Right up until election day, most people thought Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election. She didn't, and many people have many different theories about what went wrong. Which one you ascribe to probably does a fair bit of work in explaining who you back in 2020 and why. And the fact that we don't really know which answer is the right one, and feel an urge to cover all our bases "just to be sure", probably contributes to the Johnny Unbeatable problem -- the explanations aren't all mutually compatible, and so "learning their lessons" will pull us in contradictory directions.
Theory #1: It was anti-Clinton mania: Claim: Hillary Clinton is uniquely reviled for idiosyncratic and effectively non-ideological reasons. Lesson: don't nominate Hillary Clinton. Simple.
Theory #2: It was misogyny: It's not just Hillary Clinton. Any female candidate is going to whip up a toxic brew of wounded masculinity and machismo. People nervous about nominating another woman often believe this.
Theory #3: Clinton was too elitist: Generally a favorite of not-Democrats, though endorsed by some "moderates" too. The idea here is that Hillary Clinton represents a far-left agenda and the Democrats need to return to the good old days when they were the party of ... Bill Clinton? JFK? FDR? Unclear. What is clear is that Democrats need to show more respect for rural heartland voters, respect people who oppose gay rights, respect people who want to deport immigrant children, and above all respect people who want to ban abortion. Oh, and under no circumstances should a Democrat call anyone "deplorable" -- except maybe Ilhan Omar. These folks believe Joe Biden would have won in a cakewalk
Theory #4: Clinton was too centrist: Hillary Clinton didn't offer a true progressive alternative to conservatism, to capitalism, to corporatism, to technocracy, or to neoliberalism. Hence she didn't inspire voters thirsting for an alternative. Donald Trump at least purported to speak to voters who believed the system had failed him, and a Democrat who basically was seen as a "the status quo is okay" figure would not do well. A bold and uncompromising progressive vision that unabashedly targets the systemic forces immiserating us all, by contrast, can speak to the millions of Americans who feel dejected, disempowered, and ready for a change. Favored diagnosis of the "Bernie would have won!" crowd.
Theory #5: Clinton abandoned the Midwest: "She didn't even visit Wisconsin!" The blue wall cracked, Democrats lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. So to win -- rebuild that blue wall, by nominating a candidate most likely to be extremely popular among rust belt swing voters in the Midwest. This could point you anywhere from Joe Biden to Tim Ryan to Amy Klobuchar to "recruit Sherrod Brown".
Theory #6: Clinton didn't excite the base: Democrats took for granted the constituencies that are most responsible for powering them to victory and so left a ton of votes on the table. Rather than chase the elusive (and probably white) swing voter, the strategy here is to goose turnout among voters (especially women) of color. It's not the same as Theory #4 because -- despite what Jacobin Mag would have you believe -- it is not necessarily the case that people of color are inspired by fire-eating leftism of the Jacobin Mag bent. Often believed by those who think Democrats must nominate a woman and/or person of color; and often also paired with a belief that Democrats should abandon the rust belt and focus more on winning emergent sun belt swing states like Arizona, North Carolina, or (dare to dream) Georgia and Texas.
Theory #7: PC backlash: The Democratic Party allowed themselves to be taken over by a radical identity politics fringe who alienated regular Americans with all this talk of "intersectionality" and "microaggressions" and "trigger warnings". Trump's victory was a result of a PC backlash prompted by White men who just was sick and tired of being called racist all the time, and lashed out by ... endorsing a really racist candidate. The interesting thing about this diagnosis is that its political description basically boils down to "White Americans are hella racist" while its political prescription is usually "don't ever say White Americans are racist." Facts sure care about those feelings.
Theory #8: Voter suppression: Lower turnout among the base wasn't (just) because of less enthusiasm for Clinton. It was also a function of a sustained conservative campaign to obstruct poor and minority communities from voting. Proponents of this view aren't necessarily tied to a particular candidate as they are to urging Democrats to take voter access seriously as a top priority -- both in terms of legislating and in terms of activism. Unfortunately, the Senate won't pass any legislation, the courts are basically endorsers of the voter suppression project, and it's not like Republicans are going to be less invested in voter suppression the next time around, so this can rapidly turn fatalistic.
Theory #9: Conspiracy theories: Russian interference, social media, fake news. Voters were buffeted by a frenzy of misleading or outright false information. Not only were some taken in by outlandish nonsense (QAnon, Pizzagate, Soros conspiracies), even those who weren't directly affected often suffered a general decline in trust for political institutions and the reliability of authority -- something that ended up redounding to Trump's benefit. And the Republicans exploited media timidity and its reflexive instinct to tell "both sides" to put naked falsehoods on par with actual truth. To a large extent, people in this camp think the media has to accept in a much more decisive manner its obligation call lies lies -- even if it makes "certain" elected officials mad.
Theory #10: The Democratic Party is corrupt/incompetent/in disarray: Democrats don't really want to win, or they don't want to win if it means displeasing their true corporate masters. The party is beholden to an out-of-touch consultant class and big money donors locking them into unpopular positions that predictably lose elections. Only by seizing control of the party apparatus and smashing the old guard can Democrats actually run races that will actually inspire people. The more militant version of Theory #4.
Theory #11: Nothing went wrong -- it was a fluke: During the entire 2016 cycle, the polls oscillated between a high of "Hillary Clinton landslide" and a low of "statistical dead heat". The argument here is that all that happened in 2016 is that election day happened to have the tremendous bad luck of occurring at one of the nadirs, leading to what was effectively a statistical dead heat and a coin-flip Donald Trump win. The lesson here is that there is no lesson: if you have a campaign strategy that gives you a win 75% of the time, that's a pretty good strategy even though (as Nate Silver reminds us) statistically you should lose a quarter of the time. All the efforts to "explain" the outcome basically a function of statistical illiteracy. To the extent Democrats should be on alert for anything, it's in letting the "we have to change something" impulse to tinker lead to making things worse.
Showing posts with label Election 2016. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Election 2016. Show all posts
Friday, January 03, 2020
Tuesday, June 05, 2018
Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XLV: Electing Trump (and Making Russia Pay For It)
I already did an entry in this series where people blamed the Jews for Trump's election (it ... did not take long). But this one is a little different. It's not a claim that Jews voted for Trump (spoiler alert: we didn't). It's a much more nested little argument from John Schindler, a former NSA intelligence analyst who thinks that all this talk about Russian interference in the election might just be a smokescreen distracting from the real culprits.
Oh, those sly dogs.
The hook here is an interview George Papadopoulos's new wife did with the Daily Caller, where she claimed that he only plead guilty to charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller "to avoid facing charges that he was an agent of the Israeli government."
Mueller hasn't corroborated the account. But Schindler sure took it up and started running ... hard:
To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if Israeli intelligence had contacts with the Trump campaign during the election run-up -- he was such an inviting target that it's hard to imagine them passing up the chance. And to the extent the evidence leads in that direction, we should follow it fearlessly.
But the claim that the entire thing was an Israeli plot of whom they made Russia their patsies? That's on quite a different level.
“What if the real secret of the Trump campaign isn’t that it’s a Kremlin operation, rather an Israeli operation masquerading as a Russian one?”— John Schindler (@20committee) June 5, 2018
Oh, those sly dogs.
The hook here is an interview George Papadopoulos's new wife did with the Daily Caller, where she claimed that he only plead guilty to charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller "to avoid facing charges that he was an agent of the Israeli government."
Mueller hasn't corroborated the account. But Schindler sure took it up and started running ... hard:
[T]here are strange Israeli footprints all over the Trump-Russia story. Quite a few of the shady figures close to the president and his business affairs are American Jews of Soviet heritage who possess connections to Israel. Felix Sater and Michael Cohen are only the best-known of this dubious crew. Those men are also connected to Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island that is part of the worldwide Chabad movement—which just happens to possess close links to Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin.For the record, Cohen was born in Long Island to a Holocaust-survivor father -- I wonder if that's what "Soviet heritage" (is "Soviet" an ethnicity now?) means in this context? While he clearly has significant family ties to the Ukraine, I've actually been able to find little in his family history that suggests particularly "Soviet" leanings.
To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if Israeli intelligence had contacts with the Trump campaign during the election run-up -- he was such an inviting target that it's hard to imagine them passing up the chance. And to the extent the evidence leads in that direction, we should follow it fearlessly.
But the claim that the entire thing was an Israeli plot of whom they made Russia their patsies? That's on quite a different level.
Monday, March 12, 2018
Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XLII: Russian Meddling in American Elections
Vladimir Putin wants you to know that it might not be (ethnic) Russians behind the attempts to meddle in the U.S. elections. It might have been Ukrainians. Or Tatars.
Or Jews.
Of course Jews.
And of course, people have thoughts on Putin suggesting maybe all this election interference really traces back to the Jews.
There's a bad piece by David Klion trying to defend Putin from charges of antisemitism, which asks why Putin "singled out" Jews alongside Ukrainians and Tatars (the latter two are maybe easy to explain -- they're the two largest ethnic minorities in Russia. Jews are ... not in third place), answers "it's complicated", and then seems to entirely forget to explain what's "complicated" about it in favor of a stirring ode to the advances Jews have made since the era of the Tsars and a list of all of Putin's good Jewish friends.
There's a better piece by Anshel Pfeffer, which seeks to absolve Putin of personal antisemitism while noting that he has long been willing to tolerate it as a useful vector for stirring up anti-Western resentment.
And then there's the best piece by Talia Lavin, who agrees with Pfeffer that Putin generally "launders" antisemitism through allies or (in this case) trolling, but observes that this doesn't actually provide absolution for promoting antisemitism.
Read them in order, and feel yourself getting smarter.
Or Jews.
Of course Jews.
And of course, people have thoughts on Putin suggesting maybe all this election interference really traces back to the Jews.
There's a bad piece by David Klion trying to defend Putin from charges of antisemitism, which asks why Putin "singled out" Jews alongside Ukrainians and Tatars (the latter two are maybe easy to explain -- they're the two largest ethnic minorities in Russia. Jews are ... not in third place), answers "it's complicated", and then seems to entirely forget to explain what's "complicated" about it in favor of a stirring ode to the advances Jews have made since the era of the Tsars and a list of all of Putin's good Jewish friends.
There's a better piece by Anshel Pfeffer, which seeks to absolve Putin of personal antisemitism while noting that he has long been willing to tolerate it as a useful vector for stirring up anti-Western resentment.
And then there's the best piece by Talia Lavin, who agrees with Pfeffer that Putin generally "launders" antisemitism through allies or (in this case) trolling, but observes that this doesn't actually provide absolution for promoting antisemitism.
Read them in order, and feel yourself getting smarter.
Friday, January 12, 2018
What's a One Point Dip Among Friends?
Is it just me, or am I rightfully a bit skeeved out by this Erik Loomis post on "which demographic has Trump best held his support"?
One bit of context that is missing is that Jews were one of the few demographic groups that moved left from 2012 to 2016. Obama got 69% of the Jewish vote in 2012, versus 70% for Clinton in 2016. That's not a huge shift, obviously, but given that the country as a whole lurched right (most groups -- including Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and women -- gave Clinton smaller margins than Obama), it stands out. So one way of interpreting this data is that "NeverTrump" GOP or Independent Jews actually walked the walk in 2016 -- they disapproved of Trump and actually voted against Trump when it counted. Put another way, the Jews most likely to have been "soft" Trump supporters were already were turned off on him by election day, whereas other groups' "soft" supporters only turned against him later.
To be clear, there's nothing in Loomis' post that's inaccurate. We could say that writing a whole post on Jewish support for Trump dipping "only" 1 point seems like a weird thing to focus on given the extremely low baseline of support Trump had with Jews to begin with (although, as Loomis notes, some other groups where Trump also began with very low support rates saw those rates dip by much greater amounts). We could also question how much narrative weight should be put upon the difference between a 1 point drop amongst Jews versus a 3 point drop amongst Blacks (if we're comparing groups that began with low baselines of support). Indeed, since the demographic "voted Trump in 2016" also saw only a modest 3 point dip, maybe the real lesson here is "If you were [a Trump voter in 2016], you are probably still a Trump supporter" -- full stop.
But really, my discomfort stems from what to reads as a weirdly triumphant tone, as if Loomis is eager to have proven something particularly diseased about the Jews -- the one group whose Trump flunkies are sticking to Trump more than any other group in the nation.
Maybe I'm reading into it. But Loomis sure sounds excited to put "Jews" and "Trump diehards" in the same conversation, doesn't he?
Since his inauguration, Trump’s support in every polled demographic has fallen. That includes groups where he had massive support (his own voters, evangelicals) and where he had very low support (Hillary voters, African-Americans). But there is only one group where his approval has fallen by a mere 1 point. What do you think that is? Christians? The wealthy? The South? Nope, nope, and nope.
It’s Jews.
Of course, Trump had low Jewish support initially. But those Jewish voters who care only about an aggressive, expansionist Israel love Donald Trump. If you were Jewish and a Trump supporter in 2016, you are still a Trump supporter. Which says a remarkable amount about a particular type of politics that makes you a stickier Trump supporter than literally every other demographic group in the nation.
And yet, among all religious groups, Jews still have the lowest overall Trump support, at 30 percent, although Trump now has a lower approval rating among atheists/agnostics, which he did not a year ago.Loomis is drawing from this NYT article detailing how much Trump's approvals have dropped off across various demographic groups between inauguration day and today. These range from a 12 point drop for Democratic men and a 10 point drop amongst Latinos to a 3 point drop amongst Blacks and a 1 point drop with Jews.
One bit of context that is missing is that Jews were one of the few demographic groups that moved left from 2012 to 2016. Obama got 69% of the Jewish vote in 2012, versus 70% for Clinton in 2016. That's not a huge shift, obviously, but given that the country as a whole lurched right (most groups -- including Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and women -- gave Clinton smaller margins than Obama), it stands out. So one way of interpreting this data is that "NeverTrump" GOP or Independent Jews actually walked the walk in 2016 -- they disapproved of Trump and actually voted against Trump when it counted. Put another way, the Jews most likely to have been "soft" Trump supporters were already were turned off on him by election day, whereas other groups' "soft" supporters only turned against him later.
To be clear, there's nothing in Loomis' post that's inaccurate. We could say that writing a whole post on Jewish support for Trump dipping "only" 1 point seems like a weird thing to focus on given the extremely low baseline of support Trump had with Jews to begin with (although, as Loomis notes, some other groups where Trump also began with very low support rates saw those rates dip by much greater amounts). We could also question how much narrative weight should be put upon the difference between a 1 point drop amongst Jews versus a 3 point drop amongst Blacks (if we're comparing groups that began with low baselines of support). Indeed, since the demographic "voted Trump in 2016" also saw only a modest 3 point dip, maybe the real lesson here is "If you were [a Trump voter in 2016], you are probably still a Trump supporter" -- full stop.
