stevenkesslar

On that I agree. Not that the Democrats will give them everything they want. Or even half of what they want. But the big money will try to help elect and then co-opt Democrats more than usual this year, and perhaps in future years depending on how this plays out. The Chamber of Commerce and I agree. Several moderate Democratic challengers I sent money to in 2018 and that I am sending money to now because they could lose, like Rep.'s Harley Rouda and TJ Cox, are also endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce. Somebody once came up with a great line about this: If the Democrats win, The Squad immediately has more power, I think. 4 House votes falls a little bit short of what's needed to get a House majority for a wealth tax. So maybe your "owners" do have the power to block ideas like wealth taxes - for sure now, maybe permanently. I'm not sure what it would take to get to a wealth tax in the US. I just don't buy the idea that the "owners" are so smart that they can use the media or ads or whatever to manipulate all this from behind the scenes. It was interesting this year that Billionaire Bloomberg tried to buy the nomination, and failed badly. Meanwhile Biden was broke, and he's the nominee. Sanders and Warren had both money and armies. They could not get a majority, or anywhere close. Maybe when today's 20 year olds are 40, this will change. I hope. Or maybe they'll change. Something very vaguely related to this struck me today. I was looking at the Florida polls. I was thinking Biden's Florida lead is shrinking, but Bloomberg 's money will help Biden win. Then I thought: What if the $100 million Bloomberg spends to help Biden win Florida helps him lose? People are so turned off by The Establishment or whatever you want to call it that Bloomberg ads could just label Biden as a bought and paid for shill. I think the conventional wisdom is still that having all that money helps. And so right now all the Biden ads are helping him maintain a solid and steady lead. The polls seem to suggest that. I agree with Michael Moore that the chances for progressive wins on things like health care and poverty programs and income inequality are greater than they were during all the Democratic debates last year, simply because reality has changed. More people are poor, and without health insurance. It's not inconsistent with The New Deal. More than anything, what really leads to economic change is an economic crisis.

How to Rebalance the Supreme Court Combine an immediate expansion with a proposal for a constitutional amendment This is a great article. I think this is the debate Democrats should start having among themselves now. Meaning, Biden's public comments should be focused on what the Republicans are doing. Period. Like how hypocritical and divisive it is. And what impact it will have: on health care, pre-existing conditions, deporting DREAMers, unmarrying Gays, banning abortion, and a long list of other progressive victories that could be reversed or at least gradually chewed to the bone. Just as Republicans can and will decide among themselves what to do with Garland or Gorsuch or Justice Rapist or RBG, this is the Democrat's call. That said, whatever we do should be based on the idea that Independents are the dilettantes who will reward or punish either party. I think we can do a better job than the Republicans of doing something that makes sense to them. It is quite possible that Rich Mitch's bet in 2016 paid off. President Toxic in 2016 got 2 million more votes than Romney in 2012. Hillary got 100,000 less votes than Obama did in 2012. No one can ever know why that was. But it's easy to believe right wing thirst for court packing had something to do with it. It's also easy to believe that was exactly what Mitch McConnell had in mind. Even if that is true, all the evidence suggests that Republicans hurt themselves badly with Independents in 2018. In the House, it is undeniable. You can debate the Senate, since it was win some lose some. My way of looking at it, going forward, is that the SCOTUS issue has probably now flipped. It used to energize Republicans more. It will now likely energize Democrats more. Just since RBG's death, there are already indications of that in polling and fundraising. I could make up a list of more than 25 states where this will help Democrats win Senate seats in the future, I think. If you accept the premise that it will help Republicans win in red states like Kentucky and South Carolina, there are fewer than 25 of those. In fact, how this plays out in Senate races in South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, Montana, Kansas, Kentucky, and Georgia in 2020 will provide excellent data on how the liberal and conservative tectonic plates are being shifted. In terms of the content of the article above, I've read several articles that propose a constitutional amendment. I like the idea of combining immediate action Democrats can take unilaterally with longer term action that is oriented around bipartisanship and preserving the integrity of the Court. In my mind, the long-term solution is the easier of the two. I like the idea that we agree that we like a 9 judge court. I like the idea that we limit it to terms. If we had 16 year terms, and each President appointed two during a four year term, that could solve a few problems. I think RBG did wait too long. That said, the way the system works now leaves lots of things to fate. When will I get cancer? Even if she resigned in January 2015, McConnell may have invented some other "rule" to block her replacement. With 16 year appointments, "fate" will of course happen, anyway. But I do think it would rationalize and improve the existing system. And it would be more reform than revolution. In a period like the FDR New Deal, it would allow liberals to dominate, resulting in something like the Warren Court. If conservatives dominate, it would result in something like what we have right now. All that said, I'm fine with proposing an amendment like this that goes absolutely nowhere. Of the last 10 Presidential terms from 1980, including President Toxic, six were Republicans and four were Democrats. If we do nothing, my guess is that Democrats will be more likely than Republicans to win the Presidential lottery for the next 40 years. Speaking as a Democrat, why rush to change the permanent rules when it's finally our turn? What I like about the idea of a permanent agreement like this is it leaves the permanent number at 9 and attempts to rationalize and reform how individual justices come and go. Instead of encouraging them to hang on too long, it gives them 16 years to do their best work. It also guarantees that just like a Senate that is replaced every six years, we'd have incremental changes in the court's makeup. As far as the short term goes, this interview with Joe Manchin, which doesn't actually say a lot, would be my starting point: Like Kasie Hunt, I would read Manchin's "institutionalist" comments as a "no" to the idea of court packing. With Biden, we don't even have to guess. He's always been an institutionalist, too. That said, if he wins and Democrats have a Senate majority there will be huge pressure from the base to do "something". Whatever anyone thinks of Manchin, if Democrats are able to get a majority there's a good chance his vote will be essential. Another reason to wait is that if Democrats somehow ran the table and won 52 or 53 or 54 seats, that could be taken as a "mandate", and Manchin's vote might not be needed. I like the idea of adding one seat, period. And I like the idea of doing it quick, with 50 votes. COVID, vaccines, health care, jobs and the economy should be the urgent priorities. That said, if you assume Democrats in 2021 have 50 votes for "something", it's worth thinking about whether "something" should be one liberal seat, or three liberal seats. In part because a debate between 3 or 1 makes 1 look a lot more reasonable. The difference between 3 and 1 would be transparent to most people. 3 (or more) new liberal judges sounds like court packing. If there is an argument for it, it's that President Toxic was not a legitimate President because he actually lost in 2016. So we're just balancing out his three conservative picks. It would actually leave a 6-6 spit SCOTUS. I'd rather leave any arguments related to the Slavery Electoral College and President Toxic losing the popular vote in 2016 out of this. Given the choice between packing the court and getting rid of the Slavery Electoral College, I'd choose the latter in a heart beat. That's not going to happen quickly or easily, either. For now, I'd rather focus on getting one more liberal on the court. I think the idea of one would also be transparent. This partisan war started in 2016, when McConnell "stole" one seat that should have been filled with Garland. If you assume McConnell had allowed Obama to replace a conservative icon in 2016, and Garland was seated, it would follow that Republicans have every right to replace a liberal icon in 2020. Republicans would of course see it differently. But on the face of it, I think lots of Independents would see it as "fair and balanced" (But not Fox News.) Significantly, it would still leave the 10 member court with a 6-4 partisan split that favored Republicans. In my mind, that would be intentional. Rather than seeking to use raw power to instantly create a liberal majority, which is what FDR tried and failed to do, the argument would be we want to right ONE wrong from 2016. And then agree to permanent fair rules. Again, if Republicans had seated Garland and everything else worked out the same, fate worked out that they'd have a 5-4 majority after replacing RBG anyway. 5-4 and 6-4 are not the same. But it does mean, for example, that one conservative (e.g. Roberts) could block an effort to repeal Obamacare by by creating a 5-5 split vote, which leaves precedent standing. The idea would be to eventually get back to a more rationalized nine justice SCOTUS through bipartisan agreement. Again, this is reform. Not revolution. If we assume Manchin and others will say they don't want to destroy the institution, this fits in. The Republicans were the ones who gave Lincoln a 10th seat, temporarily. They took 2 seats away from Johnson, temporarily. I'd argue that this is the same thing: a temporary measure in extremely partisan times married to an explicit goal of finding our way back to a 9 justice SCOTUS with both formal and informal norms around bipartisanship and balance. Republicans would never agree with this. But I'd argue that Republicans took the institution hostage in 2016. And we're balancing it back in 2021. Democrats have the right to disincent what we can legitimately argue is hostage taking. (In 2016, there are polls saying a majority of Americans wanted Garland confirmed.) The thing both sides should want to incent is bipartisan problem solving. There's also a precedent in terms of outcome, which is FDR. While the formal court packing scheme failed, it did achieve the goal of getting ONE justice to essentially switch sides, from anti-New Deal to pro-New Deal. It ended the extreme obstructionism. Putting one more liberal on a Court run by conservatives, anyway, would send exactly the same message to a conservative majority court. There's one other explicitly political factor that the most cravenly political of Democrats (let's say Rahm Emmanuel) will like. Rich Mitch has been effective in using the courts as bait to get people to turn out and vote Republican. I have no problem with Democrats doing the same thing. If progressives want a Green New Deal and Biden passes "mini-deal" incremental laws that the conservative Court blocks, that sends a clear message. Vote Democratic, and we can create a Democratic-dominated court. We'll do it by following the bipartisan rules, rather than packing it. It worked for McConnell. It can work for Democrats, like it did with the Warren Court. There's one other piece of this small "d" democracy puzzle that fits in. As soon as Democrats have a simple majority we have to immediately go full steam ahead on making it easy and safe for everyone to vote. I'd actually open the debate by making voting mandatory, and then work from there. "Court packing" sounds inherently anti-democratic. Making it easy and safe for every adult American to vote sounds like the essence of democracy. That's where the Slavery Electoral College fits in to me. For half of US history, it was literally built on the blood and tears of slaves. Republicans will say that ended in the 18th century. True. But for another half of US history, it's been a way to undermine the principle of "one person one vote". On this one, I'm now completely adamant. It's the Slavery Electoral College. If you are for it, you're endorsing an institution created to enslave Blacks that to this day undermines their right to vote. And it violates the principle of "one person one vote" in a country that needs to finally except that all men and women and non-gendered people are created equal. For a long time a majority of Americans have agreed that the Slavery Electoral College is an anachronism. If President Toxic loses, it will be proof that not even this anachronism built on the blood of slaves could save his sorry, racist ass. The time to dump the Slavery Electoral College as a vestige of a more racist America has come. None of this will, or should, be debated by Biden and President Toxic. I hope Biden just keeps putting the focus on the horror of what a 6-3 conservative packed court will do to health care, the ACA, and pre-existing conditions. All during a pandemic that President Toxic allowed to kill 200,000+ Americans while he golfed and "played it down". This is the debate I think Democrats can happily look forward to in 2021.

Just out of curiosity, still waiting to see the list of the party's owners. In case it isn't obvious, I do have an ego. I just hate being the last one to know.

