USA Politics (redux)

[T. D.]

It's a reference to the medallions the Nazis produced to commemorate the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. These were inscribed with:

Ein Volk!
Ein Reich!
Ein Führer!

But yes, it is difficult to distinguish between fact and The Onion these days. I can see something like this happening though, because Trump is profoundly ignorant and stupid (and a worthless piece of shit), while certainly a subset of his followers clearly harbors Nazi inclinations.

Funny but sad...

Knowing full well the source German text, I still believed your original post. 

[André Le Nôtre]

And did you hear that Trump--even though he is a tea-totaller--is planning on having rallies in beer halls? But instead of beer, punch will be served!!

[Karl Henning]

Cross-post:

Since Trump lost the election, the Trumpiest areas of the country have had a death toll 50% higher than blue areas. The GOP is killing its own voters with its own lies. And they don't care.

[Karl Henning]

The fix is in.

Donald Trump Is Now the Odds-On Favorite to Be President in 2025

[Fëanor]

The fix is in.

Donald Trump Is Now the Odds-On Favorite to Be President in 2025

Haha!! I love it:  yep, it's true Trump is by every reasonable esteem the Republican front-runner for 2024.

For sure Trump will run in '24 apart from serious illness or stopping a bullet or two, (I don't mean to give anyone any ideas ).  And given the USA's idiot system of primaries at the beginning, state control of Federal electors lists & election processes along the way, and ending with the purposely anti-democratic Electoral College, Trump is reasonably the favorite to win.

Lots of Republicans understand the Trump is a de facto criminal and threat to the nation and the world.  However what's more important?  The world or winning the primaries?  No question there.

[Karl Henning]

As a mode of thought, "In a world where the dollar is collapsing, the government is collapsing, and only bitcoin can save you," aligns nicely with "I alone can fix it."

Maybe it wasn't a coincidence at all.

Anti-Anti-Crypto

[Karl Henning]

Personally, I rather fear the worst in Virginia, and that will be a dark watershed for the country as a whole.

Jno. V. Last: 1. Trump Is Rocket Fuel
After getting a backdoor win in 2016 (thanks Director Comey!), Donald Trump was really bad for Republicans. He cost them races all over the map. He lost the House for Republicans. He lost the Senate for Republicans. He was a drag on just about every ticket, nearly always running behind down-ballot R's. And he was rocket fuel for Democrats: Trump was so unpopular that he became a turnout machine for Team Blue.

What we're seeing in Virginia today suggests that Trump has finally gotten to a place where he is an unambiguous net positive for Republican candidates.

By the numbers, Glenn Youngkin should not energize the Republican base. He's a plutocrat who treats the base like a bunch of dopes.

But when the returns come in tonight, watch how Youngkin does in the very reddest counties in Virginia: the places where Confederate fanboy Corey Stewart did great in the 2017 GOP primary.1 We're not just concerned with the percentage of the vote Youngkin gets here, but the total turnout from these counties.

At the same time, watch how Youngkin does in the suburbs to see if he's able to eat into the Democratic margins with college-educated, suburban voters.

I suspect that what we'll see tonight is

(1) Youngkin getting high turnout levels in rural Trump country.

(2) While also making inroads with Democrats in suburban Northern Virginia.

If this happens, the most likely explanation will be that:

Trump is meaningfully on the ballot for Republican base voters—that he has succeeded in energizing them with his claims of election fraud, critical race theory, etc.

But that Trump is simultaneously not on the ballot for Democrats and swing voters, who view him as the irrelevant past with no connection to what they're voting on today.

Historically speaking, this is very strange!

Nixon was not a net-positive for Republicans in the 1974 midterms (or the 1976 general). Republican voters were not energized by loyalty to Nixon and Democrats had not turned the page on him.

Ditto for Herbert Hoover and the Republicans of 1934.

All of which is to say that:

The linkage between Trump and Republican voters is something new.

It is unambiguously helping Republican candidates.

Democrats have no idea how to counter it.

Or at least that's my working hypothesis going into tonight. But that's the top level.

[Karl Henning]

It's gonna be a long, tense night in The Old Dominion:

Virginia Governor

Glenn Youngkin (R) leads by 66,732 votes over Terry McAuliffe (D) with an estimated 17 percent of votes counted.

