking place. Elsewhere in the complex, rioters fought hand-to-hand with police, broke through windows, and ransacked offices as they and world saw through other surveillance footage and cell phone video shot by the insurrectionists themselves. Carlson described Trump fans in the halls as peaceful sightseers.
Bullshit, said North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis (R).
Former US Capitol Police officer Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, one of the officers injured that day, tweeted his “souvenir” of the attack.
BBC again:
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday it had been a “mistake for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks” about the riot.
Mr McConnell pointed to an internal memo by Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, whose agency is responsible for protecting the buildings where the lawmakers meet.
In that memo, Mr Manger says the primetime Monday broadcast was “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6 attack”.
“The programme conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video,” he wrote.
Poor little rich boy Carlson is being roundly lampooned for trying to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 insurrection for his MAGA viewers.
And while Carlson promised more footage for Tuesday night, he did not deliver.
Perhaps Carlson is destined to take an unplanned vacation. Murdoch may have to take drastic steps to save his network. The Dominion defamation suit is looking like a slam-dunk. Would Murdoch dare not settle out of court? Would he go so far as to give Carlson the boot?
Fox and the diary of a madwoman
The newest document dump from the $1.6 billion Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox is news the network’s viewers won’t see. A flood of incriminating texts and emails between Fox staffers reveals how much the network caved to pressure to feed viewers what they wanted to hear rather than the truth. The internal texts also reveal how much network top executives knew the 2020 election fraud narrative Donald Trump and network anchors promoted was bullshit.
This text in particular will have a hard time finding its way to Tucker Carlson’s fans (Washington Post):
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” prime-time host Tucker Carlson texted a colleague on Jan. 4, 2021. “I truly can’t wait.”
Carlson, who had shared private meetings with the president and defended him on-air, added in a text: “I hate him passionately. … What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
Fox’s founder knew it too.
“Maybe Sean and Laura went too far,” Fox’s billionaire co-founder Rupert Murdoch emailed the company CEO, referring to prime-time stars Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, who had entertained the baseless election conspiracy theories on-air.
“All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump,” Murdoch continued, “but what did he tell his viewers?”
[…]
Not long after Murdoch agonized over whether his hosts had “gone too far,” one of the most high-ranking news editors, Bill Sammon, texted a colleague: “In my 22 years affiliated with Fox, this is the closest thing I’ve seen to an existential crisis — at least journalistically.” The “crisis” was the network’s continued focus on what Sammon called “supposed election fraud.”
Sammon is behind the times. The right’s existential crisis began on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, when the country elected a Black man to the White House. White conservatives until then could ignore repeated warnings that by 2042 demographic shifts would mean whites would no longer be a numerical majority in “their” country. That white voters had not been a voting majority for many election cycles was too subtle.
But Barack Obama’s face on their TV screens each night was a shock to the dominant caste Isabel Wilkerson described in her “instant American classic” a dozen years later. White backlash to Obama brought us Donald Trump, the T-party, and MAGA. It may yet bring Fox to its knees, or at least Tucker Carlson.
Just how desperate Trump’s true believers were to believe the election had been stolen comes in the form of a letter from one Marlene Bourne forwarded by self-appointed Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo: “proof” that Dominion voting machines flipped Trump votes Joe Biden (from mid-February):
One particularly odd section deals with how the source claims to have gotten her information. It says:
“Who am I? And how do I know all of this?…I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl….I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live….The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”
At another point she described herself as being able to “time-travel in a semi-conscious state.”
Does she call the wind Mariah?
Reading about the letter in February was one thing. Seeing it now is another.
Bartiromo called the Bourne letter “nonsense” in her deposition yet nonetheless brought Powell onto her November 8, 2020 show to discuss a “a massive and coordinated effort” to “steal” the 2020 election (without mentioning the letter). Bartiromo asked for no proof of Powell’s claims. And the stolen election narrative took off.
(Daily Beast reporter Justin Baragona’s tweets on this Dominion material are eye-opening.)
But the Fox news division’s election call of Arizona for Joe Biden had sent viewers into fits. The stock price was down! Despise Trump or not, Tucker Carlson in particular was desperate to retain audience share by reinforcing the Bourne-Powell narrative of election theft, adding voter fraud to the mix like shrapnel to an improvised explosive. A violent insurrection and the ransacking of the U.S. Capitol followed on Jan. 6, 2021.