Here's a fact check that I found interesting. It tells me everything I need to know about partisanship and why President Toxic has to be crushed. From McConnell's Senate page: I knew about that statement back in 2016. I guess surprisingly for me, I didn't both to fact check it. Today I finally did. Technically, it is not a lie. But I think it is fair to call it a gross misrepresentation. The way it misrepresents the truth goes to the core of what this conflict is about - partisanship - and why it's going to make a really divided and sick nation more divided and sicker. When I went to fact check, I found this: Supreme Court vacancies in presidential election years If you are like me, you probably already feel like that's a contradiction of what McConnell said. The key question is: what happens if there's a vacancy in an election year? The answer in every case since 1900 has been: you fill it. Period. We know Obama nominated Garland in 2016 and the nomination was not acted on in 2016. So that sure sounds like it broke the continuous trend since 1900, right? Every other time, in a Presidential election year, a SCOTUS vacancy was filled. Every single time. Why not 2016? It's worth reading the whole article above that details each vacancy. It's short. The key thing it nails down is the issue of partisanship. Here's a summary. There are 5 vacancies listed between 1912 and 1940. All ended in Senate confirmations in an election year. But here's the thing. In all five cases, three involving Democratic Presidents and two involving Republicans, the Senate was held by the same party as the President. That was just fate. So that means McConnell is right, correct? No. Not correct. The 6th vacancy that was filled in a presidential election year was Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed on February 3, 1988. He was nominated by President Ronald Reagan. He was confirmed 97 to 0. The Senate was controlled by Democrats, who had 54 seats. So a Republican President did nominate a SCOTUS justice who was confirmed by a Democratic Congress in 1988, an election year. Technically, you can say that McConnell did not lie, because he said "arising in an election year". McConnell is a venal political animal who is not interested in fairness. But if this actually was about fair debate, he would argue the vacancy arose in 1987. That was, of course, when Reagan nominated Robert Bork, and the confirmation failed. Then he nominated Ginsburg, who Reagan withdrew. I'll return to Bork, but before I do I think it's worth noting the two other exceptions. Eisenhower made a recess appointment of Brennan, a liberal Democrat, a month before the election in 1956. Wikipedia described it as a unifying move to help him in the 1956 election, which he won in a landslide. Then in 1957 he renominated Brennan, who the Senate confirmed. Ike governed like what I would call a "Kasich Republican". Meaning he tried to unify and bring everyone along, even if he was right-of-center. Romney just used this phrase "center-right". It describes Eisenhower well. It is not a good phrase to describe far right organizations picking right-wing justices based on far right litmus tests. The one other vacancy involved the nomination of Abe Fortas by LBJ. He was already on the Court, but LBJ nominated him to be Chief Justice. So in this case there was no vacant seat to fill, and the Senate was controlled by Democrats. Regardless, the nomination failed after a bipartisan filibuster. The two reasons cited in this article are that there was a reaction by some Senators against the liberalism of the Warren Court, and ethical concerns about Fortas. "Too many liberal justices" sounds ironic based on today's ideological conflict. It is noteworthy that on a partisan basis, this could have been a slam dunk in a very Democratic Congress. Regardless, there was a bipartisan concern about the Court not going off too far in one direction. The details offer a clear lesson about partisanship to me. In the majority of these cases since 1900, it was a slam dunk. It was all handled by the same party, which controlled the White House and the Senate. RBG's appointment was a great example of that dynamic. It wasn't a Presidential election year. But Clinton was President and Democrats had 57 seats in the Senate. Slam dunk. In the two cases since 1900 when The White House and Senate were in opposite parties, it was essentially a test of bipartisanship. In both instances, some type of bipartisan solution was worked out. What Reagan did with Ginsburg in 1987, is what I believe was one of two good options with Justice Rapist in 2018. They could have withdrawn the nomination and ended up with a different - and better - conservative, like Reagan did in 1988. Or they could have had a real FBI investigation. It wasn't like President Toxic wasn't going to be President one or two months later. Ginsburg's nomination was pulled because he smoked pot. If Reagan could do that, President Toxic could have pulled Justice Rapist based on the seriousness of the multiple sexual assault allegations made. As it turned out, the conflict helped give Nancy Pelosi a commanding House majority. Democrats probably lost two Senate seats in solid red states and gained two Senate seats in Arizona and Nevada. That's a huge win, and a wash. I'll say this as a Democrat. Thanks, Dr. Ford. Jon Tester's analysis is even more favorable to Democrats than mine is. He wouldn't argue 2018 was a win for Republicans in the House or Sernate: The Bork example is what I'll end with. And on this one I'll speak as a Gay man. Some Republicans say that fight really poisoned the well of bipartisanship. They are entitled to their opinion. But I vehemently disagree. I've listened to Sen. Ted Kennedy's whole speech "Borking" Bork several times. His central point, which I passionately agree with, is that Bork's tendency would have been to drag us back and force us to relitigate all the hot button fights of the past - on race, on gender, on everything. I'm grateful to Ted Kennedy for what he did. It did not leave a vacancy. The process ended up in Justice Anthony Kennedy. If you want an argument for "bipartisanship" or "Kasich Republicanism" - meaning right-of-center politics with an intent to unify - that's it. If you want to know why I mostly respect SCOTUS, and why I deeply admire both Senator Kennedy and Justice Kennedy, that's it. Ted Kennedy did not know how this would play out, of course. But we do. What if Bork, or someone like him, was the swing vote on same sex marriage? Would the outcome have been different? On the face of it, yes. Bork would have wanted to drag us back. Justice Kennedy moved us forward. If you need a good example of what Kennedy was talking about in 1988, what happened in America in 2015 is it. As Jeb Bush said, thousands of years of culture and religion were changed at warp speed on same sex marriage, and he didn't get it. Justice Kennedy did that for us, and I will always be grateful. Would Bork have been for that? I very much doubt it. The precedent that was in place before 2016 was that the death of Scalia called for a bipartisan moment. You could debate whether Merrick Garland was a unifier and centrist from the left in the same way Justice Kennedy was a unifier and centrist from the right. But if the Republicans didn't like Garland, they could have forced Obama to pick someone else. They shattered precedent by not even having a hearing. What is happening now is the opposite of 1956, and 1969, and 1988. In a moment that calls for bipartisanship, and that in one messy way or another was met with bipartisanship in those past three examples, we're likely getting President Toxic's and McConnell's venal partisanship. It will be another nail in President Toxic's coffin. So I'm fine with the outcome it will have for him. I personally agree with Biden. Up until now he's been the institutionalist saying court packing is a bad idea. Now he's saying let's focus on what the Republicans do, and then go from there. I think he's being wise. I also personally agree with RBG. She said court packing is going to degrade the institution. And her most fervent wish was to be replaced by the President elected in November. She's right on both counts. For anyone who honors RBG, listening to her on both counts would be the honorable thing to do. And you can't pick and choose. I'm quite sure she knew that what's probably about to happen would just further poison bipartisanship, and be another nail in the coffin of a unifying Supreme Court. If the Republicans fill the vacancy, my view is they continued to trash a continuous chain from 1900 to 2016. Most of it was a chain of clean partisan action, due to fate. But when it got messy, the solution was to get bipartisan. If there's a 2021 discussion about court reform, I'd rather it address some of the problems in this history. Maybe it's better not to leave some of this to fate. Mostly, I'm with Biden. This is another huge problem we don't need, after COVID-19 and a crippled economy. We don't need to relitigate abortion, DREAMers, same sex marriage, and voting rights. We don't need to empower the type of judicial conservatism that would shut down escorting websites and target men that hire escorts. If the Republicans do what they are seemingly preparing to do, it will Bork America, send us backward rather than forward, and create more division. Democrats should figure out how to respond to that wisely, and with the interests of all of America and it's future at heart, after Biden wins. The one silver lining in this cloud is that President Toxic and McConnell have set such a low bar for decency and unity that it will be easy to do better than them.

I think we're all in store for a real good debate about democratic legitimacy. Because the conservatives who want to pack the court with far right conservatives are going to claim that 1) we are not hypocrites, and 2) we have a "mandate" to do this. This is what the American people want. Here's a few examples. This is what Republican Tom Cotton is saying: Here's my interpretation of that. "Steven, I have your balls in a vise and I am going to crush them. And I have a mandate to do it." I can argue all I want that what these Republicans are saying directly contradicts what they said about Merrick Garland. They don't give a shit. They just want to crush my balls. I can argue that right now even Trump's favorite pollster, Rasmussen, says 51 % of Americans want the seat to be filled by the President elected in November, versus 45 % who say Trump should fill it. A Politico poll finds an even larger 13 point margin: 50 to 37, Americans say the President elected in November should fill it. How's that for a "mandate", Tom? What Cotton wants to do is crush my balls. Period. Why? Because might makes right. This is about how a minority of Americans, overwhelmingly Straight White Men, can keep power. Losing the 2016 popular vote by 2 million votes did not give President Toxic a mandate to do this. You can argue anything you want about the Slavery Electoral College. It was designed to enslave Blacks, and did that well for half of US history. But that has nothing to do with a "mandate" to fill RBG's seat. If you want to talk about a 2016 "mandate", Americans elected Hillary Clinton President by a margin of 2 million votes. Let's talk about 2018. Republicans got their asses kicked. They lost the House vote by a margin of about 9 points. In the Senate, I was sending money every month to the key candidates. I would tend to agree that McCaskill and Donnelly lost their seats on this issue. In the Summer they led, and health care was the priority. White men in Missouri and Indiana abandoned them in droves all Fall, as President Toxic argued that horrible women like Dr. Ford could destroy the life (and testicles!) of any man in America. Those White men are entitled to their opinions. And I'd buy the argument that the voters in Missouri and Indiana gave a Republican Senator a mandate to vote for far right judges. Meanwhile, Sinema in Arizona and Rosen in Nevada probably won on this issue. Independents in Arizona opposed Justice Rapist's nomination 50-37. John Tester, who opposed Justice Rapist, won re-election. So if you want to argue about clear "mandates", the voters in Arizona already told McSally, specifically, that in 2018 she was on the wrong side of the majority. Polls in Arizona right now say the majority believe the President elected in November should decide. Did she not listen? Is she not listening? Do they need to tell her again? There's no far right judge "mandate" to be found. If you go by these four state elections, it's more like a muddle. But Tom Cotton doesn't care. He just wants to crush my balls. You want to talk about the "referendum" we had in 2018? In the 2018 Senate elections 52.2 million Americans voted for a Democratic Senate candidate. 34.7 million Americans voted for a Republican Senate candidate. So if Cotton wants to talk about "the American people", as opposed to the voters of Arizona or Missouri, the American people gave a mandate to Democrats to block Republicans from packing the court with far right judges. That's my read. Of course, the 2018 midterms were NOT a referendum on a 2020 SCOTUS vacancy. But if you want to talk about "the American people", it was a 58/39 split. Not even the Slavery Electoral College could subvert that big a majority. This is about a minority built around Straight White men. Pretty much everyone else agrees with the Democrats. It's a majority. But of course, they know that. That's probably why they will crush my balls to pulp right now, before any election. They don't want the people to decide. Just don't be surprised if the polls are right, and the American people don't agree with what you did, Sen. Cotton. It may work out okay in Arkansas, like it did in Missouri. But that's not "the American people". Here's an interesting coincidence. You can use that slavery "3/5ths a person" thing that allowed for the enslavement, torture, and murder of Blacks for 1/2 of US history and update it to make your "mandate" argument. In the 2018 midterms, 52,260,651 Americans voted for Senate Democrats, and 34,723,013 Americans voted for Senate Republican candidates. Do the math. 3/5ths of 52,260,651 is 31,356,390. So here's my suggestion. If Republicans like Cotton want to argue 2018 was a "referendum" or "mandate" for far right judges, they should be honest and say Democrats are 3/5ths of a human being. Then they will have a legitimate majority "mandate". It's in the spirit of how Straight White male Americans have always handled these things - from uppity Blacks to uppity women to uppity Gays to uppity immigrants. And it's actually a pretty good deal for Democrats. Unlike with slaves, at least our 3/5ths of a vote is counted. Unlike with DREAMers, we won't be at risk of being deported. Utah is also not "the American people". Here's Romney's fiction as reported by Politico: Again, Sen. Romney is entitled to his opinion. But if a minority wants to pack SCOTUS with far right judges who are against what the majority of Americans are for, "the American people" will get to decide. Go ahead. Crush my balls, Mitt. Let's see what happens. The religious right wing elected President Toxic and will do so again, if the Slavery Electoral College will let them, because they want far right judges who are hostile to abortion, Gays, immigrants, Muslims, Black voting rights, efforts to regulate corporate greed, and many other things. Let's see where this could lead: Same sex marriage - 5/4 split Majority: Kennedy, RBG, Sotomayor, Kagan, Breyer Minority: Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas This will not be the key issue for most Americans. But it's my key issue. I volunteered and fought for years for same sex marriage. I opposed the Rentboy shutdown, wrote articles about it, and donated money to Jeffrey's legal defense. My assumption, which I think is reasonable, is that a 6-3 far right court will be hostile to anything that begins with the letters L, G, B, T, or Q. They may leave "+" alone. Other than that, we're fine. Oh, and Guys who like to wear dresses? Websites that have something to do with escorts and people who like to get tied up and maybe pay somebody to do that? I'm sure they'll be fine, just like Rentboy. Don't worry guys. You'll be just fine. Or maybe not. Jokes on you. Suckers Losers. Louisiana abortion ruling - 5/4 split Majority: Roberts, RBG, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan Minority: Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito My assumption, which I think is reasonable, is we will have a 5-4 court majority that is deeply hostile to a woman's basic right to choose. On completely and openly trashing Roe v. Wade, I mean. On just chipping away at it so that it is mostly dead, it will probably be a 6-3 majority in many cases. Obamacare - 5/4 split Majority: Roberts, RBG, Breyer, Kagan, Sotomayor Minority: Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Kennedy My assumption, which I think is reasonable, is we will have a 5-4 majority to overthrow Obamacare. Kiss your pre-existing conditions goodbye. Oh, but don't worry. They'll have something better than Obamacare, just like they did right after the 2016 election. Or maybe not. Suckers. Losers. DREAMers - 5/4 split Majority: Roberts, RBG, Sotomayer, Breyer, Kagan Minority: Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito My assumption, which is reasonable, is that the 800,000 DREAMers can kiss their culos goodbye in a 5-4 vote. Bienvenidos a Mexico! Voting Rights/21st Century Jim Crow - 5/4 split Majority: Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia Minority: RBG, Sotomayor, Kagan, Breyer This one is a no brainer. There wasn't even a pretense of moderation by Roberts or Kennedy. Blacks, kiss your voting rights protections goodbye. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - 5/4 split Majority: Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh Minority: RBG, Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer. This one is a little bit of a stretch. Warren cut it as a reaffirmation of the basic validity of her consumer protection effort. I included it because the Republicans who are packing the Court with far right conservatives will of course make the principled argument that court packing is just the most awful thing ever. The FDR issue was more than anything about the legitimacy of The New Deal. It was another case where if you look at the 1932 and 1934 elections, "you couldn't have a clearer mandate", as Tom Cotton might say. So my assumption, which I think is reasonable, is there is a 6-3 majority hostile to consumer protection and efforts to reign in corporate greed and corporate power. The wealth tax on Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates that 70 % of Americans support, including a majority of Republicans and Bill Gates? Yeah, I'm sure they'll find that Constitutional. Suckers. Losers. I almost feel sorry for these conservatives. If we went to some horror film like Silence Of The Lambs, the sadist can't help himself. The reason my balls are going to be crushed is that sadists are sadists. I'd be the first to say that President Toxic and Mitch McConnell and The Divine Miss Graham are not sadists, or anything like that. They are men of principle. They stand by their word. In this case, I'm not talking about what McConnell and Graham said publicly in 2016. Only suckers and losers would have believed that. I'm talking about all the far right religious voters who they promised to appoint far right judges to. So even though they are no Hannibal Lector or anything like that, the principle is the same. They gotta do what they gotta do. The only difference in this case is the lambs are the majority, according to the polls and the 2016 and 2018 elections. Don't count on them being silent. Grab your popcorn, and buckle your seatbelts. And, as always, guard your testicles, guys. It's going to be a bumpy ride. The movie this tragedy makes me think of is Orphul's The Sorrow And The Pity. It was about how a minority, in that case Nazis, tries to work around the fact that majorities don't like them all that well. It's about might makes right. It's about how people are silent and go along. It's about how minorities that the Straight White guys don't like get screwed. In Orphul's The Sorrow And The Pity, it was French Jews and Gays and anyone who stood up for them that got screwed. In the 21st century remake, it's going to be about the groups I listed above. Gays. Immigrants. Muslims. Blacks. DREAMers. Women seeking safe abortions. People who hire escorts. Escort websites. It will only work if the majority stays silent, and allows the minority to pretend they are the majority. And that they have some kind of mandate to be cruel. For most of us, everything will be just fine. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

