Month: July 2023

They no longer have any need or desire to be statesmen

And, as with everything else, it’s a long, slow evolution that’s been accelerated at warp speed by the presence of Donald Trump in American politics:

There are 26 Republican governors. Three of them showed up here this week at the annual summer meeting of the National Governors Association.

And of those three, one left after the first night, and another had little choice but to attend — his chairship of the group began at the conclusion of this year’s gathering.

Striding the Hard Rock Cafe casino stage like a megachurch pastor, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox used his maiden speech as NGA chair to implore his fellow governors to make the organization a model of robust yet civil debate.

“If we’re ever going to find our better angels again, it has to start with us setting the example of how to disagree better,” Cox said.

But it’s hard to do much disagreeing, or have a conversation at all, when nobody is listening: Fewer than a half-dozen governors were still in attendance for his remarks Friday, the session’s closing day, and they were all Democrats.

After more than a century of bringing together the nation’s governors, the NGA — long a wellspring of ideas, forum for best practices and platform for innovating policymaking — is at grave risk of falling victim to the silos plaguing most every other element of American politics.

That’s the bad news. The good news is if any governor can reverse or at least slow this trend, it’s Cox.

“A bipartisan organization in a partisan world is always going to struggle, there’s no question about that,” the earnest Utahan acknowledged in an interview before vowing to round up more Republicans for next summer’s meeting. “I’ll definitely be cajoling them next time.”

It won’t be easy.

Republicans and Democrats increasingly prefer to exist in separate political spheres rather than debate one another, let alone try to find consensus.

This sorting plays out on television, where right and left have their preferred cable networks and joint appearances between lawmakers or candidates on network shows are increasingly rare; it’s a way of life in Congress, where the parties have separate lunches and spend much of their free time raising money with their co-partisans; and of course, division is the mother’s milk of politics online, where algorithms push users toward the reinforcing content they crave.

Then there’s the fact that one of our two political parties has for seven years been in the grip of a demagogue who simultaneously benefits from and accelerates this polarization while driving Republicans further away from mainstream institutions.

Despite this descent, the NGA remained a vibrant if overshadowed bipartisan institution. I can recall attending the group’s summer meeting in 2017 and finding a robust turnout of governors from both parties.

At least for the chief executives, it was a storied association.

Besides the opportunities to learn from one another, and often poach a bit, the group’s meetings offered the governors attention from the media, business community and lobbyists that they couldn’t easily attract to Jefferson City or Montpelier. (Former Washington Gov. Gary Locke was thrilled to attend the meetings, he told people, because he knew the late Washington Post columnist David S. Broder would be in attendance.)

There’s the annual winter meeting in Washington, D.C., always paired with a White House dinner with the president, and the more casual and rotating summer conclave. Particularly for new governors or those with little national profile, these were must-attend events — a way to sell their state, their story and themselves.

Chairing the NGA offered even more visibility, luring ambitious governors like Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, Arkansas’s Bill Clinton and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty to take control of the group and bolster their profile ahead of future presidential bids.

[…]

Republican participation has slowly tailed off, though. A few conservative states, like Florida and Texas, stopped participating in the association at all, no matter their governor.

Then, in the Trump years, some Republican governors stopped coming or sequestered themselves while in attendance because they didn’t want to face questions from the press about the president’s latest eruption. (The GOP executives needn’t have much worried this year — I didn’t see another national journalist, and there were few cameras besides C-SPAN.)

Since 2018, there’s been a turnover in states that has left both fewer Republican governors and fewer Republican governors of the sort who want to discuss best practices or share a soft-serve cone or bumper car on the boardwalk with their Democratic counterparts.

Blue-state Republicans such as Maryland’s Larry Hogan and Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker have been replaced by Democrats, and many purple states have elected or reelected Democrats.

In some states, where new Republicans have taken office, governors like Nevada’s Joe Lombardo have appeared reluctant to participate in the NGA. At last month’s Western Governors Association conference in Colorado, Lombardo told people he thought the NGA was a Democratic-leaning group, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

A Lombardo representative said he didn’t come to the NGA because of scheduling issues, but he and other Republican governors almost always find time to attend events hosted by the Republican Governors Association, which is dedicated to electing the party’s governors.

Fittingly for this polarized moment, it’s the RGA that has become the preferred organization for most GOP governors. That’s why the winter gathering of governors is usually well-attended across party lines: In addition to the White House invite, there are always ancillary fundraising events in Washington that ensure donors and therefore a good turnout.

