Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Florida Republicans knew that Democrats in the state who applied to vote by mail during the pandemic were new to the practice so they decided to force them to re-apply. Normally, once you apply they automatically send you a ballot for four years. Now it’s just two:

Florida Democrats say they’re spending and organizing to chase down people who vote by mail after election officials across the state canceled all standing mail ballot requests this year.

The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two. It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to cancel millions of requests and start their lists of vote-by-mail voters from scratch.

In practice, that means that voters who requested mail-in ballots in 2021 or 2022 will have to make such requests again to vote in local races and the 2024 primary and general elections. In previous years, voters would not have had to request a ballot again for four years.

Democrats in the state say the change disproportionately affects their voters, who have embraced mail-in voting more than Republicans since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting was rife with fraud. The new law is forcing campaigns to adapt; Democrats say they’re organizing aggressively to educate voters about renewing their mail ballot requests, sapping resources from voter registration and other outreach efforts. 

“It’s doing exactly what they intended it to do, which is suppress voters and take resources,” said Nikki Fried, chair of the state Democratic Party. “Instead of focusing our money, resources and time on other endeavors and talking to voters, we’re having to spend resources to get people back on the rolls.”

Campaigns and volunteers who might have connected with voters once or twice to remind them to return their mail-in ballots may now need to connect with them three and four times to turn out a vote, Fried said.

“I’ll be very honest with you: In the Black community, it’s very top of mind,” said Shevrin Jones, a state senator who represents part of Miami-Dade County. He runs a group called Operation BlackOut, which focuses on getting Black voters to sign up for mail ballot requests. They are just one of the many groups mobilizing to get voters of color on the mail-in voting list, he said.

Election officials, too, say they’re sending out mailers and text messages and reminding voters of the change whenever they get the chance. But in the six months since the ballot requests were canceled, less than a third of voters in three large counties have taken steps to request mail ballots again.

They just want to make the Democrats have to put in tons and tons of work to get their vote out. As usual.

And they have the nerve to call the Democrats the cheaters…

I’m just going to leave this here. It says so much more than he knows:

To protest the Barbie movie, Ben Shapiro lights Barbie & Ken dolls on fire.” pic.twitter.com/R6Wc5BkwM6

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2023

That man has the most popular political podcast in the country.

Ron Brownstein on the defiant red border states:

A pregnant teenager writhing in pain as she suffered a miscarriage while trapped in the barbed wire that Texas has strung along miles of the state’s southern border.

A 4-year-old girl collapsing from heat exhaustion after Texas National Guard members pushed her away from the wire as she tried to cross it with her family.

Texas state troopers receiving orders from their superiors to deny water to migrants in triple-digit heat. Officers on another occasion ordering troopers to drive back into the Rio Grande a group of migrants, including children and babies, that they found huddling alongside a fence by the river.

These are all incidents that a medic in the Texas Department of Public Safety says he witnessed during recent patrols, according to an explosive email published this week by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News. “I believe we have stepped over a line into the in humane [sic],” the medic, Nicholas Wingate, wrote in the email.

These revelations capture not only the extreme tactics that Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and state law-enforcement officials are employing against undocumented migrants seeking to cross the U.S. border with Mexico. They also show how aggressively Texas and other Republican-controlled states are maneuvering to seize control from President Joe Biden’s administration over immigration policy. To many immigration experts, these moves by Texas, like the harsh measures against undocumented migrants signed into law this spring by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, push to the edge the legal limits on states’ ability to infringe on federal authority over immigration.

“U.S. immigration law governs the border; Texas law doesn’t govern the border,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. Federal law, he noted, establishes a process for handling undocumented migrants seeking asylum in the United States. “It may not be a process that I like, or you like, or people in Texas like, but it’s a process,” Leopold added. “And that process does not include taking a 4-year-old child and throwing that child into the water … or depriving them of water when the temperatures are above 100 degrees. Those are not our values. Those are not our laws.”