What's charming about you is that you are perfectly willing to let ideology trump facts. On some issues, every time. We all do it. But you do it better than most.. How do you explain Andrew Yang? People had a perfect opportunity to vote for him. I'd argue he was more than a one issue candidate. He sounded smart about lots of things - like technology, and climate change. Yet he got nowhere. How do you explain Bernie Sanders? He ran strong races twice, and ended up second twice. So it's not like people were incapable of hearing what he was saying. Millennials liked him twice in a row precisely because they heard what he was saying. On the other hand, I think there was a tidal wave against him on Super Tuesday because people heard what he was saying. In most states, that included a majority or plurality of union members. So if the idea is we are basing it on class or income or work or unions, people had that option. They did not choose it. The single biggest thing I liked about Bernie 2016 is he brought the class war to a higher level. Two elections in a row all these ideas like economic justice and income inequality and wealth taxes were popular. But we learned in both Bernie 2020 and Warren 2020 it was close, but not quite. The single biggest thing I liked about Bernie 2020 WAS his Latino identity politics. He listened to Latino organizers, who said these people are unorganized and ambivalent and you need to go out and organize them based on their IDENTITY. You need to have picnics where you get the family to come and you have the high school mariachi band play. The parents come because the kids are in the band and they are curious. They will mostly like what you have to say. If you say it in Spanish they will like it even more. That's how he won Nevada and did way better in Texas than in 2016, if you look at how many voted for him. How do you explain Black Lives Matter? That just happened spontaneously. On the face of it, I think probably 90 % of Blacks agree with the basic goals and statement of the problem. President Toxic got some conservative Blacks to offer an alternative vision. But most Blacks are with Black Lives Matter. I would argue that the movement for economic justice is part of that. They are talking about both Black Lives and Black paychecks. I think Whites and Hispanics support it in part because they have had some of the same economic problems, as well. But it is identity politics. And the media certainly did not manipulate Blacks to feel the way they feel. I think you are not giving voters enough credit. The implication of your statement is that the media leads people around like sheep. There are good examples of that. Fox News news is a massive propaganda machine. And the mainstream media is made up of elites who generally think Bernie and some of his ideas go too far. But lots of affluent liberals and progressives also sent lots of money to Bernie. I'm still waiting for your list of who our country's owners are. Is it 10 people? 100 people? I mean, I live here. Don't I have the right to know?

As the initial shock settles and the polls come out, my guess is this will help the Democrats on balance. Specifically, it will intensify Democratic turnout. It will likely help Biden win at the margin. It will likely help Democrats win the Senate at the margin. Although the Senate races vary depending on whether it's a red state or blue state or in between. What do others think? Does this help President Toxic and Republicans, or Biden and Democrats? I'm going to go through a bunch of things I found noteworthy in the articles I've been reading. First, Biden has said he won't comment on Court packing, which he has opposed before. He said he doesn't want to let President Toxic change the subject. I think that's wise. My view is that we now get to test the 5th Ave. principle. President Toxic thinks he can shoot someone on 5th Ave. and get away with it. He was actually talking about his base being fine with it. And he's right. But how about everyone else? What if he shoots a bullet and Obamacare is dead? What if he shoots a bullet and same sex marriage is dead? What if he shoots a bullet and abortion is dead? What if he shoots a bullet and DREAMers are deported? Do people care? Who cares? Do we know he will pull the trigger even? Those are the questions I think we should focus on now. If and when he shoots the bullet, then we should focus on what we do. If he shoots the bullet before Election Day, obviously that does give voters an easy way to say whether they agree with what the Republicans did or not. Here's some bad news for you, proud tough gun-slinging President Toxic. In a Politico poll, 50 % of voters say the seat should be filled by the election winner, and only 37 % say you should do it now. Even your favorite pollster, Rasmussen, says 51 % of voters say you should leave the seat open and let the winner of the election fill it. Now, I know you are a mean-spirited and cruel asshole, so you are going to do whatever you want. But since there is this argument that somehow Republicans have a "mandate" based on how people voted in 2016 or in 2018, you might want to actually consider what the majority of Americans think for once. Just kidding. You'd never do that. Just go ahead and pull the trigger and see what happens on Election Day. The 50 % or so that think the election winner should choose the nominee is right around Biden's average support of 50 %. The 37 % or so that think President Toxic should nominate now is less than his 43 % average vote share. So that suggests there is no real downside for Biden in this, who has about half of the electorate either way. But there may be downside for President Toxic. There seem to supporters with whom he is on the wrong side of this issue. That's even more true with the Independents. In the Politico poll, 49 % of Independents say the election winner should choose, and only 31 % say President Toxic should choose now. That suggests that moving ahead now is not likely to help President Toxic with Independents, and may hurt him with a voter group he badly needs. It's generally assumed that the 2016 SCOTUS fight over Garland and Gorsuch may have helped Republicans. The 21 % of voters in 2016 who said SCOTUS was a priority leaned 56/41 to Trump over Clinton. It could easily have made the difference in Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin, but no one will ever know for sure. So far, it looks like it could have the opposite impact in 2020. At least one poll says that the SCOTUS vacancy is more important to Democrats than Republicans now. Here's a line that jumped out at me that may explain why this may have a very different impact in 2020 than 2016: So far, that appears to be the case from what I've been reading. I also think there may be an important difference between who this motivates on either side. On President Toxic's side, it of course motivates his base. But most Republicans say they are the ones who are most likely to turn out, anyway. The polls above suggests that some of President Toxic's supporters DO NOT support him filling the vacancy now. So it's at least possible this could hurt him with some of his softer support. It also could hurt him with Independents who are still on the fence. Meanwhile, this will likely light a fire under some of Biden's weakest support. Progressives, Blacks, and Hispanics all have specific reasons to care about this, and to want Biden to be the one making the pick. If Berniecrats or young Black or Hispanic men who are skittish about Biden or just ambivalent about voting need a reason to vote, this is a good one. I was very curious to see how Claire McCaskill would react to this on MSNBC. If the Justice Rapist/Dr. Ford confirmation did not cost her her Missouri Senate seat in 2018, it certainly at least hurt her effort. She said that she knew as soon as she hear Justice Kennedy was retiring she was in trouble. Now she thinks it's the other way around. Instead of putting Democrats in red to purple states in a tough position like in 2018, this puts Republicans in blue to purple states in a tough position. I think she hit the nail on the head. Another phrase that Charlie Cook used - "color intensifier" - also hit the nail on the head in 2018. He predicted while the hearings were happening that the conflict would make red states redder, and blue states bluer. I think the same is probably true today. In 2018, I was sending money to all the key Senate Democrats in swing states. So I was paying close attention to the state polls. My take is that Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota was already in deep trouble before the vacancy opened, and would have lost anyway. McCaskill in Missouri and Donnelly in Indiana are questions. They both were leading in the Summer, when the focus was on health care. As soon as the Justice Rapist thing hit, they started to tank in the polls - especially among White men. So the confirmation fight may have cost them their seats. Meanwhile, there's a good case to be made that this helped Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona and Jackie Rosen in Nevada. In Arizona, 50 % of Independents opposed Kavanaugh's nomination and only 37 % supported it. Independents are about one-third of voters in the state. Since Sinema was opposed to the nomination, it was probably more likely to help her with Independents than hurt her in a close race. Here's some poll data about swing states in 2020: I think McSally and Collins are the McCaskill and Donnelly of 2020. Collins was next to dead anyway, and this won't help no matter what she does. McSally is going against the majority of her state. This will work out badly for her in 2020, just like in 2018. There's no polling from Colorado, but I'd guess it's one more big nail in Gardner's coffin, too. Tillis is less clear, and there's no polls in yet at all on Iowa. If it works out that this does energize Biden voters more than President Toxic voters, it could help defeat Republicans in both North Carolina and Iowa. Georgia will be interesting. Ossoff and Perdue are in a dead heat. My guess is that this may help Ossoff win in Georgia for the same "color intensifier" reason: it could energize turnout among all the voters that are at the core of why the state is turning purple. There are two states where I'd guess this could hurt Democrats. Montana is close, and it's a red state. In theory, this should rally the state's Republicans around Daines. That said, Jon Tester, who voted against Justice Rapist, held his seat in 2018. My guess is this helps Lindsey Graham. South Carolina is a red state, and President Toxic has approval in the low 50's in some recent polls there. I have no idea what is driving Graham's weakness there. But if there's a state where Republicans will come home over this fight, I'd guess South Carolina is it. The thing that matters to me is that if President Toxic does actually pull the trigger, I want Democrats to be in a position to respond next year. We can only do that with President Biden and a Senate majority. So I think we have to call the bluff. They have the power to pull the trigger. My guess is they're almost certain to pull it, probably in the lame duck session but maybe before the election. If they do pull the trigger, it's certainly fair to say that they'll have to deal with the consequences. For right now, though, the focus should be on one thing. Despite the American people, are you actually going to pull the trigger? And if you do, what are the consequences? What parts of American life - like access to abortion or voting rights - are going to die?

