Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Cyberyeti]

 

 

 

In other words - Only Dear Leader can tell you what to do. To be a true patriot, you must be willing to let your children die for Dear Leader.

 

It's not usually the children that die, they kill their older relatives

[y66]

The chances for Democrats to have unified party government with a real working majority in the Senate seem to be getting better by the day. As Jessica Taylor writes, in the five races that the Cook Political Report rates as toss-ups — Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Montana and North Carolina — Democrats out-raised Republicans by more than $18 million last quarter.

 

Of course, there’s still nothing like a guarantee that former Vice President Joe Biden will defeat President Donald Trump, but he does have a strong polling lead at this point so the possibility is worth thinking about.

 

Republicans currently hold 53 Senate seats, and the one most likely to switch parties in November is Alabama, where fluky Democratic Senator Doug Jones will be going up against Tommy Tuberville, the former college football coach who won Tuesday’s Republican primary. If Republicans win back that seat, then Democrats would need to win four of those five toss-up races to reach 50 and allow a theoretical Democratic vice president to let them organize the Senate.

 

That alone would be a big deal. It’s not clear how obstructionist Republicans would be if Biden is president and they cling to a small majority. But it’s certainly possible that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would take up where he left off in 2016 — confirming very few if any judges, and filling very few if any executive-branch positions. Biden might not even be able to put together a cabinet unless Democrats take 50 seats. And even 51 seats — what they’d get by sweeping the toss-ups — would make it difficult to get much done.

 

However, the longer this election cycle goes on, the better the prospects for Democrats have looked. Right now, they not only have raised more money, but actually have an apparent polling lead in all five of those toss-up races, according to the RealClearPolitics averages, although several states (especially Montana) have had limited surveys so far.

 

The Cook Report lists five more contests, including Alabama, as leaning Republican. If Trump really is down by nine points or so nationally, then it’s possible Democrats could pick off one or two of them. And if Trump loses badly, the only lean-Democrat seat, Michigan, would be pretty safe; in fact, incumbent Democrat Gary Peters appears to have a solid lead there for now.

 

The real blowout possibilities start to kick in if Trump slips a little more. Then it starts to look possible for Democrats to win four of the five lean-Republican seats, or even one or two of the four likely Republican contests. In that case, the possibility of an aggressive legislative agenda starts to look much more likely.

 

I’ll emphasize again: Just as it’s possible that the presidential race remains where it is or gets somewhat better for Democrats, it’s also possible for Trump to rally and win — or, even if he comes up short, for Republicans to do well enough to win most of these seats. But the fact remains that Republicans are extremely vulnerable in this cycle; they are, after all, defending 23 seats, including several in closely contested or marginally Democratic states, while Democrats are defending only 12. So the map is tilted toward Democratic gains. And if it’s also tilted by a poor showing from the national Republican ticket, then things could get pretty ugly for Trump’s party.

[Winstonm]

It's not usually the children that die, they kill their older relatives

 

Older relatives aren't sent to school by Dear Leader.

[Zelandakh]

Oh my, this is real. I thought it was a photoshopped joke. It surely cannot be right for the POTUS to sell access to the WH for advertising? Or if it is, how about a large Heinz bottle sitting on the Resolute Desk spewing ketchup around the Oval Office in celebration every time the President signs a new EO? What could be more American...? :blink: :unsure: :lol:

[Cyberyeti]

Older relatives aren't sent to school by Dear Leader.

 

No, but the kids catch it (without severe or any symptoms) and pass it on within the home

[johnu]

Oh my, this is real. I thought it was a photoshopped joke. It surely cannot be right for the POTUS to sell access to the WH for advertising? Or if it is, how about a large Heinz bottle sitting on the Resolute Desk spewing ketchup around the Oval Office in celebration every time the President signs a new EO? What could be more American...? :blink: :unsure: :lol:

I have to admit that is is relatively rare that the Grifter in Chief would actively advertise for another company's product. Individual-1 can't make a monetary profit by promoting other people's products although it could be considered a quid pro quo, just like Ukraine manufacturing dirt on Biden.

 

Promoting or protecting his own pocketbook is something like when the Grifter in Chief decided that the G7 should be held at his own Doral Resort after the initial vetting had been done for other locations. Miraculously, the toadys in charge of selecting the G7 site decided the Doral Resort in the middle of Florida's incredibly hot and muggy summer would be the perfect location.