Now, to be sure: Natural disasters kept some governors away this year. Others found the Eastern Seaboard location (with no major airport nearby) forbidding, and there was also a dip in turnout from some Democratic governors, if not nearly as significant as with Republicans.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, told me he thought some Republicans stayed away for the same reason they did during Trump’s administration: “I don’t think they want you to ask them about the former president.”

Walz pointed out that the two governors staying for the conference didn’t need to worry about that: Cox has been clear about his distaste for Trump, and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt is already supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

But what I found alarming was the talk racing through the hallways of the Hard Rock (which, in a reminder that Trump can never be fully escaped, was formerly his Taj Mahal): The NGA’s summer meeting may come to an end, replaced by only regional meetings that would likely reflect the partisanship of the region. That may be a safer space, to borrow a phrase, but it would be tantamount to surrender, a concession that even with governors the partisan chasm is just too deep to sustain a national organization.

This all may sound like so much nostalgia for a bygone day. Yet many of the governors do stand apart from their counterparts in Congress for their seriousness of purpose, their executive leadership in the face of crisis and, yes, their willingness to forge coalitions across party lines.

“It’s one of the more unique organizations where folks across the aisle can find common ground,” as New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, the outgoing NGA chair, put it.

The Democrat Murphy and Republican Cox, who spent the last year as vice chair, offered an example of the productive work that can be done by the group, as they and their wives spent much of their time together addressing the country’s youth mental health crisis.

The paltry turnout here may prove ominous, or it may be altogether fitting for the “Disagree Better” initiative of Cox, who in the days before the conference toured Gettysburg, Independence Hall and Valley Forge.

The whole party is polluted. There is no saving it.

Asa Hutchinson is lustily booed before the Turning Point crowd

He’s a hard right establishment Republican. And it’s just not good enough. Why?

During the event, Carlson asked the former governor about his veto of the first-in-the-nation gender-affirming care ban for minors. 

Hutchinson said at the time of his veto that he believes the law went too far and was an example of government overreach. 

On Friday, the former governor said that he believes only two genders exist and he would not personally support a member of his family changing genders, but he does not think the government should be involved in the decision. 

“There should not be any confusion on your gender. But if there is confusion, then parents ought to be the ones that guide the children,” he said. “That to me is a fundamental principle.” 

Hutchinson added that he would have signed a bill that only banned gender-affirming surgery for minors because a parent should not be able to consent to that “permanent change.” But the Arkansas law, which went into effect after the state legislature overrode his veto, bans all forms of care, including surgery, puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. 

Carlson pushed back on Hutchinson’s position, questioning how gender-affirming care is treatment and arguing that a responsibility exists to prevent this. 

Hutchinson reiterated his view and said he did not support an Obama-era policy that required schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity. 

Carlson then cut Hutchinson off, asking about the distinction that Hutchinson was drawing and if he supports allowing children to change their gender but not be able to use a different bathroom. Hutchinson expressed frustration in a briefly tense moment. 

“Let me finish what I said. Let me finish, if you don’t mind,” Hutchinson said. 

He said the government should not be “pushing an agenda” in schools, which is what he opposes. He said parents and faith should guide these “difficult” decisions and the government should stay out. 

You do not deviate from the hate, even a little bit.

Unless you are Trump , of course. He is not bound by any rules. He makes them up as he goes along.

Wait. The Insurrection Act? Where did that come from? Trump did amend that post later to say Espionage Act, but it appears that the Insurrection Act is on his mind. You have to wonder if maybe he’s gotten a target letter from the Special Council.

There is good reason for him to worry about that.

Jennifer Rubin looked at a new prospective prosecution memo which sees Donald Trump potentially facing some very serious charges based upon the public evidence. One of them is the likelihood of being charged under the Insurrection Act:

Building on a prior prosecution memo, a group of seven former prosecutors and defense attorneys — lawyers with decades of collective constitutional and criminal law experience — published at Just Security a voluminous updated memo giving their best estimate (and advice to Smith) as to what to expect.

