Come on…
"what digby sez..."
Month: July 2023
Ron DeSantis’ implosion has been well documented here and elsewhere. It’s real and it’s spectacular. This is just frosting on the cake:
“Ron DeSantis fires staffer who retweeted video with Nazi imagery.”
The staffer, Nate Hochman, had retweeted the video over the weekend before he deleted the post, a screenshot shared with NBC News showed. Hochman, a communications staffer who has written for The New York Times, National Review and other outlets, is considered by some to be an up-and-coming thinker on the right.
“Nate Hochman is no longer with the campaign,” a campaign official said. “And we will not be commenting on him further.”
He’s also an up and coming Nazi but the NY Times and National Review don’t have a problem with that. Maybe they should have read the Tim Miller profile of this fine young man from last March:
Hochman, a conservative writer who has earned more ink by the age of 25 than anyone this side of Justin Bieber, has garnered a reputation as a young MAGA whisperer. The New Republic tagged him as one of “the radical young intellectuals who want to take over the American right.” He’s written for the Dispatch, National Review (where he was on staff), the Claremont Institute’s American Mind (where he interned), and more. Heck, even the Gray Lady turned to Hochman for a think piece about the secular culture war.
But like every MAGA intellectual (or “intellectual”) before him, Hochman, has found it necessary to cozy up to the movement’s gutter-dwelling racists in order to climb the ladder of influence.
As first reported by the Dispatch last year, Hochman participated in a Twitter Space with white nationalist virgin Nick Fuentes—and lavishly praised him. “We were just talking about your influence and we were saying, like, you’ve gotten a lot of kids ‘based’ and we respect that for sure,” Hochman said. “I literally said, I think Nick’s probably a better influence than Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservative.”
The film captures the race against the Nazis to develop the first atomic bomb, and…
He went on to discuss the merits and demerits of one of America’s most vile humans, saying the fact that he has said “super edgy things means that there’s a pretty strong ceiling to what you can actually accomplish in politics.”
“Edgy” is definitely one way to describe Holocaust denial!
When the Dispatch asked him about his Fuentes remarks, Hochman acknowledged that he said some “really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe”—but did not apologize.
In the intervening time The Bulwark was provided with the audio from the Twitter space—and it turns out that complimenting a white nationalist was not the only stupid thing Hochman uttered that day.
During his naked attempt to get Fuentes to think he was also based, Hochman says “when the man’s right, he’s right” in response to Fuentes’s claim that “women are goofy, okay, they should have no authority, they should have no authority over men.” Then, after Fuentes says that women “just really have no business in politics,” Hochman repeats his response: “When the man’s right, he’s right.”
Hochman later asked Fuentes how he plans to deal with the fact that “50 percent of American whites are, like, shitlibs now” if he wants to be successful in advancing white identity politics.
Women are goofy and shouldn’t be allowed in politics.
Half of white people are shitlibs.
Ron 2024.
As Miller wrote: “Nate Hochman’s hiring sends a signal of what the Florida governor wants for his campaign.” He knew what he had. He liked it.
An interesting segment with Andrew Weissman:
Others have made the point but it’s important to remember: the people who testified about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election were some of his staunchest defenders. They went along with all his unethical behavior but finally drew the line at a coup. They will make good witnesses because of it.
Frank Luntz
He needs to atone for this. He is hugely responsible.
Pay no attention to those pundits behind the curtain
Attempts on the right to vilify teachers and public schools have long infuriated me. As I’ve indicated time and again, it’s about the money. An investor class bent on privatizing public schools wants to turn those not-for-profit abominations into another rent-seeking extension of Wall Street. Teachers and school adminstrators stand between them and their money. Christian right parents are their useful idiots.
Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum cites data that refutes the notion that parents of school-age children are unhappy with their kids’ public education:
“Contrary to elite or policy wonk opinion, which often is critical of schools, there have been years and years worth of data saying that families in general like their local public schools,” said Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
“It would be natural to assume that in 2020, 2021, parental support for schools would have cratered,” said Smarick. “But it didn’t.”
You might not know that from that narrative advanced in the press. Naysayers tend not to have kids in school. “Most Americans” are not most parents:
Surveys actually show that it’s people without school-age children who are especially dissatisfied with public schools.
A recent EdChoice survey found that 57% of parents said their local school district was moving in the right direction, which was 10 percentage points higher than in January 2020, before the pandemic. (This is a bit different from the other parent surveys in that it was not asking about parents’ own experiences directly.) But among non-parents, only 29% said the local schools were on a positive trajectory.