 

Or when the FBI was planning to move headquarters located close to one of the Manchurian President's hotels and probably be turned into a luxury hotel by a new buyer. This would have severely impacted the profits of the Grifter's own hotel. Through the luckiest of coincidences, Individual-1's bagmen at the GSA decided that the FBI shouldn't move to the suburbs as planned for decades, but would remain in the middle of Washington DC in inadequate office space.

 

Or having the US air force do stopovers at an obsolete airport in Scotland so occupants of the plane would have to spend travel money at one of the Grifter in Chief's golf resorts.

[y66]

Even if the Polls Are Really Off, Trump Is Still in Trouble by Nate Cohn at NYT:

 

Joe Biden’s lead is sufficient to cover a sizable error. And several of the biggest problems with polling in the last election have either been addressed or become less relevant.

Perhaps the biggest risk is one that has loomed over the polling industry for a decade: declining response rates to telephone surveys. Up until now, there has been little evidence that low response rates have endangered the accuracy of high-quality survey research. It turns out that the people who respond to telephone surveys appear to vote similarly to people from their same demographic group who do not respond.

 

But they are different in some ways. They are likelier to be volunteers. They are likelier to express trust in their neighbors and society. Such differences could become more significant, or grow into closer alignment with political views. In the worst-case scenario, declining trust in experts, the news media and polling could lead to systematic nonresponse bias, where even adjusting for education or demographics would be far from enough to ensure a representative sample.

 

There are reasons to doubt that this will happen. Only a few months ago, polls showed Mr. Trump highly competitive, and there is a fairly simple explanation for the turn against him: his handling of coronavirus. The trend against the president holds regardless of how the survey was conducted. Panel surveys, in which respondents are repeatedly contacted, also show former Trump supporters abandoning the president. And most surveys show the right number of respondents who say they voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. They’re just saying they won’t vote for him again. It would take an awfully targeted form of bias for polls to get the right number of 2016 Trump voters yet vastly overrepresent those who are leaving him.

 

Even so, you can imagine how it could, possibly, happen — such problems can’t be discounted. The problems even harder to discount are those that can’t be imagined.

Sure, it could happen. F#ck us once.

[Winstonm]

Even if the Polls Are Really Off, Trump Is Still in Trouble by Nate Cohn at NYT:

 

 

 

Sure, it could happen. F#ck us once.

 

The problems even harder to discount are those that can't be imagined.

 

Damn! Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns rear their ugly heads. I had hoped those died in Iraq.

[y66]

Difficult negotiations on another economic-stimulus bill got a bit worse on Thursday. And with very little margin for error going in, this is bad news indeed.

 

Remember the state of play. House Democrats passed a large bill — with more than $3 trillion in relief measures — two months ago. President Donald Trump and the White House haven’t always been on the same page, but in general seem to support doing something big to prevent a further meltdown. Senate Republicans have been following a policy of “wait and see,” while reporting indicates that they’re just now trying to come to an internal agreement about what to propose.

 

Meanwhile, multiple deadlines are approaching. Expanded unemployment insurance expires in little more than a week. The possibility of a severe eviction crisis is increasing. And lawmakers will only briefly be back in session before a month-long August recess, so if they don’t do something quickly there’s a chance that they won’t act until after Labor Day. Or later.

 

Into all of this the White House on Thursday tossed another complication: Trump may veto the package if a payroll-tax holiday isn’t included. The problem? Trump has pushed this idea before, and no one — Democrat or Republican — seems to support it.

 

It’s just astonishing, although at this point not surprising, how poorly Trump is playing this. If he places such a high priority on a payroll-tax holiday, he should’ve been pushing hard for it — not mentioning it in passing a few times, but making a sustained case in public. He also should’ve been poking around Capitol Hill looking for potential allies and trade-offs. Are there Trump-loving senators who would be willing to fight for such a measure within the party? What would Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ask for in return? Or: What are the possibilities for creating a cross-party coalition, with Trump supporting a House Democratic priority (robust unemployment insurance? Money for state and local governments?) in exchange for payroll-tax relief. I don’t think House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would go for it, but maybe she would!

 

Of course, there’s also the possibility that Trump doesn’t actually care about this but some in his administration do. In that case, a strong president would’ve shut down the whole debate, or had his chief of staff do so. It would actually make sense if Trump was relatively indifferent to the substance of the next relief package and simply insisted that Congress get it done quickly. But that doesn’t at all cohere with pushing this unpopular measure as the White House’s big ask.