But really, my discomfort stems from what to reads as a weirdly triumphant tone, as if Loomis is eager to have proven something particularly diseased about the Jews -- the one group whose Trump flunkies are sticking to Trump more than any other group in the nation.
Maybe I'm reading into it. But Loomis sure sounds excited to put "Jews" and "Trump diehards" in the same conversation, doesn't he?
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Personal Responsibility and the Infantilization of the American Right
If there was a single day that characterized the conservative movement's relationship to the Obama administration, it was September 28, 2016. That day, Congress overrode President Obama's veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. Congress had passed the law earlier that month, ignoring the President's warnings that it opened up a massive foreign relations can of worms and placed American servicemembers and diplomats at risk of being haled into hostile foreign courts. President Obama followed through on his promised veto on September 23rd, and Congress promptly overrode the veto.
Both the initial vote and the override were bipartisan affairs (the Senate and the House votes on both were overwhelming). But in the aftermath, once the issues President Obama identified now were encoded in law and presented a real and immediate threat, congressional Republicans took a very distinctive stance. They recognized the law had grave problems. But it wasn't their fault for voting for it. It wasn't their responsibility in drafting it. If anyone was to blame, it was none other than President Obama, who, they told us, was not sufficiently emphatic in communicating the bill's problems.
It would have been astonishing if it wasn't so sad. A Republican Congress passes a bill over the President's warnings, then overrides his public veto of the same bill, and then has the chutzpah to blame the President for not doing enough to stop them.
In reality, it was part of a pattern. The American right is fundamentally incapable of taking personal responsibility for its own decisions. Everything is someone else's fault. Everything can be blamed on someone else, usually Democrats or Democrat-leaning constituencies. It's never on them.
Consider the ever-popular parlor game of "who's responsible for Trump's victory?" The left is indulging in its own form of this game, with the predictable factions deciding between "it's the fault of Bernie Bros and Jill Stein for undermining Hillary Clinton", "it's the fault of the neoliberal hacks at the DNC for rigging the game for Hillary Clinton," and "it's the fault of everyone who cares what non-White, non-male, and non-straight people think." To that debate, my contribution has been simple: the people responsible for the election of Donald Trump are the people who voted for him. Full stop.
On the right side of the spectrum, though, this debate has taken a different hue. Much of the conservative movement has spent the last two years slowly transitioning from "it's an outrageous slander to say that a racist cartoon character like Donald Trump represents the conservative movement" to "it's an outrageous slander to say that the American conservative movement is 'racist' or 'cartoonish' just because it adopted Donald Trump as its representative." In between, the conservative movement treated Donald Trump as if he was some sort of inexplicable act of God, a deus ex machina whose surge to dominance in the conservative political movement defied all logic or rationality. He's a cipher, he's a reaction to Obama's own extremism, he's ... [hiss] really a Democrat. Whatever Donald Trump was, he wasn't their fault.
And so when conservatives talk about why Trump won, they play the game quite differently. Why did Trump win? It's because of safe spaces and trigger warnings, Katherine Timpf declares in the National Review; Trump was "a long-awaiting contrast to the infantilization and absurd demands for 'safe spaces' sweeping our society." Nay, says George Will, it was academia as a whole -- their books are full of "pretentious jargon" like "interrogated" and "problematized" and their courses have silly titles like "Jews in American Entertainment." Jonah Goldberg attributes Trump's rise to the media "crying wolf" -- how could anyone have known that Trump really was that terrible, given how untrustworthy our newspapers have been? None of these persons, from what I can tell, is a Donald Trump fan, which makes their commentary all the more striking. They recognize what a terrible choice Donald Trump is, but whirl about seeking to blame everyone but those who chose him.
This is pathological. Even if every critique the right had about, for example, liberal academia was entirely on target, is it really the case that a middle-income suburbanite in Dubuque decided to vote Trump because of how Wesleyan students want their classroom syllabi structured? It's implausible that it is true, and it'd be deeply pathetic if it was true. And to the extent that -- abstracted out to a broader commentary on "kids these days" and coastal elitism -- it is even part of the explanation, it's more pathetic still. "Just because the media says Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to American civic values doesn't mean he is one; and I don't feel the need to figure that out myself when I could be sending a message to those snot-nosed Ivy League teenagers who think they're so much better than me!" Who is patronizing who here?
This is the politics of a temper tantrum. There's certainly no notion of personal responsibility, that conservatives have duties to cause and country that exist independently of what media figures say or liberal youths do. Instead, conservatives are treated as creatures of instincts; minor children who are scarcely capable of independent reason. They lashed out, and now blame liberals for being inadequate babysitters. Republican voters, we're told, are helpless in the face of the grave insults they face from ... 19-year old bloggers living across the country. Minorities in cities they never visit. Professors at schools they don't attend. Nobody who has any real power over the conditions of their lives, mind you. No matter: they just had to respond. The backlash was inevitable. Certainly, they can't be expected to have independently come to the conclusion that Donald Trump is a menace. In these circumstances, nobody can reasonably hold them accountable for the decision they made in the ballot box.
The ur-form of this must be the very favorite explanation for why Trump won: That White Americans were sick of being criticized for racism, for sexism, for xenophobia, for not being perfect little egalitarians. Liberals insisted on holding Americans to account for these sins, and Americans deeply resented them for it. Eric Holder called us a "nation of cowards" around the subject of race, and White people railed against him even in the course of proving him absolutely right. And so, under this story, Trump won because he offered an alternative where Americans didn't have to feel guilty about any of these things: They could mock minorities, swap stories about assaulting women, demand an American free of non-Christians, and they'd be okay, even justified, in doing so.
There is a very literal form of emotional regression at work here. I was a pretty well-behaved kid growing up, but like anyone else I sometimes misbehaved. Sometimes I was inconsiderate or hurtful, or mocked or insulted people. And when I did do those things, my parents made me own up to it and apologize. I didn't get a ton of "this is what it means to be a man" type parenting, but if ever I got it, this was the context. Part of being a man means manning up and taking responsibility when what you're doing hurts other people.
Of course, as anyone who's gone through this knows, it's not fun. It made me feel bad, and the actual act of apologizing felt even worse. As a kid, just learning these lessons, you're very susceptible to being in denial about the whole thing. It wasn't really your fault, the other guy had it coming, they deserved it, I was right, they were wrong, my friends got away with it -- anything to avoid owning up to the mistake. How easy it would be to fall in with a pied piper who endorsed that entire line? The reason we have to teach children to take responsibility for their actions is because the alternative is very, very tempting.
We expect adults to know better. To the extent our nation has and continues to commit wrongs along the axis of race, of gender, of religion, of disability -- and we have, and we continue to -- we should have the maturity to look it in the eye and take responsibility for it. That doesn't mean always accepting blame. It does mean fairly taking one's share of it and -- more importantly, in the case of complex political issues -- being open to the difficult conversation such issues provoke.
Donald Trump's appeal was precisely in offering the opportunity to circumvent all of that. He held out a choice that would be understandably appealing to spoiled children, but should have been beneath the dignity of a mature democracy. Turns out, it wasn't (or turns out, we weren't one). And it's hard not to think that part of the reason why is the legion of commentators who have been eager to explain why those persons who did choose to align themselves with Trump -- a notorious racist, a flagrant misogynist, a man whose only qualification to lead our nation was that he was openly in contempt of half it -- could be excused for it. It's not their fault. It's not their responsibility.
You want to talk about infantilization in American culture, this is the place to start. American conservatives have gleefully regressed to a state of childhood. They spent years acting out and then wonder why someone else didn't protect them from the consequences of their own actions. At some point, America cannot move forward unless we collectively grow up. Part of that will involve conservatives -- especially conservatives who have recognized the perils of the Trump movement -- accepting responsibility for the choices their faction has made, and holding their colleagues to account.
Is that day coming? Now, of course, conservatives control both houses of Congress and the President-elect. They hold the levers of American government. And -- just as we saw over the last two years -- there are right-wing voices who do recognize serious fissures in our democratic fabric. Noah Rothman in Commentary frets about "the normalization of intemperance or even fanaticism" we have recently begun to witness. So, now that their fruit has fully bloomed, will conservatives finally take responsibility for it? What does Rothman say?
Alas: "[D]on’t blame Donald Trump or his voters for this condition. Blame the left."
Old habits die hard.
Both the initial vote and the override were bipartisan affairs (the Senate and the House votes on both were overwhelming). But in the aftermath, once the issues President Obama identified now were encoded in law and presented a real and immediate threat, congressional Republicans took a very distinctive stance. They recognized the law had grave problems. But it wasn't their fault for voting for it. It wasn't their responsibility in drafting it. If anyone was to blame, it was none other than President Obama, who, they told us, was not sufficiently emphatic in communicating the bill's problems.
It would have been astonishing if it wasn't so sad. A Republican Congress passes a bill over the President's warnings, then overrides his public veto of the same bill, and then has the chutzpah to blame the President for not doing enough to stop them.
In reality, it was part of a pattern. The American right is fundamentally incapable of taking personal responsibility for its own decisions. Everything is someone else's fault. Everything can be blamed on someone else, usually Democrats or Democrat-leaning constituencies. It's never on them.
Consider the ever-popular parlor game of "who's responsible for Trump's victory?" The left is indulging in its own form of this game, with the predictable factions deciding between "it's the fault of Bernie Bros and Jill Stein for undermining Hillary Clinton", "it's the fault of the neoliberal hacks at the DNC for rigging the game for Hillary Clinton," and "it's the fault of everyone who cares what non-White, non-male, and non-straight people think." To that debate, my contribution has been simple: the people responsible for the election of Donald Trump are the people who voted for him. Full stop.
On the right side of the spectrum, though, this debate has taken a different hue. Much of the conservative movement has spent the last two years slowly transitioning from "it's an outrageous slander to say that a racist cartoon character like Donald Trump represents the conservative movement" to "it's an outrageous slander to say that the American conservative movement is 'racist' or 'cartoonish' just because it adopted Donald Trump as its representative." In between, the conservative movement treated Donald Trump as if he was some sort of inexplicable act of God, a deus ex machina whose surge to dominance in the conservative political movement defied all logic or rationality. He's a cipher, he's a reaction to Obama's own extremism, he's ... [hiss] really a Democrat. Whatever Donald Trump was, he wasn't their fault.
And so when conservatives talk about why Trump won, they play the game quite differently. Why did Trump win? It's because of safe spaces and trigger warnings, Katherine Timpf declares in the National Review; Trump was "a long-awaiting contrast to the infantilization and absurd demands for 'safe spaces' sweeping our society." Nay, says George Will, it was academia as a whole -- their books are full of "pretentious jargon" like "interrogated" and "problematized" and their courses have silly titles like "Jews in American Entertainment." Jonah Goldberg attributes Trump's rise to the media "crying wolf" -- how could anyone have known that Trump really was that terrible, given how untrustworthy our newspapers have been? None of these persons, from what I can tell, is a Donald Trump fan, which makes their commentary all the more striking. They recognize what a terrible choice Donald Trump is, but whirl about seeking to blame everyone but those who chose him.
This is pathological. Even if every critique the right had about, for example, liberal academia was entirely on target, is it really the case that a middle-income suburbanite in Dubuque decided to vote Trump because of how Wesleyan students want their classroom syllabi structured? It's implausible that it is true, and it'd be deeply pathetic if it was true. And to the extent that -- abstracted out to a broader commentary on "kids these days" and coastal elitism -- it is even part of the explanation, it's more pathetic still. "Just because the media says Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to American civic values doesn't mean he is one; and I don't feel the need to figure that out myself when I could be sending a message to those snot-nosed Ivy League teenagers who think they're so much better than me!" Who is patronizing who here?
This is the politics of a temper tantrum. There's certainly no notion of personal responsibility, that conservatives have duties to cause and country that exist independently of what media figures say or liberal youths do. Instead, conservatives are treated as creatures of instincts; minor children who are scarcely capable of independent reason. They lashed out, and now blame liberals for being inadequate babysitters. Republican voters, we're told, are helpless in the face of the grave insults they face from ... 19-year old bloggers living across the country. Minorities in cities they never visit. Professors at schools they don't attend. Nobody who has any real power over the conditions of their lives, mind you. No matter: they just had to respond. The backlash was inevitable. Certainly, they can't be expected to have independently come to the conclusion that Donald Trump is a menace. In these circumstances, nobody can reasonably hold them accountable for the decision they made in the ballot box.
The ur-form of this must be the very favorite explanation for why Trump won: That White Americans were sick of being criticized for racism, for sexism, for xenophobia, for not being perfect little egalitarians. Liberals insisted on holding Americans to account for these sins, and Americans deeply resented them for it. Eric Holder called us a "nation of cowards" around the subject of race, and White people railed against him even in the course of proving him absolutely right. And so, under this story, Trump won because he offered an alternative where Americans didn't have to feel guilty about any of these things: They could mock minorities, swap stories about assaulting women, demand an American free of non-Christians, and they'd be okay, even justified, in doing so.
There is a very literal form of emotional regression at work here. I was a pretty well-behaved kid growing up, but like anyone else I sometimes misbehaved. Sometimes I was inconsiderate or hurtful, or mocked or insulted people. And when I did do those things, my parents made me own up to it and apologize. I didn't get a ton of "this is what it means to be a man" type parenting, but if ever I got it, this was the context. Part of being a man means manning up and taking responsibility when what you're doing hurts other people.
Of course, as anyone who's gone through this knows, it's not fun. It made me feel bad, and the actual act of apologizing felt even worse. As a kid, just learning these lessons, you're very susceptible to being in denial about the whole thing. It wasn't really your fault, the other guy had it coming, they deserved it, I was right, they were wrong, my friends got away with it -- anything to avoid owning up to the mistake. How easy it would be to fall in with a pied piper who endorsed that entire line? The reason we have to teach children to take responsibility for their actions is because the alternative is very, very tempting.
We expect adults to know better. To the extent our nation has and continues to commit wrongs along the axis of race, of gender, of religion, of disability -- and we have, and we continue to -- we should have the maturity to look it in the eye and take responsibility for it. That doesn't mean always accepting blame. It does mean fairly taking one's share of it and -- more importantly, in the case of complex political issues -- being open to the difficult conversation such issues provoke.