And speaking of cynical. I ended up having a four hour phone conversation yesterday with a former client/friend and the subject of Kamala came up. It also had a lot to do with all these points we've been posting about relating to Independents. So this is a wandering rant about Independents and the fucked up politics of America Divided 2020. This guy, who I've known for 20 years, is my poster child for understanding Independent thinking. That said, I think that in part because the tendencies I notice in him match with what I've seen with Independents in poll after poll after poll. When I read polls I pay the most attention to what Independents think. Because usually their views are in between where Democrats and Republicans are, even though they are not necessarily centrists. So they are the ones who more likely than not will determine whether candidates or policies win or lose. At this point I'd hardly describe myself as objective or dispassionate. But I do try to read and hear opposing points of view. I'm developing an increasingly hardened and pessimistic view about the political era we are in. Which is to say I think the polarization and disunity will remain with us for a very long time, and perhaps intensify. And on balance I think Independents will be of no real pragmatic use in bringing the two sides together. They'll keep doing what they do. They broke for Obama in 2008, Romney in 2012, Trump in 2016, and it looks like Biden now in 2020. In theory you could call that bipartisanship. But in reality it means we're divided, increasingly polarized, and nothing ever gets done unless one party can dominate. So the goal of the Democratic Party, to me, should be to try to dominate - which includes winning over enough Independents as often as we can. What I told this guy is it means treating him like a lab rat in a maze and just getting very good at figuring out where we want Independents to go with delicious pieces of cheese. He took that as an insult, which is how it was meant. But everything I heard in four hours and in 20 years of knowing him suggests that's the real bottom line. If his job as an Independent is to be thoughtful and more objective than a Democrat like me and help create some stable majority that can solve big problems, he's failing. Everything I heard for four hours suggested this is probably the most sober view of reality. Politics will be increasingly winner take all, not both sides trying to find a way to compromise. An important caveat: it will also be loser take all, if you are President Toxic and you lose the popular vote by 2 million votes. You still claim democratic legitimacy to invent whatever rules you want and drive through three conservative justices. You argue "the American people spoke" and that's what gave you the right to do it. Fuck Democrats, and fuck Crooked Hillary, and fuck RBG. My friend told me there's two things he's hearing a lot among his friends. "His friends" would include people like the CEOs of the local banks and hospitals, who are all sort of country clubs friends with their US Senators and House members. He's worked with and served on boards with God knows how many current and former Governors as part of his business. So if there is such a thing as "the country's owners", these are people who either are in that group, or at least know who the group is. (By the way, can you post a list of the country's owners. I'm curious. ) The two things he said he's been hearing the most are the sense of deep exhaustion with all the antics of President Toxic, which turn him and most of the people he knows off. The other thing is that the concerns are about Kamala, not Biden. Part of the thinking is that Biden has lost a step, and Kamala may be President. That's not viewed as a positive. She may be too liberal. There were some unfavorable references to Black Lives Matter, although it wasn't clear to me whether that sense had anything to do with Kamala herself. At some point I decided I really didn't want to probe his views of Kamala too much, because he'd just be showing me how ignorant he is and piss me off. In the terms of your comment, @tassojunior, if Kamala is the person the country's owners chose, this guy hasn't gotten the memo. He is pretty much smack dab in the Establishment Center, meaning like people from Democrat Bob Graham on the left to Chuck Grassley on the right. No Bernie, no Tea Party. They are worried about Kamala. Which does not surprise me in the least. These are the kinds of reactions that probably suggested to Hillary in 2016 that she was better off with Kaine. And at least in my friend's case, it worked. He despised Trump but hated the idea of voting for Hillary, who he has met and worked with. So he planned to vote for Gary Johnson. Before he voted it struck him that President Toxic would be such a disaster that he'd rather be stuck with Hillary. Having Kaine on the ticket rather than Bernie probably made his vote for Hillary easier for him to bear. There's two ways I have described my friend to his face for years that I think describe two of the best and worst qualities of Indepedents. First, he's an early warning system. That's meant as a compliment. Second, he's a dilettante. That's of course meant, and taken, as an insult. As a result, he's like you. Reactive, and mostly unhappy and negative. The two parties suck, a pox on both their houses, and there's nothing I can do about it. That's my picture of the environment many Independents have created for themselves. So they'll basically keep punishing any party that does anything. Because they don't like what either party does. At least if you are a Democrat, you liked what your government did in 2009. Republicans mostly liked what their government did in 2017. Many Independents are never happy, and never able to do anything about it. They haven't figured out how to have a party of their own, like the Green Party in Europe. So all they can do is bitch, pick the lesser of evils, and bitch more. His messages last night fit exactly into my view of what Independents like him add to the debate. It's not exactly news that there is Trump fatigue and Kamala jitters. For me, it was one little piece of data I take as an early warning system. It's another indicator President Toxic will lose, because people in the center of political gravity are sick of him. But there are these Kamala jitters that could blow up. Less likely in this campaign, if she makes some gaffe or says something that sounds too scary to moderates. More likely down the line, if she becomes President or looks like she could become President. It also was, to me, a great example of being a dilettante. I told him he was feeding me buzz words and bumper stickers from Trump commercials. Biden is senile. He's surrounded by scary socialists. Be afraid. My friend hasn't made any effort I could discern to study Kamala's history or any of the controversies around her positions. At one point I mentioned things Biden is saying about saving jobs in Michigan. He asked me why it would matter what Biden says about what Obama did. I told him that it matters because Obama put Biden in charge of the Recovery Act, and things like working with the unions and auto industry to save and restore manufacturing jobs. My friend knew none of this. So if the job of an Independent is to be objective and knowledgeable and committed to making our politics better, sorry. He fails. He didn't like hearing that. But I didn't hear a good rebuttal. His main point is that both parties ought to be working to persuade people like him. I get the idea, and he's not wrong. But I couldn't help notice - this has been a pattern for 20 years - that he's making a lot of his decisions based on impressions you get in 30 second attacks ads. During 2014, for example, I got very annoyed with the constant refrain of how Obamacare is "crap, crap, crap". I'm sure he got that from any of the thousands of Republican attack ads. I stated, and my friend agreed, that it would be better if we could go back to the politics of the 1990's. Back then George Mitchell and Bob Dole met weekly and had a cordial relationship. Bill Clinton and John Kasich are examples of politicians of that time who say that members of both parties could mostly sit down together and solve problems through compromise. By most objective metrics - job growth, income levels, poverty reduction, wealth creation, home ownership, federal budget surpluses - it was a good decade for most Americans. And in an environment like that Independents could elect Bill Clinton in 1992, then punish him in 1994, then re-elect him in 1996, then punish him in 1998. And it all worked out okay. Because whether the Clinton people or the Kasich people had more or less power, they could still compromise and get shit done. They claimed that they understood their job was to make life better for the American people. Right around then was one of the few times in my adult life when over 50 % of Americans said they trusted the federal government to mostly get things right. I think that's causation. I also stated, and my friend agreed, that we're probably not going to get back to that in our lifetimes. We even more likely won't get back to the Ike and JFK eras, where 3 in 4 Americans trusted their government. He agreed. Again, if Independents have a plan to get what they want, I don't hear it. He's not happy. But he has no plan to fix it other than, "You guys should make me happy about what you do." I mentioned Rick Wilson, of Never Trump Republican/Lincoln Project/"Everything Trump Touches Dies" fame. There's two things about him that matter to me. First, I've heard him talk online about how in his GOP days he could get just about any House Democrat fired by checking the gun registrations, cross referencing it with voter registrations, and sending targeted messages to Democratic male gun owners that sent them into a frenzy. ("The socialists are coming for your guns!") I use him as an example of how you find the right piece of cheese to lure the rat in the maze to where you want. Wilson also talks about how the Republicans had to be strategic and thoughtful about cultivating Republicans who could be elected Governor in states like Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maryland. Obviously, they succeeded. And they are not like Republican Governors in West Virginia or Texas or Idaho. I think that's the challenge for Democrats. I think there is a role for Independents. But it's not a pretty one. I think Democrats have to be strategic and thoughtful about building a party where we can try to secure at least 270 electoral votes. And get rid of the electoral college as soon as we can. And also try to secure 50 Senate seats and a majority of House seats for several cycles. That involves your dreaded suburban women, and Democrats like Lucy McBath in suburban Atlanta and Lauren Underwood in suburban Chicago. We're going to have to figure out things that both Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin can agree on. That won't be easy. But like I said above, the Republicans could figure it out with red Governors in blue states. My sense with Independents like my friend and you is you are doomed to political misery. But at the end of the day the Rick Wilson-like political task is to lure you with a nice piece of cheese through the maze to where I want you to go, which is a voting booth where you vote Democratic. Example: you won't like what Joe Biden does on health care. It won't be Medicare For All. But you can decide that in 2022 you want Republicans to win big and start to try to repeal whatever Biden does, like in 2010. Or you can follow that awfully delicious piece of cheese and keep the House and Senate Democratic. That's basically all you get to decide. Cheese, or Tom Cotton? Your decision. If you really don't like the cheese and do nothing, you can have President Nikki Haley in 2024. Or President Don Jr. Wouldn't that be swell? I said it to my friend and to you that way to sound like an arrogant prick and get a reaction. But I don't think I'm fundamentally wrong. At the federal level, I'm planning on 100 % Republican obstruction. More likely than not, they will fill RBG's seat. That will set the tone for much of what follows, if Democrats take the Senate. The message to Republicans I like is: "You can sit there for four or eight years and watch us work. We have the minimum votes. Or you can participate and compromise." At some point they might decide to participate and compromise. At least The Squad, which has four votes, is on the team that wants to compromise with each other and have a majority that can legislate and govern.

You're sort of the opposite of the Team Toxic Trumpians arguing Biden is senile. They got themselves in this box. It turns out Biden can open his mouth and speak, and move people. Beyond that, it looks like Team Biden won the law and order debate in Wisconsin, and nationally. Too early to tell. But a majority, including Independents, seem to agree that there is a systemic racism problem. And President Toxic is simply throwing fuel on the fire. So now they have to explain how this happened. Are they giving Biden drugs? They must be doing something to make it seem like the senile old corpse has a functioning brain. Well over 50 % of America observes this and feels the Trump nonsense and toxic circus is exhausting. You're doing the opposite. I think we'd both agree that the DNC is a bit like the Keystone Kops. They get hacked, DWS puts her foot in her mouth. We'll learn about all the 2020 fuck ups after the election. But in 2016 they were kind of a mess. And yet, these same people came up with a perfectly thought through master plan and executed it perfectly. Elizabeth Warren was set up as the spoiler who could not win but could make Bernie lose. And she fooled tens of millions of followers. Because at one point Biden and her were tied for first. But that was just all manipulated masterfully by these brilliant people who we all thought couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag. Okay. Whatever. There are three things that stood out to me about Super Tuesday. The most important one is the opposite of your argument. The first was that the only logical explanation for the Biden groundswell was that Lichtman is right. People are not sheep. They don't need little pieces of paper on their doorknob or 30 second ads that are intended to emotionally manipulate them. Because Biden had none of that. And in Minnesota and Massachusetts I literally mean none. No money. No ads. No organization. But people looked at the situation and said he's our guy to get President Toxic fired, at least given the choices we have available. So if you are right, and the DNC was behind all this, there surely would have been bread crumbs. Even Putin, a master spy, left hundreds of pages of bread crumbs behind if you read the reports. How did the DNC get away with it? How did they get people to vote for Biden if not through ads, or money, or organization - which is what the DNC does? My conclusion is not that there is a conspiracy. The opposite. It's that there was a legitimate Democratic AND Independent groundswell for Biden. Carville, as usual, had a pithy line. It was something like this: "The Democratic Party needed an intervention. And the voters, thank God, provided it." The second thing is that's when I decided that Biden is certainly not senile. And that he is in fact a pretty good manipulator and coalition builder. If I'm right, most of it was going on behind the scenes. But, again, there were bread crumbs everywhere. Pete and Klo and Kamala were persuaded to endorse him. Like immediately. And that was leveraged into a ton of free media. Beyond that, people saw what happened in South Carolina thanks to what Clyburn and Biden managed to do, and thought some more. You can certainly argue that all this was in a script that DWS or HRC or Biden himself wrote two years ago. (Biden could not, of course, since he's senile.) So the script would be that Biden would lose Iowa and NH and Nevada and look pretty much humiliated, and then have this amazing come from behind victory in South Carolina. That can be organized easy, right? Wrong. It can't be organized easily, or at all. One of the best descriptions of politics I ever read was by Leon Panetta. Politics, he said, is not about having the best plan to win a war. It's about getting up every morning and figuring out how to take the next hill. Then when you do that you figure out how to take the next hill. Sometimes you will lose the battle. So you have to regroup and recalibrate. The people who do this well in politics tend to be the survivors, and the winners. I like that description. I think it accurately describes how Joe Biden has survived, and how he won the 2020 primary. This is NOT - by no means - the way most Berniecrats think. They think they need the right plan to win the revolution. How well did that actually work in 2020? That said, so far AOC seems like someone who may end up being quite good at winning her battles one hill at a time. This may be a good way to think about what went wrong for Elizabeth "I Have A Plan" Warren. I loved her plans. And so did a lot of people. And she's actually pretty good, I think, at rolling with the punches. But Biden's soft attack on her was spot on. We're not electing a planner. We're electing a President. I'm a Warren fanboy, and the idea of a Biden nomination scared the shit out of me last year. So I don't have a deep pro-Biden bias. But if the question is who is better at politics based on Leon Panetta's definition, I think Biden proved he was better. You can argue Leon Panetta is another corrupt party hack who is full of shit. But if the goal is to win and take power, he seems to know some things that accurately portray who is likely to win, and why. Third, the interesting thing about Warren is that unlike Klo and Pete and Kamala and half of all elected Democrats in America, she didn't endorse either Biden or Bernie. Even though I think we know Bernie begged her to. At the time, my idealistic impulses won out. I thought she should endorse Bernie, if only to go down fighting together. I now feel my impulse was wrong, and I'm glad she didn't. I knew by that point Bernie was dead politically. No poll ever suggested that in a two way race, Bernie would get more votes than Biden. Again, I'll go to the grave thinking that the only math that could have prevented Biden from getting to 50 % is if Warren and Bernie got more delegates than Biden working as a progressive dynamic duo. This by the way invalidates your entire conspiracy theory. The best thing for Biden would have been a clean one on one race with Bernie. It was always likely, based on just about 100 % of hundreds of polls, that he would win that one on one race. So getting Warren or Kamala or Pete in the mix was not the Biden plan. And it did not help Biden. He needed to get everyone else out so he could go one on one with Bernie. Any hopeful notion that Bernie would win one on one with Biden in states like Michigan died as soon as the votes came in. The reason I'm glad Warren did not do what my idealistic impulses wanted her to do is it may have reduced her ability to influence what happens down the line. That's a function of Biden, really. If he holds deep grudges, he's very good at hiding it. Warren endorsing Bernie would not have changed the tide. But it may have slowed it down, and given Bernie/Elizabeth a bit more influence. The basic outcome would have been the same. It's clear to me that Biden, Bernie, and Elizabeth are now all three peas in a pod. Like I said, the real battles will come when Biden wins. But Bernie and Elizabeth are both in positions of influence. Another logical melt down of the Warren "evil snake" conspiracy theory is this. Anyone who believes that shit should not have been expecting Warren to ally with Bernie. They should believe their own theory. The bitch is an evil snake. So what they really needed to do was expose her for the evil snake she is. Putin could hack the DNC. So some whiz Berniecrat computer geek ought to be able to hack the DNC and get the plan. Show America the conspiracy hatched by the reptiles back in 2019 or 2018 or whatever. This fucking bitch evil snake Elizabeth Warren is being run to stick her awful venomous fangs into Bernie at exactly the right moment. Everything good and righteous will be destroyed. Evil will reign the Earth. And it is because of that fucking bitch evil snake Elizabeth Warren. I'm taking it to the extreme. But if you believe the conspiracy theory, you have to believe some version of that. I felt sorry for Bernie, who I ended up voting for because Warren would have been a throwaway vote in California. Kute Kyle was fact free on this one. First he argued that this notion that Bernie was trashing Warren had to be a plant from the evil snake herself. Then when it became clear that Bernie did have a script that "trashed" Warren, Kyle shifted to explaining that Bernie said he hadn't been aware of it, he stopped it, and it wasn't really a big deal. In fact, it wasn't a big deal. Compared to the shit Obama and Clinton threw at each other in 2008, the 2020 primary was kid gloves. It's fair to ask why Warren said anything about it. But she certainly had the right. The amusing thing was all the "evil snake" stuff simply confirmed that everyone spreading the "Bernie Bros." meme had a point. Here you have a feminist champion who gets in bloody fights with any super powerful male bank CEO or Treasury Secretary who disagrees with her. And the Bernie Bros are calling her an "evil snake"??? And then AFTER you do that you expect her to get in the trenches and fight with you? Why would you even want an evil snake in the trench with you? She'll bite you. It makes no fucking sense whatsoever. The thing that I would compare it to now is President Toxic blabbing his ignorant mind to Woodward. To quote Claire McCaskill, this was just stupid, stupid, stupid. And monumentally stupid. But there's a difference between an old and possibly senile President being monumentally stupid, and young idealists being monumentally stupid. I was once young and idealistic myself. And I said and did lots of things far more stupid than that. I'll repeat what I said. This is a big part of the political project of the 2020's. More than a few of the Berniecrats are politically immature. And some of them are just immature, period. The ones active in 2008 were arguably too naive. They thought if they just won the battle in 2008, they'd won the war. Now they know better. The 2020 version is more than a bit like Tea Party 2010/Trump Party 2016. Now they are pissed, for good cause. And some of them are lashing out. But as I posted above, and as I would have guessed, they are a gifted and promising generation. They seem to have their eyes on the prize. They want to win in 2020. I obviously hope they elect Biden and do everything they can to hold his aqing ass to the fire. My worst fear is that the Berniecrats, when they take power, will be like the Tea Party or Trump Party, or worse. Meaning zealots. Incapable of governing. More interested in purity tests than incremental progress. That is certainly the way they are being portrayed right now. Team Toxic can't make Biden look like a Marxist. At least Kamala is Black, and a woman. That gives them something to work with. (More to come on that in a separate post.) The idea of the President Toxic campaign is that if we elect poor senile Joe all of these dark forces that represent the very heart and soul of evil will be unleashed on America. That's the Bernie Bros/Our Revolution/BLM/Bernie as Che/Elizabeth as Pocahontas stuff packaged in shit and put on steroids. It's fair to say they are using the fear of Bernie and his ilk, and even Kamala and her ilk, to try to scare people into not voting for Joe. I actually do believe the political evolution of what I'm calling the Berniecrats will be one of the most important trends in the 2020's. And it could go either right or wrong. My main reason for hoping it will go right is that they are the opposite of The Tea Party in at least one important way. The Tea Party was mostly people who think government - like Obamacare- is the root of all evil and is not be to be trusted. While you could not have guessed it in 2010, President Toxic has articulated their philosophy perfectly. Go in, flip over the table, break the glass, and go after the "Deep State" relentlessly. They are more complicated than that. But if their idea is freedom means not wearing a mask, complexity is not their strong suit. My hope and belief is that the progressives believe the opposite. They actually want a government that takes things like climate change and systemic racism seriously. You can't address climate change if you don't know how to govern. So they will have to figure it out. And they are. What happened with The Squad this year was a good omen. Yeah, they say some inflammatory things that is red meat for Team Toxic to attack with. Had they all been crushed in their primaries, you could conclude that the voters wanted to send them all back to the shit holes they came from. Instead, the primary voters ratified and empowered them. These are not women that think Bernie and Elizabeth are snakes. These are women who want to be Bernie or Elizabeth in the future. Leaders of the progressive movement. We - progressives - were not ready for prime time in 2020. I'm optimistic about the future. Sadly, @tassojunior, I assume you must not be. If you assume the evil reptiles pulled off a conspiracy to block and expel progressives in 2016 and 2020, they will no doubt do the same in 2024, 2028, 2032, etc. If you believe this, you have my deepest sympathies. It must really suck to be you.