 

I think it’s more likely than not that Congress gets something done before the August recess, and that Trump ultimately goes along with it. But there’s still a chance that the whole thing blows up, and takes the economy down with it.

SOP = astonishing?

[Winstonm]

SOP = astonishing?

 

 

 

It’s just astonishing, although at this point not surprising, how poorly Trump is playing this. If he places such a high priority on a payroll-tax holiday, he should’ve been pushing hard for it — not mentioning it in passing a few times, but making a sustained case in public

I can't believe reporters and opinion writers continually sweep by this idea of a payroll tax reductions without comment - any challenge to the payroll tax is an attack on Social Security and the social safety net. This needs to be pointed out - no, shouted out - every time Trump brings this stupid idea out and shakes it around. He doesn't care about you.

[y66]

From David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics by Eric Levitz at The Intelligencer:

 

David Shor got famous by getting fired. In late May, amid widespread protests over George Floyd’s murder, the 28-year-old data scientist tweeted out a study that found nonviolent demonstrations were more effective than “riots” at pushing public opinion and voter behavior leftward in 1968. Many Twitter users — and (reportedly) some of Shor’s colleagues and clients at the data firm Civis Analytics — found this post insensitive. A day later, Shor publicly apologized for his tweet. Two weeks after that, he’d lost his job as Civis’s head of political data science — and become a byword for the excesses of so-called cancel culture. (Shor has not discussed his firing publicly due to a nondisclosure agreement, and the details of his termination remain undisclosed).

 

But before Shor’s improbable transformation into a cause célèbre, he was among the most influential data gurus in Democratic politics — a whiz kid who, at age 20, served as the 2012 Obama campaign’s in-house Nate Silver, authoring the forecasting model that the White House used to determine where the race really stood.

 

And before that, he was a college Marxist.

 

This idiosyncratic combination of ideological background, employment experience, and expertise has lent Shor a unique perspective on American politics. He is a self-avowed socialist who insists that big-dollar donors pull the Democratic Party left. He is an adherent of Leninist vanguardism and the median voter theorem. And in the three years I’ve known him, I don’t think I’ve found a single question about U.S. politics that he could not answer with reference to at least three peer-reviewed studies.

 

Shor is still consulting in Democratic politics, but he is no longer working for a firm that restricts his freedom to publicly opine. Intelligencer recently spoke with him about how the Democratic Party really operates, why the coming decade could be a great one for the American right, how protests shape public opinion, what the left gets wrong about electoral politics, and whether Donald Trump will be reelected, among other things.

 

What is it like to have your name become shorthand for a culture war controversy?

 

I cannot comment on any of the stuff around all of that.

 

All right. That line of questioning is canceled.

 

Sorry!

 

I feel silenced, but it’s okay. Let’s start here then: What are the biggest revisions you’ve made to your conception of how electoral politics works since you first took a job on the Obama campaign?

 

I think going into politics, I overestimated the importance of the personal ideology of people who worked in campaigns for making decisions — which was part of a broader phenomenon of overestimating the extent to which people were making decisions. In 2012, I would see Daily Kos Elections publish stories like, “The White House is doing a Climate Week. This must be because they have polling showing that climate is a vulnerability for Republicans.” And once you know the people who are in that office, you realize that actually no; they were just at an awkward office meeting and were like, “Oh man, what are we going to do this week? Well, we could do climate.” There’s very little long-term, strategic planning happening anywhere in the party because no one has an incentive to do it. So, campaigns’ actions, while not random, are more random than I realized.

 

I’ve also fallen toward a consultant theory of change — or like, a process theory of change. So a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material interests of her donors.

 

But that’s not what happened. The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes. But the problem was mechanical, and less about the vulgar Marxist interests of all of the actors involved.

 

A tasteful Marxist (or whatever the opposite of a “vulgar” one is) might counter that class biases were implicated in that mechanical error — that cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class pollsters and operatives’ eagerness to see their worldview affirmed led them to ignore the possibility that their surveys suffered from a systematic sampling error.

 

That’s exactly right. Campaigns do want to win. But the people who work in campaigns tend to be highly ideologically motivated and thus, super-prone to convincing themselves to do things that are strategically dumb. Nothing that I tell people — or that my team [at Civis] told people — is actually that smart. You know, we’d do all this math, and some of it’s pretty cool, but at a high level, what we’re saying is: “You should put your money in cheap media markets in close states close to the election, and you should talk about popular issues, and not talk about unpopular issues.” And we’d use machine learning to operationalize that at scale.