How desperate was the network?
“So what Tucker [Carlson] comes up with is, dead people voting is how he’s going to get the audience back on the side, and he gets a special on dead people voting on one of his shows,” Chris Hayes told former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki Tuesday night (Raw Story):
“This is a screen grab from an exchange on November 11th, features one of the greatest lines I’ve ever read,” said
CarlsonHayes. “‘Do we have enough dead people for tonight?’ Unknown: ‘I think we have six or seven names right now. Miller told me they might drop some more names.’ ‘Good. But obviously, they need to do what they can to help us. I mean, seriously, let me know if I should call.’ Miller, maybe Stephen Miller. I should say subsequently I think he featured four dead voters who voted, three of whom were alive. But this is like the creative problem solving happened there is like we need to tell them what they want to hear, how can we do it?”
This is always who Tucker Carlson has been. “Stop hurting America,” Jon Stewart told Carlson on CNN’s “Crossfire” in 2004.
“You’re as big a dick on your show as you ar on any show,” Stewart said.
Nothing has changed. Carlson and Fox are still hurting America.
Ron Brownstein on the 2024 GOP primary
Second verse same as the first?
The same fundamental dynamic that decided the 2016 Republican presidential primaries is already resurfacing as the 2024 contest takes shape.
As in 2016, early polls of next year’s contest show the Republican electorate is again sharply dividing about former President Donald Trump along lines of education. In both state and national surveys measuring support for the next Republican nomination, Trump is consistently running much better among GOP voters without a college education than among those with a four-year or graduate college degree.
Analysts have often described such an educational divide among primary voters as the wine track (centered on college-educated voters) and the beer track (revolving around those without degrees). Over the years, it’s been a much more consistent feature in Democratic than Republican presidential primaries. But the wine track/beer track divide emerged as the defining characteristic of the 2016 GOP race, when Trump’s extraordinary success at attracting Republicans without a college degree allowed him to overcome sustained resistance from the voters with one.
Though the early 2024 polls have varied in whether they place Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the lead overall (with the latest round tilting mostly toward Trump), that same overriding pattern of educational polarization is appearing in virtually all of those surveys, a review of public and private polling data reveals.
“Trump does seem to have a special ability to make this sort of populist appeal [to non-college voters] and also have a special ability to make college-educated conservatives start thinking about alternatives,” GOP pollster Chris Wilson said in an email. “I think we’ll continue to see a big education divide in his support in 2024.”
The stark educational split in attitudes toward Trump frames the strategic challenge for his potential rivals in the 2024 race.
On paper, none of the leading candidates other than DeSantis himself seems particularly well positioned to threaten Trump’s hold on the non-college Republicans who have long been the most receptive audience for his blustery and belligerent messaging. By contrast, most of the current and potential field – including former Governors Nikki Haley and Chris Christie; current Governors Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia; former Vice President Mike Pence; and Sen. Tim Scott – appear better suited to attract the white-collar Republicans who have always been the most skeptical of Trump.
That could create a situation in which there’s too little competition to Trump for voters on the “beer track” and too many options splintering the voters resistant to him on the “wine track.” That was the dynamic that allowed Trump to capture the nomination in 2016 even though nearly two-thirds of college-educated Republicans opposed him through the primaries, according to exit polls, and he didn’t reach 50% of the total vote in any state until the race was essentially decided.
While the political obstacles facing Trump look greater now than they were then, his best chance of winning in 2024 would likely come from consolidating the “beer track” to a greater extent than anyone else unifies the “wine track” – just as he did in 2016. In each of the past three contested GOP presidential primaries, the electorate have split almost exactly in half between voters with and without college degrees, analyses of the exit polls have found.
“Right now, unless somebody cracks that code to get competitive with Trump there [among blue-collar Republican voters], it could fall into the old pattern which is the best scenario for him,” said long-time GOP strategist Mike Murphy, who directed the super PAC for Jeb Bush in the 2016 race.