There's two things I find scary about that. The first reaction is it scares me to think of what Democrats/socialists/whatever will be like if Sanders ever wins. Because if Warren, who Republicans think of as a complete fucking bitch, is a "trashy motherfucker" to progressive women, the tent Bernie builds is gonna be pretty small. Warren is on most scorecards as one the of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate, with Bernie only a bit more to the left. So if she's not welcome, who is? The second reaction is I don't have to worry about the first reaction. Because Bernie can never win. He can't build coalitions. If Warren is a motherfucking bitch and Kasich is the root of all right wing evil, how do you ever win an election outside Brooklyn? I know. I know. Ojeda will wave his tattoo and people in West Virginia will says, "He's my guy." Cynthia Nixon will put on her progressive high heel shoes and give em that old Sex In The City strut, and the next thing you know she'll be Governor. It never actually happens in reality. My assumption is that maybe 1 % of these people really are Russian trolls who are paid to post this shit. I could care less about that. Because even if I'm right, and ThiaBallerina is a Russian troll, s/he's just echoing what the other 99 % of genuinely purist progressives are saying. Part of the political project of the 2020's is that the progressive movement is going to have to learn what it actually means to win and govern. They were not ready for prime time in 2020. But they are getting closer. And they are building a bench with leaders like AOC. Bernie knows all this. After spending a decade losing and losing and losing, he decided to win and became a popular Mayor himself. But a lot of his followers really don't seem to have a pragmatic bone in their body. Like President Toxic and a lot of his Tea Party followers, they see politics as subtraction, not addition. Hopefully when President Toxic learns that didn't work out so well for him in 2020 the progressive purists will internalize the lesson. By the time we elect someone like Bernie Sanders, I hope we've figured out that if we want them to get re-elected they have to govern well and build coalitions that can actually win.

We do agree about most things. This is about something where we have completely opposite views. I think we both would be just fine if Sanders or Warren had been the nominee. I would have been just fine with Castro as VP. Florida would have been harder with Sanders and socialism. I don't know Texas would be easier. But it could be a realistic target. The type of massive expansion of the electorate Bernie promised didn't quite materialize. So I don't assume for a minute that Bernie would win because all these young progressives would magically appear. The lesson of Bernie is the opposite. Organizing is hard work. And in a state like Texas, where I think Bernie's army organized their asses off, the results were impressive, I though. But it still wasn't enough. They lost. In others, they lost. But in the larger sense, they lost. Warren lost, too. I'll go to the grave thinking that the only way either could have won is if they'd agreed upfront that they would both fight like hell to make sure one or the other was going to be the nominee, and they would let the electorate decide which one was best. My observation of them in 2019 suggested to me they had actually cut such a deal. When it all blew up earlier this year, we all learned they had simply agreed to disagree. That decision, or inability build a coalition, may have doomed both of their candidacies. The thing that has impressed me most about Biden this year is that it is obvious that he is not senile, and that his coalition buildings skills after 50 years in politics are actually quite good. He's not the kind of guy that is magnetic like Obama or ground breaking like Hillary was by virtue of being a woman in politics when most politicians are men. Morning Joe keeps saying politics is about addition, not subtraction. He keeps saying President Toxic has no clue how to do that, in part because he doesn't want to do it. Biden is very good at addition. I think part of the narrative is that 2020 happened to be the year that something Biden was offering all of a sudden looked pretty attractive. Especially compared to President Toxic. My read of Warren's behavior is that once she realized she couldn't win she started playing for influence. She's a "personnel is policy" person and she's getting her progressive pals placed all around Biden. Bernie is doing the same thing. My impression is that Biden is playing with them more easily than Hillary did. We are seeing a "Biden coalition" being built right before our eyes. So this idea that reformers are being driven out is ridiculous. Biden is embracing them, because he obviously realizes the politics of 2020 is not the politics of 1980 or 2000. And he needs them to win. In an earlier post you cited Ojeda as an example of how you can be a progressive in West Virginia. True enough. But here's the thing. He lost, too. Manchin won. So the example makes my point, not yours. I'm all for AOC and Cori Bush getting elected. Maybe in 20 or 30 years they could be elected President by the 2040 or 2050 electorate. But I don't think they can be elected today, outside very liberal urban enclaves. Again, how well did Cynthia Nixon do in royal blue New York? What does that tell us about what Democrats want, let alone Republicans? I gave Jimmy Dore a try for a while, and just stopped listening. He's more fun that Saager and Krystal. Mostly I feel they just parrot dumb ideas, that are often enough built on a factually shoddy analysis. Dore just says lots of provocative shit that he doesn't even try to wed to facts, or polls, or complicated analysis. It's just a good old rant. Which is fine. I obviously love rants. But if he thinks it has anything to do with winning, he's full of shit. Sorry, but the kinds of candidates Jimmy defends and lifts up, like Bernie, are usually the ones that lose.

Where do you get this shit from? I am guessing your point is that not picking Bernie for VP is the same as "keeping reformers out of the party at all cost." The polling I found interesting is that Warren was more likely to be named than Harris as a favorite VP choice among Democrats. Even among Blacks, it was pretty much a tie. All that changed when George Floyd was murdered and BLM erupted. It would have been interesting to see if there had been push back if he selected a White man, albeit a progressive one like Bernie. Other articles I've posted talk about how Biden is surrounding himself with Warrencrat economic advisers. When asked about the Green New Deal, Biden says he and Bernie's folks negotiated a plan that is now "my deal" and is in the platform. Of course, Biden will really play his cards when he wins. Then we'll learn whether the Treasury Secretary is Warren, or a progressive like her, or Summers, or a Wall Streeter like him. The verdict is out. Voting will matter. Biden is a survivor. He'll notice who makes up "the Biden coalition". That's who he'll pay the most attention to, since he'll want them to vote for him or his successor in 2024. My political hack view of the best way for "reformers" and "progressives" to make sure they are at the center of the Biden coalition is to turn out in droves and elect a Democratic majority. But if this is your definition of Democrats being "vicious" in "keeping reformers out of the party at all cost", you may be suffering from the same dementia Joe Biden apparently has. The immediate question is whether progressive Millennials and Gen Z types are running for the exits, or Canada, or some mythical progressive nirvana. They're not. Younger voters choose Biden over Trump — but they're not wild about either It's not a shocker that Millennials and Gen Z are not wild about Biden. My nieces and nephews who wanted either Bernie or Warren can tell you why. They'll also tell you why they're of course voting for Biden, not President Toxic. My guess is that RBG's death was both horrible timing and perfect timing. It of course would have been better if she'd lived six months longer. That said, there is every reason to think the fight over who replaces her will drive certain progressive types into a frenzy. Just like the idea that Hillary Clinton would decide who replaced Scalia was one factor in why 2 million more Republicans turned out in 2016 for President Toxic than they did in 2012 for Romney. This time, the shoe is on the other foot. My strong hunch is that lots of Millennials who care about climate change and fair elections and money in politics and abortion and voting rights and all kinds of things will be extremely motivated to vote for RBG - or at least for her legacy. Biden is doing better than Hillary with two of three key groups: Millennials/Gen Z, and the suburban voters with college degrees. Where he most lags, and in some cases (like Florida) is doing worse than Hillary is with Hispanics. I've got a theory for what explains part of this. With Millennials, the key things he needed to do play to Biden's strengths. He is a deal maker, and a coalition builder. His survival depended on building coalitions and cutting deals with Blacks all along the way. The best expressions of that were his marriage with Obama, and how Blacks saved his ass in the 2020 primaries. So the idea that Biden may be slowly but successfully weaving activist progressives into a left-leaning coalition isn't shocking. These people are engaged, and they don't support Trump. (Although among White AND male Millennials, there perhaps is a slight preference for President Toxic.) Biden needs to do the same thing with Latinos. And for left-leaning and engaged Latinos, I suspect he will. That said, Biden has never been and never will be an organizer, a lightning rod, an RBG-like pioneer. So if the premise of Latino activists is right - that there are huge chunks of ambivalent and disengaged Latinos in all these swing states that can be organized into a Democratic majority - Biden was never going to be the best candidate to do that. This article, which I found while digging around for data on Millennials and Hispanics, provides an excellent set of data that may explain why. These Are the Voters Who Could Decide the Election Latinas and ambivalent Latino voters are key to winning back the White House in 2020. There's a graphic that sums up Latino participation by state I can't cut and paste. it's about "base" voters and "ambivalent" Latino voters. But here's a few examples, based on the data presented by Latino activists. In Arizona, 31 % of Latinos are Democratic base voters, and 14 % are Trump base voters. Add what Valencia calls "mobilization" voters, Latinos who are Democrats at heart but need a nudge to vote, and you get to 38 % of Arizona Latinos supporting Democrats. Meanwhile, 40 % of Arizona Latinos are "ambivalent". The author implies they are probably more likely to vote Democratic. But that can't be assumed. What can be assumed is that many of them are simply not likely to vote. Here's what she says happened in 2016: Bernie, with the help of the Latino pros, gave a glimpse of what a real effort to engage more Latinos in states like Nevada and Texas would look like. Again, I don't think Tio Bernie or Tio Joe are the right ones. Democrats ought to be looking for Mexican American Tio Bernardos and young Cuban Tia Josefas. The Republicans have Marco Rubio. If Democrats don't do it, Republicans eventually will. If these numbers are right, Florida is the one state where the Trump Latino base (30 %) is actually bigger than the Democratic Latino base (21 %, which goes up to 34 % if you nudge all the "mobilization" Latino voters). Either way, there's 30 % who are "ambivalent" and could go either way, or just not vote, according to this data. These numbers make intuitive sense to me based on what actually happened in 2016 and 2018. In 2016, states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan broke for President Toxic. That was clearly driven by shifts to him from Whites without colleges degrees. Meanwhile, many "natural" Democratic constituencies like Blacks and Millennials just voted less. I've never read anything clear about what Hispanics in Wisconsin or Michigan did in 2016. In 2018 in the same states, higher turnout from Democratic constituencies produced very different results. If this data is correct, Hispanics could be an increasingly important part of El Muro Azul in the Rust Belt. Of those that are engaged, most are Democratic. Only 1 in 10 of them are identified as being in the "Trump base" in these Rust Belt states. Nevada and Arizona and California were all bright spots for Democrats in 2016 and 2018. In 2016, Hillary won Nevada and held a Senate seat with a Latina. In 2018 we flipped a Senate seat in Arizona. In Orange County we flipped multiple House seats from red to blue. Hispanic candidates and voters had a lot to do with that. In states like Pennsylvania, the challenge is to slow down or stop the drift of White voters without college degrees away from Democrats. In states like Arizona, the challenge is to speed up the movement of Latinos into the Democratic tent. The one "Latino" stronghold that was the exception, especially in 2018, was Florida. This perhaps helps explain why. According to this data, Democrats have little no natural advantage with Latinos in Florida. In fact, Republicans may have the advantage. Both because they are better at mobilizing their Latino "Trump base", and because they are better at reaching out to ambivalent Latino voters. One offset is that it seems likely that Biden will do better with older White voters, and Whites without college degrees, than Hillary did. That may be more than enough to offset Democratic problems with Latinos in Florida and all over the US in 2020. But it is not a long term solution. I don't think this is really a Biden problem. I think it is a huge long term challenge for Democrats.