 

The right strategies for politics aren’t actually unclear. But a lot of people on the Clinton campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the social views of racist white people.

 

What is the definition of racist in this context?

Ah, right. People yell at me on Twitter about this. So working-class white people have an enormous amount of political power and they’re trending towards the Republican Party. It would be really ideologically convenient if the reason they’re doing that was because Democrats embraced neoliberalism. But it’s pretty clear that that isn’t true.

 

I think that winning back these voters is important. So if I was running for office, I would definitely say that the reason these voters turned against us is because Democrats failed to embrace economic populism. I think that’s sound political messaging. But in terms of what actually drove it, the numbers are pretty clear. It’s like theoretically possible to imagine a voter who voted for Democrats their whole life and then voted for Trump out of frustration with Obamacare or trade or whatever. And I’m sure that tons of those voters exist, but they’re not representative.

 

When you take the results of the 2012 and 2016 elections, and model changes in Democratic vote share, you see the biggest individual-level predictor for vote switching was education; college-educated people swung toward Democrats and non-college-educated people swung toward Republicans. But, if you ask a battery of “racial resentment” questions — stuff like, “Do you think that there are a lot of white people who are having trouble finding a job because nonwhite people are getting them instead?” or, “Do you think that white people don’t have enough influence in how this country is run?” — and then control for the propensity to answer those questions in a racially resentful way, education ceases to be the relevant variable: Non-college-educated white people with low levels of racial resentment trended towards us in 2016, and college-educated white people with high levels of racial resentments turned against us.

 

You can say, “Oh, you know, the way that political scientists measure racial resentment is a class marker because college-educated people know that they’re not supposed to say politically incorrect things.” But when you look at Trump’s support in the Republican primary, it correlated pretty highly with, uh … racially charged … Google search words. So you had this politician who campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti–political correctness platform. And then he won the votes of a large group of swing voters, and vote switching was highly correlated with various individual level measures of racial resentment — and, on a geographic level, was correlated with racist search terms. At some point, you have to be like, oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just an important fact of the world.

 

I think people take the wrong conclusions from it. The fight I saw on Twitter after the 2016 election was one group of people saying the Obama-to-Trump voters are racist and irredeemable, and that’s why we need to focus on the suburbs. And then you had leftists saying, “Actually these working-class white people were betrayed by decades of neoliberalism and we just need to embrace socialism and win them back, we can’t trust people in the suburbs.” And I think the real synthesis of these views is that Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them to vote for us.

 

How should Democrats do that?

 

So there’s a big constellation of issues. The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.

 

If you decided to create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions, health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of two policy options, and then had 1,000 Americans fill it out, you would find that Democratic elected officials are to the left of 90 to 95 percent of people.

 

And the reason is that while voters may have more left-wing views than Joe Biden on a few issues, they don’t have the same consistency across their views. There are like tons of pro-life people who want higher taxes, etc. There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones. Some people responded to media coverage of that paper by saying, “Oh, people are just answering these surveys randomly, issues don’t matter.” But that’s not actually what the paper showed. In a separate section, they tested the relevance of issues by presenting voters with hypothetical candidate matchups — here’s a politician running on this position, and another politician running on the opposite — and they found that issue congruence was actually very important for predicting who people voted for.

 

So this suggests there’s a big mass of voters who agree with us on some issues, and disagree with us on others. And whenever we talk about a given issue, that increases the extent to which voters will cast their ballots on the basis of that issue.

 

Mitt Romney and Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people changed their votes. And the reason that happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked a lot more about immigration, and because of that, correlation between preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went up. In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for went down.

 

So this means that every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters. But this is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they talk about.

 

Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.

[y66]

Ginsburg Says Her Cancer Has Returned, but She’s ‘Fully Able’ to Remain on Court by Adam Liptak and Denise Grady at NYT:

 

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Friday that she had had a recurrence of cancer, but had been undergoing chemotherapy that had shown “positive results” and would remain on the court.

 

“I have often said I would remain a member of the court as long as I can do the job full steam,” she said in a statement issued by the Supreme Court. “I remain fully able to do that.”

 

Justice Ginsburg, who is 87, said she had begun a course of chemotherapy on May 19, after “a periodic scan in February followed by a biopsy revealed lesions on my liver.”

 

“Immunotherapy first essayed proved unsuccessful,” she said. “The chemotherapy course, however, is yielding positive results. Satisfied that my treatment course is now clear, I am providing this information.”