This same gap between parents and non-parents has also showed up in polls by Education Next and the New York Times. The views of those without school-age children may be shaped by news coverage, which has advanced the narrative that schools are in disarray and parents are upset.
Education writer Diane Ravitch responded to Barnum’s Xitter thread:
Declining public support for public schools is the result of 40 years of propaganda, starting in 1983 with release of Reagan’s fraudulent “Nation at Risk.” 90% of US kids go to public schools . We have a great country. Thank a teacher.
Back then, gaslighting was still a movie reference.
Update: Fixed 2nd graph. Thx, RM.
Demographic change is more than race and ethnicity
A flurry of articles and polling herald the arrival of Gen Z voters: progressive, more engaged than their predecessor “Gens” and, critically, more prone to show up and vote. You’re either at the table or on the menu, the saying goes. Younger voters are pulling up chairs.
Youth turnout jumped dramatically in 2018 and again in 2020, spawning headlines. Critically, turnout among the 18-29 set in 2022 helped stave off the overhyped red wave that instead rippled. “Researchers say the 2022 election had the second highest voter turnout among voters under 30 in at least the past three decades,” NPR reported. The record was set in 2018 when 31% of those eligible cast ballots. Not exactly “whopping,” but we’ll take it. The trends are moving in the right direction.
Harvard Youth Poll director John Della Volpe points to “the big four” issues driving their engagement: climate change, gun violence, economic inequality and LGBTQ+ rights drive their engagement. The group charted the changes over time (above) for The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent:
Those numbers — which come from the Harvard Youth Poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released each spring — all suggest that today’s young voters are substantially more progressive on these issues than young voters were even five or 10 years ago. Sizable majorities now reject the idea that same-sex relationships are morally wrong (53 percent), support stricter gun laws (63 percent) and want government to provide basic necessities (62 percent).
Meanwhile, support for government doing more to curb climate change soared to 57 percent in 2020 before subsiding to 50 percent this year. That small dip may reflect preoccupation with economic doldrums unleashed by covid-19. While that 50 percent could be higher, the issue has seen a 21-point shift, and the polling question asks if respondents want action on climate “even at the expense of economic growth.”
Many of today’s 18-to-29-year-olds, who are mostly older Gen Z Americans plus the tail end of the Millennial generation, lived their formative years during the Great Recession and the election of Trump. What’s more, these new voters are politically coming of age during a remarkable confluence of events that appear to be conspiring in an improbable way to push them to the left.
Those “big four” are changing voting patterns as well as policy:
Demographer William Frey and his colleagues calculate that by the 2036 presidential race, Gen Z will represent 35 percent of eligible voters. “They’re growing up in a 21st century America that’s far more diverse, inclusive and globally connected than the 1950s and 1960s America of the GOP base,” Frey told me. “They’re going to shun the Republican Party as they get older.”
What that means for now is that the 2024 electorate is not the same as it was in 2016. Demographic changes involve more than the complexion of voters. An older cohort is exiting while a new one takes the stage. Every year there are 20 million fewer older voters, write Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and documentarian Mac Heller (also in The Post):
Which means that between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people. That’s about 20 percent of the total 2020 eligible electorate of 258 million Americans.
And unlike previous generations, Gen Z votes. Comparing the four federal elections since 2015 (when the first members of Gen Z turned 18) with the preceding nine (1998 to 2014), average turnout by young voters (defined here as voters under 30) in the Trump and post-Trump years has been 25 percent higher than that of older generations at the same age before Trump — 8 percent higher in presidential years and a whopping 46 percent higher in midterms.
That’s “whopping” in relative terms. Celebrate the trend. Younger voters still underperform their elders quite a bit as this North Carolina graphic you’ve seen before demonstrates:
Lake and Heller see Gen Z voters driven to the polls by the same policy concerns policy Della Volpe found.
Another trend that may be reversing, at least in California, is people registering to vote with neither major party. That is, as independents. That’s NPP (No Party Preference) in California, NPA (No Party Affiliation) in Florida, and UNA (Unaffiliated) in North Carolina, etc.