Jennifer Horn, the former GOP state chair in New Hampshire, added that while Trump’s ceiling is likely lower than in 2016, he could still win the nomination with only plurality support if no one unifies the majority more skeptical of him. “He isn’t going to need 50% to win,” cautioned Horn, a leading Republican critic of Trump.
The wine track/beer track divide has been a consistent feature of Democratic presidential primary politics since 1968. Since then, a procession of brainy liberal candidates (think Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Gary Hart in 1984, Paul Tsongas in 1992 and Bill Bradley in 2000) have mobilized socially liberal college-educated voters against rivals who relied primarily on support from non-college educated White voters and racial minorities (Robert F. Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton and Al Gore in those same races). In the epic 2008 Democratic primary struggle, the basic divide persisted in slightly reconfigured form as Barack Obama attracted just enough white-collar White and Black voters to beat Hillary Clinton’s coalition of blue-collar Whites and Latinos. Joe Biden in 2020 was mostly a beer track candidate.
Generally, over those years, the educational divide had not been as important in Republican primary races. More often GOP voters have divided among primary contenders along other lines, including ideology and religious affiliation. Both the 2008 and 2012 GOP races, for instance, followed similar lines in which a candidate who relied primarily on evangelical Christians and the most conservative voters (Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012) ultimately lost the nomination to another who attracted more support from non-evangelicals and a broader range of mainstream conservatives (John McCain and Mitt Romney).
The conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, in his long-shot 1992 and 1996 bids for the GOP nomination, pioneered a blue-collar conservatism centered on unwavering cultural conservatism and an economic nationalism revolving around hostility to foreign trade and immigration. Huckabee and even more so Santorum advanced those themes, clearing a path that Trump would later follow – with a much harsher edge than either.
In 2008, there was no educational divide in the GOP race: McCain won exactly the same 43% among Republican voters with and without a college degree, according to a new analysis of the exit poll results by CNN polling director Jennifer Agiesta. But by 2012, Santorum’s blue-collar inroads meant Romney won the nomination with something closer to the Republican equivalent of a wine-track coalition: Of the 20 states that conducted exit polls that year, Romney won voters with at least a four-year college degree in 14, but he carried most non-college voters in just 10.
Wilson, the GOP pollster, said that an educational divide also started appearing around that time in other GOP primaries for Senate, House and governor’s races more frequently though by no means universally.
“This wasn’t always the driving demographic or ideological difference in primaries before Trump,” Wilson said. “Sometimes a candidate [who] was particularly strong in sounding populist themes would create this type of gap, but often a more traditional issue difference either on social issues or on issues like tax increase votes or support for Obamacare or something adjacent to it would be a stronger signal in a primary.”
In 2016, Trump turned this traditional GOP axis on its head. He narrowed the big divisions that had decided the 2008 and 2012 races. He performed nearly as well among voters who identified as very conservative as he did among those who called themselves somewhat conservative or moderate, according to a cumulative analysis of all the 2016 exit polls conducted by ABC’s Gary Langer. Likewise, Trump performed only slightly better among voters who were not evangelicals than those who were, Langer’s analysis found.
Instead, Trump split the GOP electorate along the wine-track/beer-track divide familiar from Democratic primary contests over the previous generation. According to Langer’s cumulation of the exit polls, Trump won fully 47% of GOP voters without a four-year college degree – an incredible performance in such a crowded field. Trump, in stark contrast, carried only 35% of Republican voters with at least a college-degree across the primaries overall. But the remainder of them dubious of him never settled on a single alternative. Sen. Ted Cruz, who proved Trump’s longest-lasting rival, captured only about one-fourth of the white-collar GOP voters, with the rest splitting primarily among Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Trump himself.
In October 2015, I wrote that Trump’s emerging strength in the GOP nomination race could be explained in two sentences: “The blue-collar wing of the Republican primary electorate has consolidated around one candidate. The party’s white-collar wing remains fragmented.” That same basic equation held through the primaries and largely explained Trump’s victory. The question now is whether it could happen again.
There’s no question that some of the same ingredients are present. Recent national polling by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, according to detailed results shared with CNN, shows that Republicans without a college degree are more likely than those with advanced education to agree with such core Trump themes as the belief that discrimination against Whites is now as big a problem as bias against minorities; that society is growing too soft and feminine; and that the growing number of immigrants weakens American society.
