Month: April 2023

Big Pharma has feels for mifepristone

Corporations are not people, my friends. They have no feelings, only appetites and strong instincts for self-preservation. In that way, they are primitively animal-ish the way A.I. simulates thought. But damned if they aren’t territorial, too.

David Dayen considers Big Pharma’s reaction to the potential banning of mifepristone:

The pharmaceutical industry is very upset. Right-wing federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of abortion medication mifepristone could severely damage companies’ ability to develop and market prescription drugs. Companies could spend a fortune getting a drug approved, only to see the courts take issue with the process, and the money washed down the drain. To them, it’s the worst thing a court ruling can be: bad for business.

That’s why Big Pharma is speaking out. On Monday, industry leaders fashioned an open letter condemning Kacsmaryk’s “act of judicial interference,” which “creates uncertainty for the entire biopharma industry … Adding regulatory uncertainty to the already inherently risky work of discovering and developing new medicines will likely have the effect of reducing incentives for investment, endangering the innovation that characterizes our industry.” Over 400 industry CEOs and top executives have signed on to the letter, as of Tuesday afternoon.

Not that Big Pharma cares about its customers. The group displays not even a ChatGPT level of feelings for them. The words woman or women appear nowhere in their 400-word missive. But the group does experience a primitive sense of betrayal, Dayen observes:

[T]he industry’s lament about judicial activism feels a bit like Dr. Frankenstein expressing outrage over the destruction carried out by his monster. The pharmaceutical industry as a whole, and many of the individual officials who signed the letter, financially supported the Senate Republicans who confirmed Kacsmaryk to the federal bench.

They’ve donated self-interestedly to both Republicans and Democrats, writes Dayen, to be fair, as avarice has no party.

Though it’s possible that the ruling will create an irreparable split, given the alignment between drugmakers and anti-regulatory Republicans (all of whom opposed price negotiation on prescription drugs through Medicare last year), it’s unlikely to happen. The only lawmakers who are sure to get left out of the campaign funding bonanza are progressives who want to cut spending on prescription drugs.

Dayen accounts for some of the money PhRMA members have thrown at Republican politicians. Additional millions flung at dark money groups is by design beyond accounting, save perhaps for a “$4.5 million donation from PhRMA in 2020 supported the American Action Network, a right-wing group.”

So if the pharmaceutical industry is looking for someone to blame when right-wing judges don’t respect the FDA approval process, and if they want to cry about the significant investments into drug development that could be lost if it gets blown up, they could try looking in a mirror.

These artificial lifeforms can spare us their silicon tears.

Their plans come together

The conservative base may be driven by what it “knows” in its gut, as Stephen Colbert’s alter ego once observed, but conservatism’s real movers are far more strategic. The left, not so much, despite pretensions to the contrary.

Thomas B. Edsall asked several authors and academicians how strategists of the right pursue their ends and by what means.

Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor of political science and sociology, tell him what we see today in the states is the result of careful, long-term planning and organizing by the right’s strategists, particularly the Federalist Society, to produce “minority authoritarianism” inside a nominally democratic government.

Their base may dream of establishing a Christian nationalist theocracy, but for the right’s brain trust, turning the U.S. into a right-wing demockracy will do:

Skocpol outlined her thinking in an email:

The first-movers who figured out how to configure this new ‘laboratory of democratic constriction’ were legal eagles in the Federalist Society and beyond, because the key structural dynamic in the current G.O.P. gallop toward minority authoritarianism is the mutual interlock between post-2010 Republican control, often supermajority control, of dozens of state legislatures and the Scotus decision in 2019 to allow even the most extreme and bizarre forms of partisan gerrymandering.

These organized, richly resourced actors, she wrote,

have figured out how to rig the current U.S. system of federalism and divided branches, given generational and geographic realities on the ground, and the in many ways fluky 2016 presidential election gave them what they needed to put the interlock in place. They are stoking and using the fears and resentments of about half or so of the G.O.P. popular base to undo American democracy and enhance their own power and privileges. They are doing it because they can, and they believe in what they are doing. They are America’s G.O.P. Leninists.

That harkens back to the infamous 1983 Cato paper, Achieving a “Leninist” Strategy. The authors argued for a long-term, divide-and-conquer strategy for undermining support for Social Security using incremental changes to move the public toward private accounts. It might take years, but if that’s what it takes….

Similarly, Skocpol argues, incremental law changes mean that “behind a bare facade of ‘constitutionalism,’ [Republicans] can render majority-elected officials, including the President and many governors, officials in name only.” 

Decades of conservative tweaks to election laws have worked to threaten the franchise of millions of Americans. That they have become more brazen about it over the last decades is a sign both of the those incremental changes bringing American democracy to the brink of demockracy and desperate recognition on the right that they are losing the culture war.