If this is what you mean by getting President Toxic's followers to fear him, I agree. I would characterize it as pulling away at the edges of of his loyal cadre of authoritarian followers. It's never been stated quite this clearly. But I think the goal of the Lincoln Project types is to pull away maybe 5 % of them, not 50 % of them. 5 % of even a relatively small slice of the electorate can make a huge difference in a swing state. If Republicans are 30 % of all voters, and 60 % of them are the "Trump Republicans" who 99 % support Trump, that's 18 % of the electorate. 5 % of them is about 1 % of the electorate. That was the difference between winning and losing in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016. That said, I think the 5 % of the Republican Party the Lincoln Project types are going for are mostly those in the 40 % who see themselves as "party" Republicans. About 1 in 3 of them view Trump unfavorably. Up to half of them disagree with President Toxic on important matters like race. What's keeping them glued more than anything is their view that Trump is good for the economy, in traditional Republican (low tax/cut regulation) terms. It's the "he's a great businessman" thing tied to traditional Reagan free market conservatism. To say it differently, I think the Lincoln Project has mostly conceded that the "Trump Republicans" are 99 % loyal to Trump, and will stick with him. And while we don't know this for a fact, my guess is that slice is where the test for authoritarian followers would be going off the charts. I agree with all your points about messaging, and COVID-19. Except for one critical one. Everyone knows that 200,000 Americans have died on President Toxic's watch. Yet when Joe Biden tells that to those Trump Republicans who are 99 % loyal to Trump, what it mostly tells them is that Joe Biden is senile and weak. When the Lincoln Project says it, they say, "Well, they were RINOs all along. Good riddance!" Meanwhile, the Lincoln Project ex-lifelong Republicans says their former friends who are now President Toxic loyalists are "unrecognizable". Pelosi got off a real zinger today, which I really liked. She said President Toxic wants to rush through an appointment to replace RBG because he cares more about killing Obamacare than ending the COVID-19 pandemic. She is relentless in these messages that tie it back to health care, safety, economic security, and the things people most care about. Like their lives, and the lives and health of their loved ones. That message worked very well in 2018. Except in states like Missouri and Indiana, where Trumpism and old White men with guns still roam free from the Marxists. That said, my guess is that the "Trump Republicans" who are 99 % loyal to Trump won't even hear those words. Let alone think about them. Because they are coming out of Nancy Pelosi's mouth. Arguably, she's even worse than your typical Black suburb killer. In your first post on this subject you gave an example that was extreme, but that I thought was a perfect illustration of the problem. It was about the Nazi soldiers who shot and killed other Nazi soldiers for being disloyal. Even after Hitler was dead and the war was lost. There's not many better examples of extreme loyalty to the wrong cause. As I mentioned already, my gut feeling is that reflects a deep psychological need to try to prove that my cause was the right one. I know that over 30 years later there were still ex-Nazis running around Bavaria who still thought Hitler was right all along. The Nazi example is a good one, I think, because it goes to Dean's verbatim quote I'll keep repeating. "They understand defeat." The best de-nazification program was simply for Hitler to lose. It might be better to say some understand defeat. In the case of President Toxic, he's already paving the way for this message: "We won. The only reason Biden will be President is fraud and cheating and a rigged election." Of the 60 % of Republicans that are 99 % loyal to President Toxic, my guess is that the vast majority will agree with him. Do the math on that one. If 3 in 4 "Trump Republicans" stay loyal to him in defeat, it means the Republican Party is split just about 50/50 between party loyalists who like the John Kasich and Mitt Romney types, and Trump loyalists. Team Toxic will perhaps think that Donald Trump, Jr. will win the 2024 rematch. I'm happy this is their problem to figure out. I think another word that belongs in this discussion is shock. In this case, I'm actually basing this on one of those Myers Briggs type personality tests I took once with all my-coworkers. A concept I remember is that the "D" or "dominant" typology often ends up being the leader. Usually they will dominate followers. Sometimes it takes a shock to actually get through to them. I think that describes both President Toxic, and the impact he has on his followers. Mostly, I think this is just common sense. If you listen to what they say, his followers feel Trump has "healed" and "unified" the party. Everyone else in America is like, "huh?" The people waiting in line without masks to see him in Nevada tell reporters of course President Toxic will win. How could he lose? Look at everyone here today. Everyone else in America goes, "Huh?" My point is that if you stipulate that Biden is going to win 55/45, which is possible at the extreme best case scenario for Democrats, I think, that is going to come as a massive shock to President Toxic's followers. This is where you might argue Democrats who are smart will have messages ready for those shocked voters. Messages other than, "Fuck you, loser." If you made an argument like that, I'd agree with you. I was looking through this Georgia poll today and it has some good news and bad news relevant to your point. The good news is that the Senate race in Georgia (Ossoff/Perdue) is a toss up. My hunch is that this RBG fight might elect Ossoff. Just like the 2018 Justice Rapist battle helped elect Sinema in Arizona, I think. In 2018, Indepedents in Arizona opposed Justice Rapist's confirmation 50/37. McSally was for it, and Sinema was against it. Who knows why Sinema won. But she needed to win the Independents. And at the margin the Justice Rapist fight probably helped her. Just like it hurt Claire McCaskill in a much more red state like Missouri. So if we are talking about the White college graduates Ossoff needs to win, my gut feeling is that everything that's about to play out about abortion and McConnell's venal hypocrisy and his contempt for any notion of unity or bipartisanship may help Ossoff win. The same White college graduates are the ones who would buy your (or Pelosi's) message on how President Toxic is endangering their health by trying to kill Obamacare even as he ignores COVID-19. (I think that Arizona poll also means Kelly now is even more likely to beat McSally in Arizona, if this plays out in roughly the same hyperpartisan way as 2018.) Here's the bad news. This fresh poll says that Georgians believe President Toxic will do slightly better (41 % to 40 %) than Biden in handling COVID-19. It's a statistical tie. But in the other state in that poll, Minnesota, Biden is viewed as being the better one to end the pandemic, 48 to 35. So how is it possible that in Georgia, after everything that has happened, people see President Toxic as being more capable of ending the pandemic than Biden? We both like facts, and on this one we are ignorant. My strong guess is that if we gave them the test that 41 % who say President Toxic will do better on COVID-19 is where most of the authoritarian followers are clustered. ("My leader doesn't wear a mask. I trust my leader.") So if the argument is that the reality of what I see as Trump's murderous incompetence will persuade people, that persuasion has its limits. If Ossoff wins, it will be because of the highly educated suburban Independents. Not the rural "poorly educated" who Trump loves. Many of those Whites in rural Georgia are also probably lifelong racists, I suspect. I think the concept of "Trump identity politics" is probably a good one to think about. The reason I like the concept is that it merges the economy, culture wars, and this stuff about authoritarianism. I buy the idea that "Trump Republicans" are 99 % loyal because there is an identity they've built around Trump. He is a business man. He'll make the economy right. He will take care of any crisis like COVID-19 better than anyone else. I am certainly NOT a racist. You're the racist. But I do agree with Trump that these Black Lives Matter Marxists and racists, and all their violence and rioting, is completely out of control. What is wrong with a young White guy with an AR-15 trying to defend our property rights? And, no, that has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with how White men with guns and nooses used to protect their right to own Blacks as property. Stop bringing up all that slavery shit, okay? I don't own slaves. I think that's in the ballpark of how many of them think. And, no. They don't want to go to college. College makes you liberal and Gay. Who needs more of that? Give me a gun and a job and a Make America Great Again cap. I'll be happy. The potential de-toxification target to me is that Mexican American family in the picture I posted a few posts above. I'll post this article in another thread as well, but the Latinos most likely to support President Toxic are younger men. If they live in Florida and fled Communism in Latin America, they are much more likely to buy President Toxic's rhetoric on socialism. Some Latinos argue that Latino men in particular are attracted to authoritarian leaders (caudillos) and Trump taps into that. The guy in the picture above is an Obama/Obama/Trump/Trump voter. He won't be persuaded on COVID-19 because his whole family is waiting in line to see President Toxic, without masks on. When President Toxic loses, he'll be disappointed. It may or may not come as a shock. My guess is that the way to pry a guy like him loose is this: it's the economy, stupid. If he voted for Obama twice, and he's Latino, he's probably not a flaming racist. He may be attracted to authoritarian leaders. He says he likes Trump because he is strong, and good for jobs. If Biden does right by the economy and millions of factory jobs come back or are created in new industries, that's something that would likely move the needle with a voter like him. Arguably, the main way Ike and JFK and Johnson scratched the authoritarian follower itch was the Cold War. It DID NOT require McCarthyism, which Ike happily referred to as "McCarthy-was-ism" after the poor dear asshole was discredited. In LBJ's case, it of course slipped into the Viet Nam War. Fast forward to W. and Iraq. To me, that's the type of fear mongering we want to avoid. It is interesting that President Toxic won in 2016 and is running now as the guy who thinks George W. Bush DID NOT keep us safe on 9/11. Trump will make it sound like the Iraq War, which he was against from Day One (liar!), was obviously Joe Biden's idea all along. My point is that I think Democrats should, and will, steal from Trump's playbook. On the jobs thread I started, Biden was using similar China language, which bordered on Wellstone populism, back in 2007 in New Hampshire. He was saying no one will take on China because powerful US corporations are making tons of money for fat cat US stock holders by shipping both jobs and products to China. I think that is a populist message whose time has come. I'm not proposing World War III with China. The opposite. I actually do worry that President Toxic, if allowed to follow all his worst and dumbest impulses, could start a war with China or North Korea. (According to Woodward, Gen. Mattis would agree with me.) I'm proposing where the polls show the majority of Americans are at. They view China as, at best, a frenemy. Yes, we have to work with them on climate change. No, their system is not going to evolve to be like US democratic capitalism. Yes, it is important that the US win the technology race. In part because we want to have a middle class, and rebuild it where we lost it. Some version of that is what I suspect Biden will try to focus people on. Instead of Make America Great Again, it will be Make It In America. One possible positive outcome is that Biden and Harris can now say to Silicon Valley and Hollywood millionaire movie stars and even probably most Wall Street fat cats that if we keep ignoring these people in Scranton, and Millennials, who have a legitimate bitch with 21st century capitalism, we are inviting Trump II, or worse. I started that jobs thread because I think a message of economic populism, which in part casts a fearful eye on China, is a way out of the mess we are in.