[Karl Henning]

looking like a wrap: 92% of the vote counted, and Youngkin leading by 115K votes.

[Fëanor]

looking like a wrap: 92% of the vote counted, and Youngkin leading by 115K votes.

The minutiae of American politics is obscure and tedious to foreign observers.

Anyway, in this case was a Youngkin-Trump connection a big factor in Youngkin's win?  Word is that Trump isn't very popular in VA and that Youngkin downplayed any connection.

[milk]

The minutiae of American politics is obscure and tedious to foreign observers.

Anyway, in this case was a Youngkin-Trump connection a big factor in Youngkin's win?  Word is that Trump isn't very popular in VA and that Youngkin downplayed any connection.

The arrogance of the Dem activists who never learn the lesson. Identity politics and woke "theory" will drag them down in big elections. It's divide and conquer only, with Dems, they do it to themselves. It's a shame because republican economic policy can't really make things better for working folk. 

[Karl Henning]

Aaron Blake:

1. Bad news — and omens — for Democrats

The reason we focus on Virginia and New Jersey isn't because we love them so much (though some of us do). It's because these states are the only ones to vote statewide on this particular Election Day. And they provide pretty clear indicators of how the two parties are doing.

It's not a pretty picture for Democrats.

Youngkin is currently defeating former governor Terry McAuliffe (D) by about two points — a 12-point swing on net from 2020.

In New Jersey, Republican Jack Ciattarelli turned Murphy's reelection race into an unexpected nail-biter. With approximately 87 percent of the ballots cast, he's at 49.7 percent to Murphy's 49.6 percent. That's currently a 16-point shift from last year.

(Republicans also notably fared well in New York state, particularly Long Island.)

Recent history suggests those kinds of shifts, more often than not, mean such a party is in line for a good midterm election the following year. In fact, in five of the past seven post-presidential Election Days, the party that over-performed its presidential vote margins from the previous year in these races went on to flip the House, the Senate or both a year later.

Republicans only need to win five House seats and one Senate seat to do that. Tuesday showed they have the wind at their back, and they don't need much of a gust.

That doesn't mean anything is set in stone, but even before Tuesday night, it was clear this wasn't going to be an affirmation of Democrats' electoral superiority. And it was far from that. They'll now have to figure out how to avoid anything close to a repeat in a year's time.

2. A road map for the GOP after(?) Trump

The Virginia governor's race was an interesting proposition when it comes to former president Donald Trump. While Democrats didn't generally focus that much on Trump in such races before — perhaps because Trump was so ever-present anyway — McAuliffe pushed the issue, and hard. He tried to turn Youngkin into Trump in khakis and a fleece vest.

Two lessons:

It didn't work.

The result was not an affirmation of Trump.

Exit polls showed a majority of voters viewed Youngkin favorably, compared to 42 percent who said the same for Trump. Youngkin was also winning 17 percent of voters who viewed Trump unfavorably, which is a big number.

Trump's 42 percent favorable rating was also slightly lower than his 44 percent approval rating in 2020 Virginia exit polls, though not outside the margin of error.

Not to make everything about Trump, but the GOP's ability to distance itself from him — and Democrats' ability or inability to tie Republicans to him — matters in upcoming elections, especially with Trump out of office.

Youngkin provided a road map for the GOP when Trump isn't front-of-mind for most people. Whether Trump will stay so out-of-mind ahead of the 2024 election is a very relevant question.

What also matters is whether Republicans can actually put forward candidates like Youngkin and perhaps Ciattarelli who can effectively craft their own brand. That's especially true given how much some top GOP Senate candidates have tied themselves to Trump in the service of winning primaries — and how much Republicans might nominate candidates more extreme and with more baggage than Youngkin because they have Trump's backing.

3. The pivotal school issue

The temptation after every race is to talk about how everything the winner did worked and everything the loser did failed. Things are often much more nuanced than that. And given that the national environment seemed to matter quite a bit — see: New Jersey and Republicans apparently sweeping the other statewide Virginia races — we can't lay this all at McAuliffe's feet.

But the top of the ballot matters. And even aside from McAuliffe's failure to tar Youngkin with Trump, there was his inability to shake the school issue.