Donald Trump's appeal was precisely in offering the opportunity to circumvent all of that. He held out a choice that would be understandably appealing to spoiled children, but should have been beneath the dignity of a mature democracy. Turns out, it wasn't (or turns out, we weren't one). And it's hard not to think that part of the reason why is the legion of commentators who have been eager to explain why those persons who did choose to align themselves with Trump -- a notorious racist, a flagrant misogynist, a man whose only qualification to lead our nation was that he was openly in contempt of half it -- could be excused for it. It's not their fault. It's not their responsibility.
You want to talk about infantilization in American culture, this is the place to start. American conservatives have gleefully regressed to a state of childhood. They spent years acting out and then wonder why someone else didn't protect them from the consequences of their own actions. At some point, America cannot move forward unless we collectively grow up. Part of that will involve conservatives -- especially conservatives who have recognized the perils of the Trump movement -- accepting responsibility for the choices their faction has made, and holding their colleagues to account.
Is that day coming? Now, of course, conservatives control both houses of Congress and the President-elect. They hold the levers of American government. And -- just as we saw over the last two years -- there are right-wing voices who do recognize serious fissures in our democratic fabric. Noah Rothman in Commentary frets about "the normalization of intemperance or even fanaticism" we have recently begun to witness. So, now that their fruit has fully bloomed, will conservatives finally take responsibility for it? What does Rothman say?
Alas: "[D]on’t blame Donald Trump or his voters for this condition. Blame the left."
Old habits die hard.
Saturday, November 19, 2016
The Media Does Not Get To Blame Hillary Clinton for their Own Choices of Coverage
Last night, I tweeted out the following as an "unpopular opinion":
It turned out to be ... rather popular (for me at least).
Now here's the thing. There is an entirely valid post-mortem critique of the Clinton campaign vis-à-vis the media. It would go something like this:
But for the media -- whose political coverage never left the pendulum swing of "look at this KEE-razy thing Trump said" and "EMAILZ!" -- to now turn around and say that the problem was that Clinton didn't forward a positive agenda for America ... that takes serious chutzpah. Yes, she ran plenty of negative ads. But I saw plenty of positive ads too. And listening to her at the debates or at her DNC speech, the vast majority of her statements were about explaining, calmly and seriously, her plan for how to keep America safe, how to improve the lives of working Americans, how to bring about justice for the full panoply of our diverse population, and so on. The problem was not that this analysis wasn't there. It was, if anything, the centerpiece of her campaign! To say that she tried to run a campaign on nothing more than "I'm not Trump" is ludicrous.
The problem was not that Hillary Clinton ran as "the one who isn't Trump." She didn't. It was the media who chose to treat her as "the boring one who's only relevant as the one who isn't Trump. And who had an email server." And again, if we're saying it's her responsibility to deal with the media we have and the electorate we actually have, not the one deliberative democrats fantasize we have, that's one thing. But it's another thing entirely to blame Hillary Clinton for not presenting a positive policy agenda that she tried desperately to frontload in the face of months of media apathy.
UPDATE: Scott Lemieux: The Media Refuses Accountability For Its Own Malpractice.
Unpopular opinion: Hillary Clinton in fact devoted plenty of time to promoting a positive agenda for America. Media just didn't give a shit.— David Schraub (@schraubd) November 19, 2016
It turned out to be ... rather popular (for me at least).
Now here's the thing. There is an entirely valid post-mortem critique of the Clinton campaign vis-à-vis the media. It would go something like this:
In our current media climate, what matters is who can get the attention of the cameras. Donald Trump was a master at ginning up free publicity for himself by being outrageous and outlandish. Hillary Clinton -- too dry, too boring, too establishment, too wonky, too policy oriented -- was incapable of adequately countering this strategy. One can moan about how unfair that is, but politics is the art of winning, and Clinton didn't win. So in that essential respect, she, her team, and the Party that picked her failed.If a member of the media wanted to level that critique, I'd respect that. I'd view it as a rather sad commentary on democracy, but I'd respect the sort of hard-headed realism of it. I'd even accept the claim that the "media climate" reflects nothing more than what the people want, and so the media can't be blamed for not indulging in the delusion that what the people want is neatly laid out agendas for American policy reform.
But for the media -- whose political coverage never left the pendulum swing of "look at this KEE-razy thing Trump said" and "EMAILZ!" -- to now turn around and say that the problem was that Clinton didn't forward a positive agenda for America ... that takes serious chutzpah. Yes, she ran plenty of negative ads. But I saw plenty of positive ads too. And listening to her at the debates or at her DNC speech, the vast majority of her statements were about explaining, calmly and seriously, her plan for how to keep America safe, how to improve the lives of working Americans, how to bring about justice for the full panoply of our diverse population, and so on. The problem was not that this analysis wasn't there. It was, if anything, the centerpiece of her campaign! To say that she tried to run a campaign on nothing more than "I'm not Trump" is ludicrous.
The problem was not that Hillary Clinton ran as "the one who isn't Trump." She didn't. It was the media who chose to treat her as "the boring one who's only relevant as the one who isn't Trump. And who had an email server." And again, if we're saying it's her responsibility to deal with the media we have and the electorate we actually have, not the one deliberative democrats fantasize we have, that's one thing. But it's another thing entirely to blame Hillary Clinton for not presenting a positive policy agenda that she tried desperately to frontload in the face of months of media apathy.
UPDATE: Scott Lemieux: The Media Refuses Accountability For Its Own Malpractice.
Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XXXI: Electing Donald Trump
In 2008, when Barack Obama won election with 78% of the Jewish vote. a Greek newspaper heralded the outcome as "the end of Jewish domination." So now in 2016, with Donald Trump surging to victory while only carrying 24% of the Jewish vote, who's the driving force behind his victory? Oh, you know who:
Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, has reportedly suggested that Donald Trump won the US election because of support from “the Jews.”
Zakharova made the comments over the weekend on a nationally televised talk show, saying that it was Jewish money that tipped the election for Trump, Radio Free Europe reported.
“If you want to know what will happen in America, who do you have to talk to? You have to talk to the Jews, naturally. But of course,” Zakharova said while on Sunday Evening, a show hosted by pro-Kremlin television personality Vladimir Solovyov, the report said.
Zakharova then reportedly adopted “a cartoonish Jewish accent” while impersonating her alleged interlocutor.Honestly, the question was less "would people blame the Jews for this" and more "who would be the first to blame the Jews for this." Although, given that this is a Russian governmental official talking about Trump winning the presidency, we might more accurately title this one "Things People Credit the Jews For."
Wednesday, November 09, 2016
Democracy is a Choice We Make Everyday
Election day is an important day when we as Americans choose who we are as a nation. Today, Americans chose Donald Trump to be our standard-bearer, and he will be our next President.
I truly didn't think this would happen. I can say that with 100% honesty, as I actually put a bunch of money into the stock market this morning on the assumption I could turn a neat profit on the Clinton victory bounce. That didn't turn out great.
As it became more evident that Donald Trump would win tonight -- massively outperforming prior Republican tallies in White regions even as he lost Latinos by shocking margins -- I didn't quite have the reaction I thought I would. I wasn't quite as panicked as I thought I'd be. I wasn't quite as despondent as I thought I'd be.
This is not a softening on the Trump campaign one bit. I do not believe this election was about "economic anxiety", and I do not believe it was about generic anger at the "establishment". What drove the White majority in this nation was the realization that they didn't have to pretend to care about others' equality. And if they didn't have to do it, they had no interest in it. If ever a hypothesis was falsified, it was the conceit that contemporary American bigotry was subconscious rather than simply in hiding.
Peter Beinart's twitter feed today -- retweeting message after message gleefully promising to send him to the gas chambers -- was an entirely unnecessary confirmation of the hell Trump has unleashed for Jews in this country; a hell that parallels the terrors he promises for Muslims, immigrants, people of color, and women. Indeed, the most terrible lesson we've learned this day is the degree to which White people in this nation thirst to return to an overt position of supremacy -- advantaged not just implicitly but openly. What I was reminded of most was Bernard Henri-Levy's commentary on the resurgence of European anti-Semitism. It came out of a yearning
Another lesson we learned was the absolute, complete irrelevancy of the "intellectual" wing of contemporary conservatism -- a faction which has always feared Trump. Let's be clear, if even a quarter of Republicans actually bought into #NeverTrump, this election is a blowout. The GOP establishment, its elites, its thinkers -- people who found Trump risible -- they are trivial. They are nothing. There has probably never been a larger gap between public profile and actual influence in the history of this nation.
So what caused my zen-state earlier this evening? Maybe it was numbness. Maybe it hasn't set in yet.
But Donald Trump is not interested in governing. I suppose thank goodness for that; heaven help us if he developed an interest. But if he's not interested in governing, then he won't be interested in following through on his more vicious policy proposals. They'll require work, after all, and since when does Donald Trump wish to work?
Take the Supreme Court. Trump clearly couldn't care less about it. Which means he'll almost certainly nominate bog-standard conservative justices from the standard conservative lists. Under normal circumstances, that would be awful. But the silver lining is those justices tend to come from that "intellectual" wing of the Party I just dismissed as trivial. They are precisely the sorts of conservatives who may well recoil at any overtly authoritarian tendencies by a Trump administration.
Or perhaps not. The Republican establishment has been thoroughly cowed by Donald Trump, and that has a tendency to prompt one to reconcile oneself (maybe that's what I -- optimistic, establishment-oriented-I -- am doing right now). And does anyone really trust Trump to abide by a hostile court decision? The fact that we're asking these questions is scary in its own right. And there are other issues -- global warming is perhaps the most striking -- where it seems we are probably just doomed.
But what this boils down to is this. As awful as Donald Trump is, I'm less scared of him than I am of the people who elected him. They formed a national plurality that talks of throwing political opponents into jail, that revels in hurting others unlike them, that has unleashed a torrent of racist and sexist abuse the likes of which haven't been seen in my lifetime. All that talk about how "you can't say" certain things about Muslims or Jews or Blacks or women? We've discovered you absolutely can say it -- and become President in the process! That genie won't get bottled up again easily, regardless of how Trump comports himself from this day forward. Trump was just an opportunistic vessel for that sentiment; I no longer think it needs his express or implied support for it to survive. That said, better men than him have tried to purely translate raw populist sentiment into concrete policy. It's no easy task even for skilled politicians.
So where do we find ourselves?
Election day is a day when we as American choose who we want to be as a nation. But that's only because we make that choice every single day. We make it tomorrow, when we agree to a peaceful transition of power. We make it this weekend, when we stop making stupid jokes about moving to Canada and start thinking about our next steps here. We make it over the next two years, when we dig in our heels and renew the fight. We make it each and every moment that we put forward a vision and a dream that the choice America makes for itself tomorrow will be better than the choice we made today.
Today's choice was a terrible choice. But it is not our last choice. It is not history that will vindicate us, or the arc of the universe that will bend our way. It is up to us, and our choices, to (if I can adopt a successful slogan) make America great again.
I truly didn't think this would happen. I can say that with 100% honesty, as I actually put a bunch of money into the stock market this morning on the assumption I could turn a neat profit on the Clinton victory bounce. That didn't turn out great.
As it became more evident that Donald Trump would win tonight -- massively outperforming prior Republican tallies in White regions even as he lost Latinos by shocking margins -- I didn't quite have the reaction I thought I would. I wasn't quite as panicked as I thought I'd be. I wasn't quite as despondent as I thought I'd be.
This is not a softening on the Trump campaign one bit. I do not believe this election was about "economic anxiety", and I do not believe it was about generic anger at the "establishment". What drove the White majority in this nation was the realization that they didn't have to pretend to care about others' equality. And if they didn't have to do it, they had no interest in it. If ever a hypothesis was falsified, it was the conceit that contemporary American bigotry was subconscious rather than simply in hiding.
Peter Beinart's twitter feed today -- retweeting message after message gleefully promising to send him to the gas chambers -- was an entirely unnecessary confirmation of the hell Trump has unleashed for Jews in this country; a hell that parallels the terrors he promises for Muslims, immigrants, people of color, and women. Indeed, the most terrible lesson we've learned this day is the degree to which White people in this nation thirst to return to an overt position of supremacy -- advantaged not just implicitly but openly. What I was reminded of most was Bernard Henri-Levy's commentary on the resurgence of European anti-Semitism. It came out of a yearning
for people to feel once again the desire and, above all, the right to burn all the synagogues they want, to attack boys wearing yarmulkes, to harass large numbers of rabbis, to kill not just one but many Ilan Halimis....They want to do it, and they want to feel good about wanting to do it. This election was about White people wanting to no longer feel guilty about wanting to stand atop and astride people of color, about Christian people wanting to no longer feel guilty about dreaming of an America that only includes Christians, about men wanting to no longer feel guilty about their fantasies of assaulting women.
Another lesson we learned was the absolute, complete irrelevancy of the "intellectual" wing of contemporary conservatism -- a faction which has always feared Trump. Let's be clear, if even a quarter of Republicans actually bought into #NeverTrump, this election is a blowout. The GOP establishment, its elites, its thinkers -- people who found Trump risible -- they are trivial. They are nothing. There has probably never been a larger gap between public profile and actual influence in the history of this nation.
So what caused my zen-state earlier this evening? Maybe it was numbness. Maybe it hasn't set in yet.
But Donald Trump is not interested in governing. I suppose thank goodness for that; heaven help us if he developed an interest. But if he's not interested in governing, then he won't be interested in following through on his more vicious policy proposals. They'll require work, after all, and since when does Donald Trump wish to work?
Take the Supreme Court. Trump clearly couldn't care less about it. Which means he'll almost certainly nominate bog-standard conservative justices from the standard conservative lists. Under normal circumstances, that would be awful. But the silver lining is those justices tend to come from that "intellectual" wing of the Party I just dismissed as trivial. They are precisely the sorts of conservatives who may well recoil at any overtly authoritarian tendencies by a Trump administration.
Or perhaps not. The Republican establishment has been thoroughly cowed by Donald Trump, and that has a tendency to prompt one to reconcile oneself (maybe that's what I -- optimistic, establishment-oriented-I -- am doing right now). And does anyone really trust Trump to abide by a hostile court decision? The fact that we're asking these questions is scary in its own right. And there are other issues -- global warming is perhaps the most striking -- where it seems we are probably just doomed.
But what this boils down to is this. As awful as Donald Trump is, I'm less scared of him than I am of the people who elected him. They formed a national plurality that talks of throwing political opponents into jail, that revels in hurting others unlike them, that has unleashed a torrent of racist and sexist abuse the likes of which haven't been seen in my lifetime. All that talk about how "you can't say" certain things about Muslims or Jews or Blacks or women? We've discovered you absolutely can say it -- and become President in the process! That genie won't get bottled up again easily, regardless of how Trump comports himself from this day forward. Trump was just an opportunistic vessel for that sentiment; I no longer think it needs his express or implied support for it to survive. That said, better men than him have tried to purely translate raw populist sentiment into concrete policy. It's no easy task even for skilled politicians.