Tressie McMillan Cottom urges readers to keep an eye on the South where the right’s state-by-state strategy is coming to a head:

I also keep my eyes on the South because the Republican strategy of disenfranchisement is a state-by-state strategy. It looks like judicial rule where they cannot win. Where they cannot win by judicial rule, they will rule by procedural theft. Where they cannot persuade voters to vote for them, they will persuade the candidate they voted for to become one of them. This Republican strategy of winning by losing can work in any state, but it is most brutally efficient in states where we consider nonwhite voters — especially Black voters — inherently illegitimate.

The right won’t stop with Black voters.

Enraging!!!!!!:

 Anya Cook did not want to push. But sitting on the toilet, legs splayed wide, she knew she didn’t have a choice.

She was about to deliver her baby alone in the bathroom of a hair salon. On this Thursday afternoon in mid-December, about five months before her due date, she knew the baby would not be born alive.

Cook tried to tune out the easy chatter outside, happy women with working wombs catching up with their hairdresser.At 36, she’d already experienced a long line of miscarriages, but none of the pregnancies had been more than five weeks along. Now she hadto deliver a nearly 16-week fetus — a daughter she’d planned to call Bunny.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

As soon as the fetus hit the water, blood started flowingbetween her thighs. Blood splattered on the white toilet seat and across the floor. She panicked, her hands shaking as she picked up her phone to call her husband, Derick.

“Baby,” she said, “I need you to come to the bathroom.”

Over the course of the day, according to medical records, Cook would lose roughly half the blood in her body.

She had intended to deliverthe fetusin a hospital, a doctor by her side. When her water broke the night before — at least six weeks ahead of when a fetus could survive on its own — she drove straight to the emergency room, where she said the doctor explained that she was experiencing pre-viability preterm prelabor rupture of the membranes (PPROM), which occurs in less than 1 percent of pregnancies. Thecondition can cause significant complications, including infection and hemorrhage, that can threaten the health or life of the mother, according to multiple studies.

At the hospital in Coral Springs, Fla., Cook received antibiotics, records show.Then she was sent home to wait.

Cook’s experience reflects a new reality playing out in hospitals in antiabortion states across the country — where because of newly enacted abortion bans, people with potentially life-threatening pregnancy complications are being denied care that was readily available before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

When abortion was legal across the country, doctors in all states would typically offer to induceor perform a surgical procedure to end the pregnancy when faced with a pre-viability PPROM case — which is the standard of care, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), and an option that many women choose. Especially before the 20-week mark, a fetus is extremely unlikely to survive without any amniotic fluid.

But in the 18states where abortion is now banned before fetal viability, many hospitals have been turning away pre-viability PPROM patients as doctors and administrators fear the legal risk that could come with terminating even a pregnancy that could jeopardize the mother’s well-being, according to 12 physicians practicing in antiabortion states.

The medical exceptions to protect the life of the mother that are included in abortion bansare often described in vague language that does not appear to cover pre-viabilityPPROM, doctors said. That’s because the risks of the condition are often less clear-cut than other medical emergencies, such as an ectopic pregnancy, in which a fertilized egg grows outside of the uterus, dooming the fetus and posing an immediate danger to the mother’s life.

A 2022 study on the impact of Texas’s six-week abortion ban found that 57 percent of pre-viability PPROM patients in Texaswho were not given the option to end their pregnancies experienced “a serious maternal morbidity,” such as infection or hemorrhage,compared with 33 percent of PPROM patients who chose to terminate in states without abortion bans. According to 2018 ACOG guidance, “isolated maternal deaths due to infection” have been reported in early PPROM cases.

Florida’s abortion law, enacted last year, bans the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy exceptwhen an abortion would either “save the pregnant woman’s life” or“avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” The law includes another exception for a “fatal fetal anomaly,” which generally would not apply in a pre-viability PPROM case, according to several doctors,because there is no fetal anomaly but a lack of amniotic fluid, which limits the fetus’s chances of survival.

The state’s Republican-led legislature is swiftly moving toward passing a far stricter law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The new measure — which passed the Florida Senate last week and is awaiting final passage in the House — adds exceptions for rape and incest but does not address PPROM.

One of the sponsors of Florida’s 15-week abortion ban defended the currentlaw as written, saying the existing exception should be sufficient to cover cases with serious health risks. An explicit exception for PPROM is not necessary, she added.

“The bottom line is we value life, and we would like to protect life,” said former Florida state senator Kelli Stargel (R). “We don’t want to give a gaping exception that anyone can claim.”

Of all the pregnancy complications affected by abortion bans, pre-viability PPROM is one of the most widespread, according to doctors interviewed for this story. The condition is common enough that one day after Cook was turned away from the hospital, the same thing happened to one of her closest friends. Shanae Smith-Cunningham, 32, was 19 weeks into her pregnancy when her water broke.

This story of what happened to the two friends is based on over 200 pages of medical records provided by the patients and on internal hospital documents, as well as text messages, videos and social media posts. In addition to Cook and Smith-Cunningham, The Washington Post interviewed friends and family members who witnessed the events, and several of the doctors involved in the women’s care.