Abbott has defended the state’s enforcement effort by arguing that Biden’s immigration policies have exposed his state’s residents to dangerous migrants and drug smuggling, and has endangered migrants themselves by encouraging them to make the arduous trek to the southern border. Responding to Wingate’s email, Abbott’s top law-enforcement officials issued a joint statement in which they maintained that “these tools and strategies—including concertina wire that snags clothing” were necessary to discourage migrants from making “potentially life-threatening and illegal crossings.”

The red-state offensive against undocumented immigration sits at the crossroads of two powerful trends in the Donald Trump–era Republican Party. One is the growing movement in the red states to roll back a wide range of civil rights and liberties, including voting rights, access to abortion, and LGBTQ protections.

The other is an arms race among Republican leaders to adopt ever more militant policies against undocumented immigrants. That dynamic is carrying the party beyond even the hard-line approaches that Trump employed in the White House.

This is where Trump has had a serious effect on the GOP. They’ve always been cruel and racist. But he’s started an arms race that has them trying to one-up each other on how vicious they can be toward some “other” where it’s Muslims as it was in 2016 or back to the perennial Latinos. Needless to say, their hostility to Black people is always obvious.

The lengths they are prepared to go to now are just one step shy of shooting on sight. And invasion of Mexico is on the table, That’s how far they’ve gone.

Both DeSantis and Trump, for instance, have promised that if elected, they will move to end birthright citizenship, the guarantee under the Fourteenth Amendment that anyone born in the United States is automatically an American citizen. In his town-hall appearance on CNN, Trump suggested that he would reinstate his widely condemned policy of separating the children of migrants from their parents at the border to discourage illegal crossings. And he’s promised to “use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” That’s an idea Trump often discussed but never risked trying to implement as president.

DeSantis, meanwhile, has indicated that he would authorize federal border-enforcement personnel to use force against suspected drug smugglers. He’s also talked about deploying the Navy and the Coast Guard if Mexico does not act more aggressively to interdict the arrival of chemicals used to manufacture drugs.

Simultaneously, DeSantis and Abbott have been at the forefront of the red-state efforts to seize more control over immigration policy. The legislation DeSantis signed contains sweeping measures to crack down on undocumented migrants, including criminal penalties for anyone providing transportation for such a migrant in Florida.

Abbott, for his part, is building an enforcement apparatus outside the control of the federal agencies legally responsible for managing the border. His efforts represent one of the most tangible—and consequential—manifestations of what I’ve called the red-state drive to build “a nation within a nation” that operates by its own rules and values.

Abbott has not gone as far as conservative activists who claim that the Constitution gives states the right to set their own immigration policies, on the grounds that they are facing an “invasion” of undocumented migrants. During a campaign stop in Texas, DeSantis embraced that fringe legal theory and argued that it provides states, not just the federal government, deportation authority.

This guy will say anything. He is very dangerous and I just hope he is forced to find another career if this one flames out as it looks like it’s doing.

Most immigration-law experts are dubious that even the current conservative Supreme Court majority would agree, and Abbott has not claimed this power. Operation Lone Star, the expansive enforcement effort he launched in 2021, is not attempting to deport undocumented migrants it apprehends in the state. Instead, Texas has returned them to the border, arrested them, or bused them to Democratic-controlled jurisdictions. Abbott’s choice not to claim deportation authority under the invasion theory has generated a steady stream of criticism from some immigration hard-liners.

Yet the revelations in the emails from Wingate, the Texas state trooper, show how far the state has already moved toward usurping federal authority. It has lined its southern border with miles of concertina wire and sunk barrels wrapped in that wire into the river. Recently, the state placed floating buoys in the river to block areas that might be easier and safer to cross. State troopers and National Guard members are also using force to push migrants away from the barbed-wire barricades. Republican governors from nearly a dozen other states have sent law-enforcement personnel, equipment, or both to Texas to support Abbott’s efforts.

“In the federal government’s absence, we, as Governors, must band together to combat President Biden’s ongoing border crisis and ensure the safety and security that all Americans deserve,” Abbott wrote in a letter asking other states to send resources.