So where do we find ourselves?
Election day is a day when we as American choose who we want to be as a nation. But that's only because we make that choice every single day. We make it tomorrow, when we agree to a peaceful transition of power. We make it this weekend, when we stop making stupid jokes about moving to Canada and start thinking about our next steps here. We make it over the next two years, when we dig in our heels and renew the fight. We make it each and every moment that we put forward a vision and a dream that the choice America makes for itself tomorrow will be better than the choice we made today.
Today's choice was a terrible choice. But it is not our last choice. It is not history that will vindicate us, or the arc of the universe that will bend our way. It is up to us, and our choices, to (if I can adopt a successful slogan) make America great again.
Tuesday, November 08, 2016
2016 Election Day Live Blog
It's a Debate Link tradition (though each year I swear to end it). We'll be following returns all evening from throughout the country -- not just Presidential but Senate, House, and Gubernatorial races as well (all times are Pacific -- I'm a California kid now, remember?).
* * *
10:00 PM: Took a long shower. Preparing what I'm going to say to my Intro to American Politics students on Thursday. Frankly, it's amazing how not bad the Senate turned out to be (51-49 GOP) -- but given that we're facing down President Trump with a unified GOP legislature, that's not exactly a consolation. Anyway, I'm probably done for the night. Best of luck to the President-elect, and to the country. As President Obama said, the sun will come up tomorrow.
9:04 PM: 89% of Pennsylvania is in, and Clinton's lead is less than 6,000. McGinty is down by 4,000.
8:55 PM: I wonder if folks realize that Hillary Clinton may about to become a literal martyr for democracy. I mean, I don't expect her to flee the country. And I do expect Trump to do his best to "lock her up." And I hardly expect him to be content with normal legal processes if they don't go his way.
8:37 PM: I'll probably write more about this in another post, but as far as I'm concerned the story of this election is the realization by White voters that they didn't have to care about minorities or their rights. Nobody was forcing them to. And in turned out, when given a choice, they happily elected to endorse White supremacy.
8:24 PM: You might have noticed that I'm basically looking for bright spots while praying that Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire turn around (and Pennsylvania holds up). This moment's bright spot comes to you courtesy of New Jersey where Rep. Scott Garrett (R) is down two points with 88% in. He was wildly conservative for any district, let alone his swingy eastern seaboard one.
8:12 PM: Sheriff Joe Arpaio has lost his bid for reelection in Arizona. And to be too racist to win election tonight is deeply humiliating.
8:10 PM: Yes, Iowa was almost certainly a mirage. Trump's now up by a half point with about half the state in, but the trendlines are clearly moving his way.
7:44 PM: I assume that Clinton being up 10 in Iowa with 30% in is solely a function of which counties are reporting. It's hardly the sort of night where Clinton would pull out a surprise-win in an overwhelmingly White Midwestern state.
7:37 PM: Half in in Pennsylvania, and Clinton is still up four. McGinty is beating that pace, up five against Toomey.
7:29 PM: Colorado is 2/3 in, and Clinton's up 5 there. That's a good thing.
7:24 PM: Ohio called for Trump: He's up by 11 with 75% in.
7:22 PM: On the one hand, Wayne County (Detroit) is only 15% in. On the other hand, Clinton is only up 51/44. Those are cataclysmically bad numbers for her if they hold. Trump is up 50/45 in Michigan as a whole now, with 30% in.
7:20 PM: The only thing really in question in North Carolina right now is the governor's race, where Roy Cooper holds a tiny lead over incumbent Republican Pat McCrory. Ross is down 5.5 points, Clinton 3.5, with 86% in.
7:15 PM: Virginia looking decent for Clinton now, but North Carolina (as well as Florida) almost certainly will go Trump. Michigan and Wisconsin are where it's out now -- and if you thought White working class voters were angry in the southeast....
7:02 PM: Broward County just came in (98%). Trump is still up by 1.5% statewide. Looks like Florida is Trump territory after all. Damn it. Egg on my face (least of my concerns right now, but I'll own it).
6:54 PM: Clinton just took a (tiny) lead in Virginia, with 82% in.
6:52 PM: In Michigan, Clinton is winning Oakland County by 52/44. Earlier in the evening I'd note that's above her county benchmark (49/49). But with rural areas really coming in hard for Trump, the logic is that Clinton needs to badly overperform in counties like Oakland (affluent inner suburbs) to counterbalance Trump's big night out in the exurbs.
6:44 PM: Now it's a 10,000 point gap in Virginia with 80% in. Anyone who follows Virginia politics knows that Democrats tend to keep creeping up in late returns, but it'd be nice if they'd hurry it along and relieve some of my heart palpitations.
6:36 PM: Clinton is creeping up in Virginia. Down just 25,000 votes with 78% in.
6:27 PM: Still waiting on Broward County. A little less than 2/3 in, which is still a lot. But goodness, it really will be down to the wire.
6:12 PM: Since I was harping on county benchmarks, here's the counterstory. The key big counties, Clinton is overperforming. But there are lots of little counties, and Trump is overperforming there. That's the story in Florida, for example -- we'll see if it's the same nationwide.
6:10 PM: 50% of Broward now in, and its not a big dent in Trump's lead. Now I'm officially nervous.
6:03 PM: FL-07 gets called for Stephanie Murphy -- a Democratic pickup.
6:00 PM: Not that it was remotely in doubt, but Chris Van Hollen will be the next Senator from Maryland. First campaign I ever volunteered on. Still a huge fan. Congratulations Senator!
5:53 PM: I'm still feeling pretty good about Florida, with Broward outstanding, but I understand why people are nervous -- particularly with more rural/exurban locales going hard for Trump.
5:51 PM: Given how catastrophic West Virginia is for Democrats these days, its very impressive that a Democrat is winning the governor's race right now. Jim Justice is up 48/42 with 30% in the Mountain State. Clinton, for her part, is down 65/30.
5:42 PM: North Carolina seems to be slipping away from Deborah Ross at the moment. It's not just that Burr just took a lead. Up 55/41 in Wake County (Raleigh) with 88% in, she wanted to be at 57/42.
5:34 PM: Ohio has quietly reported a third of its votes and Clinton is up 50/46. Again glancing at the benchmarks: Cuyahoga County is Clinton 68/29, she wants 68/31 (it's a third in right now as well).
5:30 PM: Two Florida House seats have already flipped, but they cancel each other out and in any event are the product of redistricting turning a blue seat red and vice versa. The two other high-profile House races there were the FL-13, where ex-Gov. (and ex-GOP) Charlie Crist looks like he'll turn the seat blue (albeit by a closer than expected margin -- he's up 52/48 with 91% in), and the FL-26, where Carlos Curbelo held off a truly awful Democratic candidate in Joe Garcia. But remember when I said to keep an eye on the FL-07? 86% in and Democrat Stephanie Murphy is up 52-48 over incumbent Rep. John Mica. There's more vote left in Mica-friendly turf, but this one looks down to the wire.
5:24 PM: I am seeing a lot of panic about Florida, as Trump is currently leading by about 20,000 votes with 89% counted. Broward County is the second largest county in Florida. It has not put in any of its non-early votes. Its early votes went Clinton 70/29 -- well ahead of her benchmark.
5:19 PM: Taking a gander at New Hampshire, we see that Hassan (Senate) and Van Ostern (Governor) are both running ahead of Hillary Clinton. My first instinct was to be pleased, but it seems that Democrats are actually falling a little short of their targets here. Concord, where everyone is stacked at around a 60/35 lead, was supposed to be closer to a 63/36 Democratic advantage. 80% of the vote is counted in Concord, but just 6% statewide.
5:15 PM: Exit polls looking very robust for Jason Kander (D) in Missouri (and the same polls have Trump meaning by about the margin you'd expect, so that helps validate them). Man, do I want that one -- this ad deserves to be rewarded.
5:13 PM: Looks like Rubio is going to hold onto his Senate seat in Florida. There's still a good chunk of south Florida yet to report, but Murphy just isn't wracking up the numbers he needs down there. Miami-Dade is now 80% in and Murphy's only up 54/43 (he wanted 62/38; Clinton's at 63/34).
5:11 PM: It might not seem like big news that Kentucky Republicans cleaned house -- literally -- in taking the Kentucky State House tonight. But Democrats have held it continuously since the 1920s. Really, this is just the final spasm of the realignment of Appalachia, but it's still worth noting.
5:08 PM: Tammy Duckworth knocks off Mark Kirk to secure the first Democratic Senate pickup of the night. Probably the most "in the bag" Senate race for us, but it still feels really good -- especially after Kirk's grotesque racism at the tail end of the campaign.
5:00 PM: I'm feeling really good about a Clinton victory tonight. The Senate is a dicier proposition. With Indiana out (as I suspected it would be), Democrats still need that last piece of the puzzle assuming that their core trio of Wisconsin/Illinois/Pennsylvania holds together. In Florida, Murphy is inching closer to Rubio but remains four points behind (compared to Clinton, who's up by two). In North Carolina, Deborah Ross (D) is ahead of incumbent Richard Burr by four points whilst Clinton is currently leading in the state by seven. The good news is that Ross is -- just -- hitting the number she needs in Wake County (the largest in the state): with 25% in she's up 58/38 there, she needs to be 57/42.
4:56 PM: We must be close to calling Florida, right? Clinton's up by 2% with 73% in. Trump and Clinton are tied in Duval County (Jacksonville), a place Trump absolutely needed to win. Meanwhile, the south Florida trio of Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties haven't reported anything except their early vote -- and Clinton's beating her benchmarks in all three.
4:54 PM: Ohio Senate race goes to Rob Portman without trouble. A state Democrats should have been competitive in, but where ex-Gov. Ted Strickland could not get off the ground. Meanwhile, Richard Burr is maintaining a slight lead in North Carolina -- but will it hold as Democratic areas start to come in?
4:51 PM: With Clinton's early numbers looking excellent in both Florida and Virginia (don't worry about the aggregate totals right now -- she's hitting or beating her benchmarks in the huge counties that will decide things), my eye falls on Pennsylvania. Florida and Virginia are blue-trending states where higher percentages of educated, professional, and/or Latino voters are giving Trump fits. Pennsylvania, at least in theory, cuts a different profile -- a state where their remains a solid core of working class white rust belters. If they break red this year in a mirror image of how Latinos and upscale professionals are turning blue, we still have a race. If not, we're done here.
4:42 PM: All the early numbers look dreadful for Evan Bayh, who seemed to piss away a sizable lead late in this race. I'm 10% satisfied, because Bayh is the quintessential entitled arrogant political hack and this is justified comeuppance, and 90% annoyed, because this was a Senate seat Democrats should have taken and he blew it hard. 24% in and he's down 55/39
4:40 PM: The VA-10 is one of those races that Democrats need to win if they have a chance of making the House interesting. It's a blue-trending district whose demographics (wealthy educated professionals) are primed to despise Trump, but currently held by a really strong Republican incumbent in Barbara Comstock. And with 22% in, Comstock is leading her Democratic challenger by a measly 400 votes.
4:35 PM: Man, it really will be interesting to see if the Latino tide that is drilling Trump in Florida right now carries over to sweep Rubio out of office. As much as I'd like to see it, it looks like there are enough ticket-splitters for Rubio to survive. There are some House races, too, where Democrats might see some stretchier pickups -- keep your eye on the FL-07.
4:27 PM: That said, it doesn't seem like Trump's misfortunes are carrying over to Marco Rubio. Right now, he's running 7 points ahead of Trump's pace -- enough to give him a five point lead over Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy.
4:23 PM: Early numbers looking very good for Clinton in Florida. She's ahead in Duval County, where Romney narrowly won in 2012 (and recall that Trump needs to do better than Romney to win the state). In Palm Beach County, she's starting out up 61/37 -- the benchmark she needs to hit is 58/41. Ditto Broward County, where Clinton wants to keep Trump at 32% or below ... and he's not even cracking 30% right now.
4:17 PM: There's a lot of crowing about South Carolina being "too close to call" following exit polls. I personally am less enthused, for two reasons. (1) SC is extremely polarized by race, so Democrats have both a high floor and a low ceiling; and (2) it does Clinton no good to lose SC by less than the typical Democrat. In fact, it's the possibility that Clinton will overperform in non-competitive states while getting nipped at the finish line in swing states that's been my main frustration with relying on national popular vote polls (and my main keep-me-up-at-night terror).
4:09 PM: CNN has called the Kentucky Senate race for Rand Paul. Not a surprise, even with Gray overperforming Clinton (and Grimes in 2014). I will observe -- not to give false hope -- that CNN's tally is behind other numbers I've seen (e.g., those nice numbers for Gray out of Fayette County).
4:05 PM: The GOP's stranglehold over the south may well be cracking. Virginia and North Carolina are already purple. Meanwhile younger voters -- and "younger" here means younger than 45 -- are now decisively in the Democratic corner in Georgia.
3:55 PM: One sleeper race that nobody had on the radar was the Kentucky Senate race, where Democrat Jim Gray challenged incumbent Senator Rand Paul (R). And to be sure, most sleeping races stay asleep. But in Fayette County, near Lexington, Gray is beating 61/39 with 80% in (by comparison, in 2014 Democratic candidate Allison Lundergan-Grimes won this county 52/45 in the course of losing statewide to Senator Mitch McConnell 56/40). But particularly in a state like Kentucky, it's entirely plausible that the more liberal portions of the state might swing noticeably to the D column even as the more conservative areas tilt even harder to the right -- and there are more of the latter than the former.
3:51 PM: Exit polls are tricky business. But if this one is at all accurate, it does not augur well for the GOP -- it has Latinos voting for Clinton over Trump by a crushing 79/18 split (it was 71/27 in 2012, 67/31 in 2008).
3:49 PM: Since we've got some time, let's use an early example of the importance of looking at comparative county level data rather than early aggregate numbers. There is currently one county in Indiana where a non-negligible percentage of the votes are in: Montgomery County, northwest of Indianapolis (59% in). At the presidential level, it's going 73/23 Trump (about a 5,000 vote advantage). Now, I have no idea if that's historically good or bad for the GOP nominee. What I do know is that at the Senate level, it's 63 Young (R)/30 Bayh (D), and for the Governor's race it's 61 Holcomb (R)/35 Gregg (D). So the downballot Democrats are running about 15 points ahead of Clinton in that county -- potentially a good sign that there's a non-trivial number of ticket-splitters, though again it's hard to know without info on how strongly Republican this county is (not to mention it's super-early, this is a relatively small county, etc. etc.).