About 15 minutes after Anya delivered the fetus, paramedics charged through the hair salon doors with a stretcher, she and her husband, Derick Cook, recalled.Paramedics slipped the fetal remains inside a red biohazard bag and rushed Anya to a nearby hospital.

When Hany Moustafa, the OB/GYN on call that day, started the procedure to clear remaining pregnancy tissue out of Anya’s uterus, she was still bleeding profusely, he said, describing Anya’s condition with her consent. She was “critically ill” and “mechanically ventilated,” according to medical records.

The doctor stepped out into the waiting room to talk to Derick, who had followed his wife to the ER.

Moustafa told Derick that his wife could die in the operating room, both men recalled.

“I will do my very best,” the doctor said. “But the rest is up to God.”

The story goes on to show that, by awful coincidence, this woman’s friend was going through the same there in Florida. It’s a horrific, horrific story. Their health is permanently compromised from this and they could have died.

Florida’s six-week abortion ban passed the Senate with a vote of 26 to 13, without a specific exception for PPROM.

In South Florida, Cook and Smith-Cunningham both plan to start trying to get pregnant again.

They worry the same thing will happen again — this time, with an even stricter abortion law in place.

“Getting pregnant now feels like a death sentence,” said Cook.

“They are playing with people’s lives with this law,” said Smith-Cunningham.

This is what comes from zealots and political cynics interfering in medical decisions. Not that they care. They really don’t. It’s quite clear that they are more concerned about someone “cheating” their ridiculous rules than saving lives.

This is actually worse than I thought it would be. And I knew it would be bad.

I loved MAD Magazine so much as a kid that I think it may have been my greatest influence (for better or worse.) And I loved the Fold-in. Al Jaffee was a hero and I’m not surprised to learn that he had an incredibly interesting life:

Al Jaffee, a cartoonist who folded in when the trend in magazine publishing was to fold out, thereby creating one of Mad magazine’s most recognizable and enduring features, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 102.

His death, at a hospital, was caused by multi-system organ failure, his granddaughter Fani Thomson said.

It was in 1964 that Mr. Jaffee created the Mad Fold-In, an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a liberal-leaning or authority-defying message.

For instance, the fold-in from the November 2001 issue asked, “What mind-altering experience is leaving more and more people out of touch with reality?” The unfolded illustration showed a crowd of people popping and snorting various substances. But when folded, the image transformed into the Fox News anchor desk.

The first fold-in, in the April 1964 issue (No. 86), mocked Elizabeth Taylor’s marital record. (Unfolded, she is with Richard Burton; folded, she has traded him in for another guy.) No one, especially Mr. Jaffee, expected that fold-in to be followed by hundreds more.

“It was supposed to be really a one-shot,” he said in a 1993 interview with The Kansas City Star. “But because of the overwhelming demand of three or four of my relatives, it went on to a second time, and on and on.”

That “on and on” turned into a career that included other memorable contributions to Mad, like a “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” feature, and that in 2007 won him cartooning’s top honor, the Reuben Award, putting him in the company of Charles M. Schulz, Mort Walker, Gary Larson, Matt Groening and other luminaries of the trade.

With the fold-in, Mad was turning an industry trend on its head. “Playboy, of course, was doing its centerfold,” Mr. Jaffee told The Star. “Life, in almost every issue, was doing a three- or four-page gatefold showing how dinosaurs traversed the land, that kind of thing. Even Sports Illustrated had fold-outs.”

Mad went in the other direction, literally, although Mr. Jaffee said in a 2008 interview with The New York Times that he initially didn’t expect the magazine’s editor, Al Feldstein, and publisher, William M. Gaines, to go for the notion. “I have this idea,” he recalled telling them. “I think it’s a funny idea, but I know you’re not going to buy it. But I’m going to show it to you anyway. And you’re not going to buy it because it mutilates the magazine.”

The men did buy it, and then asked for more, and the inside back cover quickly became Mr. Jaffee’s turf. Although other regular Mad features changed artists over the years, no one but Mr. Jaffee drew a fold-in for 55 years.

In mid-2019, the magazine announced that it would stop printing issues full of new material, except for year-end specials. In the special issue that appeared at the end of 2019, the cartoonist Johnny Sampson, with Mr. Jaffee’s blessing, became the only other artist to draw a fold-in.

In real life, however, Mr. Jaffee was the opposite of a smart aleck: a genteel, unassuming man whose in-person humor was delivered with a wink, not a cudgel. He adorned each of his drawings with a tiny self-portrait, a kind of logo, with his name scrawled in his hair.

“It’s not that Al does not have an ego,” Sam Viviano, Mad’s art director, said in 2008. “You don’t draw your face into everything you do without some kind of an ego. But it’s a really healthy ego.”

Abraham Jaffee (he later legally changed his name to Allan) was born on March 13, 1921, in Savannah, Ga. His parents, both Jewish, had immigrated from Lithuania, his father, Morris, arriving in New York in 1905 and his mother, Mildred, in 1913.