 

She said a scan this month showed the liver lesions had been significantly reduced. “I am tolerating chemotherapy well and am encouraged by the success of my current treatment,” she said.

 

Justice Ginsburg has had both colon cancer and pancreatic cancer. When cancer spreads to the liver from another organ, it is considered advanced. Usually, it cannot be cured, but treatment may shrink the tumors and help control the disease.

 

Justice Ginsburg did not say where the tumors in her liver are thought to have originated, but she did say her chemotherapy was called gemcitabine. That drug is generally used for pancreatic cancer, which is more difficult to treat than colon cancer.

 

Doctors not involved in her care said there were various ways to treat cancer that has spread to the liver.

 

“We’re pretty good at controlling it with chemotherapy and targeted therapy,” said Dr. Christopher George, a medical oncologist at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.

 

Justice Ginsburg’s statement mentioned only chemotherapy, not targeted therapy. But targeted therapy — treatments that attack tumors with certain mutations — can help only 10 percent to 20 percent of patients with pancreatic cancer, Dr. George said.

 

Dr. Nancy Kemeny, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said that sometimes, after chemotherapy shrinks liver tumors, tightly focused radiation can reduce them even further.

 

Given Justice Ginsburg’s various brushes with cancer, Dr. Kemeny said, “She actually has done remarkably well.”

 

Justice Ginsburg is the senior member of the court’s four-member liberal wing. Were she to leave the court, President Trump would have the opportunity to nominate a third justice, joining Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh. A successful nomination would almost certainly move the court further to the right.

 

Justice Ginsburg has had surgery for lung cancer and radiation treatment for pancreatic cancer in recent years. She has also had surgery for early-stage pancreatic cancer in 2009 and treatment for colon cancer in 1999.

 

More recently, in May, Justice Ginsburg underwent a gallbladder procedure and she participated in oral arguments from her room at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. On Tuesday, she was treated for a possible infection at the same hospital after experiencing chills and a fever, and she underwent an endoscopic procedure to clean out a bile duct stent that was placed last August.

 

She was released from the hospital on Wednesday and was “home and doing well,” a Supreme Court spokeswoman said.

 

“My recent hospitalizations to remove gall stones and treat an infection were unrelated” to the recurrence of cancer, Justice Ginsburg said in her statement.

 

“I will continue biweekly chemotherapy to keep my cancer at bay, and am able to maintain an active daily routine,” she said. “Throughout, I have kept up with opinion writing and all other court work.”

 

Dr. Wasif M. Saif, deputy physician-in-chief and medical director of the Northwell Health Cancer Institute in Lake Success, N.Y., said it was crucial for people receiving chemotherapy for advanced pancreatic cancer to also be treated for loss of appetite and digestive problems, to help keep up their strength and avoid weight loss.

 

“With supportive care, they do better,” he said.

 

If Justice Ginsburg were to die or step down from the court there is little question that Senate Republicans would try to confirm a third Trump nominee even in the waning days of his first term. “Oh, we’d fill it,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said last year.

 

Senate Republicans took a different approach after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, refusing to consider the nomination of Judge Merrick B. Garland in the last year of President Barack Obama’s second term.

 

Mr. McConnell and his allies say the two situations are different. Where one party controls the Senate and the other the presidency, as in 2016, they say, vacancies should not be filled in a presidential election year. Where the same party controls both the Senate and presidency, they argue, confirmations may proceed.

 

Democrats say this is hairsplitting hypocrisy that damages the legitimacy of the court. But their power to stop a third Trump appointment was diminished after changes in Senate rules on filibusters on nominations. All it takes now is a majority vote to confirm judicial nominees.

 

During the Obama administration, some liberals urged Justice Ginsburg to step down so Mr. Obama could name her successor. She rejected the advice.

 

“I think it’s going to be another Democratic president,” Justice Ginsburg told The Washington Post in 2013. “The Democrats do fine in presidential elections; their problem is they can’t get out the vote in the midterm elections.”

 

Mr. Trump, whose election proved her wrong, has been critical of Justice Ginsburg, saying in 2016 that “her mind is shot” and suggesting that she resign. His sharp words came after Justice Ginsburg criticized Mr. Trump in a series of interviews. She later said she had made a mistake in publicly commenting on a candidate and promised to be more “circumspect” in the future.

 

More recently, he urged Justices Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor to recuse themselves in all cases involving him.