3:39 PM: The first few polls have closed! They're in Kentucky, where nothing really is competitive, and Indiana, which is going to go for Trump at the Presidential level but has interesting races downballot. Of course, we still have some time before any sizable results come in.
11:58 AM: States are not a monolith. Different counties vote different ways -- in Florida, for example, Miami-Dade votes very differently than the Panhandle. Consequently, it's easy to be mislead by early returns which often come from a few counties which are likely to be unrepresentative of the state as a whole. What you want to do is see whether Democrats are over- or underperforming relative to their historic vote totals on a county-by-county level. If, for example, you saw that Clinton was getting 75% of the vote in St. Louis City, you might elated -- except that Obama got 83% there in 2012 and Clinton would want to approach 90% to counteract more conservative rural counties and win the entire state.
On this note, DK Elections' county benchmarks are an absolutely invaluable resource. They'll give a sense of where Democrats should be shooting for if they want to pick up swing states (and even in non swing states, overperforming 2012 numbers may be a good sign down ballot).
10:50 AM: I suppose I should get my final predictions in, while the getting's good:
* * *
10:00 PM: Took a long shower. Preparing what I'm going to say to my Intro to American Politics students on Thursday. Frankly, it's amazing how not bad the Senate turned out to be (51-49 GOP) -- but given that we're facing down President Trump with a unified GOP legislature, that's not exactly a consolation. Anyway, I'm probably done for the night. Best of luck to the President-elect, and to the country. As President Obama said, the sun will come up tomorrow.
9:04 PM: 89% of Pennsylvania is in, and Clinton's lead is less than 6,000. McGinty is down by 4,000.
8:55 PM: I wonder if folks realize that Hillary Clinton may about to become a literal martyr for democracy. I mean, I don't expect her to flee the country. And I do expect Trump to do his best to "lock her up." And I hardly expect him to be content with normal legal processes if they don't go his way.
8:37 PM: I'll probably write more about this in another post, but as far as I'm concerned the story of this election is the realization by White voters that they didn't have to care about minorities or their rights. Nobody was forcing them to. And in turned out, when given a choice, they happily elected to endorse White supremacy.
8:24 PM: You might have noticed that I'm basically looking for bright spots while praying that Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire turn around (and Pennsylvania holds up). This moment's bright spot comes to you courtesy of New Jersey where Rep. Scott Garrett (R) is down two points with 88% in. He was wildly conservative for any district, let alone his swingy eastern seaboard one.
8:12 PM: Sheriff Joe Arpaio has lost his bid for reelection in Arizona. And to be too racist to win election tonight is deeply humiliating.
8:10 PM: Yes, Iowa was almost certainly a mirage. Trump's now up by a half point with about half the state in, but the trendlines are clearly moving his way.
7:44 PM: I assume that Clinton being up 10 in Iowa with 30% in is solely a function of which counties are reporting. It's hardly the sort of night where Clinton would pull out a surprise-win in an overwhelmingly White Midwestern state.
7:37 PM: Half in in Pennsylvania, and Clinton is still up four. McGinty is beating that pace, up five against Toomey.
7:29 PM: Colorado is 2/3 in, and Clinton's up 5 there. That's a good thing.
7:24 PM: Ohio called for Trump: He's up by 11 with 75% in.
7:22 PM: On the one hand, Wayne County (Detroit) is only 15% in. On the other hand, Clinton is only up 51/44. Those are cataclysmically bad numbers for her if they hold. Trump is up 50/45 in Michigan as a whole now, with 30% in.
7:20 PM: The only thing really in question in North Carolina right now is the governor's race, where Roy Cooper holds a tiny lead over incumbent Republican Pat McCrory. Ross is down 5.5 points, Clinton 3.5, with 86% in.
7:15 PM: Virginia looking decent for Clinton now, but North Carolina (as well as Florida) almost certainly will go Trump. Michigan and Wisconsin are where it's out now -- and if you thought White working class voters were angry in the southeast....
7:02 PM: Broward County just came in (98%). Trump is still up by 1.5% statewide. Looks like Florida is Trump territory after all. Damn it. Egg on my face (least of my concerns right now, but I'll own it).
6:54 PM: Clinton just took a (tiny) lead in Virginia, with 82% in.
6:52 PM: In Michigan, Clinton is winning Oakland County by 52/44. Earlier in the evening I'd note that's above her county benchmark (49/49). But with rural areas really coming in hard for Trump, the logic is that Clinton needs to badly overperform in counties like Oakland (affluent inner suburbs) to counterbalance Trump's big night out in the exurbs.
6:44 PM: Now it's a 10,000 point gap in Virginia with 80% in. Anyone who follows Virginia politics knows that Democrats tend to keep creeping up in late returns, but it'd be nice if they'd hurry it along and relieve some of my heart palpitations.
6:36 PM: Clinton is creeping up in Virginia. Down just 25,000 votes with 78% in.
6:27 PM: Still waiting on Broward County. A little less than 2/3 in, which is still a lot. But goodness, it really will be down to the wire.
6:12 PM: Since I was harping on county benchmarks, here's the counterstory. The key big counties, Clinton is overperforming. But there are lots of little counties, and Trump is overperforming there. That's the story in Florida, for example -- we'll see if it's the same nationwide.
6:10 PM: 50% of Broward now in, and its not a big dent in Trump's lead. Now I'm officially nervous.
6:03 PM: FL-07 gets called for Stephanie Murphy -- a Democratic pickup.
6:00 PM: Not that it was remotely in doubt, but Chris Van Hollen will be the next Senator from Maryland. First campaign I ever volunteered on. Still a huge fan. Congratulations Senator!
5:53 PM: I'm still feeling pretty good about Florida, with Broward outstanding, but I understand why people are nervous -- particularly with more rural/exurban locales going hard for Trump.
5:51 PM: Given how catastrophic West Virginia is for Democrats these days, its very impressive that a Democrat is winning the governor's race right now. Jim Justice is up 48/42 with 30% in the Mountain State. Clinton, for her part, is down 65/30.
5:42 PM: North Carolina seems to be slipping away from Deborah Ross at the moment. It's not just that Burr just took a lead. Up 55/41 in Wake County (Raleigh) with 88% in, she wanted to be at 57/42.
5:34 PM: Ohio has quietly reported a third of its votes and Clinton is up 50/46. Again glancing at the benchmarks: Cuyahoga County is Clinton 68/29, she wants 68/31 (it's a third in right now as well).
5:30 PM: Two Florida House seats have already flipped, but they cancel each other out and in any event are the product of redistricting turning a blue seat red and vice versa. The two other high-profile House races there were the FL-13, where ex-Gov. (and ex-GOP) Charlie Crist looks like he'll turn the seat blue (albeit by a closer than expected margin -- he's up 52/48 with 91% in), and the FL-26, where Carlos Curbelo held off a truly awful Democratic candidate in Joe Garcia. But remember when I said to keep an eye on the FL-07? 86% in and Democrat Stephanie Murphy is up 52-48 over incumbent Rep. John Mica. There's more vote left in Mica-friendly turf, but this one looks down to the wire.
5:24 PM: I am seeing a lot of panic about Florida, as Trump is currently leading by about 20,000 votes with 89% counted. Broward County is the second largest county in Florida. It has not put in any of its non-early votes. Its early votes went Clinton 70/29 -- well ahead of her benchmark.
5:19 PM: Taking a gander at New Hampshire, we see that Hassan (Senate) and Van Ostern (Governor) are both running ahead of Hillary Clinton. My first instinct was to be pleased, but it seems that Democrats are actually falling a little short of their targets here. Concord, where everyone is stacked at around a 60/35 lead, was supposed to be closer to a 63/36 Democratic advantage. 80% of the vote is counted in Concord, but just 6% statewide.
5:15 PM: Exit polls looking very robust for Jason Kander (D) in Missouri (and the same polls have Trump meaning by about the margin you'd expect, so that helps validate them). Man, do I want that one -- this ad deserves to be rewarded.
5:13 PM: Looks like Rubio is going to hold onto his Senate seat in Florida. There's still a good chunk of south Florida yet to report, but Murphy just isn't wracking up the numbers he needs down there. Miami-Dade is now 80% in and Murphy's only up 54/43 (he wanted 62/38; Clinton's at 63/34).
5:11 PM: It might not seem like big news that Kentucky Republicans cleaned house -- literally -- in taking the Kentucky State House tonight. But Democrats have held it continuously since the 1920s. Really, this is just the final spasm of the realignment of Appalachia, but it's still worth noting.
5:08 PM: Tammy Duckworth knocks off Mark Kirk to secure the first Democratic Senate pickup of the night. Probably the most "in the bag" Senate race for us, but it still feels really good -- especially after Kirk's grotesque racism at the tail end of the campaign.
5:00 PM: I'm feeling really good about a Clinton victory tonight. The Senate is a dicier proposition. With Indiana out (as I suspected it would be), Democrats still need that last piece of the puzzle assuming that their core trio of Wisconsin/Illinois/Pennsylvania holds together. In Florida, Murphy is inching closer to Rubio but remains four points behind (compared to Clinton, who's up by two). In North Carolina, Deborah Ross (D) is ahead of incumbent Richard Burr by four points whilst Clinton is currently leading in the state by seven. The good news is that Ross is -- just -- hitting the number she needs in Wake County (the largest in the state): with 25% in she's up 58/38 there, she needs to be 57/42.
4:56 PM: We must be close to calling Florida, right? Clinton's up by 2% with 73% in. Trump and Clinton are tied in Duval County (Jacksonville), a place Trump absolutely needed to win. Meanwhile, the south Florida trio of Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties haven't reported anything except their early vote -- and Clinton's beating her benchmarks in all three.
4:54 PM: Ohio Senate race goes to Rob Portman without trouble. A state Democrats should have been competitive in, but where ex-Gov. Ted Strickland could not get off the ground. Meanwhile, Richard Burr is maintaining a slight lead in North Carolina -- but will it hold as Democratic areas start to come in?
4:51 PM: With Clinton's early numbers looking excellent in both Florida and Virginia (don't worry about the aggregate totals right now -- she's hitting or beating her benchmarks in the huge counties that will decide things), my eye falls on Pennsylvania. Florida and Virginia are blue-trending states where higher percentages of educated, professional, and/or Latino voters are giving Trump fits. Pennsylvania, at least in theory, cuts a different profile -- a state where their remains a solid core of working class white rust belters. If they break red this year in a mirror image of how Latinos and upscale professionals are turning blue, we still have a race. If not, we're done here.
4:42 PM: All the early numbers look dreadful for Evan Bayh, who seemed to piss away a sizable lead late in this race. I'm 10% satisfied, because Bayh is the quintessential entitled arrogant political hack and this is justified comeuppance, and 90% annoyed, because this was a Senate seat Democrats should have taken and he blew it hard. 24% in and he's down 55/39
4:40 PM: The VA-10 is one of those races that Democrats need to win if they have a chance of making the House interesting. It's a blue-trending district whose demographics (wealthy educated professionals) are primed to despise Trump, but currently held by a really strong Republican incumbent in Barbara Comstock. And with 22% in, Comstock is leading her Democratic challenger by a measly 400 votes.
4:35 PM: Man, it really will be interesting to see if the Latino tide that is drilling Trump in Florida right now carries over to sweep Rubio out of office. As much as I'd like to see it, it looks like there are enough ticket-splitters for Rubio to survive. There are some House races, too, where Democrats might see some stretchier pickups -- keep your eye on the FL-07.
4:27 PM: That said, it doesn't seem like Trump's misfortunes are carrying over to Marco Rubio. Right now, he's running 7 points ahead of Trump's pace -- enough to give him a five point lead over Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy.
4:23 PM: Early numbers looking very good for Clinton in Florida. She's ahead in Duval County, where Romney narrowly won in 2012 (and recall that Trump needs to do better than Romney to win the state). In Palm Beach County, she's starting out up 61/37 -- the benchmark she needs to hit is 58/41. Ditto Broward County, where Clinton wants to keep Trump at 32% or below ... and he's not even cracking 30% right now.
4:17 PM: There's a lot of crowing about South Carolina being "too close to call" following exit polls. I personally am less enthused, for two reasons. (1) SC is extremely polarized by race, so Democrats have both a high floor and a low ceiling; and (2) it does Clinton no good to lose SC by less than the typical Democrat. In fact, it's the possibility that Clinton will overperform in non-competitive states while getting nipped at the finish line in swing states that's been my main frustration with relying on national popular vote polls (and my main keep-me-up-at-night terror).
4:09 PM: CNN has called the Kentucky Senate race for Rand Paul. Not a surprise, even with Gray overperforming Clinton (and Grimes in 2014). I will observe -- not to give false hope -- that CNN's tally is behind other numbers I've seen (e.g., those nice numbers for Gray out of Fayette County).
4:05 PM: The GOP's stranglehold over the south may well be cracking. Virginia and North Carolina are already purple. Meanwhile younger voters -- and "younger" here means younger than 45 -- are now decisively in the Democratic corner in Georgia.
3:55 PM: One sleeper race that nobody had on the radar was the Kentucky Senate race, where Democrat Jim Gray challenged incumbent Senator Rand Paul (R). And to be sure, most sleeping races stay asleep. But in Fayette County, near Lexington, Gray is beating 61/39 with 80% in (by comparison, in 2014 Democratic candidate Allison Lundergan-Grimes won this county 52/45 in the course of losing statewide to Senator Mitch McConnell 56/40). But particularly in a state like Kentucky, it's entirely plausible that the more liberal portions of the state might swing noticeably to the D column even as the more conservative areas tilt even harder to the right -- and there are more of the latter than the former.
3:51 PM: Exit polls are tricky business. But if this one is at all accurate, it does not augur well for the GOP -- it has Latinos voting for Clinton over Trump by a crushing 79/18 split (it was 71/27 in 2012, 67/31 in 2008).
3:49 PM: Since we've got some time, let's use an early example of the importance of looking at comparative county level data rather than early aggregate numbers. There is currently one county in Indiana where a non-negligible percentage of the votes are in: Montgomery County, northwest of Indianapolis (59% in). At the presidential level, it's going 73/23 Trump (about a 5,000 vote advantage). Now, I have no idea if that's historically good or bad for the GOP nominee. What I do know is that at the Senate level, it's 63 Young (R)/30 Bayh (D), and for the Governor's race it's 61 Holcomb (R)/35 Gregg (D). So the downballot Democrats are running about 15 points ahead of Clinton in that county -- potentially a good sign that there's a non-trivial number of ticket-splitters, though again it's hard to know without info on how strongly Republican this county is (not to mention it's super-early, this is a relatively small county, etc. etc.).