Morris Jaffee quickly adjusted to the pace of early-20th-century America, starting as a tailor in New York and then taking a job in retailing in Savannah. Mildred, though, was never comfortable in the United States, had some strict religious views and was somewhat unstable, leaving young Al with many traumatic memories.

“If you were to see some naked guy sitting on top of a mountain somewhere in India with pins stuck into his body, how would you know whether the guy was nuts or religious?” Mr. Jaffee recalled in “Al Jaffee’s Mad Life” (2010), a biography written by Mary-Lou Weisman and illustrated by Mr. Jaffee. “My mother was both.”

When Mr. Jaffee was 6, his mother threw their domestic life into turmoil by taking him and his three younger brothers back to her shtetl in Lithuania. The visit was supposed to last a month, but it stretched into a tug of war between the two parents that lasted six years, most of which Al spent in Lithuania living in what he described as 19th-century conditions. But there was a silver lining of sorts: Morris Jaffee sent the boys packages of the Sunday comics from American newspapers, and Al began to find his artistic talent.

His father finally brought him back to the United States for good when Al was 12. On the strength of his artistic ability, he was admitted to the first class of the High School of Music and Art in New York. His fellow students there included several who would later start Mad, but that was still years in the future when he graduated in 1940, directly into the golden age of comics.

“I came onto the scene when they were buying original material, and in a burst of creative who knows what, I created Inferior Man, which was a shameless rip-off of Superman,” Mr. Jaffee said in the 2008 interview. “My basic premise was that he fought crime and evil, but if it became too much for him to handle, he would sneak into some phone booth and change into civilian clothes.”

Will Eisner, then emerging as a force in the comics industry, bought the feature, and Mr. Jaffee went on to do work for Stan Lee, another major name in comics, as well. He began contributing to Mad in 1955, three years after it was founded by Mr. Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman, Mr. Jaffee’s former high school classmate.

When Mr. Kurtzman left Mad in 1956 to try other ventures, including the short-lived magazine Humbug, Mr. Jaffee followed. By 1958, he was back at Mad to stay. He was never on the magazine’s staff, however; all of his work was as a freelancer.

His early Mad contributions were as a writer, though he was honing his illustrating skills in other projects, like “Tall Tales,” a syndicated comic strip he drew from 1957 to 1963. Eventually Mad made him a writer-artist, and with the fold-in and “Snappy Answers” (a feature that first appeared in October 1965) he became one of the stable of regulars who set Mad’s style.

In 1977, Mr. Jaffee married Joyce Revenson, who died in January 2020. His first marriage, to Ruth Ahlquist, whom he had met and married while in the Army in World War II, ended in divorce.

He is survived by two children from his first marriage, Richard Jaffee and Deborah Fishman; two stepdaughters, Tracey and Jody Revenson; five grandchildren; one step-granddaughter; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Jaffee lived in Manhattan but for years had split his time between his home there and another in Provincetown, Mass.

His Mad work was republished in countless books, many with self-deprecating titles like “Mad’s Vastly Overrated Al Jaffee.” In 2008, Harry N. Abrams published a collection of his “Tall Tales” strips. In 2011, Chronicle Books came out with “The Mad Fold-In Collection: 1964-2010,” a hardcover boxed set.

The impact of Mr. Jaffee’s fold-in gimmick was evident in many imitations and homages over the years, like Beck’s fold-in-themed video of his song “Girl” in 2005. Mr. Jaffee said he would often receive requests from high schools that wanted to create a fold-in for the school paper, mistakenly thinking they needed his permission.

“I write back and say, You have my blessings, go ahead and do it,” he said in 2008. “But no one can copyright folding a piece of paper.”

And they love him

Ron Brownstein on Trump’s trump card:

Even amid all his legal challenges, Donald Trump has a secret weapon in his drive to win the Republican presidential nomination next year: polling strongly suggests he has transformed the GOP primary electorate in a way that will make him harder to beat.

Since Trump’s emergence as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, the college-educated voters generally most skeptical of him have declined as a share of all GOP primary voters, while the voters without a college degree generally most sympathetic to him have increased, an array of public and private polls indicate.

Those changes suggest Trump has set in motion what could prove a self-fulfilling prophecy: compared to when he first captured the nomination in 2016, he’s encouraged more participation in the Republican primaries by the blue-collar voters most inclined to support him and less by the white-collar voters likely to become the centerpiece of any coalition against him.

“There’s no question about it,” says long-time GOP pollster Whit Ayres. “He has drawn people into the Republican Party who are more likely to support him and people like him and he has driven out of the Republican Party people who were more likely to support candidates George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney.”

This transformation of the Republican electorate is critical because attitudes in the GOP about Trump vary enormously along educational lines – what political analysts have often termed the divide between well-educated “wine track” and non-college educated “beer track” voters. In the latest CNN national poll conducted by SRSS, for instance, almost three-fifths of Republicans without a four-year college degree said nominating Trump again would give the party its best chance of winning in 2024; in stark contrast, two-thirds of Republicans with a college degree said the party would have a better chance if it chose someone else.

