stevenkesslar

Yeah, I think you pretty much nailed it, @unicorn. As a specific example, you and I have gotten into it, over things that matter. Like how to protect people form COVID. But I think grown ups can disagree, sometimes strongly, over things that matter. And still be respectful. I said it over at Company Of Men, but I'll repeat here. Temperament has a lot to do with it. I did say to Bill, like when he timed me out several times, "Your website. Your rules." So there was an underlying respect. But you could also say, "Your website. Your temperament." Bill had his own idiosyncrasies, which is an understatement. I was a moderator there for a while, which he give me as a reward I never wanted for raising money for him to run his website. I argued privately against his rule that you can't post pictures of children, and lost. But that dumb rule died when Bill did, basically. Bill came of age at a time when Gay men and children meant "predator." He was being cautious, and reactive. Thanks to The Gays being pro-active, Gay men and children now means Secretary Pete changing his kid's diapers. 😊 I absolutely love it that I got to live in a period when The Gays became a model for how to do politics in America and the world. Compassionately. And with intelligence. I have never met any of the moderators there in person, like I met Bill many times. Or Oz, once. My guess is they never particularly enjoyed that forum, anyway. I think Bill did. He'd post there sometimes, and let it all hang out. Like his posts on Black Lives Matter. Which did not go down well. When Trump first won he posted that he was cautiously optimistic. He would pin up that silly Miss Manners-type logo, and talk about how we all needed to post with decorum. I found it amusing. My own view is that we'd somehow managed to set up a massive fan where shit was being splattered all over the place, every day, for four years. In order to divide and conquer. The Gays were, and are, being singled out in a massive culture war. So how was that NOT supposed to splatter all over his website? I will always wonder whether he lived to regret his cautious optimism. I'm guessing the moderators who kept the site alive after Bill died, thankfully, just viewed that forum as the diaper that needed to be changed regularly. And it got to be a big pain in the ass for them. I can't blame them. I'm grateful that they kept the place alive when Bill died. Like I said over there, which some of the people I respect there the most like @lookin and Charlie agreed with, now they get a well deserved break. The seeming obsession with staying "on topic" personally annoyed me. Because I am guilty as charged for loving to wander off on tangents, like I am right now. I think that was in part Cooper's temperament. If there is an Internet Fairy God Mother, he would probably argue Cooper is correct. I recall reading some example of hijacking a thread that says if the title is how to groom your dog, it is impolite to bring up how you groom your cat. There'd be a post on some racist act in Kentucky, and I'd compare it to some racist act in LA. I think that would annoy the moderators. Mostly, I don't think there is much evidence that the key moderators ever really enjoyed posting on the politics forum, anyway. One person summed it all up with, "Good riddance!" It does make me sad. IMHO 20 years of interesting and diverse Gay political opinion just got flushed down the toilet.

Silly Oz! That's a trick question. The answer is both, of course. Rainbows are the symbol of Gay freedom and fun. How could we possibly live without them? And we have to be fairies in order to win our freedom and fun. Sometimes even nasty ones. Which is maybe what that thing at the other website is about. But love Trumps all, so to speak. 😉 So I'm for both, and ............... Speaking of which, I was wandering around here last night to see who is posting here, and about what. I think the last time I posted here this place may have been Boy Toy. And I saw the thread on your budding romance. I remember having a very nice discussion with you and Bill at one of Oliver's parties a long time ago, in which you educated me a bit about Thailand. Congratulations on your new relationship. Hope love wins.

I completely agree. I did not post that to suggest that Democrats should sit back. As you say, we should do the exact opposite. We need to organize. What Lichtman would add is the most important thing Democrats need to do is govern well. His theory is based on the optimistic premise that voters reward governments that govern well, and punish governments that govern poorly. So if we want to win House and Senate and state legislative seats in 2022, Priority # 1 is governing well.

America’s Captured Courts SHELDON WHITEHOUSE I assume this is part of Sen. Whitehouse's job interview for Ranking Minority Member (dare I say Chair?) of the Senate Judiciary Committee. If it is, I say give him the job. I like Dick Durbin. But he's got plenty of other fish to fry. I also like the idea of making the case that SCOTUS is now becoming the best court money can buy. What I really like is giving the Federal Society SCOTUS appointees the opportunity to prove they were appointed to be the best Justices [sic] money could buy. In order for such a strategy to make sense, there actually have to be 80 specific decisions where "identifiable Republican donor interests" can in fact be identified. More important, there have to be lots of decisions like this moving forward. Republicans will argue that these rulings of course have nothing, nothing, nothing to do with money. Just like they are now arguing it was mathematically impossible for Joe Biden to win the 2020 election. Let them. Their arguments are almost self-defeating. Most of the "process" arguments in that article don't make sense, and could backfire. Democrats will look like hypocrites if they try to make a case about money in politics, or attacks ads. Ain't it awful? But they do have a case about fat cats and corporate special interests. I'd frame it all around the sad reality that SCOTUS is just returning to the purpose it has served for much of US history. Which is to be the court of last resort for the rich and powerful. I think Democrats could use this the way Republicans used Obamacare. There was a big payoff to Republicans in 2010, right after Obamacare passed. And in 2014, right as it was implemented. So we won't have that. In fact, my guess is that Rich Mitch and The Divine Miss Graham calculated that a SCOTUS fight would help them at the margin in red states, just like it did in 2018. If they made such a calculation, they were likely correct. But their victory now sets Democrats up to let SCOTUS be the non-stop drip drip drip that Obamacare was for maybe 8 years, until 2018. If Whitehouse is right, there will be dozens of opportunities to keep reminding people that SCOTUS is the best court money can buy for Republican special interests. It's a little bit like the Trump Presidency itself. Yes, he won - kinda, sorta, maybe - in 2016. But everything since then was this annoying drip drip drip and rant rant rant and tweet tweet tweet that converted Republicans to Democrats and drove everyone to the polls. Granted, Justice Rapist is no Donald Trump. But their rulings can be used as a constant reminder that if you don't like government by the rich and powerful elite, you have to vote, vote, and vote. Such a strategy would also make it just a little harder for SCOTUS to go after the big game, like abortion and voting rights and Citizens United and LGBTQ protections. The argument should be that pandering to corrupt special interests is a pre-existing condition for judges who were hand-picked by The Federalist Society to serve the people who hired them. If people have heard that 30 times, they are more likely to believe it when SCOTUS makes a major ruling. Roberts and his fellow conservatives are not stupid. It will make them more likely to use shovels rather than bulldozers to dig their own political graves.

He already has paid for it. He lost. This is why. Poor thing. It has to hurt. There's two theories about what happens now. The optimists say a cult can never survive without its leader. True. But Trump is not exactly going away. Lots of Republican Senators must feel like this is the film Taken. We reached the climax, and they are freed from being hostages. But they know that with an audience like that, it's only a matter of time until Taken, Two hits the screen. Some of them may be secretly hoping that all those fine prosecutors in New York just land Trump's ass in jail. The pessimists say the Republican Party will be the Trump Party for a long time. I have to assume this fraud nonsense is a set up to try to return in 2024. Or control who does. And meanwhile have the adulation the poor narcissist demands in between. And - duh! - the ability to fleece people. Georgia will be a good initial indicator of how this works. Will he be able to turn people out when he doesn't have the daily ability to throw red meat to his base and agitate them? More likely, I think he'll handicap the party. He's already improved Stacey Abram's chances of taking out Brian Kemp in 2022. Republicans will have to hear all that as background noise. Meanwhile, Biden will turn out to NOT be senile or socialist. Who knew? When he starts pushing policies people like as laws it will be a challenge for Republicans to simply oppose things 2 in 3 Americans want - help to states and counties who don't want to fire cops and nurses, student debt relief, a public option, a path to citizenship for DREAMers. I'd rather have the Republicans move on and nominate someone like John Kasich or Larry Hogan or Tim Scott in 2024. But my bet is that Trump will be the gift that keeps giving to Democrats. I didn't need Trump to feel respect for Kasich or Hogan or Scott, even if I disagree with much of what they think as Republicans. One thing this process is doing is paving the way for a return to bipartisan behavior on the part of people who just don't want to be held hostage anymore. Thanks for posting that 60 minutes video @RockHardNYC. The most interesting part was watching his face. The hurt and anger and mounting indignation about having his beliefs and work trashed was obvious. I have to imagine there are a lot of Republicans that feel that way. This split between principle and paranoia - the Republican Party and the Trump Party - is going to be there for a long time.

Congratulations for writing something that makes me look terse by comparison. I don't see the direct line between Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. One small detail that popped into my mind when I started to read what you wrote is that Alinsky was a Jew. So that's not a super good logical fit with him being associated with anything involving Nazi Germany. But when I got to the part about me being brainwashed by untrue state propaganda it clicked. Me being brainwashed, of course I wouldn't be able to understand how this all fits into the Communist Authoritarian Totalitarian State. The fact that what you wrote doesn't quite make sense to me could actually confirm that I was brainwashed, so as not to be able to see the true general realities as you see them. If you made any specific points, like how there was proof that "x" number of votes were stolen using "y" method in "z" state, that would provide a framework for saying you are right or wrong. But since this is all very general and somewhat vague, it's hard to say if you are right or wrong. But I get the jist of your argument. First, with me being brainwashed and the state operatives of the Communist Authoritarian Totalitarian State being able to change the election results between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. as we slept, these are pretty clever people. Second, of course they are not going to leave any evidence behind. Third, in all honesty I actually thought I stayed up from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. watching as results kept coming in. But then it struck me that all that was maybe me being brainwashed. In fact, maybe it was between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. when they brainwashed me when everybody else was asleep so nobody else could see. Or at least reinforced the brainwashing that I guess the untrue state media has been gradually pounding into my brain. Fourth, all that probably just goes to show I am brainwashed. The really fucked up part of this is that if you are right and they are out to "destroy democracy, dehumanize & eradicate those they don't agree with" that leaves me in a truly fucked up position, brainwashed or not. Quite honestly I might be okay with the destroying democracy part, seeing as it doesn't effect me personally. But if I'm going to be dehumanized and eradicated - well, I'm not really up for that. So I'm thinking I should probably agree with the Communist Authoritarian Totalitarian State if only to avoid eradication. And then I thought if I am brainwashed I don't have a choice as to whether I agree with the Communist Authoritarian Totalitarian State, anyway. So, push come to shove, it feels like I am basically totally fucked. Something else odd struck me when I was lying in bed thinking about this. If you abbreviate Communist Authoritarian Totalitarian State you gets CATS. So is it just a coincidence that "Cats" is also one of the longest running musicals in London and New York City and wherever it has played? It also turns out Andrew Lloyd Webber is an agnostic. Which makes him a perfect fit for Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Obama, Clinton, and Alinksy, since agnostics don't believe in anything. So what if the state operatives are using an agnostic AND a Jew? No disrespect to Alinsky's Rules For Radicals, but if you really want the Communist Authoritarian Totalitarian State to do a deep brainwashing you don't go for just one book. You go for the play that is around forever and that some people have seen like a dozen times. The better to brainwash you even though you don't know you are being brainwashed. And then the whole thing suddenly fell together in my mind that one of my favorite songs is "Memories". Now just think about that. If you were going to brainwash someone wouldn't you want to use a song like "Memories" so as to make a "useful idiot" like me think I remember everything? When in fact I am totally brainwashed? I know it sounds far-fetched but these are people who stole an entire national election between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. (well, just the Presidential race, I mean) so if they can do that they can sure as fuck mess with Webber and his play. Now check this out: ’Tis the final conflict Let each stand in his place The International Union Shall be the human race. So now it is obvious. We know from The Internationale that the Marxists and Bolsheviks tried to unite the human race. But the big mistake was saying you are uniting the entire human race. Which makes it really obvious what you are up to. So people were able to fight back and hold the Communist Authoritarian Totalitarian State at bay for quite a long time. So what did they do? They fucked with our minds real good, didn't they? They went into disguise. They made it about "cats", not people. And you brainwash them by making it about "memories" even though they are not memories at all actually. So everything is the opposite of what you think it is. Facts are lies and lies are facts. Which explains why Trump is the only one telling the truth when actually the untrue state propaganda says it is the opposite and DT is the one who lies. And here is the actual proof which is undeniable: If you touch me, You'll understand what happiness is Look, a new day has begun You see how clever they are? That is of course the final part of "Memories" which everyone has implanted in their brain. It is basically the exact same as The Internationale only it is in disguise. So is it a coincidence that just at DT was on the verge of Making America Great Again the China virus comes along from Communist China? And what does everyone do? Freak out and go into their little pod. So the whole thing is you can only touch that actual person in your pod where you are all brainwashed and they say it as a "new day" which means when we wake up we are all brainwashed. And despite all that DT still won because all these rural people didn't go see Cats just the people in the cities like Philadelphia and Milwaukee and Detroit. So he still won. So they actually had to change it all between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. So I wake up being brainwashed and thinking "Oh, Joe Biden won." Which is exactly what the Communist Authoritarian Totalitarian State wants. And everybody else who has NOT been brainwashed wakes up and says, "Holy shit! They stole the election." Holy shit! Now I got it! Thank you! You'll have to excuse me. But I have this feeling I better get the fuck out of here while there's still time.