What you're describing is real. On the left, it is particularly true among the part of Millennials and Gen Z that support Bernie or candidates like him. The polls and reporting make it clear that they don't particularly identify as Democrats. Even if they end up voting Democratic. And views of capitalism and oligarchy and income inequality have a lot to do with it. To go to the left rather than right end of the spectrum, this is why "AOC" type candidates can win in New York City. Or "Black AOCs" like Cori Bush who White conservatives wielding guns call "Marxists" can win a Black House seat in St. Louis. If you notice, it didn't get Bernie the Democratic nomination. He did worse in Michigan and Wisconsin than in 2016. So whatever direction Millennials and Gen Z are going, there is a monumental political math problem for them which we saw play out this year. Could you name me the list of "rural AOCs" who have won in states like West Virginia? It's all well and good to argue that Joe Manchin or Sen. Shelley Moore Capito are Clinton triangulators or corporate conservatives who only wish to spare the heads of Jim Justice and Wall Steet fat cats from the guillotine. But the last time I checked , they were the elected US Senators from West Virginia. Which "rural AOC"s will be taking them out in the next election cycle? I'm guessing that what Manchin and Capito do is more relevant to whether we have a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court than what our imaginary "rural AOC" does. Do Millennials care about that? That 6-3 conservative majority is the one likely to try to block anything Democrats do on: 1) climate change, 2) election reform, 3) Black and Hispanic voting rights, 4) women's right to choose 5) LGBTQ issues, 6) income inequality, 7) immigration reform. Are these issues the ones the "70 percent" Millennial consensus cares about? Out of curiosity, lots of young voters in states like West Virginia like guns. Does that mean they lose their Millennial card? My guess is that if Manchin had not voted for Justice Rapist, Republicans would now have 54 potential Republican votes to nominate and confirm a conservative. Had "Clinton triangulator" Democrats McCaskill and Donnelly voted FOR Justice Rapist, like Manchin did, it is possible that they would have survived in 2018. They may be "Clinton triangulators". But it would mean that with Collins and Murkowski against it, Democrats would be in a better position to block McConnell. Just like they did on Obamacare. I'm focusing on one vote. But it is one with enormous impact on just about everything Millennials and Gen Z cares about. My real point is that one thing 2020 made clear to me is that there is no politician in America that can put together what I'll call a "Green New Deal" majority or an "Income Inequality" majority or a "Class War" majority. Bernie tried. Elizabeth tried. I wish Warren had been nominated. And I voted for Bernie. By the time I cast my vote, it was more a vote for the future than the present. Warren talked about wealth taxes. The polls show overwhelming support for wealth taxes - particularly among the young, but even among the majority Republicans. I'll be happy if we elect Joe Biden and he raises taxes on Amazon and other corporations and people who make over $400,000 a year. We at least know the "pay your fair share" argument worked well under both Clinton and Obama. Beyond that, no one has shown they can even win a Democratic primary running on wealth taxes. Let alone a general election. I fundamentally agree with many of your points. Like I said, my vote for Bernie was essentially me saying I hope for a future where Millennials and Gen Z figure it out. But they haven't yet. And they're not even close. So for now I'm going with the majority of my party, which is Joe Biden. And if Millennials are arguing we'll just forget about West Virginia and pretend the US is Brooklyn and St. Louis, that's a losing argument. Speaking of losers, Cynthia Nixon didn't even come close to taking out "Clinton triangulator" Andrew Cuomo in royal blue New York. What does that tell us?

Seriously? I hope you had fun writing that. Because it makes no sense. I agree with some of your less hysterical points in your longer post. I'll go to the grave thinking that if Hillary had chosen Warren, she would have won. Arguably, Clinton/Sanders would have been an even better choice. President Toxic himself was taped saying that's the ticket he most feared. I kept looking for reasons to feel excited about Hillary in 2016. When she chose Kaine it felt like a kick in the guts to me. Which is not a criticism of Kaine, who I like. It just made me feel like Hillary was once again being tone deaf. The people who feel Biden is tone deaf aren't really listening. Like you, they feel that Biden and Harris are more or less evil. It's now clear that Blacks don't seem to think that about Biden picking Kamala. As far as progressives go, I thought the DNC erred on the side of progressive messages. I think you can actually measure that in polling. The week of Biden's convention, President Toxic's daily approval rating went slightly up. The week of Trump's convention, his approval rating went slightly down. What I'm about to say is a theory, not a fact. My theory is that people in the middle didn't like all the talk about climate change and Green New Deal and Bernie at the DNC. Then the next week they reacted against rich White fat cats going on about how they were right to wave guns at unarmed Black women they consider a menacing threat. I thought Biden's response at the CNN town hall reflected reality, and was a politically astute response. When asked about the Green New Deal, he said him and Bernie worked out a plan which is now in the Democratic platform. He referred to it as "my own deal". He's has 50+ years of experience in not giving assholes like President Toxic the red meat he wants: "Joe Biden is for making you wear masks because he's against eating hamburgers." As far as death threats on social media, it's why I don't have a Twitter account. What else would anyone who equates tweeting with thinking expect? If there were a referendum to ban Twitter, I'd vote for it. Don't blame that on Biden. The real problem that the twitterverse can't handle is this: What to do with Joe Manchin? Or Doug Jones? If we assume Biden wins and he does want to get any version of The Green New Deal passed, he needs 50 Senate votes. It's now extremely likely Doug Jones won't even be an option, because he'll lose. So if Biden has 51 Democrats, he could maybe say I don't need Joe Manchin on this. Lose one more vote and that means he needs Kamala - a Black liberal - to break a tie. So if you start with this premise that the KHive is the nest of all evil in the galaxy, it kind of fucks up that whole Green New Deal thing. If you follow my political logic. There is a generational political problem yet to be solved. The error made by Millennials, which is understandable and innocent, was that electing Obama was enough. In 2010 the Tea Party voted, while college students partied. That right there determined that they'll pay for it with a conservative SCOTUS they don't like and could have blocked if they bothered to vote for a majority Democratic Senate. As President Toxic would say, it is what it is. Arguably, things are slightly worse since then because maybe many progressives think that politics is Twitter. Thankfully, progressives like AOC know Twitter is a tool you use to win real power, which involves things like winning House and Senate seats. I'm actually fairly confident that the 2020's will be the era when Millennials and Gen Z begin to make their voices and votes really heard. Meaning in terms of enacted laws on issues like climate change. That's as long as Biden wins and we have 50 Democratic Senators. At the simplest level, you can do Twitter and have a great time calling Joe Manchin evil, and get nothing done. Or you can do politics and get shit done. That involves Joe Joe Manchin and compromise. Everything I think I know about young progressives is that they actually want to get things done. My own compromise position with the left-wing version of Twitter morons you're referring to is I'm more than happy to let them have their tweets. As long as they leave me alone and just go fucking vote.

Sorry. Messed up one of the hyperlinks above. This is the article I tried to hyperlink on Biden and trade. Biden's Record on Trade

Trump opens Wisconsin rally blasting Biden for 'disastrous global sellouts' that 'surrendered' US jobs Until today I thought "It's the economy, stupid" was the one thing Biden still needed to focus on to close the deal. Now the race has changed. I loved you, RBG. It's going to take a while to see how that plays out, and who it may help or hurt. That said, in the debates I think the above Trump attack is what Biden needs to be prepared for, and turn back on President Toxic. I think he should portray President Toxic as what he is: a great jobs destroyer. Here's a few minute segment from President Toxic and Hillary on NAFTA and trade in 2016. Not surprisingly, we already know Trump will try to revisit this, like in that quote above: I'll go to the grave thinking Hillary won the debates. And that she would have won the election, had it been in October. But when I view that clip above, I think it's a good enough explanation of why President Toxic won the Slavery Electoral College. He nailed her, I think. "Read my book" was a horrible rebuttal. And it's not that people even watched this debate. It's that Trump plastered this message all over those swing states for months. In President Toxic's defense, this should arguably work even better against Biden. He did vote for NAFTA. He was Vice President. There's two problems President Toxic has with his strategy, that already proved not to work on "law and order". First, he can't really get away with ignoring the fact that he is President. This is all happening on his watch. Second, Biden doesn't have to defend what is going on right now. He needs to point out what a miserable excuse for a President Trump is. He's in the position Trump was in four years ago. Here's one way to make the point. Hillary said in that 2016 debate that President Toxic's plan would lose us 3.5 million jobs. She was wrong. It was 4.5 million jobs. In January 2017 there were 145.6 million non-farm jobs in the US. In August 2020 there were 140.9 million jobs. President Toxic destroyed 4.5 million American jobs so far during his Pesidency. President Toxic will of course say "it is what it is" and we could do no better than 200,000 dead Americans and millions of lost jobs. But 55 % of Americans don't approve of President Toxic's handling of COVID-19. So anytime Trump wants to talk about jobs, Biden is telling people what they already believe when he says President Toxic botched dealing with the plague. That cost us hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of jobs. While he was President. The facts on manufacturing are the same. I've posted the numbers and charts from the three key Rust Belt swing states. Here's the long term US manufacturing job chart. My premise is that 40 % or so of American voters will believe any lie President Toxic tells them. The good news about that is the 60 % of Americans who don't buy Trump's bullshit is a crushing majority. My other assumption is that if Biden just tells people the truth, he can accurately and effectively portray President Toxic as a job destroyer. In a clip I'll post below, Biden said in 2007 when he was campaigning for President that NAFTA was a net job creator in Delaware while he was Senator, until W. stopped enforcing it. That's what turned him for a free trader to a fair trader. That all sounds true. If you look at that chart you'll see that after NAFTA passed in 1994 factory jobs in the US climbed - from 16.8 million in Jan. 1994 to a peak of 17.6 million at the manufacturing peak in 1998. In Jan. 2001 when W. took office there were 17.1 million manufacturing jobs in the US. So NAFTA did not cost the US jobs in the decade it was enacted. The thing Biden can hammer on is that by the time he took office as Veep in Jan. 2009 there were only 12.5 million manufacturing jobs. Biden can't tie President Toxic directly to the loss of over 4.5 million factory jobs under W. But he can tie President Toxic to his own China policies and corporate "job creator" tax giveaways. Similar tax policies failed to produce the promised factory jobs under W. And they failed to produce the promised jobs under Trump. It's the same politically devastating argument Bill Clinton made at the 2012 DNC. Fat cat tax cuts and trickle down works great. As long as you don't understand math. Biden can add in that President Toxic doesn't understand facts, either. Speaking of facts, there were 12.4 million manufacturing jobs in the US when Obama and Biden handed the economy off to President Toxic. Now there are 12.1 million manufacturing jobs. President Toxic promised to bring back millions of factory jobs. He destroyed 300,000 of them. Who is he to talk about job creation? I spent a few hours trying to learn more about Biden and trade. What I'll post below is an article that gives a good summary of his record up until he became Vice President. And then a video from late 2007 that was helpful to me. I think it's probably a meeting with a newspaper editorial board. What I like about this clip is its less campaign rhetoric, and more of an informed discussion where Biden lays out what he probably really thinks. Biden's Record on Trade My point in posting the video is this. I think Biden can finish the job of prosecuting President Toxic's incompetence and failure on the only issue he has left: the economy and jobs. And the way I think he should do it is find the words and ideas that everyone can relate to that channel his inner Bernie. The elements of it are there in that video. Nobody really wanted to take on either the China trade practices that are unfair, or the US corporations that benefit from them. President Toxic talked a good game, maybe. But he didn't do it. He just gave huge tax cuts to corporations. Which did nothing for factory jobs, and created a $1 trillion annual debt. And that was all BEFORE Coronavirus, which Trump completely failed to manage. And which cost us many more jobs and lives. Compared to Trump's train wreck, Obama and Biden at least created close to 1 million factory jobs. Biden can legitimately argue that he can do it better and quicker again, if given a chance. And a Senate majority so McConnell can't block everything again. The line I heard that best summarized the criticism of Hillary 2016 came from Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg: "How could she not close on the economy?" He was referring to all the "sex and sleaze" anti-Trump ads Hillary ran, based on the assumption that they would disqualify President Toxic with a majority of voters. Greenberg has credibility with me because him and his wife, U.S. Rep. DeLaurio, probably did as much as any two people to work closely with Hillary to craft messages on the economy and prep for the debates. The best criticism I heard of Biden's DNC came from Axelrod and Ron Brownstein: it failed to make a simple and cutting economic case against President Toxic. My guess is that the main goal was to define Biden as "Decency Joe". Trump clearly wanted to make him "Crooked Joe" and win by a sliver again by presenting himself as the slightly lesser of two evils. Mostly, what Biden has done so far is working. People view him significantly more favorably than President Toxic. If the historians and political scientists like Lichtman are right, people will draw all these conclusions on their own. In theory, Biden can just stand at the debate silently with a sign that says "Are you better off, and safer, than you were when Donald Trump was elected?" But the debates will no doubt be livelier than that. I think Biden can nail President Toxic to the wall on the economy and jobs. What I've heard Biden say so far this year that sounded best to me was when he talks, in detail, about what he did as Veep in states like Michigan. That's when he was in charge of saving industries, and tens of thousands of jobs. It sounds real. More important, the passion comes out. All President Toxic can do is his hyperbole about "the greatest economy ever". One last line Biden argument needs to get in, about poverty. In 2017, Obama and Biden handed President Toxic an economy that had achieved the lowest Black and Hispanic poverty rates in US history. Obamacare, including help with unexpected medical bills and pre-existing conditions, was part of the reason why. While we don't have the numbers yet, we probably now have the highest Black and Hispanic poverty rates in a very long time. That's thanks to President Toxic's failure to lead with COVID-19. Plus he keeps trying to kill Obamacare, which lifted millions out of poverty. And kept others with serious medical conditions from being driven into poverty. So President Park Avenue has no business going on about poverty after what he did to America. Biden should force him to explain those failures, too.