Wingate, in his email, noted one consequence of these efforts: “With the [razor] wire running for several miles along the river in areas where it is easier for people to cross. It forces people to cross in other areas that are deeper and not as safe for people carrying kids and bags.”

He recounted the story of a woman who was rescued in the river with one of her children, while another one of them drowned. Wingate also reported that a man suffered “a significant laceration” on his leg while extricating his child from one of the wire-wrapped barrels sunken in the river.

“We have a governor who is literally using the full force of his government to inflict physical harm and even death on people,” Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas told me. “The fact that he is using the government doesn’t make it any less horrific and it certainly doesn’t make it lawful.”

Beyond the human costs, the red-state border-enforcement effort raises pointed questions about legal authority. Escobar and six other Democratic U.S. representatives from Texas last week wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asking them to investigate whether Abbott’s buoys violate U.S. and international law, including the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War. Escobar told me she believes that not only should the Justice Department take legal steps to stop Abbott’s enforcement program; the Biden administration should be “sending in federal personnel to remove all of” the physical barriers Texas has constructed.

The DOJ has filed suit and we can only hope that the Supremes don’t find some “originalist” state sovereignty rationale for allowing these people to run their own border policies. I wouldn’t put it past them.

And Abbott and the others are refusing to back down. They are seceding in slow motion:

Abbott’s willingness to pursue such a militant enforcement campaign, and the decision by so many Republican governors to assist him, provides another measure of the same impulse evident in the proliferating red-state laws restricting or banning abortion, rolling back voting rights, and prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors. All capture a determination to slip the bonds of national authority and impose a set of rules and policies that reflect the priorities and grievances of the primarily older, white, nonurban and Christian coalition that has placed these states’ leaders in power.

That impulse, as Leopold says, is producing a dangerous “balkanization” of the country reminiscent of the years before the Civil War. It has also motivated the leadership of the nation’s second-largest state to conclude that the threat of undocumented immigration is sufficient to justify, both legally and morally, entangling children and pregnant women in coils of razor-sharp wire.

On Friday, after this article was published, the Justice Department disclosed that it had sent a letter to Abbott announcing its intention to sue Texas if he does not commit to removing the floating buoys in the Rio Grande by Monday afternoon eastern time. But the department did not demand in the letter that Texas dismantle any of the barbed wire it has placed on the shore or in the river, and did not disclose any further investigative action into the behavior of  Texas law-enforcement officials interacting with migrants. On Twitter, Abbott signaled that he will not comply with the demand to remove the buoys. “We will see you in court, Mr. President.”

He sounds as if he’s looking forward to it for some reason. Maybe he’s been sharing some cigars with Harlan Crow.

This is something we have to keep our eyes on. These radical right wingers are without any real ideology anymore. It’s not really nationalism as we understand it. It’s just about dominance in whatever sphere they happen to operate.

They’ll never stop trying

Of course:

Three of Donald Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are pushing for cuts to Social Security benefits that would only affect younger Americans, as the party’s leaders grapple with the explosive politics of the retirement program.

In comments on Sunday as well as in interviews earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Social Security will need to be revamped — but not for people who are near or in retirement.

Former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley have taken similar positions since launching their presidential campaigns. From the earliest days of his 2016 run, Trump has vowed not to touch either Social Security or Medicare — a break from GOP orthodoxy that has shifted the party’s views — and has more recently hammered DeSantis for wanting to cut the program.

It’s in the DNA of the Republican Party to end the safety net. It just is. Trump may have temporarily taken it off the table but it will be right back on the minute he leaves the scene. I have never believed for a minute that this was a permanent change of ideology.

But there’s this to throw in their faces when they do it:

Of course, it’s important to remember that they are completely shameless and will have no problem screaming “liar!” at anyone who suggests they agreed not to cut social security and medicare. But it will still be useful to have this to point out to voters.