[kenberg]

From David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics by Eric Levitz at The Intelligencer:

 

 

 

Yes, just the other day I was discussing the 2016 elections, wondering whether mechanical issues or vulgar Marxists were the root of the problem. Shor has a lot of contempt for a lot of people, other than that I am having trouble making much out of his comments.

 

His answer to the first question was that he cannot comment. A good place to leave it.

[y66]

Shor has a lot of contempt for a lot of people, other than that I am having trouble making much out of his comments.

So it seems. His use of political consultant jargon can be off-putting but his basic takes on stuff feel quite sensible to me. Two examples:

 

Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration [or racist deplorables].

 

[in the context of current polling which shows Biden's lead increasing] ... if you go back and look at polling this far out, and then do a regression where you predict Election Day as a function of polling, generally, when candidates are this far ahead, things tend to revert toward a mean. And unfortunately, in this case, the historical mean we’re regressing to isn’t 50 percent; incumbents have historically averaged 51 percent of the vote. So things are likely to tighten. ... So after we get through the conventions, and partisans activate on both sides, there’s a substantial chance that we’ll find ourselves in a close election. And everybody should treat it that way. ... we should all have the discipline to continue investing in tipping-point states and appealing to the median voter. Because this is an incredibly important year. This is our last chance to win a trifecta for a very long time. And if we don’t win the presidency, things could get very dark.

As for the discussion of "mechanical issues" in the 2016 election, I thought his explanation was interesting and pretty convincing:

 

I’ve also fallen toward a consultant theory of change — or like, a process theory of change. So a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material interests of her donors.

 

But that’s not what happened. The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes. But the problem was mechanical, and less about the vulgar Marxist interests of all of the actors involved.

 

... Campaigns do want to win. But the people who work in campaigns tend to be highly ideologically motivated and thus, super-prone to convincing themselves to do things that are strategically dumb. Nothing that I tell people — or that my team [at Civis] told people — is actually that smart. You know, we’d do all this math, and some of it’s pretty cool, but at a high level, what we’re saying is: “You should put your money in cheap media markets in close states close to the election, and you should talk about popular issues, and not talk about unpopular issues.”

[kenberg]

He sounds like a political consultant, which is not a compliment from my point of view, and perhaps of greater consequence, might have something to do with losing an election. At no point does he concern himself with how to help the candidate, HC in 2016, clearly communicate her beliefs. The mechanical problem he cites is "for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals.". This is condescending. Very condescending. And it was very much part of Hillary's problem. Some professionals also have low levels of social trust. Some of us don't even answer phone polls especially when we find the questions simple minded.

 

His claim seems to be that HC was uninterested in the problems of working class people because the pollsters did not do a good job and so she had no idea she should be interested in such things.That's pretty insulting to Hillary.. If the pollsters had just told her that people trying to raise a family on a $15 an hour job would like a raise then she would have addressed this, but there was this mechanical problem and so, well, how was she to know? Really?

 

I suppose it is that his style sets me off some. Maybe he has good ideas, I am just having trouble getting to them.

 

And now, Sunday morning, I have thought more about this. If someone wanted to give a talk on the 2016 election, looking at what needs fixing, David Shor would be a very good place to start. Every time the man opens his mouth he probably costs the Democrats another hundred thousand votes.

[y66]

Stormtroopers gonna lose

A crowd of about 400 has now occupied both SW 3rd and SW Main.

 

The moms are chanting, “Feds stay clear! Moms are here!” at the federal courthouse.

 

All three fences are still up.

One of the observations from the David Shor story is that the Lafayette Square fiasco marked a turning point in Trump's polling. Trump appears to be doubling down in Portland. Clearly a genius move.

[Winstonm]

Now that Trump and Barr have their Stasi in Portland, how long before other cities are invaded?

 

President Donald Trump wouldn't say whether he will accept the results of the general election in November during an interview with "Fox News Sunday," claiming again without evidence that the process is rigged before any votes have been cast.

 

Host Chris Wallace asked Trump if he was a good loser, to which the president responded that he is not. "But are you gracious?" Wallace pressed.

 

"You don't know until you see," Trump said. "It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do."

 

Asked if he's suggesting he might not accept the results of the election, Trump said, "I have to see."

 

 

[shyams]

Now that Trump and Barr have their Stasi in Portland, how long before other cities are invaded?

President Donald Trump wouldn't say whether he will accept the results of the general election in November during an interview with "Fox News Sunday," claiming again without evidence that the process is rigged before any votes have been cast.