A recent graphic produced by my partner in data, Dick Sinclair, shows that the bulk of those registered UNA in North Carolina (relative to Ds and Rs) are roughly age 45 or younger. Your state will look similar. The separation between UNA registration and UNA voter turnout (green line and green bar chart) is also illustrative. Voting by older Ds and Rs more closely tracks their voter registration (2020 graphic). There is plenty of room for youth turnout to grow.
In California, at least, the trend toward more younger Americans registering “None of the Above” is reversing. Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California explains, “since 2018, the overall share of NPP voters has undergone the sharpest reversal in 60 years of registration data”:
This about-face has been especially visible among the youngest registrants. In just two election cycles, the independent registration rate among voters under 25 has fallen to levels unseen in almost two decades. Democratic registration has benefited most from this change, but Republican registration is also modestly higher, and the party has made its most sustained gains among young voters since at least 2002.
This reversal is also marked among Latinos and Asian Americans. And significant shares of both groups have registered as Republicans, even as Republican registration continued to slide among all other Californians.
California’s Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) implemented in 2018 contributes to this shift. “Three-quarters of voters either created or updated registration records since the advent of AVR in April 2018, compared to just 41% in the four years between 2012 and 2016. Virtually all this increase is due to AVR, which is now the touch point for 35% of the records in the file,” McGhee adds. Plus NPP seems to be out of fashion, but there might also be technical reasons for the change in the electronic registration interface.
Still, trends that begin in California have a way of spreading east.
There are probably a number of explanations for the fact that independent registration is no longer the juggernaut it once was. While it seems clear that decisions about party registration can be swayed by the way registration forms are set up, it’s also possible that many Californians are changing their minds about joining political parties. Independent registration won’t disappear, but party registration is likely to continue surging in the near future.
How that relates to voting patterns remains to be seen. As Sargent’s headline offers, the shifts should alarm Donald Trump and the GOP. They might respond by moderating their positions to appeal to Gen Z voters. But with their doubling-down reflex fully engorged, that’s not going to happen.
I’s sure you’ve heard by now that Florida’s new school curriculum says that enslaved people in the United States may have had a rough time in some respects but they got some benefits from slavery too! (This isn’t a new thing, I’ve heard right wingers suggest for years that Black people thank white people for bringing their ancestors to America.)
Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was clearly not sure if it may have gone too far and didn’t claim credit for it but defended it anyway. Philip Bump at the Washington Post took a look at why he would do that:
Asked about it, DeSantis offered that the curriculum — which he insisted wasn’t something he produced — would probably “show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Needless to say, this is not generally how historians view the institution of slavery.
But DeSantis’s argument isn’t offered solely as a governor of a large state. It is also offered as a guy who is running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and, in that context, his efforts to downplay the extent to which Black Americans suffered from slavery make much more sense.
Last week, YouGov published polling data showing a divide in how Americans view the effects of racism. Poll respondents were asked whether racism against various racial groups was a problem now and the extent to which it had been in the past.
Republican respondents were more likely to say that racism against Black people was lower in the past than were White respondents or respondents overall. (Perceptions of racism in the past are shown with triangles on the graph below.) They were also less likely to say that racism against Black Americans is currently a problem (shown with a dot) — and were about half as likely as respondents overall to say that racism is currently a big problem (indicated with a dashed line) for Black Americans.
At the bottom of that chart, you can see that more respondents believe racism is a problem for White people than was the case in the past. That’s much more true among Republicans (a group that is, of course, overwhelmingly White). In fact, Republicans are more likely to say that racism is a problem for Whites than they are to say the same of racism targeting Blacks. A third of Republicans think racism against White people is a big problem, compared with a quarter who say the same of racism against Black people.
If we directly compare those two racial groups, the difference between Republicans and other groups (of which Republicans are members) becomes clear. Less likely to say anti-Black racism was a problem in the past; more likely to say anti-White racism is a problem now.
[…]
Three in 10 Republicans say White Americans face a lot of discrimination, compared with a quarter of Republicans who say the same about Black Americans.
This is the electorate from which DeSantis is eager to wring votes. To present slavery as less bad than people might think is simultaneously to diminish the extent to which Black people suffered at the hands of enslavement and to diminish the culpability of those who enslaved them. It is easier for a White person to consider, say, being yelled at on social media as discrimination if institutional efforts to treat Black people differently are waved away.
YouGov had a question on that, too. Only about a third of Republicans think that there is racism embedded in social, economic and legal structures in the United States. A majority of Americans overall do.
Again, the problem is the Republican Party. They finally released the racist id in all its glory and it’s completely taken it over.