The authors at Just Security consolidated the seven-part conspiracy the House select committee set out into three essential prongs. They explained the first prong: “Trump knew he lost the election but did not want to give up power, so he worked with his lawyers on a wide variety of schemes to change the outcome. Those schemes included creating fraudulent electoral certificates that were submitted to Congress, implicating statutes such as 18 U.S.C. § 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States” and 18 U.S.C. §1001, which prohibits false statements to the government. Second, after the phony elector scheme failed, Trump tried to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to obstruct the joint session in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512. And third, when that too failed, “Trump went to his last resort: triggering an insurrection in the hope that it would throw Congress off course, delaying the transfer of power for the first time in American history. This implicated statutes such as 18 U.S.C. § 2383, which prohibits inciting an insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists.”

Applying the first two statutes — fraud and obstruction of an official proceeding — to the facts should not be difficult; operating under a lower evidentiary threshold, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter already found that Trump and lawyer John Eastman “probably” violated those laws.” Since then, the authors pointed out, evidence concerning seven slates of phony electors procured with Trump’s direct knowledge has come to light. These slates were allegedly assembled “with the purpose that those electors be submitted to Congress and the National Archives, and that the false slates of electors were in fact submitted to Congress.” Fortunately, a parade of witnesses was left behind — ranging from Pence and his chief of staff and lawyer to former Trump campaign and White House staff to the electors themselves. If former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has “flipped,” Smith will have an even more compelling case.

The incitement charge might be trickier, given the difficulty in proving Trump’s intent to cause violence, First Amendment issues for his Jan. 6, 2021, speech on the Ellipse, and the lack (so far) of definitive evidence connecting Trump to the militia groups. Given the gravity of the offense, the authors suggested proceeding but with a narrower approach based on Trump’s original call-out to his supporters, “his infamous 2:24 PM tweet targeting Pence and his 187 minutes of inaction in derogation of his affirmative duties while the riot raged.” Under a narrower approach, prosecutors could omit the speech on the Ellipse.

The authors concluded: “Based on all the available evidence, case law, and analogous historical precedent, Donald Trump’s combined support for the insurrectionists and inaction while the insurrection was ongoing seems to more than pass the bar to support charges under DOJ policy for engaging in the January 6, 2021, insurrection and providing support, aid, or comfort to the insurrectionists under the criminal insurrection statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2383.”

Because this statute has not been used since the Civil War (although several militia leaders were convicted under a related statute for seditious conspiracy), and because other, more easily provable charges are available, Smith might not want to charge this most serious crime. However, the authors made a persuasive case that if Attorney General Merrick Garland keeps his promise to follow the law and the facts, the charge would be unavoidable. Indeed, no charge better captures the essence of Trump’s alleged coup attempt. Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and one of the co-authors of the Just Security memo, told me: “Smith can charge this case in a way that is straightforward but fully captures the use of deception, pressure, and ultimately violence to thwart the peaceful transfer of power in a way that pushed democracy in America to the brink.”

As for potential defenses, the authors found no legitimate claim of presidential immunity to commit crimes and no evidence that Trump acted in good faith. (“They all knew that Trump had lost the election in each of the states that submitted phony electoral certificates — and they knew the express purpose of submitting those electoral certificates was to overturn a lawful election. Indeed, the central plotters … expressly acknowledged that the scheme was unlawful.”) Likewise, a defense based on advice of counsel is not available when the lawyers themselves are alleged to be co-conspirators.

Even without knowing the grand jury testimony (especially from Pence) that remains secret, Smith’s case, as the authors at Just Security laid out, would be devastating. In digging out each nugget of information, piling one on top of another and applying them to the elements of the alleged crimes, the memo makes an overwhelming case for indictment on three easily comprehensible charges. It therefore is practically inconceivable Smith would fail to bring an indictment.

Florida Republicans think so. That’s how batshit insane they are. And Ron DeSantis has empowered them:

The Brevard County Republican Executive voted by a supermajority this week to call upon Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to ban sale and distribution of Covid “and all related vaccines” in the state, Florida Today reported.

The nonbinding resolution also demanded that “Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody seize all remaining doses in the state for safety testing, ‘on behalf of the preservation of the human race,’ the resolution states,” the report said.

The resolution is part of a trend among GOP county officials in the state, and “closely mirrors” a measure advanced in February in Lee County. Last month a similar resolution was passed in Tampa Bay Hillsborough County, bringing the total to more than half a dozen counties, the outlet reported.

Here’s some verbiage from the resolution in Brevard County, according to Florida Today:

“Strong and credible evidence has recently been revealed that Covid-19 and Covid-19 injections are biological and technological weapons,” the Brevard draft resolution says, citing claims that have been disproven and disputed by respected medical groups.