McAuliffe birthed what seemed like a million attack ads when he uttered, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." Weeks later, his campaign effectively affirmed this comment was hurting him by running an ad explaining the whole thing.

In isolation, it might have been survivable, but the backdrop was unhappiness with how the state's schools handled reopening amid the coronavirus pandemic and a controversy over sexual assault in highly important Loudoun County in Northern Virginia.

Exit polls showed 51 percent of voters said parents should have "a lot" of say over what schools teach, while 33 percent said they should have "some." Another 13 percent said either "not much" or "none at all."

Youngkin also won 58 percent of men with children, compared to the 49 percent Trump took last year.

Loudoun proved to be big for Youngkin. He narrowed Biden's 25-point win there in 2020 to just more than a 10-point advantage for McAuliffe.

4. Setbacks for the far-left

Moving beyond Virginia: To the extent some on the left might argue that the antidote for the above is for the party to move further to the left, there was plenty to rebut that.

Speaking of comments that didn't wear well on voters, there's the whole "defund the police" movement that was spurred amid racial-justice protests — especially after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. Democratic leaders seemed to pretty quickly recognize the problems with that talking point, and tried to nip it in the bud.

Election results in Minneapolis on Tuesday validated that position. A proposal to replace the Minneapolis police department with a public-safety department run by the city council failed by a strong margin — in a very blue city with that very recent past.

Meanwhile in Buffalo, democratic socialist India Walton, who pulled off a shocking upset of Mayor Byron Brown for the Democratic nomination, was losing by a wide margin to the write-in option, which seems very likely to be overwhelmingly composed of Brown voters.

Losing to a write-in candidate would be a pretty remarkable feat. We saw a similar scenario in the 2010 Alaska Senate race when Republican nominee Joe Miller lost to Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R) write-in campaign after defeating her in a primary. The reason: Voters overall overwhelmingly disliked Miller, even in a friendly electorate for the party.

In Seattle, moderate former city council president Bruce Harrell held a commanding lead in the mayoral race over more-liberal current city council President Lorena González. And that's all on top of New York's widely expected election of Eric Adams, who ran as a relatively moderate candidate in that high-profile Democratic primary.

Further-left candidates did win other mayoral races. In Pittsburgh, state Rep. Ed Gainey (D) won after defeating the incumbent mayor in a primary, and in Boston, Elizabeth Warren-backed Michelle Wu defeated a more-moderate opponent. Both are Democrats.

[Karl Henning]

The further-left mayoral candidate winning in Boston is close to non-news (on that head—that she's the first woman, first person of color and first Asian-American to serve Boston as mayor is big news)

[Spotted Horses]

I don't fault Joe Biden for what he is trying to do and has achieved, but the reality is that he doesn't have a governing majority. The Senate is a 50-50 tie (requiring Kamala Harris to break tie votes) so he can't loose a single vote, and two Senators in the Democratic Caucus might as well be Republicans. Manchin is from overwhelmingly Republican West Virginia and beats Republican candidates by being the seemingly more sensible version of a Republican. He makes his living as a coal broker, and is expected to support renewable energy support. If he supports Biden's climate plans he will suffer financial loss and get voted out. As for Sinema, she is a paradox. She started out as a Green party member and a progressive, and now has morphed into a conservative. Some suggest it is because she is beholden to her political donors.

If the people in this country want a progressive agenda they should vote for progressive candidates.

[SimonNZ]

The arrogance of the Dem activists who never learn the lesson. Identity politics and woke "theory" will drag them down in big elections. It's divide and conquer only, with Dems, they do it to themselves. It's a shame because republican economic policy can't really make things better for working folk.

What "woke" "theory"?

[Karl Henning]

Chas Sykes:

Terry McAuliffe Bet on Voters Hating Trump. Turns Out They Dislike Democrats More.

The Republican Party — populated with cranks, crooks, clowns, bigots and deranged conspiracy theorists — has spent five years alienating women, minorities and young voters.

The party — and its entire leadership from the grassroots to Congress — remains in thrall to a disgraced, defeated, one-term president, who is reduced to issuing increasingly crazed screeds from his exile in Mar-a-Lago. Every day we learn more about Republican complicity in the events of Jan. 6 and their attempts to whitewash an attempted coup.

The GOP is the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert.