I’m not a f---ing socialist’: Florida Democrats are having a postelection meltdown Trump Didn’t Win the Latino Vote in Texas. He Won the Tejano Vote. Understanding the difference will be key to Democrats moving past their faltering, one-size-fits-all approach to Hispanics. Both of those are revealing looks under the hood in Florida and Texas. I think they make a bunch of general points about what Democrats got right, what they screwed up, and what those of us who are Democrats should be relentless about if we want to keep the House in 2020 - despite the unavoidable setbacks redistricting and gerrymandering will bring. They also make a bunch of specific points about Latinos. The second article is right that Latinos helped Biden nationally, relative to Clinton 2016. The most important and obvious way they did that was by delivering Arizona and Georgia to Biden. I'll probably say this a dozen times over the next months because it annoys me and seems ungrateful that White liberal journalists are moaning about how Trump did better with Latinos than in 2016. In both elections, Latinos voted about 2 to 1 against Trump. In both elections, a solid majority of Whites voted for Trump. White liberals like me should be saying Gracias! a lot. The argument goes like this. Clinton's winning 38 % margin with Latinos (66/28) was cut to a 33 % margin with Biden (65/32). Que lastima! It's true, and we know for a fact that it hurt Democrats in Florida and Texas, which is why those stories above are worth reading. That said, here's what it leaves out. Over 11 Presidential elections from Reagan on, the average margin Democrats won the Latino vote by is + 33. Biden was right at the average. In addition, with four of the five incumbents who ran for re-election before Trump, Latino support for the incumbent increased. So as that Pew report shows, Reagan's margin went up + 2, Obama went up + 8, W. + 9, and Clinton + 15. The only incumbent who did slightly worse with Latinos was George H.W. Bush. So Trump going up + 5 fits right into the long-term trend. Those two articles reinforce my strong hunch that the main reason Trump did marginally better with some Latinos is that they felt Trump was good for the economy. That Texas article screams it. Every story I've read about what drove Latinos in places like Arizona to vote for Biden is they way Trump was going after Latino immigrants. If you read the Texas story, Tejanos don't feel that way. They're not immigrants. They're Americans. It follows that if you just assume the trends since 1980 continue, Biden has an 80 % chance of doing better with Latinos in 2024 than he did in 2020, if he runs again. The likely reason they turned against George H.W. Bush was the 1992 recession. So if Latinos feel Biden did a good job on the economy, past trends suggest he has a nearly 100 % chance of increasing his vote share with Latinos. How Biden handles the economy and COVID will obviously be the two big factors in whether Democrats lose the House in a midterm re-election when redistricting tips the odds against us. The feeling that is growing inside me is that have dividing government - even if Democrats win both Georgia seat - is obviously bad news when it comes to legislating, but could be good news when it comes to 2022. If you start with Clinton, three of the last four Presidents got wiped out in their first mid-term. But the same three cam into power with Congressional trifectas, and were perceived as going too far in their first two years. Hence, the reactions in 1994, 2010, and 2018 were powerful reactions. The exception of the last four Presidents is 2002. W. had a similar situation as Biden. He'd won a much closer election, and had a 50/50 Senate split. In both 2002 and 2004 his party won both House and Senate seats. And he won re-election. Of course 9/11 and for a while Iraq were massive winds at his back pushing him along with strong majority support. It may be a historical one off. But the general principle is that the economy got better, he was seen as trying to unify the country, and people felt he'd done a good (2002) or at least good enough (2004) job as President. If Biden does that, I don't think a similar outcome in 2022 and 2024 is out of reach. There's some things that really stood out to me in those two articles above that I really want to elevate. First, it is the economy, stupid. In both cases those stories are examples of culturally conservative Latinos where talking about cultural or social hot buttons just helps Republicans. The thing that sounds like utter political malpractice to me is that progressive Democrats ran a minimum wage initiative in Florida in 2020 that won by 61 %, but meanwhile Democrats got destroyed for being socialists. They had at least one simple and popular message right in front of their noses. "We're not for socialism. We're fighting for a fair minimum wage." It's probably unfair, but it sounds like the state's most prominent Democrat, a White woman, was more interested in polling what "Latinx" voters think (hint: they don't call themselves Latinx) than in leading an aggressive offense about how Floridians deserved better wages. Second, there really does have to be more emphasis on math. From the losing Democratic House districts I looked at, Max Rose in NY is one book end and Donna Shalala in Florida is another. Max Rose is a courageous fighter, and he probably did everything right. But he was in a district that voted for Trump by 10 points in 2016. And it was a district where no Democrat has ever gotten much more than 100,000 votes (Rose got 99,224 votes in 2020, which was more than he got in 2018), whereas a Republican getting 140,000 votes was not a heavy lift (Rose's Republican opponent got 136,382 in 2020, which was actually less than the Republican incumbent did in 2016). Shalala is the exact opposite. Clinton won that district by 20 points in 2016. How could you possibly fuck things up that badly? Lots of Democrats in lots of districts that voted for Trump in 2016 survived. There should be a bloodbath in Florida after this outcome. Because somebody missed something obvious. We know that, because we read there was a big problem in Miami Dade in news stories all Fall. Third, the worst should be over. Here's a list of House incumbents in districts Trump won in 2016. I did not bother to look at which ones Trump won again in 2020. But just scan it and it explains who lost and why. Here's Democratic losers and the percentage Trump won their districts by in 2016: MN-7 Peterson (Trump +30.9), OK-5 Horn (Trump + 13.2), SC-1 Cunnigham (Trump + 13.1), NM-2 Small (Trump + 10.2), NY-11 Rose (Trump + 9.8). The good news to me is that most of these Democrats held on in districts that are kind of Trumpy. If Biden is wildly unpopular in 2022, it will be another Democratic bloodbath. But if he is popular, like W. was in 2002, the Democrats in mildly Trumpy districts who held on in 2020 should be okay. In Southern California, the problem was the opposite. The 2 to 4 seats we look to lose there were all areas both Clinton and Biden won. But they were held by Republicans for a long time. Close Democratic wins in a whole bunch of districts in 2018 were reversed by close Republican wins in a few of them in 2020. That should be reversible in 2022. My greatest hope is that Democrats in 2022 are focused on defense. I hope whoever Pelosi puts in charge targets a smaller number of districts where we either barely won and need to hold on, or barely lost and can either win them back or finally push them from red to blue. Some of these districts we did not win in Texas in 2020 might be winnable in 2022 when the turnout dynamics change. Fourth, I think Republicans just kicked the shit out of Democrats on direct voter outreach in 2020. I keep going back to their claim that they were knocking on 1 million doors a week and registering voters like crazy. Florida was at the top of their list. It is reasonable to think they spoke to millions of voters there, often face to face. They clearly won the messaging war in Miami Dade. Where Democrats did something like that, like in Georgia, it appears to have paid off. So once the pandemics is over, Democrats need to decide which states and House districts we really think we can win in 2022. And we need to do what the Republicans did, which is in their own words is what Obama did in 2008 and 2012. (In 2012, Democrats won Senate seats in Missouri, Indiana, North Dakota, Montana, and West Virginia. Go figure.) My simple math goes like this. 80 to 90 % of "the message" voters get comes from TV - from CNN to ABC to Fox - and then you add some talk radio on the right and podcasts on the left. That's why Trump as incumbent, and as carnival barker, had such a huge advantage. My initial theory about why Trump did better than expected in 2020 is that a lot of people bought his relentless daily message that is was the best economy ever. Just like 70 % of Republicans are now buying his message that this election was somehow unfair. Havin that bullhorn every day makes a huge difference. So Joe Biden having the bullhorn will help Democrats a lot, I think. If he fucks it up, plan on a 2022 bloodbath. But there's every reason to hope it could be like W. in 2002. The other 10 to 20 % is ads and turnout. And Democrats mostly underperformed Republicans in 2020, I think. Especially on turnout, which is understandable since they were okay with door knocking and we followed pandemic protocol. That actually means they had an advantage that they won't have in 2022. If we pick areas like these districts in Southern California and Southern Texas and Miami Dade, and the ones that have been close calls like Arizona 6 which we have narrowly three times in a row, we ought to be able to win back some of these seats and maybe gain a few. But it is going to have to be based on a lot of face to face volunteer and paid contact in those districts Politico describes above. The biggest fear of all in both South Florida and South Texas was that Biden would bring in socialism, or at least a weaker economy. So if the economy turns out to be better in 2022 and COVID is mostly a bad memory that right there is a huge plus. There's an anecdote in that Texas story about how one of the Democratic Tejanos was begging with the state Democratic Party to send her stuff that would help specifically based on the interests of that one border district. They sent her signs that said, "Todos con Biden." If that's an accurate symbol of Democratic messaging, we only have ourselves to blame.

2020 Democrats fared poorly down ballot, but we're winning the fight for fair election maps Democrats will have much greater influence over redistricting in the coming decade than in the last one, despite state legislative losses this month. As a Democrat, I found that article encouraging. It's of course supposed to be encouraging, because it's in part propaganda written by someone with the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. But the arguments make sense, and reinforced these things I've been thinking all week. It is interesting that after spending much of 2020 freaking out that it would be another 2016 and Trump would win, Democrats have done a reversal. At some point, thanks to polls, we decided we were going to win in a landslide. So something a lot like 2016 happened, and now we are surprised. Which we shouldn't be. And because we didn't win in a landslide, we're taking what happened as a loss. Winning the Presidency obviously isn't a loss. Nor is gaining one Senate seat, if that's all we do. The obvious bad news is the House. Maybe I'm in denial, but I don't see it as particularly bad news. We won 41 House seats in 2018, including some that had consistently elected Republicans for decades. We did it with what I've argued was an unsustainable turnout advantage of 10 million more House votes, nationally, than the Republicans got in 2018. So in 2020 when Republicans turned out in droves we couldn't hold some of those seats. None of this is a shocker. And I still look at it as a glass two thirds full. If we lose all the seats that are still razor thin and undeclared, we kept 2/3rd of the gains from 2018. And, most important, we kept a House majority. I've been reading one after another depressing article about how 2020 was a disaster for Democrats. Again, maybe I'm in denial. But I had this nagging feeling as I read them that this just doesn't sound right. So when I read the arguments in the article above it confirmed my gut feeling. Not winning, or not making progress, is simply not the same as losing. I think it is very rational to say we are in a much better position than when the 2010 redistricting occurred. In states like Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin we now have Governors that can check the worst maps Republican legislatures try to draw. And since they already gerrymandered everything they could in 2010, it just seems like it limits their ability to do as much damage to Democrats in 2020. Texas will be a disaster. But even there, if I got the numbers right, the 100 to 50 or so advantage Republicans had in the Texas House has been gradually clawed down to a 83 to 67 Republican advantage. So you can say it was a disaster because Democrats hoped to win back a majority. Or you can say it wasn't a disaster because Democrats held the net gain of 12 seats in the Texas House from 2018. The long term trends that delivered Arizona and Georgia to Biden are also at work in Texas. So Republicans will have another shot at making it harder for Democrats. But they can't stop demography. Sean Trende has written this two part series guessing how redistricting and gerrymandering could change the House map. He's saying a good placeholder is about 10 seats will shift to Republicans, in part because Democrats will lose some seats in blue states that have shrunk and red states will get more seats due to the census that Republicans can draw red. My takeaway is that every Democrat should plan on the fact that we will lose the House in 2022 - unless we figure out a very good plan for defense. We should have done that after 2018, and instead we let ourselves get giddy about offense. Let's not make the same mistake twice. Here's a conclusion the article above reached that I rabidly agree with: In other words, it's a long slog. No surprise there. At some point I hope somebody writes a book about what the Trump 2020 ground game actually did. I've been reading bits and pieces of it for years. Having 1 million volunteers knock on doors every week. Registering tens of thousands of new voters. I worried that Team Trump was building an army that would overwhelm Democrats on Election Day. Based on their surprising turnout and Democratic underperformance in purple and red parts of just about any swing state, I think we can conclude that we underestimated the importance of all that organizing work Team Trump did. We also overestimated our ability to buy our way into winning elections in places like South Carolina, or even North Carolina. It looks like base turnout in cities like Milwaukee and Detroit and Philadelphia was mediocre. So we got lucky because lots of Whites in the suburbs had simply had enough of Trump. 2020 was a unique year, and I'm not critical of Democrats not pushing door knocking in a pandemic. But I don't think it's at all surprising that the outcome was what it was. We underestimated the passion of the Trump Party base to hold on to power and thwart Democrats. On ground game, they appear to have done a good job. They basically will admit they did what Team Obama did in 2008 and 2012. There's a lot of dust left to settle. But if we internalize and correct what went wrong, I think we can hold the House in 2022. Trende is right that Democrats are bound to lose some seats through redistricting. The silver lining in the cloud of our 2018 losses is it gives us some seats that are prime targets to win back in two years. There are a few that are in what is now solid Trump country, like the rural Minnesota seat Colin Peterson lost. After 2016, he was living on borrowed time. I don't think we should waste time fighting the trend on them. But Biden won the 2 to 4 Southern California House seats Democrats look to lose. These are areas where the trend is working for the Democrats. We should be able to win them back. The other depressing thing I keep reading is that Democrats are doomed to lose the House, anyway, because the incumbent party always does badly in midterms. If I look at it as a Democrat, that sure sounds true. My two experiences in my adult lifetime are 1992 and 2010. Both times Democrats had won a trifecta, did liberal things like Obamacare, and then got blown away by the reaction against liberalism. Especially in the House. I sort of factored that in. In my wildest dreams, we'd win a handful of House seats, maybe have 53 to 55 Senate seats, and two years to get whatever laws we could passed - like some version of a Green New Deal - before we had hell to pay in 2022. If there is a silver lining in the clouds of 2020 for democrats, it's that we didn't set ourselves up for that in 2022. The best hope for Democrats, I think, is what happened in W.'s first term. It's similar enough to what Biden will face. There was a 50/50 split in the Senate, but when Jeffords switched parties in June 2001 Democrats took control. Republicans picked up a handful of House and Senate seats in both 2002 and 2004. There was no midterm curse. Some might argue that was a one off because of W.'s popularity after 9/11. I don't see it that way. The key question is whether Biden governs well. If Americans believe he got us through the pandemic and got the economy going again, and also was trying to bring the country together in a difficult situation, I don't dismiss that Democrats could thwart any midterm curse.

The real tragedy is that The Divine Miss Graham was wrong. It did not destroy them. Not yet. Trump destroyed lots of things. But his party was not one of them. That said, I think the "Trump Party" is the gift that will keep on giving. I wasn't sure how to feel about the Lincoln Party types before the election. And I don't think a lot of Republicans, including Graham, were sure how to feel. Now it's clear. The Lincoln Party was saying that the Trump Party will shrink and become angrier as their power diminishes. I now believe that. And Graham and pretty much everybody else are stuck with The Trump Party and their crappy messages. Maybe that helps them stage a comeback. But I doubt it. If only 70 % of Republicans believe Trump's bullshit about a stolen election, that doesn't sound like addition to me. That sounds like subtraction. Meanwhile, I can't imagine contempt for democracy and fact and science will help Trump with the growing segment of voters under 50, and especially those under 30, who lean to the left.