3:39 PM: The first few polls have closed! They're in Kentucky, where nothing really is competitive, and Indiana, which is going to go for Trump at the Presidential level but has interesting races downballot. Of course, we still have some time before any sizable results come in.
11:58 AM: States are not a monolith. Different counties vote different ways -- in Florida, for example, Miami-Dade votes very differently than the Panhandle. Consequently, it's easy to be mislead by early returns which often come from a few counties which are likely to be unrepresentative of the state as a whole. What you want to do is see whether Democrats are over- or underperforming relative to their historic vote totals on a county-by-county level. If, for example, you saw that Clinton was getting 75% of the vote in St. Louis City, you might elated -- except that Obama got 83% there in 2012 and Clinton would want to approach 90% to counteract more conservative rural counties and win the entire state.
On this note, DK Elections' county benchmarks are an absolutely invaluable resource. They'll give a sense of where Democrats should be shooting for if they want to pick up swing states (and even in non swing states, overperforming 2012 numbers may be a good sign down ballot).
10:50 AM: I suppose I should get my final predictions in, while the getting's good:
President: Hillary Clinton 323 EV (49.2), Donald Trump 215 (45.1). Clinton takes Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and both Maine districts. Trump gets Ohio and Iowa.
Senate: 50/50. Democrats hold Nevada and flip Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and one of New Hampshire or North Carolina (force me to choose and I'll say New Hampshire). Republicans hold Florida, Indiana and (sadly) Missouri.
House: Democrats break 200 seats but fail to win a majority.
Gubernatorial: Democrats hold Missouri, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Montana; flip Indiana and North Carolina. If this comes true, it represents Democrats running the table on the contested governors' races -- but it seems like their candidates are overperforming compared to the Senate.8:17 AM: There won't be a lot worth reporting on for awhile, and I have a morning meeting anyway, so for now I'll just leave you with my personal GOTV theme lyrics, courtesy of Hoobastank's "Without a Fight":
The clock is counting down...
The seconds tick away...
This is our time! Without a doubt!
Time to ignite! We're not going down,
Without a fight!
This is our time! Get up off the ground!
Take what is mine! We're not going down,
Without a fight!
Monday, November 07, 2016
A Republic, If We Can Keep It
Ben Franklin was always my favorite founding father, at least since I played him in Burning Tree Elementary's Fifth Grade Play (the play was called Let George Do It, but my scene was actually a cut-in from 1776). It may even predate that -- I have to imagine I read Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin by his Good Mouse Amos at an even earlier age (an excellent children's book, by the way -- all good children's books contain mice).
Among Dr. Franklin's most famous lines was his reported statement, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention, that we had created "a Republic, if you can keep it."
The constitutional character of America is not something one can take for granted, and it is not something we claim by birthright. We must keep it, each and every day. It is an ongoing responsibility.
But some days are more salient than others. Election days are always among them, and this election day is more meaningful than most. This is the moment where we get to decide what sort of country we want to be. This is the moment where we get to prove that our homilies about law and liberty, equal justice and due process, free speech and free press, are more than just words.
Some of you (like myself) have already voted. If so, thank you. If you are waiting until election day, please make sure to go to the polls. And if you are still unsure of whether it's worth voting, or whether there's time, or whether it matters -- it is, there is, and it does.
America is not perfect, but it is a great Republic -- a haven for millions who have come to these shores seeking a better life, and a model for millions more inspired by our constitutional ideals. I never want America to stop being the sort of place people around the world look up to. I never want America to stop being the sort of place where people believe that they can achieve their dreams. I never want America to stop being the sort of place where people want to immigrate to.
America, is and has been all of these things. They define and demarcate our Republic.
Tomorrow, we will see if a majority of Americans find that Republic to be worth keeping.
Among Dr. Franklin's most famous lines was his reported statement, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention, that we had created "a Republic, if you can keep it."
The constitutional character of America is not something one can take for granted, and it is not something we claim by birthright. We must keep it, each and every day. It is an ongoing responsibility.
But some days are more salient than others. Election days are always among them, and this election day is more meaningful than most. This is the moment where we get to decide what sort of country we want to be. This is the moment where we get to prove that our homilies about law and liberty, equal justice and due process, free speech and free press, are more than just words.
Some of you (like myself) have already voted. If so, thank you. If you are waiting until election day, please make sure to go to the polls. And if you are still unsure of whether it's worth voting, or whether there's time, or whether it matters -- it is, there is, and it does.
America is not perfect, but it is a great Republic -- a haven for millions who have come to these shores seeking a better life, and a model for millions more inspired by our constitutional ideals. I never want America to stop being the sort of place people around the world look up to. I never want America to stop being the sort of place where people believe that they can achieve their dreams. I never want America to stop being the sort of place where people want to immigrate to.
America, is and has been all of these things. They define and demarcate our Republic.
Tomorrow, we will see if a majority of Americans find that Republic to be worth keeping.
Friday, October 14, 2016
Resolved: Trump-Supporting Jews Can Never Call Other Jews "Self-Hating"
Donald Trump's latest speech was notable for basically being a "best-of" compilation of anti-Semitic dogwhistles: A mysterious cabal of "international bankers" who are pushing for "radical globalization" and who have "virtually unlimited" financial, political, and media resources. This was after his second debate performance, where virtually every name he dropped as part of the nefarious Clintonite conspiracy was a Jewish one (Blumenthal, Soros, Gruber....). And that, in turn, follows from his more-or-less explicit promotion of a rabidly anti-Semitic alt-right led by David Duke and an array of other neo-Nazis whom Trump has barely brought himself to disavow.
Yet despite this, Donald Trump still has Jewish supporters. We shouldn't overstate the extent of this -- Jews on the whole are overwhelmingly Democratic to begin with, and even among Republicans Jews have been prominent members of the #NeverTrump movement. I simply observe that Trump continues to have some Jewish supporters. The Republican Jewish Coalition still hasn't pulled their endorsement, for example. Sheldon Adelson remains a high-profile backer. And the New York Jewish Week, in the course of endorsing Hillary Clinton for President (it's first endorsement in its history), especially chided the Orthodox Jewish community for being willing to back a candidate that so openly flouts their purported values of "piety, modesty in terms of sexual contact and respect for leaders with spiritual and intellectual authority."
So these Jews exist, albeit as a small minority of the whole. And to those Jews whom -- after all the contempt that Trump has ladled onto our community and our values -- continue to support Trump, I'll simply say this. I would never call you a "self-hating Jew". I loathe that term; I virtually never use it, and I won't use it here. But if you vote for Trump, you forfeit the right to ever call other Jews "self-hating".
Deal?
Yet despite this, Donald Trump still has Jewish supporters. We shouldn't overstate the extent of this -- Jews on the whole are overwhelmingly Democratic to begin with, and even among Republicans Jews have been prominent members of the #NeverTrump movement. I simply observe that Trump continues to have some Jewish supporters. The Republican Jewish Coalition still hasn't pulled their endorsement, for example. Sheldon Adelson remains a high-profile backer. And the New York Jewish Week, in the course of endorsing Hillary Clinton for President (it's first endorsement in its history), especially chided the Orthodox Jewish community for being willing to back a candidate that so openly flouts their purported values of "piety, modesty in terms of sexual contact and respect for leaders with spiritual and intellectual authority."
So these Jews exist, albeit as a small minority of the whole. And to those Jews whom -- after all the contempt that Trump has ladled onto our community and our values -- continue to support Trump, I'll simply say this. I would never call you a "self-hating Jew". I loathe that term; I virtually never use it, and I won't use it here. But if you vote for Trump, you forfeit the right to ever call other Jews "self-hating".
Deal?
Monday, October 10, 2016
Three Things I'm Scared Of Right Now
A new NBC/WSJ poll taken in the aftermath of the Donald Trump sexual assault comments has Hillary Clinton up a whopping 11 points in a four-way race (it jumps to 14 points in a two way). FiveThirtyEight has her chances of winning the presidency at 82%; Daily Kos Elections has her at 94% (and while I wouldn't normally trust a partisan site like Daily Kos, DK Elections is the successor to the old "Swing State Project" site -- a group I very much trust and whom I'm found to be eminently impartial and reliable in their electoral analysis). The polls look good, and that makes me feel good.
But still worried. Here are three things that will keep me up at night until the moment Hillary Clinton gets a check mark next to her name on election day.
(1) From Brexit to the Columbia peace deal, this year it seems like polls have consistently underestimated the electoral allure of right-wing resentment. Do they underestimate it by enough to overcome an ever-widening Clinton lead -- and Clinton's far superior campaign organization and ground game? I don't think so, but who knows? This one boils down to "can I trust the polls", and while the answer to that isn't always yes, it's never reliably no, so I'm trying to put this one aside.
(2) If Trump wins, how much unrest will we see in America's streets? Trump's "Second Amendment" comment raised the question of whether his supporters would even accept a Clinton election (and it took a long time for him to say if he'd do so when answering that question directly in the first debate). But there is a simmering mix of anger and fear of a Trump presidency in many corners of America too -- anger that America has not been living up to its promises of equal justice under law, and fear that Trump is the manifestation of White Americans preference that we continue not to do so. If there are marches or demonstrations in American urban centers, we could see a genuine, military-style crackdown from a Trump administration. It's not like he has much care or respect for the bounds of law.
(3) Russians hacking the polling machines. This one might be my greatest fear, because even if we catch it, it would still throw our nation into chaos without clear route to recovery. The risk is real, and I'm honestly not sure why Russia wouldn't try it. Imagine how it would play out: We start seeing suspiciously high Trump numbers in precincts he shouldn't be close in. The President and the head of the CIA announce that they are sure that the polling machines have been compromised by a Russian intrusion. Does anyone think any Republican would believe it? They'd immediately go in on how Obama and Hillary are trying to steal the election! Even if the evidence of Russian tampering is clear, it will no doubt be technical and not amenable to "smoking gun" images or videos. Circumstances like this require trust in our governmental institutions, and the rise of Donald Trump is the rise of a large swath of Americans who have been willing to believe anything and everything about Obama, Clinton, and the entire federal government. There's no way they'd accept a hacking story, even if it was entirely true
But still worried. Here are three things that will keep me up at night until the moment Hillary Clinton gets a check mark next to her name on election day.
(1) From Brexit to the Columbia peace deal, this year it seems like polls have consistently underestimated the electoral allure of right-wing resentment. Do they underestimate it by enough to overcome an ever-widening Clinton lead -- and Clinton's far superior campaign organization and ground game? I don't think so, but who knows? This one boils down to "can I trust the polls", and while the answer to that isn't always yes, it's never reliably no, so I'm trying to put this one aside.
(2) If Trump wins, how much unrest will we see in America's streets? Trump's "Second Amendment" comment raised the question of whether his supporters would even accept a Clinton election (and it took a long time for him to say if he'd do so when answering that question directly in the first debate). But there is a simmering mix of anger and fear of a Trump presidency in many corners of America too -- anger that America has not been living up to its promises of equal justice under law, and fear that Trump is the manifestation of White Americans preference that we continue not to do so. If there are marches or demonstrations in American urban centers, we could see a genuine, military-style crackdown from a Trump administration. It's not like he has much care or respect for the bounds of law.
(3) Russians hacking the polling machines. This one might be my greatest fear, because even if we catch it, it would still throw our nation into chaos without clear route to recovery. The risk is real, and I'm honestly not sure why Russia wouldn't try it. Imagine how it would play out: We start seeing suspiciously high Trump numbers in precincts he shouldn't be close in. The President and the head of the CIA announce that they are sure that the polling machines have been compromised by a Russian intrusion. Does anyone think any Republican would believe it? They'd immediately go in on how Obama and Hillary are trying to steal the election! Even if the evidence of Russian tampering is clear, it will no doubt be technical and not amenable to "smoking gun" images or videos. Circumstances like this require trust in our governmental institutions, and the rise of Donald Trump is the rise of a large swath of Americans who have been willing to believe anything and everything about Obama, Clinton, and the entire federal government. There's no way they'd accept a hacking story, even if it was entirely true
Sunday, October 09, 2016
2016 Presidential Debate #2: Quick Reactions
I have never, in my life, seen a debate where expectations where set so low for one of the candidates. Donald Trump would have done "better than expected" if he managed to go the whole evening without being kicked off the ballot by his own party. And yet, at the start, he managed to possibly sink below a bar that was literally lying on the ground. He looked like hell. He could not stop sniffing. His answer to the question about his sexual assault braggadocio was beyond awful. His constant whining about the terrible biased moderators was simply pathetic. And then there was his horrifying promise to jail Hillary Clinton when the night was over -- a statement that goes well beyond "will Donald Trump be bad for America" and crosses into "will Donald Trump preserve democracy in America?"
He did, to be sure, get better as the night went on. For the most part, "better" just meant that he was merely incoherent -- repeating buzz words and talking points without even the semblance of substance behind them. Still, you could at least spot some potentially plausible themes (Clinton is all talk, no action) that could have resonance. And Clinton, for her part, didn't seem as comfortable with the format as she did in the first debate. Her big strength the first time around was basically acting as if Donald wasn't in the room -- refusing to engage him, refusing to give him oxygen. The more free-wheeling town hall format (and Trump's incessant interruptions) seemed to nudge her towards feeding thetroll Trump, and not to her benefit. Finally, it has to be said that Trump's last answer ("say one nice thing about your opponent") was actually, genuinely, not-grading-on-a-curve excellent.
But still, the absolute best you could say for Trump was this was a draw (CNN's instant poll gave Clinton a solid victory, YouGov gave her a narrower win). And a draw isn't going to cut it for a candidate who is falling behind and whose campaign is floundering.
So right now, I'm less focused on the horse race aspects, and more on where we are as a nation. Ezra Klein got it right a few days ago:
America deserves better than this. But we're not going to get it, not because Hillary Clinton isn't qualified to tackle these issues -- she absolutely is -- but because Trump has dragged us back from a mature democracy to a faltering, barely functioning one. And that is truly unforgivable.
(See my reaction to the first debate here)
He did, to be sure, get better as the night went on. For the most part, "better" just meant that he was merely incoherent -- repeating buzz words and talking points without even the semblance of substance behind them. Still, you could at least spot some potentially plausible themes (Clinton is all talk, no action) that could have resonance. And Clinton, for her part, didn't seem as comfortable with the format as she did in the first debate. Her big strength the first time around was basically acting as if Donald wasn't in the room -- refusing to engage him, refusing to give him oxygen. The more free-wheeling town hall format (and Trump's incessant interruptions) seemed to nudge her towards feeding the
But still, the absolute best you could say for Trump was this was a draw (CNN's instant poll gave Clinton a solid victory, YouGov gave her a narrower win). And a draw isn't going to cut it for a candidate who is falling behind and whose campaign is floundering.