“An enormous number of humans have died or been permanently disabled” by the vaccine, it says. “Government agencies, media and tech companies, and other corporations, have committed enormous fraud by claiming Covid-19 injections are safe and effective.”

Florida Today did add this disclaimer:

“The four-page resolution cites a mix of news and government sources, legitimate scientific papers — including a Swedish study, purported to show that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine alters human DNA, that its authors have said has been misinterpreted by vaccine critics — and fringe websites.”

It continues:

“The resolution includes references to data from a 2021 Pfizer study showing more than 1,200 deaths and 42,000 ‘adverse cases’ associated with the vaccine worldwide between December 1, 2020, and February 28, 2021, but fails to include other important context.”

The report notes that, “By March 1, 2021, more than 72 million doses of the vaccine had been administered and more than 48 million people vaccinated in the United States alone, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

“The CDC has acknowledged some complications have occurred with different versions of the shot, but says ‘severe reactions’ are rare and the benefits of vaccination ‘continue to outweigh any potential risks,’ according to its website,” the report states.

The New York Times COVID-19 tracker reported as of today that 67 percent of Brevard County residents – and 93 percent of its seniors – have received the primary vaccination against COVID-19.

DeSantis tells everyone within earshot that he wants to turn the United States into Florida. I don’t think we can afford to let him do that.

Michigan Republicans go lower

I’ve never forgotten the first time I encountered an essay by the late, great Molly Ivins. She described happenins inside the “Austin Funhouse,” a.k.a, the Texas state capitol where, pre-Viagra, overstimulated legislators often went to “fist city.”

In Michigan they hit lower, says Michigan Democrats’ state Senate Majority Whip Mallory McMorrow.

Growing turnout where there’s room to grow

It’s happened before. The final, low-prestige panels of the Netroots Nation conference — late Saturday afternoon when people are already leaving — turn out to be the most interesting.

“You cannot win without the youth vote” featured observations from Voters of Tomorrow panelists:

Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, many national news sources suggested that the youth would not turn out. In reality, the election saw the second-highest youth turnout in the last 30 years. Gen Z voted overwhelmingly for pro-democracy candidates. Without the youth vote, the “red wave” may have become a reality. 

The Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade was the animating issue in 2022, as well as in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race in 2023. While the youth vote has been increasing, 2022 was the first when over half of Gen Z could vote, the panel agreed. They predict even higher turnout in 2024.

Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, 26, told a ballroom crowd earlier that Democrats must work to make Gen Z’s future a hopeful one of abundance, not retrenchment, if they want their engagement.

Campaigns now have to shift their perspective on the youth vote, not simply focus on voter history and voting propensity for which there has been, until recently, little data for Gen Z.  

Best messenger to GenZ is another member of GenZ

To reach younger voters, campaigns must have young people in the campaigns empowered to do outreach to young people. It’s their future on the line. 

That outreach cannot happen just in the last three months ahead of an election. That effort should include digital channels, of course, but also constant presence on campuses. The challenge there is the constant turnover in student populations. Candidates and officials should regularly visit college campuses, and even high schools in states where 17 year-olds can register if they’ll be 18 by Election Day.

Invest in youth content creators/influencers. There is an inherent level of trust among youth with youth. Give them information to distribute, then step out of the way; let them create the content. It’s what they do best. If they have a million followers, TRUST THEM to push out your information in way that’s most effective. (Even if the campaign doesn’t “get it.”)

Creativity and fun are the keys to reaching Gen Z. Voters of Tomorrow recounted distributing condoms on a Texas campus. They carried a QR code and a message: “Fuck Fascism”.

Finally, they suggested, invest in young content creators. Trust them to deliver. There needs to be an intergenerational infrastructure to support them. Young people should lead but they shouldn’t have to do it alone. 

Gen Z does not care much about parties, the panel agreed. That’s evident in the data a colleague generated for independent voters (UNAfiliateds in NC) in NC for 2022. The green curve above represents UNA registration by age (18-100). The green bar graph below shows actual UNA voter turnout for 2022. The youth vote (below 45, for example) may be increasing, but it has plenty of room to grow. They tend to vote Democrat.

Our opponents know this. That’s why they work so hard to suppress it.