Quiet honestly, Toto and I have been in Kansas. I guess it distorts my perception of reality. I did get racist and deplorable right, at least. I should clean up something I said above about the Philadelphia riddle. Here's what i said above. In Milwaukee and Wayne County, turnout was up about 10 percent to 15 percent, respectively - roughly the same as all of Wisconsin and Michigan. In Pennsylvania it was also up 10 percent. But in Philadelphia County it was flat. In addition, Biden's actual votes in Philadelphia County went very slightly down from Hillary 2016. He still clobbered Trump. But Trump got about 20,000 more votes. So my assumption was that Blacks in Milwaukee and Detroit turned out in a way Blacks in Philadelphia didn't. What I didn't know, being from Kansas and what not, is that Philadelphia county is the City of Philadelphia, whereas Milwaukee and Detroit are roughly half of Milwaukee and Wayne Counties. The initial stuff I've read suggests that Black turnout in all three cities may have been more or less flat. That's based on some initial reports about predominantly Black precincts. Where Biden increased votes, what I've been reading suggests it was in White liberal parts of those cities. Since Milwaukee and Wayne Counties stretch into the suburbs, it may have also been White suburban voters as well. It's 100 % clear that Biden outperformed Hillary with suburban Whites, particularly suburban White males. The same stories cite local Black leaders saying they've been ringing alarms all Fall. Unlike Florida Latinos, it wasn't primarily about people of color voting for Trump. It was about Blacks not voting at all. Especially young Blacks, and even more so young Black males. I think it's clear that the biggest mistake Democrats made is assuming what happened in 2018 was sustainable. In 2018 Democratic turnout was off the charts, whereas Republican turnout was normal. So in 2020 it was off the charts on both sides. No surprise, some right-of-center House seats that have voted Republican for decades in some cases proved hard to defend. We should have built the whole House campaign around that. We got giddy. And it may have cost us a handful of House seats we could have saved. But there was no way to stop the Trump red wave. That said, I think Republicans are in the same position Democrats were coming off 2018. I think what they just did is probably even more unsustainable than what Democrats did in 2018. History may view this as the last glorious stand of a certain part of older America that thinks of itself as "the Trump Party". I'll be broken record on this. They spent four years and $1 billion and knocked on 1 million doors a week to win one election on one day. They also had the national bully pulpit of Trump framing their message every day. And they still lost. And it's anybody's bet whether these 10 million "low engagement" Trump Party voters who appeared out of nowhere in 2020 will vote again in 2022 or 2024. Once the dust settles, we'll probably learn Biden won in large part on a fragile base of suburban voters who he may or may not be able to consolidate in 2022 and 2024. If he underperformed with Blacks and Latinos, more because of lack of turnout efforts than because they voted for Trump, that actually gives us a way to pad margins if some of those suburban votes go away. It will not help in state legislative races. The problem there is there's a big Red Wall between the suburbs and the ex-urbs Democrats failed to breach. But it would help win Senate seats that will be up for grabs in 2022 in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. For Democrats, the mantra for the next two years has to be turnout, turnout, turnout.

Michigan voters file federal lawsuit seeking to toss 1.2M ballots Rudy Giuliani claims 650,000 votes were counted unlawfully in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh Those headlines speak for themselves. It is just surreal. Call me stupid. But as much as I feel Trump has proven he is racist, deplorable, go through the whole list of negative adjectives, this is going way past where I thought he'd go. If only because I really didn't think he was willing to hurt America this much. Or, more important, destroy his own reputation further. Both in the history books, and right now. I have to assume he has some calculation in his mind that somehow this helps him in some way. Even if it is with a post-White House career. But it really makes no sense. Some partisan part of me is just hoping he does more of this. The message could not be more clear. This is supposed to be the least racist guy in America. And now what they are saying is that the votes of Blacks in Detroit are not legal, and should just be thrown out. The votes of White progressives in Philly or Pittsburgh are not legal, and should be thrown out. It's the most outrageous claim I've ever heard in my lifetime in the US. That hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes are unlawful. And yet there is still not any proof. I have to imagine that every headline like this just loses Trump and the Republicans more future votes. I guess losing by over 5 million votes wasn't enough. It goes without saying, but I'll say it. I'm assuming Trump will win by about 75,000 votes in North Carolina. That's about half of Biden's winning margin in Michigan and maybe double Biden's final winning margin in Pennsylvania right now. I'm quite sure Democratic lawyers could whip up a nice shit list of similarly baseless claims about White voters in North Carolina. I don't have a clue why Democrats would WANT to do that, since it would alienate Whites in North Carolina. Why would Democrats do that? I also assume that right-of-center suburban Republicans who are just groaning right now could forget all this in 4 years and switch back to voting for a John Kasich. IF the Republicans nominated someone like him in 2024. I get the idea that maybe this is a play so that Trump or Trump, Jr. or Ivanka or maybe a Trumpy Nikki Haley/Ivanka Trump ticket are the Trump Party nominees in 2024. It just seems to me like even if this helps you get 70 % of the shrinking Republican Party on your side, that's a losing proposition. Both in 2020, and moreso in 2024. Again, some partisan part of me is saying, go ahead Trumpians. Burn the bitch down if you must. If the goal is to drive out any remaining Kasich Republicans and consolidate control of the Republican Party for the Trumps, that's a winning ticket for Democrats. If you didn't get that in 2020, we can do it again in 2022 and 2024. Please. Go ahead. Make my decade. This is where I'll keep repeating the excellent question Ron Brownstein is asking. Do Republicans not think that Millennials have memories? Do Republicans not think Blacks have memories? If the exit polls are right, 60 % of Latinos in Michigan and Wisconsin and 70 % in Pennsylvania voted for Biden. In the specific urban areas where Trump is saying the votes should be tossed out, it was probably more like 3 in 4 Hispanics, I'd guess. Do you think those Latinos will forget this? So what Republicans are teaching entire generations and races of Americans is that if we don't win, you don't count. Your vote doesn't count. Whatever small gains the Republicans made - and all the exit polls suggest they were small - with Blacks and Latinos, this wipes it out. Telling them their vote does not count, because they somehow cheated, just wipes away any pretense of caring about them. Or their votes. Outside of the ones that are committed Trumpians, I can't see how this could possibly help with alienated suburban centrists, as well. It will just alienate more of them. I've posted endless dorky data over on Daddy's. But I am going to do a brief summary here. I actually hope this stuff is debated. Because the facts underscore how totally ignorant Trump is. And that he is willing to tear down democratic norms based on completely baseless bullshit. The data I will refer is not polling guesses. This is based on actual vote totals in 2016 and 2020, based on current vote totals - which I think include like 99 % of all votes cast. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, statewide voter turnout is up about 10 % from 2016 statewide. In Michigan, it's close to 15 %. For the most part, the urban parts of those states closely reflect the state trend. In Milwaukee County, turnout is up 10 % - same percentage as all Wisconsin. In Wayne County (Detroit) - turnout is up 15 %, just like in all of Michigan. in both counties I just mentioned, Biden managed to boost Clinton's winning margin as well. So, for example, Clinton's win of 65.48 % in 2016 became Biden's win of 69.1 % in Milwaukee County. Blacks and Berniecrat Whites and to a lesser degree Latinos (since they are not a huge population group there) ran up big vote totals for Biden in all three states. So what happened in the urban areas Trump wants to focus on basically reflects very closely what happened in the entire state. Turnout was up, across the board. Second important point. If you are decent at math, you will understand that Trump could have won all three states if he pulled off exactly the same thing in the predominantly White parts of the state he won in 2016. But he did the opposite. He lost vote share in predominantly White suburbs, as well as in some predominantly White working class areas like Erie County, Pennsylvania (88 % White). So here's a specific example. Biden's winning vote share in Wayne County. Michigan was 322,925 votes, compared to Hillary's 290,451 winning vote margin in 2016. Meanwhile, Biden cut Trump's winning vote share in Macomb County, Michigan from 48,348 votes in 2016 to 38,974 votes in 2020 - even though turnout in Macomb County was up about 22 %, higher than the statewide increase. Overall, Biden turned Hillary's roughly 10,000 vote loss into his roughly 150,000 vote win in Michigan. So do the math. If we're talking about fraud in Michigan, you really have to go after how White voters (often in Republican areas) fraudulently tipped the vote to Biden. That's where he ran up most of those 150,000 votes. Trump needs to be talking about, and proving, White voter fraud. Even if Biden implausibly had gotten 30,000 FEWER votes in Wayne County, he STILL would have won Michigan. Because of White voters. Trump can't say that. In a state Biden won by 150,000 votes, the only mathematically tenable position he can take is literally to say just take all those Black votes in Detroit away. They just don't count. How racist is that? Thank you. I thought so, too. If there is some logic in Trump exposing himself to be the racist, erratic, ignorant, democracy-hating monster he has always been, I don't see it. Third important point. There were outliers. I just mentioned one. Turnout in Macomb County was up 22 %, which beat Michigan's 15 % overall increase. In Dane County (Madison), White Berniecrats drove turnout up 17 %, much higher than the 10 % statewide increase. So if we are looking for outliers were there were unusual vote totals, those places could make more sense. Or you could just decide that educated voters in Dane and Macomb County were highly motivated to vote. As I said above, Milwaukee and Detroit conformed almost exactly to the overall statewide increase in turnout. Here's an outlier I can't figure out, other to say it is what it is. In Philadelphia County, turnout was only up 1 %, compared to 10 % in Pennsylvania as a hole. And for reasons social scientists or activists will have to figure out, Trump's winning vote share in Philadelphia actually INCREASED. Since it undercuts any theory of fraud in Philadelphia, I'll spell out the details as of yesterday. Clinton got 584,025 votes in Philadelphia County in 2016, which went DOWN to 573,785 for Biden in 2020. Meanwhile, votes for Trump went from 108,748 in 2016 to 128, 123 in 2020. Net impact: Clinton's winning 2016 vote share of 475,277 in Philadelphia County was shaved to Biden's 445,662 vote share. So if everything else in the state stayed exactly the same as 2016, Trump would have won Pennsylvania by 30,000 votes more than he did in 2016 - BECAUSE OF PHILADELPHIA. If there was farud in Philadelphia, which I don't believe there was, the vote totals suggest it helped Trump. Why did Biden win? In Bucks County (suburbs), he boosted Hillary's victory of 2,699 votes in 2016 to his victory of 16,395 in 2020. In Alleghany County (Pittsburgh), Clinton's winning margin of 108,317 votes in 2016 climbed to a 146,706 winning margin for Biden. For whatever reason, in Pennsylvania Biden's win was irrefutably grounded in White voters in suburbs and working class areas like Erie County. He actually had to make ground he lost in Philadelphia County. (This may have something to do with slow vote counting. But the vote seems likes it's mostly counted. And turnout and votes for Biden in every other blue part of Pennsylvania - like Pittsburgh - did increase a lot.) I have no explanation for why Philadelphia sticks out like a sore thumb, compared to all the other big cities in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. But it does. It actually looks like somehow Trump cheated to reduce the number of votes Biden got. Basing an argument about fraud on the actual vote totals in Philadelphia makes this more a comedy than a tragedy. It's absurd. Trump has no proof. And it makes no fucking sense. Other than to prove Trump is an ignorant monster who feels winning is more important than democracy. Ron Brownstein often comes back to the same question. Do you think Millennials have no memories? Do you think Gen Z has no memories? Do you think Blacks have no memories? Those groups in particular turned out in droves to fire Trump. So if the message back is that your vote just doesn't count, I am with Brownstein. They are teaching entire generations and races to view them as deplorable for the rest of their lives. Republicans just paid a huge price for letting Trump degrade, corrupt, and pollute their party. The verdict is out. But I think the price they just paid may look like a small down payment of the full cost from the vantage point of history.

Understanding The 2020 Electorate: AP VoteCast Survey CNN Exit Polls There ya go. The first link is to the AP VoteCast, the second to the CNN exit polls. We all know now to take polls with a gain of salt. Which is partly why I included two different ones. That said, I think the results are in the ballpark. We know Blacks overwhelmingly supported Biden. Whether it's 90 % (AP) or 87 % (CNN) makes a difference. A close election could turn on that. But it does tell you about 9 out of 10 Blacks supported Biden. The cool thing about the CNN polls is that you can toggle through various state exit polls from swing states, as well. On education, there are no surprises. Both AP and CNN show Trump overwhelmingly won the White non-college vote. Biden won the White college vote. How that shakes out in various states helped determine the outcome. The Blue Wall states are important because Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (plus Ohio, which is now solid red) have a treasure trove of White non college voters. Georgia had just enough college Whites to add to non-Whites to produce a razor thin Biden win. AP started their data base in 2018. But with CNN you can compare 2020 to the state-level CNN polls from 2016. It indicates that both non college White men and women shifted back to Democrats a bit in 2020. We've heard a lot about suburban women and working class White women fed up with Trump. The state polls suggest that the shift among White suburban and working class men may have been just as important in getting Biden enough votes to win the electoral college as well as a 5 million + popular vote lead. AP says Trump won White non college men 64/34, and White non college women 60/39. Trump also won White college men 52/46, but Biden won White college women 59/39. Net it out, and Trump won White America. Biden offset it with Black, Latino, Asian, etc. voters. I'll wait to hear from the experts. But I'm pretty sure in Michigan Biden would have won if if he won ZERO more White votes, based on the increased turnout from Blacks in Detroit alone. The fact that he won back a lot of suburban Whites and at least a sliver of non college Whites helped him rack up a pretty decent win that fell a bit short of 4 %. In Wisconsin White Berniecrats in Madison and Blacks in Milwaukee produced enough votes to turn a 20,000 loss in 2016 into a 20,000 vote win in 2020. But small gains among Whites in the suburbs helped offset higher Trump margins in the core red meat rural areas. In Pennsylvania I am almost certain that Biden absolutely needed to win more White suburban voters and a sliver of White working class voters to win. Which he did. That's one of my go-to charts that I post a lot, because I think it explains so many things. It's already clear that Biden reversed the trend from Clinton's R + 39 wipeout with non college Whites in 2016. I'm pretty sure that Biden did not quite get back to Obama's R +25 outcome in 2012. My guess, or at least hope, is that we'll look back at 2020 as the peak of Trumpism - much like McCarthyism had a peak. Trump had The White House. He spent $1 billion or so (not his money) and four years building an army to legitimately overwhelm the field in one election on one day. If true, Trump volunteers were knocking on 1 million doors a week while Biden volunteers knocked on zero doors. So they put a lot of effort into this. And they failed. And at the end of the day Trump lost at least a sliver of his White non college base. And his racist and mean antics alienated a treasure trove of suburban college Whites that delivered Arizona and Georgia to Biden. Bill Clinton is the only Democrat to split the non-college White vote 50/50 - two times in a row. And there's a rumor I heard that Barack Obama was actually Black. Some people even describe Bill Clinton as "America's first Black President". (Don't tell Trump.) My point is I think you are right to not jump to conclusions about racism. What we still don't know is how many of these non-college Whites are driven by these "cultural" drivers (racism, sexism, Gays, feeling like America is being lost). Versus how many feel the Democrats betrayed them and their communities by either helping to give their jobs to robots or Chinese, or at least acquiescing to it on behalf of their corporate and Wall Street donors. Trump obviously played on that in 2016. My guess, or at least my hope, is that with Trump gone or at least reduced to Trump TV there will be an opportunity to move some of those Whites back to the Democrats. But that will depend on Biden persuading them that he got the message, Democrats got the message, and we are now doing specific and clear things to make it right. That is a huge fight yet to be fought, I think.