And, by the way, this fatuous “we’re only cutting it for the young” has never worked in the past and it won’t work in the future. The old people have kids and grand kids to protect and the young aren’t that stupid.

There is a very easy way to shore up the program and that’s to lift the cap on contributions from rich people. At some point that will have to happen. But until then this silly kabuki dance will continue. And it just figures that DeSantis is leading the way. There is not one issue he’s on the right side of.

Meadows was in the thick of everything in Trump’s last year in office from the COVID mess to the Big Lie and he’s been MIA in the media since it was over. He wrote his book, which was full of some colorful details that made Trump angry and he provided a lot of emails to the January 6th Committee before clamming up. But nobody knows to what extent he’s been cooperating with the Special Counsel, not even Trump. According to reports Trumpworld is very nervous about that.

According to the Washington Post, the Special Counsel is interested in him but it doesn’t sound to me as if he’s cooperating:

Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there.

In a text message that has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors, Meadows wrote to a White House lawyer that his son, Atlanta-area attorney Blake Meadows, had been probing possible fraud and had found only a handful of possible votes cast in dead voters’ names, far short of what Trump was alleging. The lawyer teasingly responded that perhaps Meadows’s son could locate the thousands of votes Trump would need to win the election. The text was described by multiple people familiar with the exchange.

The jocular text message, which has not been previously reported, is one of many exchanges from the time in which Trump aides and other Republican officials expressed deep skepticism or even openly mocked the election claims being made publicly by Trump, according to people familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the criminal investigation.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading a Justice Department investigation of Trump’s activities in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, has focused on exploring whether Trump and his closest advisers understood that claims of fraud in the election were baseless, even as they pressed state officials and others to overturn Biden’s victory and convinced Trump’s millions of supporters that the election had been stolen, people familiar with the probe have said.

The text message is a small part of a broader portrait of Meadows that Smith appears to be assembling as he weighs the actions of not just Trump but a number of his closest advisers, including Meadows.

People close to Meadows have said that he was privately sympathetic to those Trump advisers who were skeptical of the fraud claims. Yet Meadows also played both sides, often appearing to indulge Trump’s desire to use those false allegations to try to remain in office, people who witnessed his behavior have said.

The January 6th Committee and half a dozen books about the administration have made that clear. He played all sides telling everyone what they wanted to hear.In fact, he may have been the ineffectual Chief of Staff in history which is unsurprising since he had done nothing in his life that could have prepared him for such a job. But that’s what Trump wanted. He hated those chiefs of staff who told him that he couldn’t do whatever he wanted and tried to keep the cranks away from him. He wanted a marshmallow yes man and that’s what he got in Meadows.

This is one of the great mysteries in the January 6th investigations and it’s going to be very interesting . Will Meadows be indicted? Is he a cooperating witness? Or is he someone who ends up providing a bunch of documentary proof of his boss’s criminality?

Draw your own conclusions

Anne Applebaum responds (h/t Laffy) to the Russian missile attack overnight on the Ukrainian port city of Odessa: “I believed Russia would not destroy historic Odesa, because of the city’s significance to the Russian empire. But I was wrong – now it seems they know they will never control it again, so they are happy to see it burn.”

The main Orthodox cathedral in #Odesa, with roots dating back to 1794, faced destruction by both Stalin in 1936 and Putin in 2023. Adding to the tragedy, several other historical parts of central Odesa, a #UNESCO world heritage site, were also hit by Russian missile strikes. pic.twitter.com/7UqkrxWaai

— Misha Komadovsky (@komadovsky) July 23, 2023

“Russian missiles badly damaged a historic Orthodox cathedral in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa, sparking outrage and prompting President Zelensky to vow retaliation,” CNN reports:

Odesa is a key cultural center, and has long links with Russia. It was founded under Catherine the Great and was once Russia’s second most important port.