The conundrum for Republicans is that while the influence of college-educated adults is diminishing inside the GOP primary, those voters have become a growing obstacle for the party in general elections. The rejection of Trump, and Trump-style candidates, in well-educated suburbs across the country has been a central factor in the mostly disappointing election results for the GOP in 2018, 2020 and 2022. The Democratic landslide in last week’s state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, a state the GOP likely must win back to recapture the White House next year, underlined the party’s continuing erosion in such places, especially amid the sharpening debate over abortion rights.

The changing nature of the GOP coalition compounds the party’s problems of winning back those suburban voters. The shift toward a more blue-collar primary electorate advantages the candidates like Trump emphasizing precisely the slashing culture war messages that are alienating those general election voters.

Probably the best long-term data set capturing the shifting dimensions of the Republican electoral coalition is polling by the GOP firm Public Opinion Strategies. Each year, it cumulates the results of all the polls it conducts for media clients including the Wall Street Journal, NBC and CNBC to produce a large-sample picture of the two parties’ supporters.

This annual merged data shows some significant changes over the past decade among the voters who identify with the GOP, according to a detailed breakdown the firm provided to me. In the POS data, the party is getting somewhat grayer: in 2012 it found that 43% of all Republicans were aged 55 or older. That figure rose to 50% in 2022, the latest annual compilation. Over that same period, the party moved modestly to the right, with the share of GOP voters who identify as very conservative edging up from 34% in 2012 to 38% in 2022.

On other key dimensions, the party didn’t change much: in 2022, as in 2012, men constituted a slight majority of all GOP partisans (a stark contrast from the electorate overall, where women are the majority), and voters of color represented about one-in-eight party members, virtually unchanged from 10 years ago.

But one change in the GOP electorate was more dramatic than any other, says GOP pollster Bill McInturff, one of the firm’s partners: “the growth of non-college Whites as a percentage of self-identified Republicans.” In 2012, the firm found, those Whites without a college degree constituted 48% of all Republicans, only slightly more than Whites with a college degree, who represented 40%. By 2016, when Trump was first nominated, the gap between the two groups had widened, with the non-college Whites rising to 56% of all Republicans, and the college-educated Whites falling to 33%. In the 2022 results, the Whites without a college degree soared to 62% of all GOP partisans, while the college-educated Whites sagged to 25%. (Looking at all GOP supporters, including the relatively small number who are racial minorities, the group without a college degree rose from 56% in 2012 to 70% in 2022, POS found.)

What makes this shift even more striking is that over that same period, Whites without a college degree have generally declined as a share of the total electorate by about two percentage points every four years, according to figures from the Census Bureau and other data sources such as the projections by the Democratic targeting firm Catalist. That means the non-college Whites have been increasing their presence inside the GOP while they were shrinking overall, as American society grows both more racially diverse and better educated.

[…]

Three Republican pollsters I spoke with – Ayres, McInturff and CNN contributor Kristen Soltis Anderson – all said that their analysis projects college-educated voters will represent about 40% of the GOP electorate next year. That leaves the non-college voters who provide the bedrock of Trump’s support as the clear majority at around 60%.

State-level polls also document how the GOP electorate has shifted toward those without degrees. In New Hampshire, for instance, adults with a four-year college or graduate degree constituted a 54% majority of likely voters in a January 2016 poll just before the primary there by the University of New Hampshire, according to results provided to CNN. In a January 2023 UNH poll, college-educated voters had fallen in half, to just 27% of likely GOP primary voters, while those without degrees had soared to 73%.

Likewise, in New York, Siena College polling has found that the share of likely GOP primary voters with a college degree in that state has fallen in half, from around 50% in 2016 to just 25% now. Polling over the same period by the Public Policy Institute of California shows a more modest shift in the same direction there.

These shifts enormously complicate the task of assembling a coalition that can beat the former president in the primaries.

Trump has gained ground in recent weeks among college- and non-college voters alike, particularly as the party has rallied around him in the face of his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. But there’s no question that college-educated Republicans are much cooler toward Trump than their counterparts without a degree. In 2016, only about one-third of college-educated Republicans supported Trump in the primaries, according to Langer’s cumulative analysis of the exit polls. And while 63% of non-college Republicans said in the latest CNN poll that the party should nominate Trump in 2024, only 33% of those with degrees agreed (suggesting his underlying support among them has not increased from its meager level in 2016).

Anderson says that in polling over the past few months by her firm Echelon Insights, nearly half of all Republicans who express unfavorable views about Trump hold a college degree. That’s true, she says, both for Republicans who identify as conservatives and those who do not. “The portions of the right that are not very favorable to Donald Trump are the most highly educated,” she says.