Sane Republicans are heading for the exits, even as assaults on democratic norms have become a litmus test of loyalty.

So, now, Democrats need to ask themselves this rather urgent question:

Why can't we beat these guys?

Tuesday night, Democrats lost the governorship of Virginia — a state Joe Biden won by 10 points — to a Donald Trump-endorsed candidate, who ran up massive margins in rural parts of the state and made inroads into the once reliably blue suburbs.

There are obvious caveats and rationalizations available: Virginia has a long history of voting against the party in the White House in off-year elections; and Democrats did, in fact, beat Republicans in 2018 and 2020. They control both houses of Congress and the presidency.

But even with Joe Biden's slumping poll numbers, Virginia should have been a firewall. As political guru Reuben Rodriguez (who nailed the 2020 results) noted, Virginia is a "Dem dream." It has the highest concentration of tuned-in highly educated white people in the country in northern Virginia. It has large African American centers in Richmond and "very diverse suburbs that are ground zero for Trump disgust."

"This," he tweeted hours before the Democratic defeat, "is a state that should not vote red."

But it did. And thus Virginia became the latest in a series of warning signs for the Democrats, who suffered unexpected losses in congressional and state-level elections despite defeating Trump last year.

So this seems a good time to ask hard questions that I suspect Democrats won't appreciate.

Glenn Youngkin may have run as a quasi-post-Trumpian candidate, but across the country, Republicans continue to beclown themselves with lies about the election, even as they become more extreme on issues from guns to abortion.

But then why does a new NBC poll give Republicans double-digit leads on issues like border security, inflation, crime, the economy, national security and even on "getting things done"?

Why are Democrats facing the possibility of a Republican wave in 2022, and — even more ominous — the restoration of the Trump presidency in 2024?

Why can't they beat these guys, even in a state as blue as Virginia?

Democrats have been busy constructing excuses for their lack of success. They blame dark money, gerrymandering, racism, the right-wing media ecosystem.

But none of the self-soothing explanations account for what has been a clear erosion in support not merely in rural areas, but also among suburbanites and Black and Hispanic voters.

Democrats are also learning that without Trump himself on the ballot, they had merely rented some of the suburban votes that had shifted their way in the last two cycles. Running against Trump is apparently not a winning formula when the former president is merely a spectral presence.

Even so, many progressives still seem reluctant to engage in any sort of deeper introspection into why they may have alienated former members of their base. Many prefer to cling to the concept of "asymmetric polarization" that blames the widening split solely on conservatives because Republicans have moved farther to the right than Democrats have to the left.

But that view was challenged earlier this year by Kevin Drum, who cited studies showing that, in fact, it had been Democrats who had drifted to the left on issues like immigration, guns, religion and gay marriage.

It is not "both-sides-ism" to point this out. Like others, I have written hundreds of thousands of words about how the Republicans have not only moved hard to the right, but have also gone mad in the process. So this does not suggest any sort of moral equivalence.

The derangement of the GOP, however, has tended to obscure what happened on the left, where elite Democrats have increasingly lost touch with many of the voters who will determine the outcome of the next few elections.

At soccer matches and PTA meetings, or other gatherings of suburban parents, you won't hear talk of "intersectionality," or debates about the proper use of pronouns. The words "autocracy" or "authoritarianism" seldom come up; and if you try to define the terms, it's as likely as not that people will bring up mask and vaccine mandates, cancel culture and what they see as the overreach of the progressive nanny state. References to "white supremacy" are likely to be greeted or with eye rolls or treated as conversation-ending insults.

At times, it seems as if Democrats are speaking a different language than many Americans. This is what veteran democratic strategist James Carville was talking about when he told Vox:

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like 'Latinx' that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like 'communities of color.' I don't know anyone who speaks like that. I don't know anyone who lives in a 'community of color.' I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in ... neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, this disconnect has been accelerated by the shift in the balance of power and influence in the Democratic party. "Liberal college graduates, especially liberal white college graduates, have gained a sort of hegemony in the nation's elite media, foundations and NGOs, in academic and cultural institutions and in the staffing of the Democratic party's infrastructure," writes Ruy Teixeira. "This hegemony sets the tone for the Democratic party's commitments and rhetoric on sociocultural issues."

This has had real world consequences.