One of the buildings damaged in Russia's night missile attack on Odesa is the Count Pototskyi Palace (Palace of Scientists). Many halls are damaged, and exhibits lost.
📷 USI pic.twitter.com/7RmjRZTvnb

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) July 23, 2023

Euromaidan Press:

During the night of 23 July, Russia launched five types of missiles at the south-Ukrainian port city of Odesa, destroying port infrastructure, residential buildings, and the largest Orthodox Church in the city, Operative Command South said.

As well, at least six residential buildings, including apartment buildings, damaged dozens of cars were damaged, as well as the facades and roofs of many buildings in the city, including two monuments of architecture, it added.

The attack killed one person and injured 19, Odesa authorities said. 

Central Odesa now after Russia's night missile strike. Residents help clear debris from the Transfiguration Cathedral, the city's oldest and largest Orthodox church
📽️ @suspilne_news pic.twitter.com/YNDlU6n2x8

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) July 23, 2023

The Transfiguration Cathedral's main Orthodox church in Odesa after a rocket attack at night on 23 July.

📹Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty pic.twitter.com/926TBdhtX4

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) July 23, 2023

Your mind probably went to the same place regading control of the U.S. government.

Ukrainians clear severely damaged Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa after a Russian missile strike. Founded in 1794; destroyed on Stalin’s order in 1936; rebuilt under independent Ukraine in 1999; hit by a Russian missile on Putin’s order in 2023. #ClearUNSCandUNESCOofRussia pic.twitter.com/QDrDI4O1oA

— Sergiy Kyslytsya 🇺🇦 (@SergiyKyslytsya) July 23, 2023

Why small is still beautiful

Tripp Narup ran for and lost a state senate seat in red, red Iowa. As a Democrat. Because the last time he’d voted in Iowa’s 9th district there was no one for him to vote for. Narup tells Salon’s Kirk Swearingen that only 17% of voters are registered Democrats in that southwest Iowa district. He tells Salon:

After losing spectacularly for the Senate, I have now started a PAC to raise money to support (as yet undetermined) candidates to run for four [state] House seats and one open Senate seat. The plan is to raise $2,000 per candidate as an enticement to get someone to step up and run. Any additional money will be used to run ads pointing out the many sins of our current state senators representatives. Now this may strike you as small potatoes (these are farming districts, after all), but my whole campaign cost less than $6,000 and I paid for a third of it. “Big campaign money” around here is $10,000 or so. (In farm terms, that’s about 7 cows.) Compared to big-city politics, this is quaint and kind of endearing.

Swearingen quotes filmmaker Michael Moore on living blue in a red district:

One of the lessons I learned over the years is that there are always more of us than you realize. A lot of people just give up or they go into hiding or they say “I don’t care about politics” or “I just live in a Republican area and there’s nothing I can do.” So, I know you’re thinking, “Oh, Mike, Mike, you don’t understand, I live here. I’m in Oklahoma, I’m in Arkansas.” Yeah, OK. Well, you know, it’s not exactly how we think this is in this country, because we are the majority. The majority of Americans agree with us on the issues, from the climate catastrophe to minimum wage to paid leave to health care. Go down the whole damned list. The majority of Americans are with us.

That can be hard to see in a region awash in Trump signs. Being a loudmouth doesn’t make you a majority, though. For Democrats in rural America, hiding your light under a barrel simply reinforces the loudmouth’s belief that his unchallenged views are the majority’s.

Narup ran against someone from his church, from the same choir. With no rancor, it seems. Imagine. Reasonable people can still disagree. But when the disagreeable go unchallenged, it reinforces their sense of rightness and entitlement.

Swearingen adds:

Reasonable people who believe in the basic tenets of democracy and who, as Michael Moore observes, share the opinions of a large majority of their fellow Americans, should step up and run for office. Even in the most hopeless circumstances, even in places where Democrats won’t win this election or the next one or the one after that. No more ceding ground and conceding defeat in advance. It’s time to win back, little by little, the places that have been lost.

Democrats have ceded rural America to the right for far too long. Reversing that will take some doing. And some courage. And a few thousand dollars.