After eight years of Trump’s seismic impact on the party, though, those highly educated Republicans have less leverage over the nomination process than they did in 2016. With the non-college Republicans now a growing majority of the primary electorate, it’s unlikely that anybody can overtake Trump without significantly cutting into his lead among those blue-collar voters who gave him nearly half their total votes in 2016 and again are supporting him at least at that level in most 2024 polls.

Long-time GOP consultant David Kochel is one of many party strategists who believes that “If you are going to have an anti-Trump coalition in the primary,” college-educated Republicans are “where it has to start.” But since those voters likely won’t be enough to beat Trump on their own, Trump’s rivals will also need to loosen his hold on non-college Republicans. Yet doing that may require taking hardline positions on cultural issues that makes it more difficult to unite the college Republicans. Those two groups, Kochel says, “have very different values, they see things differently, they live in very different media universes.”

Ron DeSantis’ recent polling decline among college-educated Republicans may reflect that challenge. While he often led Trump among them earlier this year, the Florida governor has consistently slipped somewhat as he’s leaned even harder into his culture warrior credentials, signing a bill allowing permit less carry of concealed weapons and backing a six-week abortion ban in Florida. (DeSantis also stumbled on Ukraine by initially echoing, and then somewhat distancing from, Trump’s skepticism of sustained US support.)

Wilson says it’s possible college graduates could comprise a somewhat larger share of the GOP electorate in 2024 than 2016 if President Joe Biden does not face a competitive Democratic race and more white-collar independents choose to participate in Republican primaries as a result. But most other Republicans I spoke with believe the other candidates will face the challenge of beating Trump in an electorate tilted even more than in 2016 toward the voters most sympathetic to him. “He has created favorable conditions for himself,” says Kochel.

Kochel doesn’t believe that dynamic guarantees a Trump victory, though. While Republicans of all camps, he says, mostly rally around Trump when he’s criticized by Democrats or the news media, the former president could be more vulnerable to “a sustained effort to define him negatively from the right” on issues such as his support of steps to lock down the country in the very first days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Taking down Trump with those arguments won’t be easy because the GOP voters theoretically most receptive to that case are largely the same non-college Republicans who display the strongest emotional connection to the former president as a “warrior” who fights for them. Yet most GOP strategists agree Trump’s 2024 rivals must find some way to reduce his commanding lead with the blue-collar Republicans. “If he stays that high,” among those non-college primary voters, says Ayres, “it is going to be very difficult to dislodge him.”

Unless one of Trump’s opponents can disrupt these dynamics, the former president in 2024 may have even more reason to declare, as he so memorably did in 2016, that “I love the poorly educated.”

He’s got the best chance to win the GOP nomination. The General Election not so much…

Kellyanne: I think we got some work to do on the young people who think differently on abortion perhaps, guns, or climate change.. The thing I’m really concerned about on this is that the left becomes a turnout machine with young people.. pic.twitter.com/M5NWaOHRnP

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 11, 2023

She and her accomplices built a political party based upon bigotry and hate. They approve of torture and celebrate death. They addicted their followers to conspiracy theories and rank tribalism. Old people like me watched it happen over time and it was just slow enough that we didn’t see the full scope of how ignorant and nihilistic their movement had become until Trump came along.

Young people see them for what they are — and they are appalled. They and their friends don’t want to live in a country where people like this are in charge. They have large numbers and they are engaged and active.

As for the issues of abortion, guns and climate change, young people know hypocrites when they see them and they won’t be fooled by insincere outreach efforts. And they will be insincere because Republicans have trained their own voters over many years to believe that abortion is murder, unfettered gun rights are inalienable and climate change is a hoax. Nobody will be able to thread that needle. All that’s on top of the fact that they are racist, homophobic and transphobic, misogynist monsters.

And then there’s this:

Good luck Kellyanne…

John Amato at Crooks and Liars:

Bill Barr, Trump’s former Attorney General, told ABC’s This Week that Trump’s legal trouble may help him in the Republican primary; however, it all but assures he would lose in the 2024 general election.

“What do you think the likelihood is at the end of the day that we are actually going to see Donald Trump convicted and sentenced to prison?” Host Jonathan Karl asked.

Barr at first made the case that the indictments are part of a conspiracy to help Trump by those in power wanting the cockwombler to be the nominee in 2024.

“I also think though, as far as the general election is concerned, it will gravely weaken Trump. He is already, I think, a weak candidate that would lose,” Barr said. ” But I think this sort of assures it.”

Barr seems perturbed by this. Why should that be? He knew what he was dealing with when he covered for Trump’s massive obstruction of justice while he was president. (Also, everything else.) . But then Trump lost and was no longer of use to him.

I know a lot of people hate the Never Trumpers but I give them credit for getting off the train and staying off it since 2016. The incentives were all going the other way. But the people who knew better but worked for Trump either for money and status or political/ideological opportunism, stuck with him until he lost the election and only then “realized” that he’s a menace are beneath contempt. Barr is the undisputed leader of that group (many of whom are still trying to have it both ways.) He is irredeemable.