Even though Democrats have succeeded in getting a much larger share of college-educated voters, educational polarization has been very much a double-edged sword because they have been losing ground among working-class voters, who greatly outnumber the college-educated electorate. (Nationally, according to 2020 Catalist data, the electorate is 63 percent non-college/37 percent college).

Teixeira has warned that if this pattern continues, "with the college-educated moving toward the Democrats while the working-class becomes more Republican, equal-sized shifts favor the GOP."

But there is worse news.

In 2020, Teixeira notes, working-class non-whites swung toward Trump by 12 points, "despite Democratic messaging that focused relentlessly on Trump's animus toward nonwhites." This may not have been a one-off. "Since 2012, running against Trump twice," he writes, "Democrats have lost 18 points off of their margin among nonwhite, working-class voters."

If this continues, Democrats will be in a world of hurt.

But this is, in part, a result of the shift in the Democratic Party itself. As educational polarization has increased, white college-educated liberals have come to dominate the party, even though, as David Shor has noted, the white liberals who staff the campaigns and shape the party's messaging "are more left-wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing and even on racial issues or various measures of 'racial resentment.'"

The result, says Shor, is that as "white liberals increasingly define the party's image and messaging, that's going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us."

That is, of course, only part of the reason Democrats lost in Virginia. The Biden administration has stumbled on Afghanistan, inflation, supply chains, the border and boosters. Congressional Democrats have spent months locked in a murder-suicide pact over spending.

Trump wasn't on the ballot, and Youngkin kept him at a discreet distance from actual swing voters. His attack on critical race theory, though often cynical and dishonest, proved unexpectedly potent. Terry McAuliffe was a political retread who proved an uninspiring candidate.

But Democrats need to understand that bigger spending bills won't solve those problems if they fail to find a way to connect to the voters they most desperately need.

And, right now, it is not working.

[greg]

What "woke" "theory"?

That's a pretty broad term, but I understand the term "woke" to encompass modern feminism/intersectionality/white guilt/LGBT activism. More like ideology mixed with theory in all of that. Unless milk is referring to CRT.

[SimonNZ]

Yes, I know "woke" is the right's latest iteration "of "Politically Correct", which I guess wasn't getting the knee-jerk reactions anymore so something new was needed, and like PC its a term nobody on the left outside of the fringiest fringe would self-apply. Likewise what the right calls critical race theory.

I meant specifically. Which "woke theories" did the democrats or the candidate put forward to damage this election?

[amw]

In areas of southwest Virginia, where most inhabitants identify as some variety of neo-Confederates, arguments involving parents who were uncomfortable with their children reading books about slavery in schools or statues of Robert E. Lee being removed, and that this constituted a "war on whiteness", did appear to motivate voters, but the population of those areas is small (and shrinking over time). Most of Virginia is suburban and part of the DMV (Washington metropolitan area) where the most commonly cited issue, at least by voters I'm aware of, was extended school closures and COVID-19-related restrictions, which they felt had been mismanaged by the previous governor's administration.

It's also worth noting that at only one point in the past ~40 years has the president's party won the Virginia governor's race, and that was during a year of economic recovery (2013) with a fairly popular president. Partisanship trends have mostly solidified on the federal level, but ruling parties tend to be unpopular, and this is no more surprising than, say, Democrats winning the governorship of Kansas in 2018.

[greg]

Yes, I know "woke" is the right's latest iteration "of "Politically Correct", which I guess wasn't getting the knee-jerk reactions anymore so something new was needed, and like PC its a term nobody on the left outside of the fringiest fringe would self-apply.

Ah yes, that's true, but at the same time, I'd rather consider it more like "PC 2.0," because "Politically Correct" is an older term which doesn't bring into mind the more modern and prominent leftist ideologies. Everything is moving leftward over time, even moderates are politically correct nowadays, we can't say some words now that were less controversial in the past, more recently words like "tranny" are starting to become considered as slurs, for example. But "woke" is a step further, not only is that stuff a given, but it also includes the far left racist and sexist attitudes toward white people/males which has only festered over the years recently, all that goes beyond simple political correctness.

I meant specifically. Which "woke theories" did the democrats or the candidate put forward to damage this election?

I'll let milk answer that, but the word "will" was used, so I don't think the implication that it has (yet)? but maybe that it will?