So right now, I'm less focused on the horse race aspects, and more on where we are as a nation. Ezra Klein got it right a few days ago:
But the question isn’t whether Trump has any decency. We’ve known for some time that he doesn’t. The question is whether we have any decency — whether we will elect this man, or even come close to electing this man, knowing all we know about him.What's sad about tonight is the way it represents such a retrogression for our nation. The world is changing at a breakneck pace, and with these changes come new and novel concerns. The problems that have emerged -- getting universal health care for everyone, ensuring that equality is true in practice as well as creed, overcoming unprecedented environmental hazards that threaten our entire ecosystem (just to name a few) -- are both difficult but also solvable if we put our heads down and work on them. Yet what the Trump candidacy has shown -- even if he loses -- is that we're still stuck on the basics. "Do we jail our political opponents?" "Do we brag about our ability to assault women?" "Do we impose flat bans on entire religious groups?" This is all 101-level material, and yet this is what we are spending our political efforts on.
America deserves better than this. But we're not going to get it, not because Hillary Clinton isn't qualified to tackle these issues -- she absolutely is -- but because Trump has dragged us back from a mature democracy to a faltering, barely functioning one. And that is truly unforgivable.
(See my reaction to the first debate here)
Saturday, October 08, 2016
Ratfucking Your Way to a Democratic Congress
"Ratfucking" is political slang for a dirty trick. Sometimes they're outright illegal (think, oh I don't know, hacking into an opponent's emails). But sometimes they're merely underhanded. One popular form of ratfucking, for example, is when a party runs ads in the opposing party's primary denouncing the (more moderate and electable) candidate as "not a true conservative/progressive". The hope is that this enflames the base to nominate a more extreme or polarizing candidate, who would in turn be an easier general election foe.
The latest burst of Donald Trump misogyny has finally caused a non-insubstantial number of prominent Republicans to withdraw their endorsement of their own candidate, or even pledge not to vote for him. Some of these Republicans include New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who just a few days ago called Trump a good role model (and is being hammered for it by her Democratic opponent) and Nevada Senate candidate Joe Heck, locked in a tight race with Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. These disavowals, in turn, have generated a furious response from the GOP base which remains avidly pro-Trump. Heck was booed by his own supporters when he announced he was abandoning Trump. Paul Ryan received similar treatment from his hometown crowd after he bailed on a planned rally with Trump.
There has always been a gap between the Republican Party leadership -- which was always worried about Trump and thought he'd be a burden on the ticket -- and the base, which continues to adore him. The entire GOP side of the presidential race, after all, has been the sustained story of the party elites being unable to stop Trump (who -- to be perfectly clear -- I consider to be a beast of their creation. The GOP elite thought it could indefinitely whip up ever-more conspiratorial anti-Obama, anti-Clinton, anti-liberal, anti-government hysteria and yet still keep their base firmly under its own thumb. This entire election has been the story of that hubris blowing up in their face). But right now, it's perhaps more stark than ever: Party leaders actually abandoning their own nominee a month out from the election, while the Party cadre continuing to back him in earnest.
So what would happen if "someone" (probably some hitherto unknown group with a name like "People for a Greater America") started putting up some targeted ads urging Republican voters to not support the "traitors" who have turned on Trump? Label them RINOs, label them appeasers, label them tools of the wretched Hillary Clinton. Haven't we had enough of Republicans who knuckle under to the liberal media and PC culture? If they don't back Trump, why should Trump and his people back them? Throw a couple ads like that in select Nevada markets aimed at the folks who booed Heck, and watch the chaos blossom.
Of course, such a move would stand in tension with another Democratic objective: convincing anti-Trump swing voters that a vote for folks like Heck and Ayotte is akin to a vote for Trump. But with a sufficiently deft touch, it could be managed. There is a core of angry Trump supporters who are primed to hear this message, and they don't necessarily live in the same place or watch the same media as the suburban swing voters for whom Democrats very much want to harp on the "Trump = GOP" message. Hell, if one does it right one could probably get The Donald to tweet something out in favor. Every fiber of Trump's being probably wants to savage those turncoat Republicans who are urging him out of the race. Give him the opportunity, and I bet he'd lash out at them almost as a matter of reflex.
The GOP is fracturing wide open, and the Party's new strategy seems to be to throw Trump overboard in the hopes that it might save their downballot nominees. That might work ... if Trump's base continues to stay loyal to Republican politicians who just sold their candidate down the river. It seems to me that there are ample opportunities for a creative political operative to make that task much more difficult.
The latest burst of Donald Trump misogyny has finally caused a non-insubstantial number of prominent Republicans to withdraw their endorsement of their own candidate, or even pledge not to vote for him. Some of these Republicans include New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who just a few days ago called Trump a good role model (and is being hammered for it by her Democratic opponent) and Nevada Senate candidate Joe Heck, locked in a tight race with Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. These disavowals, in turn, have generated a furious response from the GOP base which remains avidly pro-Trump. Heck was booed by his own supporters when he announced he was abandoning Trump. Paul Ryan received similar treatment from his hometown crowd after he bailed on a planned rally with Trump.
There has always been a gap between the Republican Party leadership -- which was always worried about Trump and thought he'd be a burden on the ticket -- and the base, which continues to adore him. The entire GOP side of the presidential race, after all, has been the sustained story of the party elites being unable to stop Trump (who -- to be perfectly clear -- I consider to be a beast of their creation. The GOP elite thought it could indefinitely whip up ever-more conspiratorial anti-Obama, anti-Clinton, anti-liberal, anti-government hysteria and yet still keep their base firmly under its own thumb. This entire election has been the story of that hubris blowing up in their face). But right now, it's perhaps more stark than ever: Party leaders actually abandoning their own nominee a month out from the election, while the Party cadre continuing to back him in earnest.
So what would happen if "someone" (probably some hitherto unknown group with a name like "People for a Greater America") started putting up some targeted ads urging Republican voters to not support the "traitors" who have turned on Trump? Label them RINOs, label them appeasers, label them tools of the wretched Hillary Clinton. Haven't we had enough of Republicans who knuckle under to the liberal media and PC culture? If they don't back Trump, why should Trump and his people back them? Throw a couple ads like that in select Nevada markets aimed at the folks who booed Heck, and watch the chaos blossom.
Of course, such a move would stand in tension with another Democratic objective: convincing anti-Trump swing voters that a vote for folks like Heck and Ayotte is akin to a vote for Trump. But with a sufficiently deft touch, it could be managed. There is a core of angry Trump supporters who are primed to hear this message, and they don't necessarily live in the same place or watch the same media as the suburban swing voters for whom Democrats very much want to harp on the "Trump = GOP" message. Hell, if one does it right one could probably get The Donald to tweet something out in favor. Every fiber of Trump's being probably wants to savage those turncoat Republicans who are urging him out of the race. Give him the opportunity, and I bet he'd lash out at them almost as a matter of reflex.
The GOP is fracturing wide open, and the Party's new strategy seems to be to throw Trump overboard in the hopes that it might save their downballot nominees. That might work ... if Trump's base continues to stay loyal to Republican politicians who just sold their candidate down the river. It seems to me that there are ample opportunities for a creative political operative to make that task much more difficult.
Friday, October 07, 2016
Could Misogyny, Of All Things, Finally Destroy Donald Trump?
In our latest spin of the "outrageous Trump remarks" wheel, we landed on misogyny. Specifically, comments Trump made during taping for Access Hollywood where he graphically talked about sexually assaulting women:
And while the comments themselves really cannot honestly surprise anyone, the reaction to them is a bit striking. Liberals have certainly noticed, and been quite wry -- "oh, it was okay to call Mexicans rapists, and to suggest banning all Muslims, and to fan a resurgent conservative anti-Semitism -- but this was the step too far?" Indeed, while there have been other moments where Trump has said outrageous things and political commentators have declared him dead, only for him to emerge stronger than before (think the John McCain "captured" comments), this feels different -- he is the Republican standard-bearer, there is no deluding oneself that by condemning Trump one can simply switch support to another conservative.
Honestly, it is hard to explain. And I'd be very curious to hear what someone like Kate Manne -- who has written very incisively on the role of misogyny in this election and in our society -- thinks of this development. Right now -- improbable as it may be -- it looks like Trump's misogyny might have finally closed the door on his candidacy. There's almost -- almost -- a sense in which it is heartening (though I won't pop any champagne until November 9).
During the lewd conversation captured by a microphone Trump was wearing on his lapel, Trump recounts how he tried to "fuck" an unidentified married woman before bragging that he is "automatically attracted to beautiful (women)" and just starts "kissing them." The conversation came just months after Trump married his third and current wife, Melania.
He also said: "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."How lovely. But this has stood out in that it has seemed to generate a particularly ferocious condemnation from Trump's fellow Republicans. Paul Ryan, set to campaign side-by-side with Trump for the first time, withdrew his invitation and declared himself "sickened". Reince Priebus was far more blunt than I've ever seen him: "no woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever." Jon Huntsman went from endorsing Trump to demanding that he drop out. Even Trump gave a non-apology-apology of the "I apologize if anyone was offended" variety (Jeb Bush: "no apology can excuse away Donald Trump's reprehensible comments degrading women.").
And while the comments themselves really cannot honestly surprise anyone, the reaction to them is a bit striking. Liberals have certainly noticed, and been quite wry -- "oh, it was okay to call Mexicans rapists, and to suggest banning all Muslims, and to fan a resurgent conservative anti-Semitism -- but this was the step too far?" Indeed, while there have been other moments where Trump has said outrageous things and political commentators have declared him dead, only for him to emerge stronger than before (think the John McCain "captured" comments), this feels different -- he is the Republican standard-bearer, there is no deluding oneself that by condemning Trump one can simply switch support to another conservative.
Honestly, it is hard to explain. And I'd be very curious to hear what someone like Kate Manne -- who has written very incisively on the role of misogyny in this election and in our society -- thinks of this development. Right now -- improbable as it may be -- it looks like Trump's misogyny might have finally closed the door on his candidacy. There's almost -- almost -- a sense in which it is heartening (though I won't pop any champagne until November 9).
Monday, September 26, 2016
2016 Presidential Debate #1: Quick Reactions
First things first: Under any definition of "winning" that goes beyond "did Donald Trump manage to stay coherent and under control for a single 90 second span", Hillary Clinton won this debate hands down. There's simply no question. No, Donald Trump did not spontaneously combust in a paroxysm of rage (though there were a few moments where I genuinely wondered if he was having a panic attack). Yes, he did manage to emphasize a few effective tropes, such the alleged mismatch between Clinton's rhetoric now and her record of accomplishment. But the overall effect was of a blustering, out of his league lunatic who could not stop interrupting, could not stop snorting, could not stop eye-rolling, and for much of the evening could barely string two coherent sentences together. That's just not going to fly on this level.
Of course, I'm biased -- but even the Republicans I've seen have scored the debate either a Clinton win or, at best, a draw. Their main complaint, of course, is to blame the refs -- the moderator, we're told, was biased! They point out that far less time was spent on Clinton's emails than on Trump's birtherism.
You want to know why that is? It's because Clinton's answer on emails was simple: she acknowledged a mistake, and left it at that. No attempt at a convoluted justification, no complaints that the whole thing was blown out of proportion, no conspiracy theory about how it was all in her opponent's head. And if you contrast that to Trump, you get what might have been his biggest problem all night: he could not let anything go. Birtherism? It was all Clinton's fault, and Trump actually did Obama a favor! Iraq war? An endless stream of consciousness demanding that we call Sean Hannity to verify that he was too an opponent. Racial discrimination? "We never admitted any guilt," and by the way, did I tell you about the time my club admitted Black people? It reached a peak when Trump started going off on how actually he had the better "temperament" compared to Clinton, and I was like "really dude? Is this the hill you want to die on?" Even Trump's supporters must have been groaning.
Clinton performed well because she actually possesses some self-discipline and was able to blunt potential problem areas early, sucking the air out of the issue. Trump was like a frenzied chihuahua on Adderall, chasing down anything and everything and hobbling himself with assertions that ranged from ludicrous (everything was "the worst deal ever") to self-sabotaging (did he just admit he paid no federal taxes?). And I have to think that every single woman watching that debate had their blood pressure rise in empathy each time Donald Trump insisted on talking over the calm, collected, prepared woman next to her.
The only thing that seems to be causing people to hesitate in awarding Clinton a total victory is the idea that "Trump is different." We thought he got eviscerated in the primary debates too, and his people loved him even more for it. I saw Nicolle Wallace make that point on NBC, and Kevin Drum said the same in his recap. To that, I simply observe that the GOP primary is not the general, and the same rules don't apply. GOP primary rules get you Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell. General election rules get those candidates annihilated as independents flee in terror.
This debate was the first time Americans really got a chance to see their 2016 choices side-by-side. It presented a stark choice, and not a particularly difficult one. I predict that when the full reactions are in, independents and swing voters will not react kindly to what Trump was selling.
Of course, I'm biased -- but even the Republicans I've seen have scored the debate either a Clinton win or, at best, a draw. Their main complaint, of course, is to blame the refs -- the moderator, we're told, was biased! They point out that far less time was spent on Clinton's emails than on Trump's birtherism.
You want to know why that is? It's because Clinton's answer on emails was simple: she acknowledged a mistake, and left it at that. No attempt at a convoluted justification, no complaints that the whole thing was blown out of proportion, no conspiracy theory about how it was all in her opponent's head. And if you contrast that to Trump, you get what might have been his biggest problem all night: he could not let anything go. Birtherism? It was all Clinton's fault, and Trump actually did Obama a favor! Iraq war? An endless stream of consciousness demanding that we call Sean Hannity to verify that he was too an opponent. Racial discrimination? "We never admitted any guilt," and by the way, did I tell you about the time my club admitted Black people? It reached a peak when Trump started going off on how actually he had the better "temperament" compared to Clinton, and I was like "really dude? Is this the hill you want to die on?" Even Trump's supporters must have been groaning.
Clinton performed well because she actually possesses some self-discipline and was able to blunt potential problem areas early, sucking the air out of the issue. Trump was like a frenzied chihuahua on Adderall, chasing down anything and everything and hobbling himself with assertions that ranged from ludicrous (everything was "the worst deal ever") to self-sabotaging (did he just admit he paid no federal taxes?). And I have to think that every single woman watching that debate had their blood pressure rise in empathy each time Donald Trump insisted on talking over the calm, collected, prepared woman next to her.