Politico reports that the Biden campaign in 2024 has plans to contest North Carolina, “home to the second largest rural population in the U.S. behind Texas.” If so, they’ll pour resources into the state, primarily into the metro areas where the biggest, easier-to-turn-out blocks of blue votes may be found. But without shaving GOP margins in those rural areas, Biden may still struggle to win the state. Even if Democrats broaden their margins in suburban areas:

Key to the Biden campaign’s strategy in North Carolina, Democrats also point to party leaders in the state like Cooper and Anderson Clayton, the state’s 25-year-old Democratic Party chair, surrogates they say can gin up enthusiasm among young voters in the state.

Clayton, who took over the state party earlier this year, is already traveling across the state to energize young people, and plans to tap into the hundreds of thousands of voters enrolled in North Carolina colleges and universities this fall. She’s also leaning into year-round organizing, working to reengage with rural voters and to make sure no Republicans run uncontested in the state.

Full disclosure: Clayton is a friend.

Clayton is pushing Democrats to contest more state House and Senate seats as well as municipal offices up for grabs this fall. Races like the one Narup ran and lost in Iowa. The strategy is to win, of course. But barring that, to show the flag, to give rural Democrats a sense that the Trump signs are more loudmouth bluster than voting strength.

The top of the ticket is not where the action is. Those “small potatoes” races build a foundation for winning the larger ones down the road.

As Tim Miller spotlighted, reflexive contrarianism drives Republicans today, not upholding American ideals. “In the modern GOP, owning the libs is what sells,” writes Kelly Garrity about culture war merchandise:

“What they’re selling is very telling because it speaks to a certain audience,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “You’re not convincing anybody with a bobblehead … but what you do want is you want your most perfect support groups to feel engaged with the campaign, to feel a part of it, and to kind of show their support.”

The point of encouraging Democrats to contest local races, even unwinnable ones, is to give Democrats something to rally around more substantive than red hats. Leaders like Clayton mean to give Republicans a wake-up call: No more wins by forfeit. Plus to build a launching pad for Democrats to take back the majority in the state legislature.

We’ve been waiting so long.

Somehow, someday
We need just one victory and we’re on our way
We’re prayin’ for it all day and fightin’ for it all night
Give us just one victory, it will be all right

Especially when it comes to migrant workers

I’m sure you’ve seen the horrific pictures of that cruel, spiked buoy barrier Texas Gov. Greg Abbot has unfurled in the middle of the Rio Grande. Luckily, the feds have decided to take action:

One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-stategovernors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually justto send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused.

But now the Justice Department has sent a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott notifying him that the department will sue the state over the barrier if Texas does not commit to removing it by Monday afternoon.

“The State of Texas’s actions violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties,” reads the letter I obtained.

Many of Texas’ moves on immigration policyseem deliberately provocative. Abbott openly declared that the barrier in the Rio Grande was designed for “securing the border” by preventing migrants from “even getting to the border,” a declaration that Texas sees itself taking over border policy.

“The Biden administration is asserting its authority over the border, and rightly so,” immigration attorney David Leopold told me. “Texas has no business taking over federal immigration law, which is what they’re doing.”

In its letter, the Justice Department flatly states that the barrier obscures navigation of the Rio Grande in violation of federal law and that the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t authorize the move.

“Texas does not have authorization from the Corps to install the floating barrier and did not seek such authorization before doing so,” the letter states.

While the Justice Department’s letter does not accuse Texas of usurping its authority on immigration in particular, the move signals that the department is closely watching to see whether Texas’s future moves do violate federal laws, on immigration and across the board.

“If DOJ is forced to sue Texas, the law clearly favors the federal government which has authority over floating barriers in navigable waters,” Leopold told me. “My prediction is that a federal judge will order Texas to remove the barriers.” He added that the clear message going forward is that the administration “will not stand idly by.”

Sargent makes the point that all these stunts are performances for the Fox News rubes. There isn’t a big crisis at the border but they have to do everything they can to create pictures and stories that give that impression.

It’s sick.