The educational divide is also appearing more regularly in other GOP primaries for offices such as senator or governor, especially in races where one candidate is running on a Trump-style platform, Republican strategists say. It is also reappearing in polls measuring GOP voters’ early preferences for 2024. Recent national polls by Quinnipiac University, Fox News Channel and Republican pollsters including Whit Ayres, Echelon Insights and Wilson have all found Trump still running very strongly among Republicans without a college degree, usually capturing more than two-fifths of them, according to detailed results provided by the pollsters. But those same surveys all show Trump struggling with college-educated Republican voters, usually drawing even less support among them than he did in 2016, often just one-fourth or less.
Wilson, for instance, said that in his national survey of prospective 2024 GOP voters, Trump’s support falls from about half of those with a high school degree or less, to about one-third of those with some college experience, one-fourth of those with a four-year degree and only one-fifth of those with a graduate education. In a recent national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, half of Republicans without a college degree said nominating Trump again would give the party the best chance of winning in 2024; two-thirds of the Republicans with degrees said the party would have a better chance with someone else.
There’s more. This same pattern is showing in all the state polls. It’s super interesting and I think Brownstein is right. He almost always is. The current thinking is that DeSantis might be able to bridge the wine/beer tracks:
When DeSantis spoke on Sunday at the Ronald Reagan presidential library about an hour northwest of Los Angeles, he smoothly displayed his potential to bridge the GOP’s educational divide. For the first part of his speech, he touted Florida’s economic success around small government principles – a message that could connect with white-collar GOP voters drawn to a Reaganite message of lower taxes and less regulation. In the speech’s later sections, DeSantis recounted his clashes with what he called “the woke mind virus” over everything from classroom instruction about race, gender and sexual orientation, to immigration and crime and his collisions with the Walt Disney Co. Those issues, which drew the biggest response from his audience, provide him a powerful calling card with GOP voters, especially those without degrees, drawn to Trump’s confrontational style, but worried he can’t win again.
“There is a lot of energy in the party right now around these cultural issues,” said GOP consultant Alex Conant, who served as the communications director for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “If you watch Fox prime time, they are not talking about tax cuts and balancing budgets. They talk about the same cultural issues that DeSantis is putting at the core of his campaign.”
The risk to DeSantis is that by leaning so hard into cultural confrontation on so many fronts he could create a zero-sum dynamic in the race. That approach could allow him to cut into Trump’s blue-collar base, but ultimately repel some college educated primary voters, who view him as too closely replicating what they don’t like about Trump. (If DeSantis wins the nomination, that same dynamic could hurt him with some suburban voters otherwise drawn to his small government economic message.)
That could leave room in the top tier of the GOP race for another candidate who offers a sunnier, less polarizing message aimed mostly at white-collar Republicans. “I think there is absolutely room for more than two candidates, especially two candidates who are both competing very hard for the Fox News audience,” Conant said. Almost anyone else who joins the race beyond Trump and DeSantis (assuming he announces later this year) may ultimately conclude that lane represents their best chance to win.
In many ways, Trump looks more vulnerable than he did in the 2016 primary. But assembling a coalition across the GOP’s wine-track/beer-track divide that’s broad enough to beat him remains something of a Rubik’s Cube, and the countdown is starting for the field that’s assembling against him to solve it.
I continue to believe that the suburban, college educated women who delivered the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections to the Democrats are not going to respond to DeSantis’ extremely hard edged culture war stances — mostly because they are so focused on children. These women know their kids and they know the world they live in. I really doubt that humiliating the LGBTQ and non-white kids among them (it is, after all, the most diverse generation in American history) is something they find appealing. He certainly won’t be able to get them back by talking about tax cuts.
Also Brownstein doesn’t mention this in his analysis because it’s about the [primary, but there are a couple of very serious roadblocks for DeSantis. The bad blood that’s going to develop during what is almost certainly a very ugly campaign is going to sour a lot of those Trump Always voters from voting in the general election. And once DeSantis is running against the Democrat, presumably Joe Biden, he’s going to face an onslaught of hostility for these hard-right culture war stances he’s taken. He may think that he can “pivot” to economics but Democrats are not going to let him. Hell, Trump might not let him either,
It really is a Rubik’s cube. Good luck to Tiny D.