The only thing that seems to be causing people to hesitate in awarding Clinton a total victory is the idea that "Trump is different." We thought he got eviscerated in the primary debates too, and his people loved him even more for it. I saw Nicolle Wallace make that point on NBC, and Kevin Drum said the same in his recap. To that, I simply observe that the GOP primary is not the general, and the same rules don't apply. GOP primary rules get you Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell. General election rules get those candidates annihilated as independents flee in terror.
This debate was the first time Americans really got a chance to see their 2016 choices side-by-side. It presented a stark choice, and not a particularly difficult one. I predict that when the full reactions are in, independents and swing voters will not react kindly to what Trump was selling.
Friday, August 12, 2016
If You Like the Greens, You'll LOVE Donald Trump
The Forward manages to not only find the rare Jewish Trump voter, but, well, I'll let his justification speak for itself:
Let me be clear: I am to the left of President Obama on healthcare. I believe Bernie represents the best instincts of public service, though I find some of his views and certainly some of his supporters an anathema. I have spent most of my professional career in not for profit work around the country.
I am Jewish, and this election will be no different than past elections. A very high percentage of my fellow Jews with whom I have identified, lived and worked among for my entire life overwhelmingly supporting the Democratic candidate.
Yet, I will continue what has become a 21st century electoral activity for me: proudly voting for the Republican at the top of the ticket during presidential years. At the same time, you should know, I continue my equally stubborn sense of independence down ballot, and I have voted for at least one local Green Party candidate for Congress, though again I found certain of his views utterly distasteful. Ethics matter to me, especially when you have a very long track record.
Donald Trump is a wild man and a populist. I believe both judgments are exactly what America needs. If anything, I hope he can fob off the corporate Republicans more worried about planning their taxes. I think he can; I know Hillary can’t shake off the yoke of Wall Street.With leftist credentials like that, what's left to argue about? Trump is the only realistic choice for Green Party leftists concerned about health care, ethics, and reining in Wall Street. The good news is that those four paragraphs pretty much sum up all you need to know about both Trump supporters and Green Party voters.
Monday, August 01, 2016
The Khan Family and Volunteering to Sacrifice
The speech given by the family of Captain Humayun Khan, Muslim, son of immigrants, who died serving in the American army in Iraq, was one of the most powerful moments of this campaign. The response of Donald Trump and his campaign has been one of the darkest. Smearing a Gold Star family, insinuating that the mother of the fallen hero wasn't "allowed" to speak -- it was truly grotesque. Several Trump supporters have, regrettably, followed suit -- this column has been making the rounds on Twitter for example. An old friend of mine posted another one on Facebook by a man named Chris Mark arguing that since Khan volunteered to serve in the American army, he -- not his parents -- is the only one who could be said to have sacrificed. Mark was clearly frustrated that the Khans were supporting a political party that he viewed as insufficiently supportive of the troops, and contended that "[t]o conflate the need to prevent potential terrorists from entering our country with the belief that ‘all Muslims’ should be banned is simply wrong and disingenuous."
I'm reposting, with minor edits, my response to the friend. Before I do so, though, I should observe that my friend is himself a person of color, of South Asian descent, who is currently serving in the American armed forces. I make that notation because it is always worth noting the perspective from which someone is coming from, particularly when it might diverge from popular expectations regarding what someone from that background would think. In any event, here is what I wrote in reply:
I'm reposting, with minor edits, my response to the friend. Before I do so, though, I should observe that my friend is himself a person of color, of South Asian descent, who is currently serving in the American armed forces. I make that notation because it is always worth noting the perspective from which someone is coming from, particularly when it might diverge from popular expectations regarding what someone from that background would think. In any event, here is what I wrote in reply:
The question of whether a Gold Star family has itself "sacrificed" something strikes me as semantic at best; I've never before heard anyone chiding the family of a fallen soldier that they cannot speak of sacrifice. I'm doubtful one wants to plant one's flag on those grounds.
That said, the spirit of voluntarism does matter. All those who serve choose to put themselves in harm's way; that choice demands respect and admiration. But Trump's proposal for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" (it is Mark who is "simply wrong and disingenuous" to characterize this as "the need to prevent potential terrorists from entering our country". There is nobody who does not seek to prevent the latter; Trump was unambiguous in calling precisely for a blanket ban on all Muslim arrivals, as the link in Mark's own letter attests to) disrespects that voluntarism. The ethic of service, of voluntary sacrifice, is but a manifestation of the larger American ethos that we are who we choose to be, not what society or government assumes us to be. Khan chose to be a soldier and chose to risk the ultimate sacrifice. But were it up to Trump, Capt. Khan would have never had the opportunity to make the choice to serve in the first place, because Trump would not have let his family arrive in the United States at all. Trump's policy treats the Khan family as a threat solely due to their faith. That judgment crashes against the reality that they produced a hero.
There's a more basic point at work here, though. I can understand the frustration from someone who sees a military family carrying water for a party that he feels doesn't support the troops. As the respective conventions make evident, there are many other families of servicemembers or other public servants that feel the same way about the GOP. And it will thus inevitably be the case that some persons who have or whose loved ones have sacrificed themselves for our nation will be the authors of pained charges against those political figures they view as having failed them and their families. And those charges may not be right or accurate or even fair. The GOP has put up some Benghazi families in similar roles to that taken up by Khan's parents; no doubt Secretary Clinton views their charges as deeply wrongful.
But if you're a decent public servant dealing with a grieving family -- even one saying bad things about you, even one giving a speech attacking you -- you take the hit. You don't issue a snarky press release, you don't suggest the family forbids women from talking. Cindy Sheehan said plenty of things about President Bush that I (no fan of 43) found pretty ridiculous. But Bush, to his credit, didn't degrade or demean her. He took the hit, because sometimes taking the hit is part of the job. And that basic decency, unfortunately, is something Donald Trump proved he is just not capable of doing.Has Trump finally gone too far? I doubt it. If "too far" hasn't happened yet, I don't know why this would change anything. But who knows. It would be poetic justice if the straw that finally broke this bigoted camel's back was that Donald Trump could not help himself in attacking the family of a Muslim, first-generation, American war hero.
Thursday, July 28, 2016
God is in the Details
Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, and I couldn't be happier. Her speech was quite good, even though it is tough for her to compete with legendary orators like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. On that note, my sentiments were summed up perfectly by one of my law firm friends:
The fact is, politics isn't about the sweeping arc or the soaring speech. It is often "a victory of a hundred thousand inches"; the strong and sole boring through hard boards. It isn't always sexy, or high-profile, or headline-worthy. It isn't always even lovable. But each one of those inches matters to someone, and we should never sell short the commitment it takes to keep on shouldering that ball a little forward, day in and day out.
So if I was to pick the line in Clinton's speech that stuck with me -- the reason I'll pull the lever for Hillary Clinton not as the best of bad options, not because she's what we're stuck with, but with pride, optimism, and enthusiasm -- it's
Look, Hillary does do the service part better than the public part.... But that's part of why I love her. Too many of our politicians do the reverse.Where it matters, Hillary Clinton gets it done.
The fact is, politics isn't about the sweeping arc or the soaring speech. It is often "a victory of a hundred thousand inches"; the strong and sole boring through hard boards. It isn't always sexy, or high-profile, or headline-worthy. It isn't always even lovable. But each one of those inches matters to someone, and we should never sell short the commitment it takes to keep on shouldering that ball a little forward, day in and day out.
So if I was to pick the line in Clinton's speech that stuck with me -- the reason I'll pull the lever for Hillary Clinton not as the best of bad options, not because she's what we're stuck with, but with pride, optimism, and enthusiasm -- it's
Because it's not just a detail if it's your kid.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Jill Stein: The Ultimate Ideological Compromise
Last week, I explored the issue of whether leftists "should" vote for Jill Stein. Many people on the left frame the choice as being between ideological purity -- the candidate whose positions are closer to their ideal candidate -- and realism about who can get elected. My argument was that (a) part of the preference calculation for picking one candidate over another should include the realistic effects of that choice (here, making it more likely Trump comes into office), and (b) while one can decide that said effects are less important than avoiding the moral compromise of voting Clinton, that decision is substantively awful and is condemnation-worthy in itself.
But while I still agree with that analysis, I also think it gives Stein way too much credit, in that it accepts the basic suggestion that Stein is a non-compromised, purely progressive choice hampered only by the fact that she stands no chance of victory.* In reality, many of Stein's positions range from the objectively terrible to the merely incoherent. The "realism" argument isn't just about political realism but policy realism -- Jill Stein swaps out actual progressive reforms in favor of vague fulminations about how the "system" is all that stands between us and our hearts' desires. It's the revenge of the Green Lantern Theory of Politics. To the extent that progressives have an ideological commitment to, say, basic precepts of science, it is not an uncompromised position to punch the ballot for a candidate who plays footsie with anti-Vaxxers and rejects the scientific consensus on GMOs.
To take one example near to my heart, Jill Stein's energy platform calls for moving completely to clean power sources by 2030. That sounds great; I'm all for aggressive efforts to promote clean power. But in this call she excludes nuclear power and (if we take the Green Party platform seriously) hydroelectric as well, without which the move to clean power is essentially impossible (unlike, say, wind or solar, nuclear power and hydroelectric power are "dispatchable" sources of power -- they can run at any time as needed, as opposed to only when the sun shines or the wind blows. This attribute is absolutely essential for grid stability, which is why we couldn't just build a lot more solar plants to replace our fossil fuel generators). This isn't a more ideologically pure energy package that suffers from being a political non-starter; it's an ideologically blinkered energy package that suffers from being utterly unmoored from any understanding of how the electricity grid works, much less how to leverage it in favor of our environmental goals.
To put it another way, the choice isn't between a flawed progressive who can get elected and a great progressive who can't. It's between a flawed progressive who can get elected and an even more flawed progressive who can't. Voting for Jill Stein is a massive ideological compromise for anyone who thinks of themselves progressive. And one gets the sense that it only feels like a "pure" choice because Stein stands no chance of being elected; the vote isn't even "for Stein" as much as it is "against the system."
And that logic hammers home another reality: The basis of Jill Stein's appeal is more or less the same as that which pulls people to Donald Trump. Both are seeking to harness an inchoate anti-establishmentarian rage that need not (and in many ways prefers not) tie itself to the world of facts and data. Everything from workable policy agendas to a basic consonance with the factual world can be dismissed as a sort of establishment-gotcha. It is to the great credit of the American left that Stein looks like she'll only muster support from the left-most 2% of the electorate or so, while Trump will capture the votes of at least the right-most 46%.
I doubt that most left-wingers are going to end up voting for Jill Stein. And it strikes me as equally unlikely that they will be the ones to tilt the election over to Donald Trump (though the spectre of Nader continues to linger). But regardless of whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins come November, if you're a Jill Stein supporter you don't get the consolation prize of knowing you kept your ideological purity intact. You compromised your integrity just as much as anyone else did.
* Some might object and argue that Stein, while not perfect, is on net a better progressive than Hillary Clinton. I'm not sure I'd even cede that, but I'll also stand my ground on the argument as presented. If voting Jill Stein is conceded to be an ideological compromise, it isn't clear how the argument against voting for Hillary Clinton on the grounds that one is tired of "compromising" sustains itself. At most it could be an argument of degree -- I'll concede up to Jill Stein, but not further -- but that's rarely how it is presented and lacks quite a bit of the self-righteous purity that normally drives the claim.
But while I still agree with that analysis, I also think it gives Stein way too much credit, in that it accepts the basic suggestion that Stein is a non-compromised, purely progressive choice hampered only by the fact that she stands no chance of victory.* In reality, many of Stein's positions range from the objectively terrible to the merely incoherent. The "realism" argument isn't just about political realism but policy realism -- Jill Stein swaps out actual progressive reforms in favor of vague fulminations about how the "system" is all that stands between us and our hearts' desires. It's the revenge of the Green Lantern Theory of Politics. To the extent that progressives have an ideological commitment to, say, basic precepts of science, it is not an uncompromised position to punch the ballot for a candidate who plays footsie with anti-Vaxxers and rejects the scientific consensus on GMOs.
To take one example near to my heart, Jill Stein's energy platform calls for moving completely to clean power sources by 2030. That sounds great; I'm all for aggressive efforts to promote clean power. But in this call she excludes nuclear power and (if we take the Green Party platform seriously) hydroelectric as well, without which the move to clean power is essentially impossible (unlike, say, wind or solar, nuclear power and hydroelectric power are "dispatchable" sources of power -- they can run at any time as needed, as opposed to only when the sun shines or the wind blows. This attribute is absolutely essential for grid stability, which is why we couldn't just build a lot more solar plants to replace our fossil fuel generators). This isn't a more ideologically pure energy package that suffers from being a political non-starter; it's an ideologically blinkered energy package that suffers from being utterly unmoored from any understanding of how the electricity grid works, much less how to leverage it in favor of our environmental goals.
To put it another way, the choice isn't between a flawed progressive who can get elected and a great progressive who can't. It's between a flawed progressive who can get elected and an even more flawed progressive who can't. Voting for Jill Stein is a massive ideological compromise for anyone who thinks of themselves progressive. And one gets the sense that it only feels like a "pure" choice because Stein stands no chance of being elected; the vote isn't even "for Stein" as much as it is "against the system."
And that logic hammers home another reality: The basis of Jill Stein's appeal is more or less the same as that which pulls people to Donald Trump. Both are seeking to harness an inchoate anti-establishmentarian rage that need not (and in many ways prefers not) tie itself to the world of facts and data. Everything from workable policy agendas to a basic consonance with the factual world can be dismissed as a sort of establishment-gotcha. It is to the great credit of the American left that Stein looks like she'll only muster support from the left-most 2% of the electorate or so, while Trump will capture the votes of at least the right-most 46%.
I doubt that most left-wingers are going to end up voting for Jill Stein. And it strikes me as equally unlikely that they will be the ones to tilt the election over to Donald Trump (though the spectre of Nader continues to linger). But regardless of whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins come November, if you're a Jill Stein supporter you don't get the consolation prize of knowing you kept your ideological purity intact. You compromised your integrity just as much as anyone else did.
* Some might object and argue that Stein, while not perfect, is on net a better progressive than Hillary Clinton. I'm not sure I'd even cede that, but I'll also stand my ground on the argument as presented. If voting Jill Stein is conceded to be an ideological compromise, it isn't clear how the argument against voting for Hillary Clinton on the grounds that one is tired of "compromising" sustains itself. At most it could be an argument of degree -- I'll concede up to Jill Stein, but not further -- but that's rarely how it is presented and lacks quite a bit of the self-righteous purity that normally drives the claim.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