The public isn’t seeing this … yet. But there are 16 months to the election. It may start to sink in with some of them:

 Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product.

Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote.

As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%.

“The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote.

The analysts also doubled their original estimate for GDP growth in the fourth quarter, to 1.3% from 0.6%. Looking into next year, they raised their forecast for real GDP in 2024 by a tenth of a percent, to 1.4%.

“The narrative behind the numbers tells the story of industrial strength in the U.S,” Zentner wrote.

Morgan Stanley’s revision came at a pivotal time for the Biden White House. The president has spent the summer crisscrossing the country, touting his economic achievements. “Together we are transforming the country, not just through jobs, not just through manufacturing, but also by rebuilding our infrastructure,” Biden said Thursday during a visit to a Philadelphia shipyard.

The White House has dubbed this brick-and-mortar economic growth formula “Bidenomics,” a phrase originally used by Republicans to jab the president, who co-opted the term as a badge of honor.

It’s just like Obamacare. They keep thinking that these are insults when they are actually compliments.

Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families. https://t.co/w0CwdlCfO9

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 17, 2023

Gosh, I wonder why?

Who could have guessed that would happen?

Republican voters with a college degree and a built-in skepticism of Donald Trump were supposed to form the backbone of Ron DeSantis’ strategy to win the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Instead, they’re leaving his campaign in droves.

A trio of Republican primary polls, including previously unpublished data obtained by McClatchyDC, show that Florida’s governor has suffered steep declines in support among GOP voters with at least a bachelor’s degree, an erosion that threatens to undermine his candidacy. Their defections — which started in the spring and have continued this summer — are disproportionately responsible for DeSantis’ overall decline in the race, where polls show he now sits a distant second place to Trump.

In all three surveys, the governor now has barely half the support with college-educated white voters that he did when the year began, larger drop-offs than he suffered with other demographic groups.

The numbers reflect a pressing problem for the Florida Republican as he seeks to reset his campaign amid fundraising concerns and flagging poll numbers, challenging him to recover the lost support among voters who once made him Trump’s top rival for the nomination. The national surveys paint a troubling picture for his campaign, even as his allies insist that recent state-level polling already shows his candidacy regaining momentum.

A poll from decision intelligence company Morning Consult, for instance, found that DeSantis’ support had dropped 18 points among white college-educated Republicans, from 41% when the year began to 23% in mid-July, according to internal data shared with McClatchyDC.

A poll from market research firm Ipsos, meanwhile, found the governor’s support had been halved since mid-March, when it reported he had 39% among college-educated Republicans, according to data shared with McClatchy. The same survey, released this week, found he had dropped to 20% among those voters, a 19-point decline. (Ipsos’ survey did not distinguish between college-educated white Republicans and college-educated Republicans, although the difference between the makeup of the two groups is small.)

A publicly available survey from Quinnipiac University found the largest drop in support for DeSantis, with the governor going from 51% support in a February poll of college-educated white Republicans to 29% with them now — a 22-point decline. These voters abandoned DeSantis’ campaign at roughly twice the rate as Republicans without a college degree, a review of polling data found.

None of the three surveys asked why DeSantis has lost the support of college-educated Republicans. But in interviews with non-partisan pollsters and Republican political operatives, some of them speculated that the governor’s decision this year to double down on a sharp-edged conservative agenda could have alienated voters who once viewed him as a more pragmatic, mainstream politician.

DeSantis earlier this year signed a law in Florida banning abortions six weeks after pregnancy, and during the campaign, he has sought to outflank Trump on LGBTQ issues while positioning himself as an “anti-woke” warrior eager to combat the political left in all sectors of society.

“College-educated Republicans were looking for an alternative to Donald Trump, and they initially thought Governor DeSantis, after his 19-point win in Florida, made for a good one,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster. “But the way he has run his campaign, constantly tacking to the right, has turned off many of those people who were initially attracted to him.”