Chris Cuomo has been clearly showing that even though he chose journalism rather than law and politics, he has the political instincts of his brother and father. He's been saying what I have been thinking, which suggests that what I'm thinking is a sensible enough hope. Everything goes through COVID. It gets you to health care. It gets you to schools. It get you to jobs. It gets you to wages (income inequality). In theory, it could even get you to taxes: whose income taxes go up to pay for this? Who is getting the benefit of this crisis (Answer: Amazon). That last part is a huge stretch. Biden was right to claim a mandate for urgent action and cooperation. Mitch knows this. He's already being the Republican in the room saying we have to have another COVID relief package. Reagan comes to mind. Yes, he had a bigger mandate. But he also had a much bigger obstacle. Despite heavy losses in 1980, Democrats had a 243 to 192 majority in the US House. Yet Reagan mostly got what he wanted. He went to the grassroots in some of those House districts. And of course he was way better at compromising than Trump was. Biden won the union vote nationwide 56 to 40. 15 % of voters in Wisconsin are union, and they voted for Biden 58/39. It would be a stretch to say that Biden won a mandate to try to restore union manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin. But I think he did. In 2016 Trump won the one third of Georgians that make under $50,000 a year by one point, 48 to 47. In 2020, Biden won that group - lots of whom are White - by a 14 point margin, 56/42. Rich Mitch has to worry about that, just like Tip O'Neill had to worry about his much larger majority in 1981. If Republicans are seen to be against cooperation to help the union factory workers of Wisconsin or the have nots of Georgia, they'll potentially have problems in Senate races in 2022. Biden is wired to understand this in a way Obama wasn't. Speaking of having enough. We now know that Kentucky and Montana and Iowa are lost causes, at least for a while. McGrath was a lost cause from Day One. The size of Bullock's loss was a bit of a surprise. As was the size of Ernst's victory. It confirms the idea that it's the geography, stupid. Where White men roam free and proud in places with lots of cows, small towns, and contentment, running a popular and centrist Governor like Bullock is a waste of time almost. This sounds cruel. But if people in Montana or Kentucky truly embrace the idea that lockdowns are a threat to liberty, and the only people who wear masks are Marxists, we know where this goes. Fauci is saying it could go to 250,000 infections a day. Seniors will die on stretchers in hospitals in Montana and Kentucky, if they even get to the hospital. Because there is no room in the ICU. I said this will sound cruel. I think of it as those people being cruel to themselves, and their neighbors. They have every right to see it differently. But if that happens, which is nowhere near the worst case scenario, it helps Biden when he says we need to cooperate and act now.

Sorry, sis. But on this one I have to completely disagree. It won't just fade away. But don't ask me. Smarter people than me have debated this for a long time. I've posted a short version of this already on Daddy's but this slightly longer version is worth posting here. That's the flip side of what Douglass was talking about. There is a time for conflict. And there is a time for reconciliation. "Reconciliation" is the word that needs to be in the mind and heart of every American right now. This is already starting. One of the many images that brought me to tears this weekend was the spontaneous celebration near The White House in DC, in what I believe is now called Black Lives Matter plaza. That was where we came close on one day this summer to looking like an authoritarian state, with the armed forces attacking peaceful US citizens who were described and treated by some as enemies of the people, as opposed to "the people". This weekend it was so clear that so many people want reconciliation, and healing. It's up to all of us now whether that can actually happen. This is my new mantra. Biden flipped the suburbs. Trump won them 49/45 over Hillary in 2016. Biden won them 51/48. Trump won rural areas. But Biden cut Trump's win from 61/34 in 2016 to 54/45 in 2020. So when he says he's the President of rural America, he's talking about places where maybe half the people actually voted for him. They want help on COVID. They want help on jobs. They want help on health care. They want a more civil debate. So Biden being Biden, we really do have an opportunity for reconciliation and healing I believe. It's sad that John Lewis was not here to see this. But his spirit is with us.

Read my snarky message to him over there. I meant what I said. I think we should thank him and encourage him to continue, loudly, on the path he is on. I won't repeat everything I said. But I will repeat the key Saul Alinsky idea: The action is in the reaction. Here's the way I'm going to view it. The problem Biden had is that Trump is the kind of guy who can actually get 70 million + Americans to vote for him, as we just saw. So the Democrats needed someone who could get 75 million people to vote for Biden. The beauty of Biden is he realized only one candidate could get 75 million people to vote for Biden. And that candidate is Donald J. Trump. To state it slightly differently, everything Trump did to agitate and divide and conquer to get 70 million votes helped Biden get 75 million votes. Augustus exemplifies the kind of rabid Trumpist thinking (sometimes it is not even thinking, really) that helped get 75 million people to vote for Biden. So he helped elect Biden, I think. We also know Biden will make plenty of mistakes and gaffes that will cause people to question his leadership. So I think it's helpful to have Trump himself, or fans like Augustus, popping up to remind us that while Biden might not be perfect, he is such a better alternative.

Now that the drama at the top of the ticket has ended, I've been sifting through what happened down the ticket. We now all have the memo that 2020 was definitely not an embrace of progressive ideals. I think the best way to read this election is that it was a repudiation of Trump and Trumpism, at least as a way of running America. But it was hardly an endorsement of progressivism, like The Green New Deal. That explains why Republicans lost the Presidency, but gained House seats. I think Biden was wise to claim a mandate yesterday. And to define the mandate as a call to unity, cooperation, and action - as opposed to any left-of-center policy. As far as I can tell, some of these new Republican House members are women of color, who probably think a lot like Mia Love - the Black Republican Trump basically verbally humiliated after she lost in 2018, because she did not "give me love", in Trump's gross words. One of the 2018 Democrats that may lose is Ben McAdams of Utah, who barely beat Love in 2018. He's now losing by a fraction to Burgess Meredith, a Black man. But it's still too close to call. It's a perfect symbol of how moderates in both parties are winning or losing very close elections in what are, and will remain, swing districts split right down the middle. Just like America is right now. Democrats have now lost a net of 4 House seats that have been called. If every Democrat losing by a fraction right now goes on to lose their election, it looks like slightly more than one third of the 41 seats Democrats gained in 2018 will have been lost. Joe Scarborough has already called this a "repudiation" of the Democratic Party. I think he needs some sleep. We just won the Presidency by maybe 5 million votes. Trump is the one who got his sorry ass repudiated, I think. If I forget about firing Trump and just focus on the US House, I'm going to look at this as 3 steps forward in 2018, one step back in 2020. That in itself is not bad news. Just from eyeballing it, every one of the seats we may lose in 2020 was a Republican stronghold we picked up in 2018. 4 are in California, all of which have Democrats I've sent money to and followed. These are hardly radical House members. Several of them are moderates who are former Republicans. Like Harley Rouda, who right now is losing by about one point to an Asian American Republican woman. Both him and his opponent are centrists. I noted that the four Democratic women who worked in intelligence/CIA jobs and won in "Trump" House seats in 2018 and wrote the controversial op/ed calling for his impeachment all won re-election. There was a very long and very good article written earlier this year about Elissa Slotkin, one of those female House members. She just won her race 51/47. That is about as good as you can probably expect in what used to be a solidly red seat in Michigan. I mention the article because it went through in great detail all the policy and relationship work she had been doing to bind herself to her district and its voters. So it clearly worked. If the question is whether Democrats can survive in these largely suburban swing districts that used to be solid red, the answer is way more "yes" than "no". No surprise, it ain't easy. You win by a few points, or even a few fractions of a point. If two of the three Democratic House members who won in Orange County in 2018 by a fraction of a point end up losing by a fraction of a point in 2020, that's disappointing. But it is hardly a shock. or a repudiation. Again, I'd look at this as three steps forward (41 new seats in 2018) and one step back (maybe lose one third of them, at worst, in 2020). One of the House moderates has now, in effect, attacked AOC by saying that Democrats should never use words like "socialism" or "defund the police" again. I'm glad Pelosi publicly pushed back against that. If Biden wins in Arizona and Georgia, some big part of that victory is Blacks and young progressive voters. The same is actually true in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. So if we're going to trash Blacks and Berniecrats, we are essentially saying we really wanted Trump to win, instead. I understand how AOC is now the woman Republicans like to use to make Democrats look crazy or radical. They did the same thing to Pelosi herself in 2010. That's politics. We should not let Republicans decide who gets to be in the Democratic coalition. On the face of it, the election results do suggest that if Bernie or Elizabeth had been the nominee, they might have lost. I could make a good argument that either one of them might have done better than Biden at running on a platform that would have motivated the blue base. But there's not much evidence that happened in the 2020 primaries. There's more evidence that Biden won in part because of a message about ending the craziness, and trying cooperation and unity and compromise instead. Especially after yesterday I feel like the principal victory in 2020, a horrible year, is that we won the grand prize and have ended the madness. Trump and Trumpism took its very best shot, and got 70 million votes. But it still failed - by millions and millions of votes - as a way to run America. That's a huge victory in my eyes. People all over America and all over the world seem to feel that way, as we all saw yesterday. When I was binging on Allan Lichtman earlier this year I watched several clips of past debates he has had on TV, usually with other Democrats, who argued he was wrong that we need to impeach Trump. They made what he called the typical and wrong argument that Clinton "won" the impeachment debate. Lichtman argued it was true that in 1998 Republicans lost a few House seats. But in 2000 they won the Presidency, which is the grand prize in US politics. And he cited poll data showing that concerns about Clinton sleaze and moral leadership gave W. an edge over Gore. This is the way Pelosi has already said we should view 2020. She's said we lost some battles, but we won the war. I agree with her. That's the way I will look at this. AOC is a good target, even within the Democratic Party. As a progressive, I of course wish that we had just made sweeping gains, and took over the Senate. But I get why we didn't. I also get that if we tell young voters and Blacks who like the language about "defunding the police" or "democratic socialism" to just go fuck themselves, we can forget about winning those Georgia Senate seats. If Democrats don't want to be a coalition, let's just not waste the time and money and give those two Senate seats to the Republicans. Of the examples I've read about so far of what happened down ticket, Pennsylvania is a good one to frame how to think about this, I think. While Philadelphia was celebrating putting Biden over the top, the news down ticket was not good for Democrats. Efforts to take over the state legislature did not go well. That was in part because of the red wave that swept over the Trump parts of the state. So this is from an article about the failures of Pennsylvania Democrats that I find a telling anecdote about the politics of Trumpism in 2020: So I think it's good to have a debate about the impact of AOC or Rep. Omar or Blacks or Muslims or progressives or whatever. And I realize that Republicans can say even Joe Biden is a socialist, and he just wants to ban cows and hamburgers. That's the kind of crazy shit Trump will say. But this is even more crazy. There is of course a legitimate debate about how far you go in closing down business in order to stop a deadly virus that is now back to killing about 1,000 Americans a day. But this is not radical stuff. The polls are clear that most people put dealing with coronavirus above the economy. Biden clearly gets this. I'm sure he scored points with America when he said to heal the economy we first have to deal with and contain the virus. What's remarkable is that we even have to have this debate. This is not about banning cows or hamburgers. This is about a pragmatic Democratic Governor taking steps to try to save American lives. But we know that Trump did pretty well, especially in Trump America, making it sound like masks are a threat to liberty itself. Laura Ingraham has been talking about "lockdowns versus liberty". As if Joe Biden's goal is to destroy liberty and capitalism, as opposed to keep Grandma and Grandpa from dying. Any by the way, Biden lost the senior vote in the end - even though he may have done better with seniors than Clinton in some of these swing states. He won on the backs of Blacks, Latinos, and young progressive voters of every race. That's where he ran up huge majorities, as we just saw vote by vote and day by day. All of this makes me feel better about the fact that we picked Biden, that he won, and that he is adopting a political strategy he debuted last night. He is clearly going to focus on unity and compromise. In some imaginary US, if Sanders were nominated and if he won and got 55 Democratic Senators, maybe we could do it a different way. But that has nothing to do with the reality we now face. We will be lucky to have 50 Democratic Senators. Ron Brownstein was on TV last night saying OF COURSE Rich Mitch will try to block almost anything Biden tries to do. I agree with Ron. We should just assume that. What Biden has going for him, and is clearly going to use, is that we have multiple crises. And that Americans just gave him a mandate to try to get people to cooperate on dealing with this huge set of messes that we all share. That gets him to health care, to income, and even to income inequality. It gets him to the fact that people at the bottom, including Blacks and Latinos, are hurting the most. So he has plenty of ways to put pressure on Republicans to vote for progressive things that deal with the immediate health and economic problems of most Americans. It may not be a mandate for The Green New Deal. But for me it's a whole let better than the craziness and non-leadership of Trump. I'm quite sure Rich Mitch's strategy will be to blame Biden for everything that happens as of January 2021. Just like he blamed Obama for everything bad he inherited in January 2009. I'm sure Rich Mitch will try to use that to prevent Biden from winning a Senate majority in the 2022 midterms, when Republicans have to defend seats in blue states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as opposed to purple states like Arizona or Georgia or North Carolina. I'm actually confident that Biden can prevail this time. In part because we now know Mitch is likely to try to do the same thing again. And in part because Mitch will be trying to beat Biden at a game Mitch himself knows Biden is very good at - in a way that Obama simply wasn't. In my mind, this explains why Mitch himself is now saying we need a coronavirus relied deal. Rich Mitch won't make it easy for Biden to paint him as the reason things Americans want and need are not getting done. The burden will be on Biden to lead by trying to unify and compromise. He clearly gets that. Somehow Biden is going to have to do this in a way that gets progressives and Blacks and Latinos to support him, but doesn't alienate those unreliable suburban swing voters who were not exactly sold on Democrats in the election that just happened. There's many good reasons to think that Biden will fail to do it. But this week definitely created a clear direction that Biden obviously sees - he actually called it a "vision" - and that I think could work. I've had a personal epiphany about Susan Collins. Two of the milestones of my own emotional turmoil about Trumpism involve Collins. In 2017 I spontaneously went nuts defending Collins in a restaurant with two former Republican friends, one of whom attacked her as a "RINO" for having just voted - along with Murkowski and McCain - to not kill Obamacare. Then in 2018 I went rabid when she did her thing defending Justice Rapist. I will always view that as one of the worst and most dishonest moments of Collins (aka Senator Susan Coverup). Had anyone but Trump been President, they would have replaced Kavanaugh with a better person - like Barrett. I have to imagine that Collins survived an election she should have lost because enough voters in Maine cut her some slack because she was having to deal with an asshole like Trump. And they helped solve the real problem by voting Trump out, even as they cut Collins some slack. So I can get my mind around and respect what voters in Maine just did. My point is that this does create an opportunity for Biden. There are at least a handful of moderates in both parties - Tester and Manchin on the D side, Collins and Murkowski on the R side, who actually have won elections that can be taken to be a mandate for bipartisanship. They are Democrats who survived elections in red states, or Republicans who survived elections in blue states. So if this came down to something like SCOTUS throwing out Obamacare, or an inability to agree on a relief package that would prevent states from having to fire cops and teachers and public health nurses, Biden may have room to outmaneuver Rich Mitch. I've now gotten the memo that this is not like 1992 or 2008. Those were the only two elections in my adult lifetime when Democratic Presidents got to do what they wanted because they had the House and Senate. Both times it ended badly for Democrats, even though Clinton and Obama - not to mention Obamacare - survived and had successful Presidencies. Even if we win both Georgia run-offs and have 50 seats, this is going to be an unrelenting uphill climb for Biden. I do think that, like Reagan in 1981, one of his weapons is he could have Americans (including voters in swing states and swing districts that have Republican Senators, like Pennsylvania) on his side. I'm going to hope this is like 1960 and JFK - which is hardly what Joe Biden is, superficially. That election swept in new ideas and a new direction. But it took years, and LBJ, to both define the real agenda, and then enact it. The agenda itself - Medicare, The Great Society, civil rights - was very powerful. And it has mostly stuck. We actually are at a similar place today. Nobody really knows what The Green New Deal is. Whatever it is, it is nowhere near becoming law. And yet all these polls show that maybe as many as 2 in 3 voters support some kind of law that addresses climate change, which they see as a real and serious problem. I think most progressives and most Blacks get where we are at. They understand that if we want to have a majority to actually enact some version of a Green New Deal, or John Lewis's new Voting Rights Act, we're going to have to build a majority. This week made me feel a lot better, not a lot worse, about having Joe Biden lead that effort for the next four years.