He’s such a God-fearing man…

The evangelicals seem to love his agenda more than the Republicans running for office:

One by one, Republican presidential hopefuls took the stage at this year’s Family Leadership Conference for one of their biggest opportunities so far in this cycle: The chance — without Donald Trump in attendance stealing the show — to win over religious conservatives in Iowa, a state increasingly seen as key to having a shot at winning the nomination.

And one by one, they were met with Tucker Carlson, who repeatedly turned to his favorite topics.

Mike Pence sparred with Carlson on January 6 and Ukraine, with the conversation getting noticeably tense as the former Fox News host repeatedly pressed him over claims that the Ukrainian government “has arrested priests.”

“I just told you I asked the religious leader in Kyiv if it was happening. You asked me if I raised the issue and I did,” Pence replied after one lengthy back and forth about Ukraine. During another portion of the conversation, when Carlson suggested Pence is more concerned for Ukraine than American cities, the former vice president pushed back, noting he’d “heard the routine from you before.”

Much of his conversation also focused on January 6, where Pence declined to describe the riot as an “insurrection,” a word Carlson derided on his former Fox News show, but rather opted to call it a “riot.”

Tim Scott was pressed about Carlson’s idea that Mexico is more dangerous than Russia, and dodged when asked if he supports sending cluster munitions to Ukraine (arguing instead that it wouldn’t be an issue if he were in the Oval Office.)

Asa Hutchinson perhaps fared worst of all: He spent much of his time in front of the roughly 2,000 attendees trying to defend his decision to veto a bill that would have barred surgeries and hormone therapy for transgender minors. At one point during that interview, Hutchinson tried to pivot, telling him that he hoped they’d “be able to talk about some issues.”

“Well, this is one of the biggest issues in the country,” Carlson replied to applause.

For some candidates, the opportunity to sit down with one of the most influential commentators in conservative politics proved to be a blessing: After the event, several attendees who spoke with Semafor singled out Vivek Ramaswamy as the candidate who impressed them most throughout the day by directly answering Carlson’s questions.

“I would negotiate the deal that ends the Ukraine war — freeze the current lines of control, yes, that means giving part of the Donbas region to Russia,” Ramaswamy said at one point. “I would make a hard commitment that NATO never admits Ukraine to NATO.”

Nikki Haley, who was largely saved from Carlson’s Ukraine probing, also impressed those watching the cattle call. She pledged to “keep fighting” against voting practices she felt were unfair, like certain uses of mail-in ballots, and cited “irregularities” in the 2020 election, but made clear she did not believe Trump won.

“Do I think that changed the results of the election? No,” she said. “I think President Biden ended up winning the election, but I think at the end of the day it showed we’ve got a lot of work to do in terms of election integrity.”

Ron DeSantis, who wrapped up the evening, was pressed on his changing answers on Ukraine — he said onstage he wanted a “sustainable peace” and opposed “open-ended conflict” — and asked about whether he’d sign Florida’s six-week abortion ban on a national level.

“I’m proud to have been a pro-life governor and I will be a pro-life president, so I mean, of course I want to sign pro-life legislation,” he said.

Carlson’s style grated on some campaigns and observers, who felt he fixated on his own obsessions rather than topics more tailored to an evangelical audience. A Pence advisor told Semafor that they’d prepped the former vice president on both January 6 and Ukraine, but ultimately felt it was somewhat unfortunate that those were the two major topics in front of an audience of religious and social conservatives.

But the former Fox host also repeatedly made news by dropping the typically deferential style from other cattle calls and prodding candidates directly on some of the most sensitive questions with the party’s populist base.

“Tucker was amazing. He was on fire. His questions were incredibly provocative, but important — they were the right ones,” Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said. “I would be willing to bet that if you had done a straw poll at the end of this and included Tucker’s name in it, he would be top one or two as a presidential candidate.”

Not all attendees loved Carlson’s choice of questions: One couple said they weren’t as focused on Ukraine topics as he seemed to be.

“I think it’s a waste of time to ask a non-person, who can’t do anything about it, what they would do about it,” Scott Steelman, an Iowa voter in attendance, said. “I mean, Tucker Carlson has an issue with it, and he’s making it an issue.”

Carlson is a terrible blight on this country, right up there with Trump. He’s totally motivated by money and will do and say anything to get it. (I don’t believe that’s true of all right wing “influencers” by the way. But for this guy — money is everything.)

Trump decided to stay in Florida for the Turning Points Action conference where these other candidates are being ripped for failing to appear. He’s playing a completely different game.