 

Host Chris Wallace asked Trump if he was a good loser, to which the president responded that he is not. "But are you gracious?" Wallace pressed.

 

"You don't know until you see," Trump said. "It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do."

 

Asked if he's suggesting he might not accept the results of the election, Trump said, "I have to see."

If he is eventually evicted from the White House (against his will), he might probably steal the Resolute desk as a final act of defiance :)

[johnu]

If he is eventually evicted from the White House (against his will), he might probably steal the Resolute desk as a final act of defiance :)

It would be poetic justice if he refused to leave the White House after Biden is inaugurated and unmarked secret police forcibly detain him and take him to a secret destination.

[johnu]

Trump mocks push to rename Fort Bragg: 'We're going to name it after the Rev. Al Sharpton?'

 

In the interview, Trump said he doesn't "care what the military says" with regards to the matter, after Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said they're open to discussion on the topic.

 

"I'm supposed to make the decision," he continued. "Fort Bragg is a big deal. We won two World Wars. No one even knows General Bragg.

So the Manchurian President doesn't care what the US military leaders have to say. He would care a lot more if it was the Russian military speaking out for a change. And of course he doesn't have a clue who General Bragg was. Stable Genius's don't have to take history classes.

 

One thing for sure, nobody is going to name a military base after a draft dodger with fake bone spurs.

[y66]

How many Trump goons does it take to take down 1 peacefully protesting Portlandian?

[y66]

As Trump Ignores Virus Crisis, Republicans Start to Break Ranks by Alexander Burns, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

 

Some of the states where outbreaks have worsened most in recent weeks are led by Republicans who spent months avoiding stringent lockdowns, in some cases because state leaders were uneasy about creating space between themselves and a president of their own party who rejected such steps. That dynamic has been particularly pronounced in Southern states like Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, where governors have either continued to resist tough public-health restrictions or have only recently and partially embraced them.

 

A few Republicans have grown more open with their misgivings about Mr. Trump’s approach, including Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who said this month that he would require people to wear masks at any Trump rallies in his state. After issuing a broad mask mandate last week, Mr. Hutchinson said on the ABC program “This Week” on Sunday that an “example needs to be set by our national leadership” on mask-wearing.

 

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, in an interview on “Meet the Press” on NBC, did not answer directly when asked if he had confidence in Mr. Trump’s leadership in the crisis. Mr. DeWine said he had confidence “in this administration” and praised Mr. Pence for “doing an absolutely phenomenal job.”

 

Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, rejected criticisms of Mr. Trump’s approach.

 

“Any suggestion that the president is not working around the clock to protect the health and safety of all Americans, lead the whole-of-government response to this pandemic, including expediting vaccine development, and rebuild our economy is utterly false,” Mr. Deere said in a statement.

 

With only a few exceptions, Republicans have avoided direct confrontation with Mr. Trump. They’ve come to view public criticism as an exercise in political futility — one guaranteed to produce a sour response from Mr. Trump without any chance of changing his behavior.

 

But many Republican lawmakers have grown exasperated with the administration’s conflicting messages, the open warfare within Mr. Trump’s staff and the president’s demands that states reopen faster or risk punishment from the federal government.

 

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said he wanted the administration to offer more extensive public-health updates to the American people, and condemned the open animosity toward Dr. Fauci by some administration officials, including Peter Navarro, the trade adviser, who wrote an opinion column attacking Dr. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert.

 

“I want more briefings but, more importantly, I want the whole White House to start acting like a team on a mission to tackle a real problem,” Mr. Sasse said. “Navarro’s Larry, Moe and Curly junior-high slap fight this week is yet another way to undermine public confidence that these guys grasp that tens of thousands of Americans have died and tens of millions are out of work.”

 

Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, was more succinct: “The more they turn the briefings over to the professionals, the better.”

 

A group of Republican governors have for months held regular conference calls, usually at night and without staff present, according to two party strategists familiar with the conversations. Unlike the virus-focused calls that Mr. Pence leads, there are no Democratic or White House officials on the line, so the conversations have become a sort of safe space where the governors can ask their counterparts for advice, discuss best practices and, if the mood strikes them, vent about the administration and the president’s erratic leadership.

 

Mr. Trump himself seems less interested in the specific challenges the virus presents and is mostly just frustrated by the reality that it has not disappeared as he has predicted. The disconnect is only growing between him and other party leaders — not to mention voters. A poll published Friday by ABC News and The Washington Post found that a majority of the country strongly disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, and about two-thirds of Americans said they had little or no trust in Mr. Trump’s comments about the disease.