The line that resonated most for me: "Slavery is an abomination ........ but neither I or any man have any immediate solution to the problem." How's that for understatement? Different century, but we're dealing with much of the same shit today. I suspect that clip was a highly white-washed portrayal of some of those men. We know about Jefferson and owning slaves. I don't feel he was a particularly good guy. I am now completely rabid about getting rid of the slavery electoral college. There's lots of scholars, especially Black ones, that can make a great argument that the electoral college is all about the ownership and blood of slaves. And there are plenty of "originalist" sources to go to to connect the dots and show the intent of "the Founding fathers" was to build institutions, like the electoral college, that were designed to support slavery. It is the last of our immediate problems, I know. And I also know we don't have the power to do anything about it right now. Talk about STILL not having an immediate solution to the problem. But it infuriates me that Biden will win this election by up to 5 million votes. And yet we have to go through this process of discussing whether the election was stolen from President Toxic. In no other country that even pretends to be a democracy would this be happening. To the extent that we're going to have noise, I'd rather have noise about how the electoral college is an institution built to support the ownership of Blacks as property. As opposed to how people feel about whether poll watchers should be six feet away from ballot counters in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Again, in no other democracy where someone just won by 5 million votes could this be happening. It makes me feel even worse about the kind of people who actually support this nonsense. There was an interesting discussion on CNN this week between Rep. Clyburn and Don Lemon. As always, Lemon was not exactly being a detached journalist. In fact, he was in tears, talking about how hearing Biden tell Blacks "You had my back, so I will have yours" made him cry as he heard it. He is not the only Black that said that on TV. The emotion and redemption in some of these moments and symbols this week was very deep and powerful. That was clear. Lemon was basically bitching as a Black man about how slow and difficult progress is. And how frustrating it is to even try to be objective interviewing people who are racists who unabashedly support Trump's racist nonsense. Clyburn got into this riff about his relationship with John Lewis and Elijah Cummings. How they became fast friends when they met and formed SNCC in the 60's. How close his religious and geographic roots with Cummings were. The love and dignity of these men, two of whom are now dead, was palpable as Clyburn went on in his riff with Lemon. But his basic point was what we would all guess. Be patient. Stay focused. Keep your eyes on the prize. Clyburn just gave an epic - one might say Biblical - example of how that works in real time with what he did with Biden in 2020. It has changed America for the good. I was in tears yesterday, too. I didn't know much about Clyburn until 2020. I am now in awe of the man. I feel America, and especially Democrats, are gifted with his wise and moral leadership. That's a way to rewrite the scene portrayed in what you posted, Adam. We still don't have any immediate solutions. I would argue we just escaped a brush with the degradation or even death of democracy. That might be going too far, since having maybe up to 150 million people vote in what was essentially a free election isn't exactly a bad example of democracy. But it was very messy, like that discussion about slavery in the clip you posted. One thing I feel good about is the discussion we just had wasn't one limited to or led by solely White men who own property, which in some cases is Black men. The key players in this debate on my side were people like Biden, Clyburn, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer. That's progress. The moral grounding of what just happened was in fact based on the words and ideals of men like Jim Clyburn, John Lewis, Elijah Cummings. So I'll take this as proof that MLK was right. We just saw the arc of the moral universe bend. 2020 is messy and sad. But if we listen to the words of men like Clyburn, Lewis, and Cummings, America will do well. That is truly a gift from God.

Why did so many Latinos vote for Donald Trump? I'm posting that article because the guy's main point is that White people (like me) who try to describe "the Latino vote" are going to get it wrong. I agree with him. That's why in what I said above, I clung to very specific polling data from actual states Biden won. The polling data contradicts some of what even this guy says. He states pundits will "ignore the fact that Trump also seems to have drawn significant numbers of votes from Mexican Americans in Arizona and Texas." What the exit polling data from CNN showed is that Biden did a whole let better among Latino men in Arizona in 2020 than Clinton did in 2016. As the author notes, the theory that Latino men like Trump because they see him as a "caudillo" is questionable. Latino men, primarily Mexican American, in Arizona didn't seem to groove too much on Trump's authoritarianism. In 2020, they seem to have decisively rejected it. Mostly what I liked about this article is it's a plea for outreach, base building, and understanding. That's a great statement. As a White liberal, I don't regret the outreach Biden did to Blacks, the ads clearly targeted to Black men, the selection of Harris as VP in a clear act of showing he "got it" to Black women. But there was no similar effort made to Latinos, as far as I can tell. Meanwhile, I'll keep saying that the efforts Bernie made in the primary seemed to provide one effective model of how to expand Latino participation. I mostly feel Democrats have a ton of work and outreach to do. This is stuff the mainstream media just is not good at covering. It is mostly quiet and tedious work. But my guess is that there were Latino progressives in Arizona and Nevada doing lots of work to register and motivate Latino voters, and that had an impact. We know the Trumpians, including lots of Cuban American Trumpians, ruled the air waves of South Florida. And Democrats' response was too little, too late. We now see the results. We should not be surprised. We should learn. A few other points in the article I'll reiterate. A lot of Blacks and Hispanics are just conservative. The history is not the same. Being anti-immigrant and even throwing Latino kids in cages is NOT the same as a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and systemic racism targeted at Blacks for all of US history. So I don't think it's realistic for Democrats to think that all Latinos or all Blacks are going to be Democrats. And I see Latinos as White people, much like I see Polish American people or Italian Americans as White people. Those ethnic groups suffered from anti-immigrant discrimination in the past, too. The author quotes Reagan in the article. But he didn't quote Reagan's best line about Hispanics: "They are Republicans, but they just don't know it yet." Speaking as a Democrat, I don't think Reagan is wrong. If Democrats aren't organizing and listening, we will lose more and more of the Latino vote. It also should be said that it is good for democracy, not to mention Blacks and Latinos, if both major US political parties are competing for their vote. So as a Democrat I don't feel bad about the fact that as the Trump ship goes down, the GOP picked up some House seats that will be filled by candidates that are mostly women, including Latina and (maybe in Orange County) Asian American women. The Republicans SHOULD feel good about that. And I applaud them for it. I was hoping South Carolina would be the first US state ever to have two Black Senators, one a Democrat and one a Republican. If we want healing and we want unity, that's exactly what the future of America should look like. Mostly I am delighted the Trump ship is going down. Thanks for that wonderful video. @Suckrates. Everything that has happened this week suggests that Trump and Trumpism will in fact rule the Republican Party during his post-Presidency. If I were a Republican, I'd feel more than a little worried about that. 75 million Americans, a majority, did just repudiate Trump and Trumpism. In that sense, Biden does have a mandate - even if it is NOT for liberalism. To me the brightest lights shining in the Republican Party are people like Sen. Scott, and some of these newly elected Republican House members (not, of course, the Q Anon whack job). If the Republican Party has a future as a majority, it is leaders like that that will build it. It's a different discussion for later, but if Republicans think or hope that blocking Biden for four years and reviving Trumpism in 2024 will be easy, they are being as delusional as Trump. Young voters voted 2 to 1 against Trump in 2020, and they turned out in droves. When McConnell pisses over everything most Americans in their 20's believe in, he will assure that the Republican Party in America will be viewed as worthwhile horse shit for the rest of our lives. Sorry, but let me repeat that. The Republican Party in America will be viewed as worthless horse shit for the rest of our lives, if McConnell pisses over all the young Americans who just voted 2 to 1 Democrat and helped turn states like Arizona and Georgia blue or purple. I'm glad you did well with some Cuban Americans and conservative Mexican Americans, Republicans. But if you are going to spend 2021 and 2022 saying "FUCK YOU" to progressive young America, don't be confused that there will be consequences in 2024 - just like there were in 2020. Again, there will be more of THEM and less of you in 2024. You might want to think that one through very carefully. I think my main takeaway from this election is already formed. The smart wizards of elections like Axelrod or Carville or Rove would probably agree that a good ground game can earn you 2 to 3 points in any election. So I'm going to just assume that some of these close 51/49 races Democrats lost might have been won if we had a more aggressive ground game, like the Republicans did. That said, we had a deadly pandemic in 2020. If being safer cost us a few House seats, I'm personally okay with that. The real takeaway is we have to do tons of outreach and organizing to Blacks, Latinos, and Whites who make less than $50,000 a year, and especially I think young voters. The very good news from 2020 is that all those groups can be registered to vote, and will vote, and will vote Democratic, if we organize and govern in a way that reflects their interests and priorities. Let me just say one other thing about young voters. More than any other group, they broke hard for Democrats. That's not quite true, in that Blacks seem to have broken up to 90 % Democratic in at least some states. But there are actually more young people than there are Blacks. And of course many of those young people are Black or Latino. And they tend to be the Berniecrats and Warrenites. So I just flat out disagree with the moderates who are trashing AOC and saying that talk about "socialism" cost the Democrats a few House seats in South Florida. That may be true. But if Democrats want Donald Trump, Jr to win in 2024, the smartest thing they could do now is tell young voters who supported Sanders or Warren to go fuck themselves. Instead, I think Biden did a more than adequate job reaching out to them and forming a coalition that just put Donald Trump to bed. Props to Biden for being smart enough to do that. The person who is about to tell most young voters in America to go fuck themselves is Rich Mitch. Let him do it. Let Rich Mitch define the Republican Party as the one that is antithetical to the goals and beliefs of the vast majority of young Americans. See how well that works for you in 2024.

I'm on a roll talking about exit poll data and what it suggests about building a Democratic majority. So I'm just going to rock on. This builds on the post directly above. But also on a post where I talked about a Fox News Pennsylvania exit poll. The key thing to me about that PA poll is it showed that Biden won a majority of all Pennsylvania voters who made less than $100,000 a year. Trump won a majority of voters making over $100,000 a year. So I said that we Democrats just have to go back to being very good at calling bullshit when Trump or other Republicans claim to be the economic populists fighting for the little guy and gal, and the working class. "Working Class Joe" is not the worst politician in America at doing that. Which is why Rev. Sharpton today said he thinks Trump could never get his hooks into Biden being an "elitist", the way he did into Clinton. I agree with Rev. Al. As if to prove my point, I watched a five minute or so riff between Sean Hannity and two Black guys he just had on that claim to be the very future of the Trump Republican Party. If I believed what I heard, Democrats are basically the coastal elite party that speaks for Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The Trump party speaks for Blacks, Latinos, and the working class of all races. This whole rap makes me want to vomit. After 5 minutes I had to change the channel. If it had anything to do with reality, I suspect Trump would have won Georgia and Arizona in a landslide. For whatever reason, Blacks in Georgia and Latinos in Arizona don't seem to understand what Sean and his two Black friends do. Dare I say that Sean is an elitist, and he needs to explain the truth to Blacks and Latinos better than he does? I also have to get on my soapbox for a minute about Sean Hannity. He is a lying, factually incorrect piece of shit. My low water mark for him was his rant on the "Community Investment Act", which he said forced banks to "give" homes to uncreditworthy people - many of whom are Black, and which they defaulted on. In fact, it is called the Community Reinvestment Act - not that accuracy matters to Sean. This was in an interview during the subprime crisis with Michael Moore. I was impressed that Moore was informed enough to ask Hannity how a law passed by Proxmire and Democrats in 1977 resulted in people losing homes in 2007, when the interviewed occurred. (By coincidence, a 30 year mortgage made in 1977 would actually be paid off in 2007. So you'd have a lot of equity, not a foreclosure). My point is that it was very clear that other than having a right wing talking point, Sean Hannity is completely ignorant about what comes out of his mouth. In fact, what Clinton did in the 90's on Black and Latino and White first time homeownership turned out to be arguably the single most effective thing any President has ever done to promote both homeownership and wealth creation for Blacks, Latinos, and low-income Whites. As a low-income White community organizer, I actually bought my first cheap home in a largely minority neighborhood for $77,000 in 1997. By 2005, it was worth at least $100,000 or $125,000 or so. Today it is worth triple that, and I own it with no mortgage. So I know Blacks who bought homes in the Clinton years built wealth and came out smelling like a rose. Elizabeth Warren can explain in amazingly accurate detail how the Blacks (and Whites and Latinos) who got screwed were the ones who bought the bullshit sold by predatory lenders in the Bush years - especially 2003 to 2005, when the Republicans ran everything. Predatory lending had more to do with refinances than purchase mortgages. So you can't blame any of that on Clinton. It happened years after his Presidency ended. Predators essentially stole Black wealth Clinton helped create. Blacks who know what happened don't blame it on Clinton. My point is that Democrats have done things that work for Blacks and Latinos. And it all has to do with things like homeownership, capitalism, wealth creation, and the American way of building net worth. It is the Republicans that usually fuck these things up. And it has nothing, nothing, and nothing to do with socialism. In early 2017 I actually thought, as a developer, Trump might have gone back to some of the things Clinton did that worked for Blacks. Instead, he went for trickle down and tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires like him. So I give credit to Trump for inheriting an improving economy and not fucking it up until 2020. He inherited the lowest Black poverty ever from Obama in 2017, and brought it a bit lower until 2020. It is now worse than it was under Obama. That may explain why 9 in 10 Blacks seem to have voted against Trump, not for him. The Pennsylvania data suggest that people who make under $100,000 voted for Biden, because they probably viewed him as the better and true economist populist. The days when Sean Hannity can put two Black talking heads on Fox News with him and claim to be the very heart and soul of Black America need to end. Democrats have to get better at being the party that talks - and delivers - real economic populism. So I thought some of this exit poll data was interesting. In Georgia, in 2016, Trump actually won by a sliver (48 % Trump to 47 % Clinton) the vote of Georgians who made under $50,000 a year. That's of all races. So we know among Whites in Georgia who make under $50,000 a year Trump had to have cleaned up in 2016. In 2020, Biden actually won this group handily. Of the one third of Georgians who make less than $50,000 a year, Biden just won them 56 % to 41 %. Meanwhile, Trump won Georgians who make over $50,000 a year 50 % to 48 %. I have no illusions about the fact that many low-income Whites in Georgia live in rural areas or small towns and probably are now fully culturally attached to the Trump/MAGA identity. I'd also guess many of them, especially the older ones, are racist and homophobic as hell. But politics is a game of margins. So if we've gone from Clinton barely losing the real low-income/working class in Georgia to Trump in 2016 to Biden winning them in 2020 by a 15 point margin, that helps to explain how he just won Georgia. It also explains why Democrats better not let Sean Hannity define them as the "coastal elite". Even Sean's two Black friends had to refer to the Blacks who are Democratic as "the Black elite". (As if being Black and rich was a bad thing?????) So it's true that part of what has changed in Atlanta is that you have an affluent and largely left-of-center and Democratic Black elite. Good for my party! We have to build on that, not be ashamed of it. I take it as a good thing that a few Black fat cats on the extreme crawled up Joe Biden's ass about how he wants fat cats of ALL races (most of whom are White) to pay more in taxes. It probably helped Biden win Black votes. Democrats need to do more of this. We need to be the real economic populists, and call bullshit on Trumpists like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. Let's take a trip down memory lane to when and why this abortion of a failed and rejected Presidency began. I'll end by playing Bernie Sanders. Shame on the Democratic Party for forgetting our roots, and our base, and letting this happen. Allan Lichtman would agree with O'Reilly that Hillary had the fundamentals working against her in the 2016 Presidential cycle. Period. That is probably the way I'll view what happened in 2016 moving forward. Just like by 2020 Biden had the wind at his back, no matter what he said or did. But my point is that if the Democrats legislate and govern like the real economic populists, we might have a better time holding on to the base we need and that Trump stole.