Back in 2004 I recall a lot of complaints when the Dean campaign had a lot of young out-of-state volunteers coming in to Iowa to canvass for their guy. They wore orange wool hats and t-shirts, making them stand out in a crowd, and the locals were not impressed. It was, I thought, a lesson learned by everyone.

But at least the Deaniacs were true believers. Guess who’s doing it again not even ten years later. And this time they’re just random people being paid to do it:

With his foot on a front porch of a stately home in Charleston, S.C., a canvasser for a $100 million field effort supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) vented on July 7 about a homeowner who he said had told him to get off his lawn.

Speaking on his phone while wearing a T-shirt with “DESANTIS” in big letters and a lanyard representing the Never Back Down super PAC, he used lewd remarks to describe what he would tell the homeowner to do to him.“And I’m a little stoned, so I don’t even care,” he added, holding materials and appearing to wait for another homeowner to come to the door.

The outburst — seen on a Ring doorbell video recording that was shared with The Washington Post — led to the canvasser’s dismissal this week, according to an official from Never Back Down. It highlighted a potentialrisk of the unprecedented effort by DeSantis donors to flood early primary states with thousands of paid door knockers armed with high-tech tools to win support one conversation at a time.

Unlike traditional presidential field organizing — which is run by an official campaign and driven largely by volunteers — the Never Back Down effort is staffed with an army of paid workers, many of whom have responded to advertisements that offer positions for $20 to $22 an hour. Trained in Iowa during an eight-day class, some come out of the system with polished pitches, as true believers. Others are just there for a job.

“After learning of the incident, we investigated and terminated the individual,” said Kate Roberts, the national field director of Never Back Down, in a statement. “Our field program is having thousands and thousands of incredible conversations around the country every day. This individual’s behavior is counter to the standards taught in our training and is not tolerated.”

[…]

“I can say one thing DeSantis has going for him over Trump is youcoming out here and talking to me. We’ve never had anyone come to our door like this before,” reads one of the voter quotes provided by the group.

But some Trump supporters who talked to The Post say they disapproved of the interactions. This is true even in cases, as in one door-knock in Marion, Iowa, also recorded on a Ring doorbell camera, where the canvasser presented a professional and enthusiastic case for DeSantis.

“I thought it was off-putting that he was from out of state,” said Geralyn Jones, the Marion resident who supports Trump and spoke with the canvasser. “If you are going to be endorsing or knocking, you need to be from here. I didn’t understand why DeSantis of all people could not get other people on the ground.”

Mike Hogan, a Trump supporter in Nashua, N.H., said he found a Never Back Down door knocker on his front porch in late May, shortly after DeSantis announced his campaign. The young man, dressed in the organization’s apparel, had ripped hems on his jeans and what he called “skater shoes,” and did not even knock on his door, he said.

“He was just standing there, which was weird. I said, ‘Can I help you?’” Hogan said,before adding that the canvasser said something and walked away. “He was not saying anything. He was just texting. He would not look up.”

Maybe it will pay off in the long run. But it isn’t showing up in the polls which have DeSantis sinking precipitously.

It seems as if he’s determined to spend hundreds of millions of dollars pursuing strategies that have long been abandoned or which almost never pay off. What a leader.

This piece by David French in the NYTimes makes the point that the right’s bully strategy as exemplified by Donald Trump and Elon Musk is predictably creating a backlash. I think this is a particularly apt observation:

Any form of domination and bullying will create a backlash, and that backlash will gain particular momentum when the bullies are both aggressive and absurd — and that’s exactly the world that both Trump and Musk built.

When I watch the world’s richest man take “Catturd” seriously, traffic in conspiracy theories and interact with a menagerie of right-wing trolls, these words come to mind: Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Who can forget when the legal team of the president of the United States, including Rudy Giuliani, promoted its alleged examples of voter fraud at a landscaping business in Philadelphia almost adjacent to a crematory and a porn shop? The only thing that keeps one from laughing at episodes like this one, and at Musk’s juvenile tweets, is the depressing realization that both Trump and Musk possess immense power and maintain loyal followings in the tens of millions.

It is profoundly depressing. It’s very hard to imagine how this species is going to fix massive collective problems like climate change with absurd people like Musk and Trump in the driver’s seat. The fact that we have to fight so hard to beat them is simply mind-boggling. But we have no choice.