 

Mr. Trump’s political standing is now so dire that even Republicans who have spent years avoiding direct comment on his behavior are acknowledging his unpopularity in plain terms. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, for instance, offered a bleak assessment of Mr. Trump’s electoral standing at a recent event hosted by Solamere, a company with close ties to Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, and his family.

 

According to a partial transcript of the comments, shared by a person close to him, the usually tight-lipped Mr. Ryan said Mr. Trump was losing key voting blocs across the Midwest and in Arizona, a Republican-leaning state that Mr. Ryan described as “presently trending against us.”

 

While Mr. Ryan did not criticize Mr. Trump’s handling of the outbreak, he said the president could not win re-election this year if he continued losing badly to Mr. Biden among suburban voters who were wary of both candidates but currently favor Mr. Biden.

 

“Biden is winning over Trump in this category of voters 70 to 30,” Mr. Ryan said, “and if that sticks, he cannot win states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.”

 

Some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers are adamant that the best way forward is to downplay the dangers of the disease. Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, has been particularly forceful in his view that the White House should avoid drawing attention to the virus, according to people familiar with the discussions.

 

Mr. Meadows has for the most part opposed any briefings about the virus, while other Trump advisers, including Hope Hicks and Jared Kushner, have been open to holding briefings so long as they are not at the White House — where Mr. Trump could show up and commandeer them. Mr. Pence’s team would like to hold more briefings with the health experts, but some of Mr. Trump’s communications aides do not want the vice president to be part of them.

 

A large number of rank-and-file Republican lawmakers share Mr. Trump’s aversion to the disease-control practices.

 

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican closely aligned with Mr. Trump, issued an order on Wednesday blocking local governments from mandating mask-wearing, then sued the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, for imposing such a requirement. Mr. Kemp’s edict came hours after Mr. Trump visited his state, declining to wear a face mask at the Atlanta airport.

 

Yet some in the G.O.P. now see no alternative to parting ways with Mr. Trump, on policy if not politics.

 

Glenn Hamer, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a powerful business federation in the crucial state, said he saw Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, walking a prudent line — breaking with Mr. Trump’s policy demands but not blasting the president for issuing them.

 

“Everyone knows that the president doesn’t react well to criticism, constructive or not,” he said.

 

Mr. Hamer, who was among a group of business leaders who sent a letter to the White House urging the creation of clearer national standards for facial coverings, said Mr. Trump presented a challenge to Republican leaders seeking to foster responsible behavior.

 

“On the mask side, it is difficult when the leader of the party had been setting a pretty bad example,” Mr. Hamer said.

[barmar]

“Any suggestion that the president is not working around the clock to protect the health and safety of all Americans, lead the whole-of-government response to this pandemic, including expediting vaccine development, and rebuild our economy is utterly false,” Mr. Deere said in a statement.

Umm, wasn't Trump on the golf course this weekend?

[Zelandakh]

It would be poetic justice if he refused to leave the White House after Biden is inaugurated and unmarked secret police forcibly detain him and take him to a secret destination.

What makes you think Individual-1 will not be detained after leaving the WH even if he does so willingly?

[y66]

Here's the scoop on the Portland guy who was assaulted by Trump's goons Saturday:

 

Attending the protests for the first time over the weekend was Christopher David, 53, a former Navy civil engineering corps officer and a 1988 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy.

 

“I wasn’t even paying attention to the protests at all until the feds came in,” Mr. David said. “When that video came out of those two unmarked guys in camouflage abducting people and putting them in minivans, that’s when I became aware.”

 

He had taken a bus to the Portland courthouse and was about to leave around 10:45 p.m. when federal officers emerged and began advancing on the protesters. He said he felt the need to ask the officers, Why were they violating their oath to the Constitution?

 

Instead of getting an answer on Saturday, Mr. David, a 6-foot-2, 280-pound former Navy varsity wrestler, found himself being beaten with a baton by a federal officer dressed in camouflage fatigues as another doused him with pepper spray, according to video of the encounter.

 

Mr. David was taken to a nearby hospital, where a specialist said his right hand was broken and would require surgery to install pins, screws and plates.

 

“I’m appalled and disappointed at the feds’ behavior — that whoever led them and trained them allowed them to become this way,” Mr. David said. “This is a failure of leadership more than it is a failure of their own individual behavior towards me.”