This is a great summary of a few election trends by Dave Wasserman of Cook Political report: House Republicans Defy the Polls, Narrow Democrats' Majority 1. Democrats suffered a catastrophic erosion in Hispanic support (note: but mostly in the specific House districts they won in mostly red states). 2. It was a stellar night for Republican women. I got to that because I saw Wasserman being interviewed on a few different TV channels tonight. And he said some things that did not quite fit with the early analysis coming out of all the cable stations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox. What he writes above also contradicts what he was saying right before the election, as he states in the article. Like everyone, he got blindsided by both external and interrnal polls - including internal polls of both Democratic and Republican House candidates. For whatever reason, the Republican internal polls were mostly off, too. I think perhaps the polls could have been off because of "shy" Trump voters. That's the main theory going around. But I actually think the biggest factor was simply that everybody had to guess about turnout. And a lot of pollsters guessed wrong. Once again, for whatever reason, they underestimated Trump turnout. That said, Republican pollsters like Trafalgar actually overestimated Trump turnout, and said he would win several states (Michigan and Arizona by 3 points each) which he lost. So basically everybody guessed wrong. Which is perhaps understandable in an election that broke all past turnout records. Here's another thing I mentioned once already that could partly explain why the polls were off. In the Fox exit poll of Pennsylvania I cited above as well as this NYT exit poll, the group that decided in the week before the election broke heavy for Trump: 63 % for Trump to 30 % for Biden. One can only guess about why that is. This group was only 2 % of the electorate. But another 3 % decided in the last few days, and they voted 50 % for Trump and 45 % for Biden. The people who decided in September and October leaned to Biden. They were about 20 % of all voters. The 75 % who came into Fall 2020 knowing who they supported split dead even - 49 to 49 - between Trump and Biden. This is exactly the opposite of what I expected. I expected, or at least hoped, that the last week would be like 1980. Meaning the small group of remaining undecided people would break against Trump. They actually did the opposite. That would explain at least part of the reason why Trump did better than it seemed he would based on polls taken a week or two earlier. The shifting at the end clearly helped Trump based on exit polls. One explanation that strikes me is that Trump had a better ground game to get last minute deciders to vote, and to vote for Trump. And Biden did basically sit on his lead while Trump was running around having rallies everywhere like in 2016. That may have helped him. Certainly the ground game did. The main thing Dave Wasserman talked about that surprised me is that Biden did NOT do particularly well in the core cities compared to Clinton, like Milwaukee and Detroit. He said the real difference in the Blue Wall states came in the suburbs, which shifted heavily from Trump to Biden. Like I said already, that somewhat contradicts some of the narrative about why Biden was able to win the three Blue Wall states, as well as Red Wall states like Arizona and Georgia. What a lot of people at least think happened, including a lot of Blacks and Latinos interviewed, is that turnout for Biden among Blacks and Latinos spiked. But at least based on a little research, including the article above, it appears Wasserman is largely correct. It may be that Biden's victory has less to do with changes in voting by Blacks and Latinos, and more to do with changes in voting among Whites. And I'll cite some data below that suggests it might actually be more White men than White women who shifted from 2016. That would be a surprise as well, since so much of what I read is about suburban White "wine Moms" who despise Trump. Another thing that prompted my curiosity is a riff that Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon got into about the overall national vote totals. Cuomo was arguing that this election was a "spanking" to Trump. Because while a lot of people (70 million) voted for him, maybe 4 to 5 million more people (getting close to 75 million) came out to fire Trump. So I buy Cuomo's idea that it is fair to say that this was a clear rejection of an incumbent, by a margin of millions of votes. The pushback against this, which is also true, is that at the same time there was a sort of red wave as well, in part due to Trump's well organized ground game. That red wave helps explains why Republicans did better than expected. In this context, somebody mentioned that we know this was a rejection of Trump because he actually underperformed, by millions of votes if I heard right, how Republican House candidates down-ticket did. If true, that would certainly help explain why some Republicans won House seats while Trump lost The Presidency. I've tried to find numbers that add up the total votes cast in this election for ALL Republican and Democratic House candidates in every district. I could not find them, since it's obviously a work in progress. The House is Wasserman's area of expertise, so he would know. And in the article above he does state this: Again, if I heard Cuomo on CNN right I think he suggested that Trump may have UNDERPERFORMED all Republican House candidates by something on the order of a few million votes. If anyone has seen data that backs that up, please post it. Once all the votes are counted, it will be easy to get a number of votes cast for all House Republican candidates, and compare that to all the votes cast for Trump. I checked in the key Senate races, and no big divergence shows up there. Trump actually got a little bit more votes than McSally, Tillis, and Ernst. He did slightly worse than Gardner. The one state where we know there was a big divergence was Maine, which Trump lost, but Collins won handily. With the Senate races, the most important big picture is that like in 2016 people who voted for Trump voted for a Republican Senator as well, by and large. Based on this information, my tentative takeaway is this may help explain some of the crosscurrents on Tuesday. It does seem like Republicans did a good job of fielding female House candidates, often women of color, that were a good fit for the districts they won in. As Wasserman states, that is certainly true in Miami-Dade and the Rio Grande border district in Texas. I'm not sure there is any evidence that Trump did much better with Latinos in MOST places - like in Arizona, for example. So as we heard a lot this week, everyone is learning that we can't generalize about "the Latino vote". Wasserman makes another point that probably helps to explain this election. In 2018, the only way that voters could send a message to Trump was by voting out a Republican House member. This year, they could support a Republican House member while voting against Trump. If it is true as Wasserman says that Trump underperformed many House Republican candidates, that would prove the point. If this happened, it only worked at the margin. Of the three Republican Orange County seats Democrats won in very close races in 2018, the two that are still razor close as of right now are ones in which White male Democrats are defending seats against Asian American Republican women who are good fitting candidates for their districts. Trump did lose in both districts in Orange County, just like he did in 2016. Again, these elections all ended up like 51/49 in both 2018 and so far in 2020. So this is not about massive swings. But at the margin it can mean the difference between winning and losing in several dozen swing districts. And if this is what happened in districts all over the country, it would explain why Republicans will pick up a handful of House seats even as Trump got fired. I also looked up exit polls for Arizona and Georgia - because they are the two parts of the Republican Red Wall that fell this week. Again, Wasserman is saying that in the Blue Wall states Biden's wins were based first and foremost on suburban Whites, not inner-city Blacks. I'll take Wasserman's word at that for now. But I figured I'd check how that compares to how things played out in Georgia and Arizona compared to 2016. And what I found seems to confirm Wasserman's point about shifts among WHITE voters - at least if you go by exit polls. Here's CNN exit polls for Georgia in 2016 and here for 2020. As I would have guessed, Biden did best among Blacks. CNN says that in 2020 30 % of all Georgia voters were Black, and they voted 87 % Biden and 11 % Trump. But that's actually pretty much the same as in 2016. In 2016, Blacks were also 30 % of all voters. And they voted 89 % for Clinton and 9 % for Trump. So Trump is not wrong in saying he got a small sliver more of Black votes. Although either way 1 in 10 is a really horrific judgment from Blacks, who mostly view Trump as a racist in every poll I've seen for years. So Blacks ARE NOT the explanation for why Biden won Georgia. He had to crush Trump among Blacks, which he did. But that was not enough to get either him or Clinton to victory. So the real difference was among Whites in Georgia. In 2016 Clinton lost the White vote, 21 % Clinton to 75 % Trump. In 2020 Biden lost the White vote, 29 % Biden to 70 % Trump. So we now know that cutting a 54 % loss among Whites to a 41 % loss was just enough to get Biden to about 50 % of the state vote, when you add overwhelming support among Blacks. Like I mentioned above, the way this played out by gender is also a surprise to me. Biden cut the losing gap among White women from a 44 % loss (70 to 26) by Clinton in 2016 to a 36 % loss (67 to 31) by Biden in 2020. But the shift among White men was bigger. They voted against Clinton in 2016 by a 64 % spread (80 to 16). Biden cut that massive gap to a 46 % spread (72 to 26) in 2020. I have to wonder whether part of the reason in Georgia is that White men just felt more comfortable voting for a man than a woman. It's impossible to say. There's also a few other demographic things about Biden's win in Georgia that are interesting and that relate to what Democrats need to do moving forward to build a majority, I think. Biden did better than Clinton among older voters, which is something we've been hearing about. Clinton lost all Georgia voters aged 65 + by 67 % to 31 %. Biden lost them, too, but by only 56 % to 43 % in 2020. that said, my guess is that the part of the White vote Democrats most need to focus on in places like Georgia is the young White vote. My guess is that a big chunk of the newly registered voters in Georgia who pushed Biden to victory were young Whites. The exit polls say that in 2016 voters aged 18 to 29 were 18 % of the entire Georgia electorate, and in 2020 they were 21 % of the electorate. So their participation expanded as a share of the total voting pie, even in a year with massive turnout. That said, in 2016 Clinton won the 19-24 year old vote by a 65 % to 29 % margin. By comparison, Biden won it, but by a slimmed down 56 % to 42 % margin. Either way, the youth vote helped both Biden and Clinton and are an obvious key ingredient to any future winning coalition in Georgia. But this is one area where perhaps a candidate - like Jon Ossoff - who is younger and more dynamic than Biden, or a woman, might actually be able to do better than Biden among young voters. We'll see how Ossoff does among young voters in Georgia in January. Or whether they even turn out for a special election. A very similar thing happened in Arizona. Latinos in Arizona, like Blacks in Georgia, turned out strong for both Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016. But the real difference in voting came from White voters. Again, here's a CNN exit poll for Arizona for 2016 and here's an Arizona exit poll for 2020. In 2016, Clinton won Latinos in Arizona by a 61 % to 31 % margin, when they were 15 % of all voters. In 2020, they were 19 % of all voters. And Biden won them by a 63 % to 36 % margin. So it's roughly in the same ballpark as Blacks in Arizona. Unlike Blacks in Georgia, Latinos in Arizona actually did grow as a share of the electorate, from 15 % to 19 %. So that helped Biden. Trump can argue he did just a fraction better with Latinos - cutting a 30 % losing margin to a 26 % losing margin. But the more Latinos vote in Arizona, the better it is for Democrats. Period. All that said, the shift among Latinos was not sufficient to explain moving from a Clinton loss to a Biden victory. Like in Georgia, the single most significant change in Arizona was Whites. In 2016 Clinton lost the White vote in Arizona 40 % Clinton to 54 % Trump. In 2020 Biden lost the White vote, but by only 47 % Biden to 51 % Trump. Like in Georgia, the most important shift was by men - not women. Which is a bit of surprise. The White female vote went from 44/51 for Clinton/Trump in 2016 to 47/52 Biden/Trump in 2020. So Biden cut Clinton's 7 point losing margin to a 5 point losing margin among Arizona White women. Among White men, it shifted from 36/56 Clinton/Trump in 2016 to 47/51 Biden/Trump in 2020. That's huge. Biden closed Clinton's 20 point deficit among Arizona White men to a 4 point deficit. That has to be the single biggest factor in explaining how he won. Whites are 74 % of all voters in Arizona, so a shift like that among White men in Arizona is massive. Something similar happened in Arizona with Latinos. Clinton won Latino men 51/44 in 2016. Biden won Latino men 59/39. Again, I have to wonder whether running a man against Trump had something to do with that. Biden actually did slightly worse among Latino women in Arizona. Clinton won Latino women 73/17 in 2016. Biden won them 66/32 in 2020. Again, Trump can argue he maybe did a smidgeon better among some Latinos. But that doesn't cut across the US. In most states, it seems clear that most Blacks and most Latinos view Trump and his policies as racist, racist, and racist. So we ought to be thinking hard about what kinds of candidates, policies, and organizing will win more and more Latino voters. While it did not happen in 2020, I still think what happened in Georgia and Arizona in 2020 CAN happen in Texas by 2024. We just have to be patient, and organize.