Ayres emphasized that he thought DeSantis still had time to recover from his underwhelming start, arguing people who once supported him can be brought back into the fold with a smart strategy that included more moderate positioning. And some Republican operatives disagree that DeSantis’ more conservative tack is at the root of his drop in support, arguing that Trump’s own popularity, combined with an indictment in March that conservatives saw as wildly unjust, is more responsible for the shift than anything the Florida governor did.

DeSantis’ allies say they already see signs that his popularity has rebounded, dismissing the importance of national surveys instead of state-based polling in places with an early nominating contest. A survey released in New Hampshire this week, from University of New Hampshire Survey Center, found DeSantis receiving 23% support, up from 22% in April, while Trump dropped from 42% to 37%. The survey showed DeSantis earning the support of 12% of Republicans with only a bachelor’s degree, and 20% support of GOP voters with a graduate degree.

“You’re going to start to see this narrative continue to develop as more state level polling increases, particularly in those states where you see the impact of our ground game,” said an official with Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting DeSantis. But the official conceded that Trump had gained ground earlier this year after he was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury over allegations he illegally paid hush money to an adult film actress, a prosecution conservatives think is politically motivated. And indeed, while DeSantis’ support with college-educated sank, Trump’s standing with those voters improved markedly since the year began.

Morning Consult, for instance, found Trump’s support nationally with these Republicans improving from 33% to start the year to 46% by mid-July. Among all college-educated GOP voters, Ipsos found him improving from 31% in mid-March to 36% this week. And Quinnipiac showed him growing from 22% support in February to 34% in a survey released Wednesday. In all three surveys, Trump now has more support among college-educated voters than DeSantis.

Trump has always fared better among Republicans without a college degree than those with a degree, dating back to his 2016 candidacy when he shocked the GOP establishment and won the party’s nomination. His presidency, in fact, helped shift the party toward a more blue-collar constituency, facilitating an influx of those voters into the GOP’s fold while simultaneously pushing many college-educated men and women, including former Republicans, to start backing Democratic candidates.

Compared to GOP voters without a college degree, GOP pollsters say, college-educated Republicans are socially moderate and fiscally conservative, with some of them both repelled by Trump’s rhetoric and uninterested in his stated aim of making the party’s economic agenda more populist They might have expected a different approach from DeSantis, political experts say, and soured on him when he didn’t meet that expectation.

“College-educated voters tend to be more liberal,” said Tim Malloy, a polling analyst with Quinnipiac. “And DeSantis has gone right a good deal more than many expected him to do so.”

DeSantis’ support has suffered among Republicans without a college degree, too, though at lower rates than he has among those with degrees. Among non-college white Republicans, Morning Consult and Quinnipiac found DeSantis’ support dropping 10 and 11 points since the start of the year. Ipsos found his support among non-college Republicans dropping six points since March.

DeSantis’ overall standing in the GOP primary has declined markedly since the start of the year, according to an average of polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com. The site has found his support dropping from about 37% to start the year to about 21% now. Some Republican strategists argue that amid such an overall drop, DeSantis’ standing with college-educated voters was bound to suffer, especially given that he had more of them to lose when the year began. And they question whether DeSantis’ loss of support among college-educated voters is really driving his overall decline.

GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini, for instance, found that DeSantis and Trump were running roughly even with “very conservative” Republicans at the end of last year. The former president, however, had a 65-point edge with those same voters in June, according to a survey his firm conducted.

In an interview, Ruffini said he thinks Trump’s numbers were temporarily low after a disappointing midterm election last year, a time when he had done little campaigning and voters were upset the party hadn’t won control of the U.S. Senate majority. Those frustrations have gradually subsided since, he said. “You add on top of that something most Republicans see as a tainted and partisan prosecution, and it’s not hard to process what’s been happening here,” he said.

He’s tanking with everyone but it stands to reason that anyone who thought he would be a more moderate, pragmatic type of Republican have realized by now that he’s a hard right culture warrior and that’s about it.

Those college educated voters who have migrated back to Trump because he’s allegedly under siege from a partisan prosecutor need to go back to school.