The weapons are similar too

Teens and college students across the country protested the war in Vietnam not just because of disagreements over U.S. foreign policy. Their lives were on the line. Or their brothers’ or their friends’ or their husbands’.

Hundreds of students, parents and teachers protested against gun violence inside the Tennessee state House on April 6 for the same reason. Lives are on the line. Theirs and friends’ and their kids’. We watched Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear in a Monday press conference hold back tears after friends were shot and one killed in a mass shooting at a bank in Louisville. How long will these daily shootings go on unchecked before each of us is personally affected the same way, if not shot ourselves?

LIVE: Protest in Tennessee State Capital over expulsion of two young Black legislators https://t.co/H95XmWgnI3

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 10, 2023

Hope for our democracy and for an end to the daily slaughter may lie with the young. This is their Vietnam. Ironically, the weapon of choice in many of these shootings is a variant of those the Pentagon sent in bulk to Southeast Asia 60 years ago.

WOW. Rep. Justin Jones is leading a march with thousands of people back to the Tennessee Capitol building right now. This is what democracy & a movement look like. Republicans messed around & they’re about to find out. Sweet, poetic Justice. pic.twitter.com/BarQstTdZl

— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) April 10, 2023

Protesters have left the Metro Courthouse and are marching to the Capitol. This is happening after Metro Council unanimously voted for Rep. Justin Jones to return to his seat in the Capitol. @NC5 pic.twitter.com/21VaWoXAlw

— Kelsey Gibbs (@kelseymgibbs) April 10, 2023

CNN:

Worry and fear about gun violence are widespread in the United States, where most families have been affected by a gun-related incident, according to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Nearly 1 in 5 adults has had a family member killed by a gun, including in homicide and suicide. About as many adults have been personally threatened with a gun, and about 1 in 6 adults has witnessed an injury from a shooting, the survey found.

The new report comes less than a day after a shooting that claimed at least four lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Mass shootings have escalated in recent years, reaching a record pace in 2023. There have been at least 146 incidents so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, leaving more than 200 people dead and hundreds more injured.

About half of all gun-related deaths are suicides, federal data shows. And the suicide rate has also recently increased, reversing years of decline and returning to near-record levels.

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman see the parallels in younger activists taking up the fight (Washington Post):

Catalyzing events in U.S. history have a tendency to shape generations of public officials. In the 1920s, Prohibition and the GOP’s depression economics gave rise to the New Deal Democrats. Racial and cultural repression in the mid-20th century spawned classes of lawmakers fighting for the “rights revolution.” In the 1970s, the Vietnam War and Watergate inspired the antiwar “Watergate babies” to run for Congress.

The Republicans’ reactionary turn against democracy, against women’s rights, against minorities of all kinds, and against efforts to stop gun violence in red states is “is beginning to shape a new generation of young Democratic officials, many of whom will one day be the party’s leaders.” It cannot happen too soon.

LIVE: @brotherjones_ is being sworn in on the Capitol steps pic.twitter.com/FMA5j7PdhB

— Justin J. Pearson (@Justinjpearson) April 10, 2023

BREAKING: Justin Jones has been sworn back in to the Tennessee Legislature after being reappointed by the Metro Nashville Council. Reports are @brotherjones_ is signing his oath of office on the capitol steps right now @scrippsnews @NC5 pic.twitter.com/yTF9NsYp2A

— Chris Conte (@chrisconte) April 10, 2023

“We’re seeing this across the country,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run For Something, which recruits progressive candidates for state and local office. “It’s no coincidence that some of the loudest voices pushing back are young leaders in red states, often from urban environments, often people of color, often LGBTQ themselves.”

Last week, after the GOP-controlled state legislature in Tennessee expelled two young Black lawmakers for protesting gun violence, and after a Texas judge invalidated federal approval of abortion medication, Run For Something’s candidate recruitment spiked. Litman says more than half the new candidates are from red states.

What binds these lawmakers and candidates together is an acute sense that the character of the country is on the line and it could determine their own futures. “For them, every part of this conversation is personal,” Litman says.

Especially bullets headed their way.

Most of the opinion piece is about the fight by the young against MAGA revanchists determined to put everyone they don’t like back in their 1950s (or earlier) places. But seeing the marchers in Nashville on Monday brought back memories of how deadly serious, and how personal, protests were against the Vietnam War. Mass shootings provoked these new Tennessee protests. People are afraid. Afraid enough to do something about it.

Republicans are fighting a cold civil war

“The doomsday prepper of the past has become a mainstay of rightwing culture,” Jeff Sharlet (The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War) said recently of scattered rural militiamen. Elected Republicans in control of state legislatures don’t need AR-15s to fight their cold civil war. They are manipulating democracy to undo democracy in full view of state capitol and national press.