A Feb. 16 filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit in Delaware against Fox News has kicked up a media firestorm: Outlet after outlet described how internal email and text messages quoted in the document, a filing for summary judgment, showed that network honchos knew that former president Donald Trump’s election-theft claims were lies — and allowed them to air anyhow.
Yet the filing is filled with frustrating dead ends, the result of the network’s aggressive effort to prevent disclosure of many of the internal communicationsthat came out of discovery in the case, Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News. The black passages in the document raise the questions: What is Fox News hiding? And will those passages ever be unredacted?
As the Dominion filing makes clear, Fox News executives panicked in the weeks after the November 2020 presidential election. The network had called Arizona on election night for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, a move regarded as treason by the network’s MAGA crowd, which declared viewers would flee to the competition, especiallyconservative cable news outlet Newsmax.
So, Fox News tried playing both sides — a little conspiracy-mongering here, a little factual injection there. Anything to hang on to its ratings preeminence.
One way the network competed with Newsmax was to host election-denying attorney Sidney Powell and her extravagant claims. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, who appeared multiple times in the Dominion filing, apparently commented on the situation, though the public, for now, doesn’t have the goods:
Impenetrable black expanses in the filing thwart a complete understanding of what was happening as Fox News faced down a ratings collapse. We do know what happened when White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked a stolen election claim made by Trump: Host Tucker Carlson advocated for her firing. Similar tensions arose when anchor Neil Cavuto cut away from a news conference at which Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, was inveighing against the election. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Cavuto said on air. “She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.”
At an actual news organization, that sort of quick thinking results in laudatory emails from the bosses. At Fox News, it set off more panic. And in the Dominion filing? A redaction:
All told, there are about 35 redacted passages in the opening narrative of Dominion’s Feb. 16 filing, a collection of anecdotes that launched a frenzy of negative press for Fox News. Though the redactions are in Dominion’s filing, they are a result of confidentiality designations made by lawyers for Fox News, according to a Dominion filing. Both parties are working under an order allowing them to protect certain discovery materials — sensitive, proprietary, commercially sensitive information, for example — from unrestricted public release. All filings containing such designated material must be filed under seal and appropriately redacted before public release.
Pressure is mounting for the redacted information to be revealed.
The New York Times and NPR on Jan. 25 filed a motion to unseal the redacted portions of the summary judgment briefs and related materials, noting that Delaware recognizes “constitutional and common law presumptive rights of access to judicial records filed in civil suits.” Though the Times-NPR filing acknowledges the difficulty of assessing redactions without knowing the nature of the information under wraps, it stresses the benefits of disclosure. “This lawsuit is unquestionably a consequential defamation case that tests the scope of the First Amendment,” the filing reads. “It has been the subject of widespread public interest and media coverage and undeniably involves a matter of profound public interest: namely, how a broadcast network fact-checked and presented to the public the allegations that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen and that plaintiff [Dominion] was to blame.”
Neither party can get away with willy-nilly redactions just for the sake of avoiding public embarrassment. Civil litigants in Delaware, as elsewhere, are subject to a presumption that anything they say in court filings is public. There is an exception for materials designated as confidential, but only for “good cause” — which Delaware courts have said is limited to trade secrets, “third-party confidential material” and “nonpublic financial information. All other documents are ‘deemed available for public disclosure.’”
Randall Chase, a correspondent for the Associated Press, submitted a letter to the court on Feb. 9 urging it to unseal a range of motions, briefs, exhibits and appendixes. It is “incumbent on the court to end the unwarranted secrecy in this case,” Chase’s letter reads.
In a Feb. 17 filing, Dominion itself challenged the confidential treatment of material in three recent briefs by itself, Fox News and Fox Corp. “All the redactions across all three briefs are there at the Fox Defendants’ request,” the document notes. A Fox News source, on the other hand, told the Erik Wemple Blog that the redactions are consistent with the law — and that the grounds for them include “redactions in accordance with the reporters’ privilege.”
Fox News didn’t respond to a question about why a media organization would insist on secrecy in a public court case.
They wouldn’t, would they?