I tend to agree with your point about grassroots organizing, even though you didn't refer to it as organizing. You are offering a good and probably correct explanation for why Trump overperformed in Florida, in particular. It may be the case that Trumpism overperformed and what I'll call "Bidenism" underperformed in part because Trumpism had a better ground game. Meaning everything from registering new voters months ago, to a massive GOTV machine on Election Day. As a former community organizer, I will never say a bad thing about organizing real people to gain power. So if Trump did better than we thought because of many volunteers who organized, kudos to the army of Trump voters who made that happen. One thing we can all agree to is that Biden and Trump are now, factually, the #1 and #2 voter getters in any race for President in US history. That's good news for democracy. I'd also say half heartedly that some of the money I sent to people like Jaimie Harrison was a waste of money. But I mean that only in the sense that there is no evidence that running a $100 million ad campaign was enough to convince people whose heart is "red" that they should vote "blue". It did not work in South Carolina. That's no shocker. And I'd argue that's a good thing. I mostly feel positive about democracy, and American voters. That includes 2016, when a minority of Americans narrowly gave Trump and Trumpism a chance. I feel they just proved my faith in American voters is well placed. Because a majority of American voters just rejected Trump and Trumpism. The verdict is clear: you had your chance to actually make our lives better, as promised. And you failed. My point about huge amounts of money is that I'm actually glad that slick ads or stupid Facebook or Twitter messaging mostly doesn't convince people to believe things they just don't believe, or support people who don't really work in their interests. Poor Brad. Wasn't his $1 billion Death Star supposed to make Trump II inevitable? The flip side of that is that the money I sent to people like Abrams and Ossoff in 2017 was hardly a waste. It paid off big today in Joe Biden winning Georgia. It is not out of the question that Ossoff and Warnock can deliver two Senate seats in Georgia, just like Sinema and Kelly have now delivered two "blue" Senate seats in Arizona. My point is the same as yours. A lot of the money that went into Georgia in the past few years paid for getting I think something like 800,000 new Democrats registered. I'd bet money that between now and January, Abrams and Ossoff and Warnock will be turning over every rock in Georgia to see if there is some eligible Black or Latino or progressive White adult who is not yet registered. Again, whoever they vote for, that's just a very good thing for democracy, period. I'll gladly donate more money to support that. It may be that we Democrats would have won a few more Senate seats and held a few more House seats, and maybe won North Carolina for Biden, had the Democrats done a better ground game during a pandemic. Even if you could prove to me that was true, I still feel very good about the outcome. Biden never has been and certainly never will be a "ground game" kind of guy. I think at core, like Trump in 2016, his message mattered a lot more than money. Biden did turn out to be a pretty good choice for top of the ticket at a particular moment in time when healing and unity and ending divisive bullshit meant a lot to people. If we lost some votes because we were timid about going door to door in a pandemic, that is not an unreasonable or certainly an unhealthy decision. I strongly suspect that some of Trump's overperformance did have to do with a passionate ground game that Democrats did not match - in part because of a pandemic. One way you could read that, which is a stretch but not a wild stretch, is that Trumpians really were desperate to keep power. So they were not even going to let a pandemic stop them. I'm not going to judge whether a decision like that is right or wrong. Any more than I judged Black Lives Matter one way or the other for marching with masks on during a pandemic. Again, it all adds up to saying that democracy is alive and well. I have respect both for the Black marchers with masks, and for the White Trumpians going door to door to register people to vote. I do believe that Trump's loss in Georgia sends exactly the same message to Democrats. If we want to know how to win, look to Georgia. Today on TV almost every Democrat in America who has the mike is lavishing praise on Stacey Abrams, and everything she stands for. She deserves it. As a former community organizer, I adore her. What she did was not about slick 30 second ads. It was about building sustainable grassroots power person by person, face to face, church by church, door to door. That is the American way, which we should all be very proud of. Honestly. I'm not sad but I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I sent thousands and thousands of dollars to people like Kelly and Ossoff and Warnock and Greenfield and Cunningham and McBath. And I assume lots of that went to slick ads. As a former organizer, it seems like a cheap (although hardly inexpensive) and almost dirty way to try to win elections. Again, this election proved as much as any that people are not stupid. Democrats did well in Georgia because we registered Blacks and young people to actually vote their interests. Meanwhile, probably no amount of ads in South Carolina could convince conservative Whites to vote against The Divine Miss Graham. I can live with that. I can also live with the fact that no amount of ads could change the fact that Cal Cunnigham came up short on a major character test. I'm not going to argue he didn't deserve to lose after his sexting nonsense. He's not going to feel good ever again about the way he let the people he claimed to be fighting for down. (Have to say. Multiply Cal x 10 and you get the male scumminess of Trump, which Republicans and Christian evangelicals seems to be just fine with.) I knew it was a long shot that good guys like Bullock could win in increasingly Trumpian places like Montana. I sent them money anyway. You never know, and some of this is luck and fate. North Carolina (Cunnigham) and Maine (Collins) were our best shots, after Colorado and Arizona. Cunningham perhaps lost because of character. Just like Collins probably prevailed because Mainers still feel she has character. None of these decisions make me feel bad about the decisions voters made. Georgia actually gives us two more shots, one of which I did not really expect to have. Again, this is why I adore women like Stacey Abrams. She's had a lot of shit thrown at her. If she runs for Governor in 2022, she'll be called a socialist and every other name in the book. I'm sure she has flaws. But she has now demonstrated that she is tough, and she is going to fight like hell for what she believes in. Democrats should be investing more in leaders like her than in slick 30 second ads. Although, that said, Kelly and Sinema in Arizona both had huge TV budgets, some of which my small donations helped pay for. So that works, too. It's not either/or. I'll be interested if they ever do an analysis of the impact of The Lincoln Project. On the face of it, if their goal was to seed doubts about Trump and get one or two percent of Republicans to switch from Trump to Biden, there is probably plenty of evidence that it worked. And in a state like Georgia, if Biden wins by maybe 2000 votes, anyone can argue that their ads were the ones that made the difference. Certainly I would not complain if The Lincoln Project bragged that they helped bring Trump down in Georgia. That said, I did and do have very mixed feelings about The Lincoln Project. It's a one trick pony, which in itself is fine. It would be stupid to argue in the 21st century that TV ads don't make a difference in political campaigns. That said, those are mostly people who traffic in highly emotional 30 or 60 second ads that often just try to demean people. So Lindsey Graham got to be a maggot, which is further than even an outspoken Democrat like me would go. And if you use Graham as an example, there is no evidence it worked. Arguably, you could say it backfired. All those attacks on Graham just made him a victim, which he played to. And maybe it got people to come out and support him. That's possble, too. When I was sending money to Ossoff in 2017, a Republican client from Georgia was saying it was essentially a joke. This is Georgia. Ossoff can't win a House seat here, he said. Well, McBath won the seat in 2018 and just held it by a pretty strong margin. Biden just won the state, probably. Bordeaux looks like she is going to flip another Georgia House seat when the votes are all counted. I would not dismiss the possibility that Ossoff and Rev. Warnock will be the newly minted Democratic Senators of Georgia in 2021. Georgia has just given the Democrats a perfect example of how we need to fight and prevail over Trumpism. Slick 30 second ads may play a role. But it is going to take like what the Trumpians did with their ground game. And Stacey Abrams just proved it. Face to face. Person to person. Church to church. Door to door.

It's funny. I have less faith in Kamala than Joe, not more. And that's coming from a California liberal who was very excited when she won her Senate race in 2016. To clarify that, what is being talked about a lot on TV right now, especially among Blacks and women, is how exciting and empowering it will be to see a Black woman speaking to America, tonight perhaps, as Vice President elect. So I strongly agree with all that. She does not look, think, or vote like Mike Pence. This is a huge fucking deal, to quote Joe Biden. Democrats should feel very excited about that. I do. We now know that even if Warnock and Ossoff win we can forget about a bold progressive agenda, Labor Secretary Sanders, or Treasury Secretary Warren. We need them in the Senate. And Warren or Sanders would never be confirmed by Rich Mitch. This actually solves some internal political problems for Biden. I'm both progressive and pragmatist, I think. I get the fact that Democrats will now have to fight hard for relatively small victories, on things like jobs and the pandemic and voting rights and climate change. There will be more young voters in 2024. And they just crushed Trump. There is no reason to think they will convert to Trumpism in 2024. So Democrats did not really settle this internal battle between progressives and moderates in 2020. And we now have Kamala as a possible presumptive heir in 2024. I have mixed feelings about that. She kind of flopped in 2020. She didn't have much time in the Senate. But she isn't a Joe Biden, meaning someone who can clearly win elections outside California, or gets laws passed. We just don't know. Joe Scarborough said today that he is convinced now that Joe Biden is the only Democrat that could have won in 2020. I think that is worth thinking about, both in terms of present and future. I tend to disagree with Morning Joe and agree with Alan Lichtman. This was a referendum on Trump and Trumpism. Period. Trump lost the referendum. Period. In January, Biden will be President. Period. Lichtman's basic argument is that who the Democrats nominate doesn't matter so much, or even at all, if the conditions are right to remove the party in power. Here's how my bias plays out. I think Sanders might have made a negative difference, certainly in very close states like Georgia and Arizona. It's not logical to argue that making it easier to attach the label "socialist" to our candidate would have made it easier to win. Especially given that we now know the "socialism" label had traction in Florida, and probably with some moderate suburban women as well. I will go to the grave thinking my preferred candidate, Elizabeth Warren, would have won. You can argue she's too liberal, or even too female. But she would have thrown this shit right back at Trump. "I'm not a socialist. I was a Republican capitalist who saw how corporate greed crushed people by taking their homes, or taking their jobs to China. I'm the one who fought predatory Wall Street lenders, Donald. You're just the predator." I think you can make a good argument that Warren could have done a very good job inspiring the base without freaking out moderate women who grew up and look a lot like her. She would have had a logical and powerful argument that she is fighting for these women, and guys like Donald Trump simply are not. Regardless, none of that really matters now. Warren and Sanders won't be in play for 2024. And now Biden has the perfect reason to say we need their votes and their passion in the US Senate. And I'm not against the idea of Kamala being heir in 2024 or 2028. But I'm not convinced. While I know Independents in Iowa who kind of do view her as "The Dark One" who may have questionable and excessively liberal views, I view her the way progressives do. I'm not sure she's the one I'd want leading the ticket in 2024 or 2028. Being a pragmatist, I'm getting used to what the voters just did. It is clear now that there is zero mandate for moving directly from Trumpism to a full-on progressive agenda. There are not votes for that. Again, that's true even if Democrats have 50 Senators in January. It may have been true even if we had 51 or 52. Did we really think Joe Manchin was on board for the kind of Green New Deal AOC would support? The main lesson I am taking out of this is that if we build power, we will win. I sent a lot of money to people like Harrison and Warnock and Ossoff. What just happened suggests Stacey Abrams can be and should be elected Governor of Georgia in 2022. Some Latina Democrat should run in Arizona for Governor, because what happened suggests she could win. We again lost a chance to get ahead of the redistricting fight for an entire decade. But we won big in 2018, anyway. So if we figure out how to build a majority, Republicans simply can't stop us. We just proved that. Biden is winning over 50 % of the vote. They can not stop him from kicking Trump's sorry ass out of The White House. That itself feels like a huge victory. I think history just answered some questions. This was not 2008, or 1992. It was not a Democratic version of 1980. It was not 1932. Again, I think 1960 may be a pretty good year to think about. Kennedy won, but barely. It opened the door for things that had already been bubbling for years - like the civil rights movement - to gain a bully pulpit, legitimacy, and stature. It means we need to feel like we won, to feel proud, and to keep donating and voting and organizing. I'm not 100 % convinced Kamala is the right leader. That said, we now get to give her a test ride. And she will have a great chance to show America her leadership skills.