The Republican majority voted to expel three Democrats from the Tennessee state House last week for what they insisted were breaches of decorum in loudly calling for action against gun violence. They kept the white woman, Rep. Gloria Johnson (barely), and expelled two young Black men. The Nashville Metropolitan Council voted 36-0 Monday to reinstate Justin Jones to the position Republicans revoked last week. Justin Pearson of Memphis is expected to be reinstated when the Shelby County Board of Commissioners meets on Wednesday.

Pardon the cliche, but if you haven’t noticed that MAGA Republicans have declared war on representative democracy, you haven’t been paying attention.

Nashville Council votes to reinstate Justin Jones 36-0 pic.twitter.com/cOueZkbtmy

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 10, 2023

Additionally, says Democracy Docket‘s newsletter, “a Tennessee court blocked House Bill 48, which would force Nashville — and only Nashville — to cut the size of its Metro Council in half. Two lawsuits argue that the law disenfranchises voters and violates the state constitution.”

Yes, there’s more: “On Friday, the Montana House passed Senate Bill 117 on a party-line vote, which would ban state, county or local officials from accepting private donations to fund election administration. It now heads to the desk of Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) for his signature.”

Now, why would such a bill be necessary? Should GOP-dominated legislatures cut budgets to state boards of elections, private donors and foundations are prohibited from taking up the slack with (as derided on the fringe right) “Zuck Bucks.” When short funding precipitates election snafus and allegations of misadministration, democracy itself is to blame, see?

Democracy Docket adds:

Since 2020, 23 states have enacted legislation targeting private election administration grants, whether banning completely or severely regulating. Five other states (Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) saw such bans vetoed by Democratic governors. 

In 2023, the trend does not seem to be slowing down. A proposal banning outside grants for election administration in Arkansas already has 64 Republican co-sponsors in the state Senate. There are similar bills introduced in Connecticut, Minnesota and North Carolina.

Rick Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick report at Slate that Republicans’ efforts are accelerating. The Guardian and Documented reported last week on a secret February conference aimed at holding down Democratic voter turnout. You’d be forgiven for missing it, the pair write: “We are all living in Steve Bannon’s Trumpian dreamworld in which ‘flooding the zone with shit’ has become a remarkably successful political tactic.”

The Fraudulent Fraud Squad has been at this for decades, as I’ve detailed again and again and again. They are well-funded and relentless:

What’s clear from the new reporting, and what may have flown somewhat under the radar last week, is that this is no longer just a lobbying effort shored up with big, often untraceable money, coming from players outside the system. What’s no longer hidden is the involvement of lawmakers and their staffs, who say the quiet parts out loud. Their enthusiastic participation in these efforts shows that these groups are not offering false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud merely to raise funds or even to delegitimize Democratic electoral victories by convincing the Republican base that when Democrats win elections, it is inevitably by fraud. Instead, the conference is powerful evidence of coordination between the decades-old voter fraud-industrial-complex and state and government officials who actually have the power to make rules over how elections are run. To put it in its simplest, the election suppression noises are truly coming from inside the house.

Participants at the conference no doubt learned the lesson we all gleaned from the aftermath of the 2020 election: No matter how much proof investigators, courts, and journalists amass to show that voter fraud is rare and almost never swings American elections, significant portions of the Republican base will always believe the false claims. Indeed, the more evidence they hear that there is no such thing as large-scale election day vote fraud, the more it leads them to distrust the investigators, courts, and journalists who attempt to debunk them. Those false claims then serve as the predicate to pass yet more laws intended to make it ever harder to vote for some voters seen as likely to vote for Democrats—including poor voters, minority voters, and students. Never mind that sometimes these laws deter Republican voters and could actually cost Republicans elections. The important thing is to puff up the lie in order to justify draconian state legislative responses. And the participation of state entities that once took pride in serving as non-partisan officials who sought only to administer elections fairly and efficiently prove that it is becoming vanishingly rare for election officials in the Republican Party to distance themselves from whatever formulation of the Big Lie best serves them, whether they personally believe it or not.

The Sun Also Sets

I am alarmed, frankly, by events in Nashville. Republican authoritarians mean business. Yet, Democrats in the states and in D.C. seem not to believe what their eyes are seeing. Nor are they mobilized to fight Trumpism with more than politics as usual. The “Tennessee Three” get it. But how many of the rest of us?

Benjamin Franklin remarked at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that we had formed a republic if we could keep it. If we are not prepared today — mentally and in our guts — for the fight MAGA Republicans are already waging against that representative democracy, future historians may ask Democrats hiding in caves how we lost it. As Hemingway wrote, “Gradually, then suddenly.”

It was *incredibly* irresponsible for Nashville police to tease the existence of a "manifesto" from the covenant school shooter only to reveal later that what they actually had amounted to disorganized ramblings about other mass murderers https://t.co/blLRmkm8B9

— Ari Drennen (@AriDrennen) April 10, 2023

And yes, the cops were completely irresponsible in saying there was a manifesto which is by definition “a published declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party or government.” I think it’s fair to assume they were pimping the right wing line…