Nobody works for DeSantis for long
Ron DeSantis is apparently in the process of “re-tooling” his campaign in light of the miserable failure it’s been so far. He’s been burning through money using private planes and using the Four Seasons as his stomping grounds. Now he’s firing staff. None of this comes as any surprise to people who’ve been watching his career from the beginning:
[T]he latest staff shakeup isn’t an anomaly within the arc of DeSantis’ career. It’s part of a larger pattern of a politician who has struggled to maintain a core group of trusted advisers or loyal employees.
During his five years in Congress, his office had one of the highest turnover rates in the House. No employed member from his victorious 2018 gubernatorial campaign team is working in a senior role on his 2024 presidential race. And things didn’t change when he became governor. In his first term, he fired staffers with enough regularity that some formed an emotional support group, according to a 2021 Politico report. Now, DeSantis is shedding staff only two months into his bid to beat out former President Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.
DeSantis’ long history of staffing woes has been a red flag to some of the party’s veteran hands. One prominent GOP operative in touch with DeSantis, who requested anonymity to speak freely, advised him last winter that he would struggle to compete at the national level without a cohesive campaign nucleus. “I told him early on: In my lifetime, I’ve never watched someone win a major race—not a congressional race, but a major contested race—without being able to keep a team and trust the team,” the source recounts to TIME.
It’s a reason why that same Republican operative warned high-net-worth donors who were looking for an alternative to Trump against investing too heavily in DeSantis until they could see how he performed as a presidential candidate. “People who were big players were thinking about giving 50 or 100 million dollars,” the source says. “I told them, ‘You should stitch that in and see if he can make it more than six months with actual professionals in charge.’”
Since DeSantis formally entered the race in May through a glitch-riddled announcement on Twitter, he hasn’t inspired more confidence. A national Reuters/Ipsos poll from last week has Trump leading him by a commanding 28-point margin. It comes as Trump’s multiple criminal indictments have only appeared to endear him more to Republican primary voters.
those who’ve worked with the Florida governor before expect staff turnover to continue to plague his presidential bid. They say he has never been one to forge lasting emotional bonds with people who work for him. “The same struggle that he has with voters, he has with staff,” another Republican operative familiar with the DeSantis campaign operation tells TIME. “When things start to sour, it’s easy for staff to either leave on their own volition, or it’s easy for the boss to ultimately cut staff loose. There are no personal connections there.”
Well, he has Casey. Isn’t that all he needs?
One person who has been at DeSantis’ side through every campaign is his wife Casey, who has a heavy influence over his political strategy. That dynamic has led some to doubt that any staffing changes can truly reorient the campaign when it will always be the two of them calling the shots. “His top advisor comes with the house,” the source close to DeSantis says. “It’s his wife. There’s no firing his spouse. The idea that DeSantis can do a reset is a complete fallacy.”
Maybe everyone needs to face the fact that he is a terrible politician who fell into the Governorship by a hair and then won re-election because he was running against a terrible retread candidate in a state that’s been wired for Republicans for decades now. He’s not good at it. And his “anti-woke” campaign should be a lesson to the GOP about the salience of those issues beyond Trump but it won’t be. They love it too much.
Senate Republicans have not been eager to sign onto Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s, R-Ala. one-man blockade of military promotions to protest a Pentagon abortion policy. A new online poll of likely voters from Data For Progress suggests their political instincts might be right: Given two statements, one dismissive of Tuberville’s actions and another supportive, 55% went against the senator’s plan while only 33% backed it.
You will note that 57% of Republicans agree with interfering with the military in order to make a point about abortion. Tuberville is right in the mainstream of the party. It’s the party that is out of the mainstream of America,
Less than a day after owner Elon Musk changed the company’s logo from a decade-old internationally recognized symbol with sky-high brand awareness value to the letter ‘X,’ workers had moved in to start dismantling the building’s giant Twitter sign.
The only problem was that Musk hadn’t secured the correct permits for the crane now blocking the street, according to a witness at the scene. Officers with the San Francisco Police Department quickly arrived and started “shutting it down,” he tweeted. The half-finished removal operation left only the sign reading just “er.”
I think that says it all.
After Donald Trump and Elon Musk, I wonder if we might be coming to the end of the “Genius Businessman will save us” era.
Nah… Americans just love the idea that being rich means you must be smart. It’s hard to imagine them giving that up even in he face of such humiliation.