I wanted to add something I heard on Fox yesterday to reinforce this point. i was mostly watching Fox to hear their spin on President Toxic's alleged but completely unproven theories about election fraud. In some discussion, one of the Fox business reporters was asked to explain why the stock market is rallying so strongly this week. Her answer was that investors like the idea of gridlock. Biden, even if elected, likely won't be able to raise taxes on corporations or wealthy individuals. Or do anything about health care, she said. Which is to say that what Wall Street investors want is NOT what the vast majority of American voters want. To cite the Fox poll of Pennsylvania voters above, 72 % of voters in Pennsylvania favor "changing the system so that any American can buy into a government-run health care plan if they want to." It looks like Biden will win Pennsylvania about 51/49. So that tells us almost half of voters who JUST VOTED for President Toxic support what could be branded as a "socialist" health care system, in that it is "government-run." This is what Wall Street is apparently breathing a sigh of relief about. They don't have to worry about this for now, they hope. This particular poll doesn't ask about tax policy. But there are mountains of polls from 2020 that show overwhelming support - including often among a majority of Republicans - for things like wealth taxes on the ultra-rich, or higher income taxes on corporations like Amazon or mega-rich individuals like Jeff Bezos. Again, Wall Street investors are happy to not have to deal with that, they are at least hoping. Wall Street is not Main Street, or America. I've been watching more Fox than usual this week. So Sean Hannity or any of these people will preach with a straight face as if it's really true that Democrats are the party of Wall Street, and the Republicans are the party of Blacks or Latinos. They are so full of shit that it is pouring out of their mouths. The history of this is very clear, and it has been for as long as there have been Democrats, I think. There is always going to be a segment of "Democrats" that don't like gun control, don't like Gay marriage, don't like all kinds of "cultural" or social issues or racial issues a majority of Democrats support. The district Colin Peterson just lost in Minnesota is a great example of that. On social issues, Peterson essentially talked and voted like a Republican, even though he was a Democrat. So now having a real Republican in that seat makes almost no difference on social issues. And that does in fact represent the views of people in that mostly rural district. But Peterson survived despite Trump and Trumpism because he worked the themes of economic populism. One of the very good pieces of news is that most of the toxicity of race is now gone, at least within the Democratic Party. Most Democrats, and a big chunk of Republicans, mostly agree with the goals of Black Lives Matter. We want to keep making progress on rooting out systemic racism, which we believe is a real thing. Progressive Democrats have a choice to make. We can have purity and AOC. But that also means we can't have a majority. We just got a perfect example of that in these House districts that are moderate. Two of the House districts in Orange County that Democrats won 51/49 in 2018 - Cisneros and Rouda - may be ones we lose this time 51/49. It's too early to tell. And in Orange County, the former heart of Reagan Republicanism, you have to be careful any time you use the word "tax". But I made a point to check the polls on how Republicans and Independents felt. If it's a wealth tax on Jeff Bezos to pay for child care or free college for the middle class, middle class Independents are strongly for the idea. That should not be a shocker. I've resigned myself to the idea that at least until after the 2022 midterms, all these ideas are probably off the table. More likely than not, Democrats won't have any choice since Rich Mitch will be Majority Leader. There's only been one model for Democratic Presidential power in my adult lifetime. It happened under 16 years of Clinton and Obama. You essentially have two years to get what you want. Because for the other six years you won't have the House or Senate, or both. Anything you get done after that has to be by executive order. Or by compromises that will feel painful, or even like losses, for many in the Democratic Party. This is now what Biden will have to live with. Probably even if we manage to win both Georgia Senate seats and have 50 Senate votes. That scenario would give lots of power to Democrats like Joe Manchin, who are not liberals. My point is that the model that Democrats should be thinking about now is the 1960's. What characterized John Kennedy's Presidency was that he DID NOT have the votes to get things done - at least things like civil rights. LBJ got that done, after winning a huge victory in 1964. Democrats actually LOST two Senate seats in 1960, even though they still had an overwhelming majority thanks to the Democratic South - which at that point was also the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. It may not be until 2022 or 2024 that Democrats have the votes to do what many of us were hoping could be done in 2021. Like actually doing something about climate change. To again use that Fox poll, 66 % of voters in Pennsylvania say they are "very" or "somewhat" concerned about climate change. Again, that means a substantial minority of voters who just voted for Trump worry about climate change. I actually think Biden has a pretty good hand to play. And he is the right guy to do it. It may be that at least the first two years of his Presidency is about making the case for laws dealing with things like climate change or infrastructure or income inequality that we don't yet have the votes to enact. That's okay. Again, that's what ended up getting landmark legislation passed in the mid-1960's, under LBJ. What Biden has, more than Obama, is he lives and breathes the very American norms of compromise and bending over backwards to get common sense shit done through the US Congress. However Biden actually feels about it, he now has a perfect excuse for not having to go to war over what could labelled as fraught jargony things like "The Green New Deal". What he can do is propose things the will be good for the planet, and good for US jobs. He can and almost certainly will put Republicans in the position of having to either support or oppose incremental changes that are popular with most Democrats and many Republicans. We can't guess where this is going. But we do know that right now we have a stalemate and a country split down the middle. That said, Biden will win by about 5 million votes. He'll likely have a margin of close to 100 electoral votes. This was not a small win. He rebuilt The Blue Wall, and smashed the Red Walls of Georgia and Arizona. Democrats should not feel bad. Democrats should be thinking about how to consolidate and expand our majority. I think economic populism is the way to do it. Biden is the perfect person to make it clear that, unlike President Toxic, he is not mostly working for the interests of Wall Street, and fat cats like President Toxic. I was impressed that his TV ads talked about how he was going to raise taxes on corporations, and very affluent Americans. Even if he lacks the power to do that in 2021, Democrats should be talking about it. It will help Democrats defeat Republicans Senators in 2022. One other thing that is critical to me in this context. Biden probably did better among seniors than Hillary did. It did not win him Florida. It may have helped win him Arizona and Georgia. And he did really well among Blacks, and also Latinos in most states. But if there is one group that is NOT really being given its due on TV, it is young voters. According to the preliminary NYT exit poll, Biden won the votes of people aged 19-24 by a 67/29 margin. That is crushing. And they were 9 % of the electorate. That's a big slice. If you want to know why Biden won Georgia, just stop right there. It was young people, often young people of color, that Stacey Abrams registered to vote. I could not ask for more than a Black pastor like Rev. Warnock and a young pragmatic liberal like Jon Ossoff to be the face of the Democratic Party in this upcoming Senate runoff. By contrast, the age cohorts of voters 50-64 and 65 + were 52 % of the electorate. And they both voted for Trump over Biden 51/48. So what we know is that in 2024 there were will be a lot more of those young progressive voters that support Democrats by crushing margins. And a lot fewer voters that this time tipped the scales for Trump more than we'd hope. It did not get a victory for Trump in 2020. It will be harder still to get a victory for Trump or Trumpism in 2024. I hope Biden fights to get those young progressive voters some of what they want. Like college debt relief. Or better pay. Let them watch Rich Mitch claim to be the voice of Blacks and the heart of Latinos, even as he pisses and shits over everything they want, and everything they believe in. And then see what happens in the Senate races in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2022. What just happened in 2020 suggests that may not go very well for Republicans. I'm used to thinking of the midterms as when Democrats get killed. But that does not have to be the case. Biden is proving to be as wise as a fox. If he does this right, the 2022 midterms is when Democrats could get the Senate votes for a popular and populist economic agenda that Rich Mitch and Wall Street simply don't like. Young voters deserve a huge amount of credit for taking President Toxic out. My nieces and nephews will not be happy. They liked Sanders or Warren. Joe Biden was never their guy. But they voted for him. And the votes of people of their age cohort was what just crushed Trump. And the shitty thing, thanks to older and more moderate voters, is that it fell short of getting a US Congress that will be able to do what most young voters want. That's not a horrible outcome. I think what we just learned is that if we organize, we can win. We can crush Trump, which we just did. Now we just have to organize more to consolidate the victory. Young people in places like Georgia under the leadership of people like Stacey Abrams, Rev. Warnock, and Jon Ossoff, are going to be the ones doing that. It excites me and inspires me.

There's one other subject I want to post about now as a separate point. Directly above was a diatribe about race and the racism of Trump. But this post is about "it's the economy, stupid." That is what the polls are saying to me explains what happened - or didn't happen - on Tuesday. Here's a NYT national exit poll, and a Fox News Pennsylvania exit poll. I'd strongly suggest everybody take 15 minutes to look over both. There will be even more protests about the validity of polling after Tuesday. The reality is that pollsters did overestimate how well TRUMP would do - if you refer to Trafalgar. Their polls said Trump would win Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania handily. Oops! Of course, most polls said BIDEN would do better than he did. But everybody was obviously guessing about how big turnout would be and who would actually vote. So what everybody should now get is that polls are not crystal balls. They are based on a set of assumptions made by imperfect people. This election again vindicated Allan Lichtman's view that people vote based on fundamentals, not stupid ads. And the two fundamentals he pointed to in predicting why Trump would lose were: 1) the economy, stupid, and 2) the social unrest which more than anything was a reaction to the racism of Trump's America. All the evidence from both polls suggest that this is at the core of what drove voting in Pennsylvania and nationally. It is likely why Biden will win Georgia and Arizona, I think. I'll bring up these polls and other better exit polls that will likely emerge in the weeks and months ahead in future posts. There's a lot of great data in them. But for now I'll just focus on the economy in these two polls. That NYT exit poll says that when asked the "are you better off?" question, 41 % of Americans who just voted said they are "better off" than they were four years ago. They voted for Trump overwhelmingly, 72 to 25. By comparison, the 20 % of Americans who said they are "worse off" than four years ago voted against Trump and for Biden 74 to 23. The 38 % who said "the same" voted against Trump and for Biden 64 to 33. I think it's helpful to do a comparison to the exact same question in 2016 from this CNN exit poll. 31 % of Americans said they were better off than four years ago in 2016. And they voted for CLINTON and against Trump 72 to 23. The 27 % who said they were worse off voted for TRUMP and against Clinton 77 to 19. And the 25 % who said "the same" voted for CLINTON, 54 to 38. So it's clear, people who said they were worse off voted overwhelmingly against the incumbent party in both 2016 and 2020. People who felt better off voted overwhelmingly for the incumbent party in both 2016 and 2020. The one difference between 2016 and 2020 is that people who said things were the same as four years ago were a much larger group in 2020 than 2016. Unlike in 2016, they voted against the incumbent in 2020. Since 2016 and 2020 both involved Trump, they essentially seemed to decide, "You promised to make the economy better, and you didn't - for me at least. So you lose." This all goes to the core of Allan Lichtman's (and Jim Carville's) theories. It's the economy, stupid. People vote on that, not stupid ads. So there is no surprise that people who feel better off voted overwhelmingly for the incumbent party in both 2016 and 2020. That may explain why people who are relatively affluent, or seniors who are sitting on a nice nest egg in a nice home, didn't end up repudiating Trump in the way some Democrats hoped. But young people - who by the way are mostly not big fans of Joe Biden but are struggling - did vote against Trump in a way that has assured the end of his Presidency. What is a bit surprising is that in the middle of a pandemic and recession there are MORE people that fell better off than four years ago in 2020 (41 % of Americans) than in 2016 (31 %). Based on that alone, it suggests Trump should have won - not lost. I question whether all these people that say they are better off really could prove that with bank statements, paychecks, and net worth. But whether they are really better off or not, that goes to my point. We've known all through the pandemic that polls suggested that the one thing Trump had going for him was this view that he was good for the economy. At the end of the day, that's probably what helped him almost pull through. That's what these polls say to me. Combine that with a wildly inflammatory message that Harris is a surrogate warrior for Black socialist America that will turn the US into the next Cuba, and you may do better in places like Miami Dade than expected. Again, it doesn't seem to win you Arizona or Georgia, though. It will win you Montana and Iowa. But if you understand that old White people from rural and small town America like their Trumpism red and raw, who could possibly be surprised by that anymore? I sent money to Bullock and Greenfield knowing that Iowa and Montana were almost certainly lost causes. This election confirmed I was right. You can now perhaps add them to the list of states that will vote for Trump's vision of America moving backward for a long time. Oh, and Biden cut Clinton's 2016 margin of defeat in Texas by almost half. Jeff Flake endorsed Biden saying that as a conservative Republican he worries that by 2024 Texas could go blue due to Trumpism. 2020 does not suggest Flake is wrong. It simply suggests that 2020 is not yet 2024. There is no way you can read the results of Texas as saying that Texas is moving in the direction of Trump and Trumpism. I'd read it as saying that Texas may be the next Georgia or Arizona. The same trends are pulling it towards Democrats - not Republicans. Just like they are pulling Iowa and Montana toward Trumpism. As a Democrat, I'd rather have Georgia and Arizona and Texas than Iowa and Montana. Nothing against "Iowa nice", of course. But there's a reason Steve King did well in Iowa for a very long time. Even in bluer Georgia, they just managed to create a House Q Anon caucus. Back to the polls, there's one other economic question that I think should be elevated, dealing with class. The 28 % of Americans who make over $100,000 a year voted for Trump 54 to 43, according to the Times survey. A majority of the other 72 % of Americans voted for Biden, by a roughly 57 to 43 margin. So that is incredibly clear. If you are the relatively well off, you voted for Trump. If you are "the little guy" or "the little girl", you voted for Biden. If you are a member of a union, more likely than not you voted for Biden, the polls say. So there will be all this rhetoric about how Trump is the blue collar billionaire. And how Democrats are the party of the elite and filthy rich. And how the Trump tax cuts and the stock market really benefit the have nots more than the rich. But it is total bullshit. And most voters know that. I included that Pennsylvania poll because it is a Fox poll. And it's of THE key swing state. I think it backs up everything in the NYT poll of all America. The one very important thing Trump pushed that clearly helped him was this view that he is better for "the economy". When asked directly in the Fox poll who they thought would handle "the economy" better, 50 % of Pennsylvania voters said Trump, 40 % said Biden, and the rest said both or neither. If they were ONLY voting on "the economy", I have to believe Trump would be about to win Pennsylvania and The Presidency. Not about to lose it. To understand why he is about to lose, read both polls. He loses on almost everything else. Handling the coronavirus. Health care. Support for extremist groups. Racism. An inability to unify Americans. A drive to divide Americans. Abortion. Global warming. People are basically with Biden and Democrats on all those issues. The Democrats are going to have to have a long debate about "economic populism". Or it might be better to call it by a name it had in US history: "prairie populism". I say that because the "prairie populist" tradition is how Democrats did well before, and maybe could do well in the future, in places like Minnesota and Iowa and Montana. It involves a relentless economic focus on the economic well being of the little guy and little girl. Which is what Trump says he is all about. The reality is that Trump is all about tax cuts to the rich and his own ego and power. The polls suggest most of America gets that. The well off vote for him. The people who are truly hurting voted against him. If Democrats want to peel off parts of the Trump coalition, that is where Democrats need to go. This should not be a surprise. It has been the # 1 weapon of Democrats ever since there was a Democratic Party. It is why a decade of trying to take out Reagan Republican Senators in Minnesota in the 1980's failed. I watched it while I was a college student, and while my friends who stayed in Minnesota after college climbed the ranks of liberal activist organizations. Nothing worked, until a populist like Paul Wellstone came along and convinced a majority of Minnesotans that Rudy Boschwitz wasn't really a blue collar millionaire. He was just a rich White guy that voted for the interests of other rich White guys like him. Amy Klobuchar is not what I would call a Wellstone Democrat. But she is smart to always mention Paul and his legacy. While she may not be the biggest populist in America, she is good at using populist language. I think it helps to explain her political success in Minnesota. For me, that is where the Democratic Party needs to go if we want to win a majority. I think this election confirmed it. We have won the culture wars. We are winning on most issues - like health care, abortion, Gay marriage, global warming. Biden gets that. He does laugh out loud when a reporter asks him about wealth taxes. I get it. As a guy who came to power in the Reagan Era, that's political suicide. Even though today getting Jeff Bezos and Amazon to pay more taxes is a wildly popular idea - even with Republicans. Biden is pushing for higher income taxes on the very well off. If Rich Mitch is Senate Majority Leader, even that may be off the table until at least 2022. The battle moving forward will be to deprive Trump and Trumpism of the opportunity to claim that they stand economically for the little guy or the little girl - whether they are Black or White or Latina. That is what the election results say to me. That is what Claire McCaskill has been shouting on social media. She should know. This is why she lost in 2018, and why Missouri is now a red state. If we Democrats ever hope to take back Missouri or now Iowa or Montana, that is where we will need to go, I believe. The very important thing that just happened is that we decapitated the snake. Unlike in a horror film, it will not just grow back. Even Trump himself gets that, which is why he slithered into the White House residence his sorry ass will soon have to vacate. He is hiding and pouting and saying epically stupid shit that will send him straight to the hell section of all the history books to be written for centuries. He is a bad loser. He is a bad person. That is why he just lost.