I think that's a great video about why irreconcilable differences may continue to dominate US politics for a long time - the 2020's, and possibly beyond. And color the electoral map as well. The most interesting fact in it is a poll that 49 % of Republicans identify as "Trump supporters". Only 39 % identify as "GOP supporters". Of the Trump supporters, 99 % approve of Trump. Of the GOP supporters, only 69 % approve of Trump. That explains why many "party" Republicans have already left. It also predicts that between now and November, more may leave. That chart is from another article that gives a deeper view into the splits in the Republican Party. I'd argue that the entire 39 % who support the party are candidates to become "Biden Republicans". Most won't, of course. But if 5 % do, it's enough for a Biden landslide. The fact is that Republicans are now outnumbered by both Democrats and Independents. So it's great that President Toxic has essentially 100 % support from Trump Republicans. But if they are 60 % of the smallest of three voting blocs, that's not winning math. And if what you have to do to get that 60 % to vote alienates the other 40 %, not to mention most people in the two larger voting blocs, you have a huge problem. It does not surprise me that they are two pieces of very solid glue holding "party" Republicans to the GOP. Institutionally, they want a Republican-controlled Congress. 86 % of "party" Republicans want that. 90 % of them approve of President Toxic on the economy. Once again, it's the economy, stupid. I'm now convinced that the one thing between President Toxic and a landslide defeat is the economy. Much of what happens in the next six weeks is beyond Biden's control. If COVID-19 has a Fall spike, the economic numbers look worse, many more Americans die, and the cut-off of $600 a week support to millions of Americans really slows or stops any recovery, it's all more nails in Trump's coffin. It's possible that all those factors could get better in the next six weeks. They pretty much have to for Trump to even have a chance to win. Lichtman and Abramowitz would say the verdict is already in, and President Toxic will lose on the economy. Whatever you believe, I think there is mostly upside in Biden thrashing President Toxic on the economy and jobs for the next six weeks. The main downside to me is Biden doesn't want this to be a choice. Certainly not a choice between capitalism and socialism. But he's proving to be quite capable of talking about his ideas and plans in a way that mostly communicates this: Donald Trump has failed, and failed, and failed. Period. One of the biggest perceptions or fears about Biden is that he's weak and maybe senile. He doesn't have a lot to lose in going for Trump's jugular. Mostly I think it makes him look stronger, and focused. Outside the economy, at least one in three and in some cases over half of "party" Republicans are turned off by Trump. They don't approve of him in general. They don't approve of his handling of COVID-19 or race. They are open to voting for Biden. If they can be detached from President Toxic, their perceptions on the economy are the cords that need to be cut. I assume these Republicans, like the vast majority of Republicans, don't see climate change, or racial justice, or income equality as big priorities. So I doubt there is a lifelong marriage with Democrats on the horizon. But they could choose to separate from their party for a while, until it seeks treatment and finds a better leader. Meanwhile, if half of Republicans are now "Trump Republicans" and 99 % of them think he's swell, I think we can forget about trying to move them. If I had to gamble, I would bet these Republicans will dominate their party for at least the next few election cycles. If they lose again in 2024, that may be the end of the "Trump Republicans". To argue against myself, if they lose badly this year maybe that creates an opening for someone like Marco Rubio. But about half the party is now basically cemented into Team Toxic. The ones that are not are fleeing. And the new ones joining have been saying things like this all year: "I want to be part of the Trump Party!" If he loses, President Toxic will likely say the election was stolen. And people need to join his crusade to make this right. If he loses, I would not be shocked if he is going to run again in 2024. Or promote Don Jr. as the way to take back power. @lookin, I think this is the problem with defusing authoritarianism. The fact that half of Republicans are "Trump Republicans" and 99 % of them approve of President Toxic is a perfect example of authoritarian follower behavior. And from Dean's data, this is the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Obama's election in 2008 probably accelerated it. And President Toxic running in 2016 put it on steroids. Even between 2018 and now there is evidence that more Whites with colleges degrees have shifted to the Democrats, and more White Democrats without college degrees have shifted to the Republicans. I don't see how you break through that trend. I don't see how you get 99 % of these people - or even 9 % - to disapprove of President Toxic. Do you? I'm stuck on the idea that what we need to focus on for now is one thing: make sure they lose. They understand defeat. And to some degree what matters most is how they respond to defeat. Like "party" Republicans, they are certainly able to shift over to the Biden camp after they lose. Or decide they need to nominate a Kasich or a Hogan in 2024. I hope some of them do. But, again, I'd bet on them starting to talk up Don, Jr. as their perfect hero in 2024. Beating Don Jr. to it may be what guys like Pompeo and Tom Cotton have in mind. I think it's a misnomer to use the phrase "identity politics" to describe this phenomenon, for two reasons. First, saying "I'm With Trump" is not like saying, "I'm Gay" or "I'm Black" or "I'm a woman." Second, no Trumpian even likes the jargon "identity politics", I suspect. There's a funny moment in that video above where a Trump guy is asked if Trump is now part of his identity. His first reaction is to laugh. That said, the video makes a strong case that all these various layers of issues - which include the economy, views about law and order, views about race, an inclination to follow authoritarian leaders - have now had years to gel around a particular type of identity: the "Trump Republican". I have a very hard time believing they will simply change their mind, or identities, the day after President Toxic loses. The final part of that ten minute piece does provide an alternative route. It's an anecdote about a Black guy in Ohio that says every bad condition - lost jobs, closed storefronts - that led him to vote for President Toxic in 2016 is now much, much worse. And that's before you add COVID-19. That's a perfect metaphor for what Biden now needs to do for the next six weeks. President Toxic will go after Biden as the root cause of all job losses in America. The facts are clear. Whatever their flaws, Obama and Biden created jobs. President Toxic has now destroyed them. That has to be Biden's relentless message. He can tie it with COVID-19 and health. And any time Biden goes after President Toxic for failing on COVID-19 he's got at least 55 % of Americans who agree with him. If President Toxic argues "it is what it is" and 200,000 dead and millions of lost jobs are simply the very best he could do, he'll be making Biden's case that he is a weak and failed leader. But don't tell that to a Trump Republican. 99 % of them will say that's you just drank the Kool Aid.

Can't we just go on a date instead? And now i'm more confused. If it goes well, is it a second date? Or a data?

They were talking on Morning Joe today about how Florida may know who won by 11 PM Election Night. They're used to mail in voting, the argument went. Florida 2020 could be the opposite of 2000. Instead of being the mess, they may be the island of clarity in the middle of a mess. As I recall, Gillum and I think Nelson led in early returns in 2018. As more ballots were counted, which I assume were the ones cast in person that day, it looked better and better for De Santis and Scott. Maybe it will all be different in 2020. But I'm going with the theory that swing states that count mail-in or early voting ballots early will come out of the box with Biden in the lead. The main point on Morning Joe was that if Biden wins Florida on Election Night or early the next morning, it's game over. We might not know the results in Michigan for weeks. And in theory if President Toxic won Michigan two weeks later ............ blah blah blah. But that's only a credible argument to his base. If Trump wins Florida, it will certainly power the argument that it's his election to lose, as long as we don't let Democrats cheat. But I think anyone paying attention knows Florida is a must win state for President Toxic and a can lose state for Biden. Meanwhile, whatever trend drives Florida will be showing up in Election Night returns in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Arizona. There was another interesting point made by some data guy from WaPo about Pennsylvania. Joe was going off about how the polls in Pennsylvania surprise him. This is all talk inside the political hack bubble. But he keeps saying Wisconsin is the state that is supposed to be close. Why Pennsylvania? The WaPo guy said go back and check the numbers from 2008. Even back then Obama won by some margin in the teens in Michigan and Wisconsin, but by about 10 in Pennsylvania. So I checked this morning. Here's the Democrat's winning margin in each election from 2000 to 2012 2012: Obama +9.5 % Michigan, + 7 % Wisconsin, + 5.5 % Pennsylvania 2008: Obama +16.5 % Michigan, + 14 % Wisconsin, + 10 % Pennsylvania 2004 Kerry + 3.5 % Michigan, + 0.5 % Wisconsin, + 2.5 % Pennsylvania 2000 Gore + 5 % Michigan, + 0.2 % Wisconsin, + 4 % Pennsylvania And here's where Biden is right now in the state polling averages on 538: 2020 Biden +7.7 % Michigan, +6.7 % Wisconsin, + 4.9 % Pennsylvania Especially if you compare Michigan to Pennsylvania, it's clear that Pennsylvania is clearly a wobblier brick in the Blue Wall. I think the best explanation is Jim Carville's word: "Pennsyltucky". The central part of the state is more like Appalachia than technocratic Pittsburgh or urban Philadelphia. Michigan has no equivalent concept of "Michissippi", really. They do have Macomb County, and "Reagan Democrats". The thing that jumps out at me is that going from a 16 % win in 2008 in Michigan to a narrow loss in 2016 really is a devastating verdict on Obama/Biden. What it says to me is that Democrats need to get their shit together on jobs, jobs, jobs in a way they just didn't under Obama/Biden. Arguably, Biden is the worst guy to do that because he was part of it. Arguably, Biden is the best guy to do it because he was part of it. And you don't have to be a genius to figure out where they want wrong. If he gets a redo, there's reason to think he learned from the mistakes that led to 2016. I'm going to start a thread on jobs and trade and Biden and President Toxic. But let me throw one thought about it in here. President Toxic is running as if he is not really President. It didn't work on law and order. Now he's trying to do it on jobs. But I don't think it will work, either. The best thing you can say about the track record of Obama/Biden on factory jobs in these three states is that they did enormously better than President Toxic, who destroyed factory jobs. And Obama and Biden didn't have to fork over trillions in tax cuts to the corporations who destroyed the jobs in order to get them to give hollow promises that they'd bring the jobs back. Which they didn't. The potshots President Toxic took at Hillary in 2016 as an outside agitator are almost certain to fail when he takes them as President Toxic. The one other thing that surprised me about those numbers above is Wisconsin. Obama did better in Wisconsin than Pennsylvania. But for both Gore and Kerry Wisconsin was the wobbliest brick in the Blue Wall. As you can see, Gore almost lost Wisconsin in 2000. That's now two decades ago. So it's probably safe to assume that the 2020 polls are right, and Wisconsin is less wobbly than Pennsylvania but more wobbly than Michigan. Here's the equivalent poll numbers for where Hillary was in these three states as of September 18, 2016: 2016 polls (9/18/2016): Hillary +5.2 % Michigan, + 4 % Wisconsin, + 6.6 % Pennsylvania. That data doesn't fit as neatly into the picture. By Oct. 1 2016, Hillary's lead in Pennsylvania was down to 2 %. I think the takeaway is that Biden probably has a consistently larger margin than Hillary did in these states. But it's not large enough to ensure he'll actually win. I'll keep being broken record on this. For those who say the polls were wrong, the last poll in Michigan and Pennsylvania right before the election was from Republican pollster Trafalgar. Both showed a razor thin Trump lead. They simply had a set up of assumptions, like Rasmussen, that worked very well in 2016 but very badly in 2018. This is way more about turnout than persuasion at this point. Depending on which poll you believe, Independents could still go either way. So persuasion matters. But what really matters is who votes. 2 million more people voted for President Toxic in 2016 than voted for Romney in 2012. Meanwhile, Hillary's turnout went down 100,000 votes from Obama 2012. She also lost Independents, but by almost the same margin Obama did in 2012. So it's all about turnout. Biden struggles to close enthusiasm gap with Latino voters I'll throw that in this post as well. It fits in in terms of thinking of this as a problem of getting to 270 votes, until we dump the Slavery Electoral College. The article is one of many lately that quote one of Bernie's top Latino gurus about how the Democrats are just blowing it. I agree with his analysis. Whether the numbers are accurate or not, it doesn't sound good or smart to spend 500 times more to persuade Whites in the Rust Belt than to persuade Latinos in Arizona. Reading this article I just decided the easy way to think about 2020 is that we (Democrats) just fucked this up completely. We should have been doing what worked for Bernie six months ago. We didn't. It's now too late. We fucked up. That said, hopefully in 2020 it doesn't matter. Unlike 2016, I'd rather just make sure we win those three Rust Belt states. That said, it's a reason I'm sending money to Mark Kelly. If Kelly wins, Biden probably wins Arizona, too. I think part of the post mortem from 2020 for Democrats should be that we just fucked up royally with Latinos, period. And if we keep fucking up, they'll at some point be why a Republican wins. They were why W. won in 2000 and 2004. So it's happened already. If the Republicans are smart, if Biden wins they'll nominate Rubio in 2024. He may not be the single best choice. But if the idea is to focus on Latinos and do it by running a Latino who doesn't have the shit of Trump smeared all over him, Rubio is the guy. And Florida is the lab for how Republicans kill Democratic dreams. Whether that means taking out old White guys like Nelson or Biden, or blocking the rising tide of politicians like Gillum or Harris. Our immediate and most urgent problem is the Blue Wall. But even if Democrats do great in 2020 we have to have a long term strategy we don't have for Latino outreach and leadership development.

Thanks for the hot GIF. But you know you had me at "rant".

Fact check time. This first one is just a repeat from the post directly above. But it did surprise me. Jackson in his article on the Slavery Electoral College says turnout was higher in 2016 than 2008. In 2008 it was 58.2 % of voting age Americans. In 2016 it was 59.3 % of voting age Americans. So if you're saying most Americans chose not to participate in 2016, that's false. Turnout was higher than normal in 2016 by US standards. And it will be higher still in 2020 most likely. I think this makes your point about Independents, albeit in a sideways sort of way. And President Toxic gets credit for this. As a former Democrat/ maybe Republican/maybe Independent who ran as a Republican, he had Independent appeal in 2016 in two ways that mattered. First, he won the Independent vote over Hillary, 46/42 according to the CNN exit polls. Second, he got 2 million more "Republicans" to vote than Romney did. I say "Republicans" because some of them were former Democrats. And some were no doubt people attracted to his Independent spirit. The notion that Democrats "purge" Independents is absurd. Hillary lost in 2016 because she lost Independents and President Toxic got more Republicans to vote. Obama won decisively in 2008 because he won Independents and he got more Democrats to vote. Do you detect a formula there? Why would any Democrat purge Independents, since that means losing? Now let me go off on Independents for a minute. This is really more about a very smart Independent client and friend of 20 years. At some point I started telling him he's not an Independent. He's a dilettante. He can't make up his mind. He stands for nothing. He believes in nothing. He thinks one candidate is a turd sandwich. The other is a giant douche. One year he votes for the turd sandwich and feels like he ate shit. Then he votes for the giant douche and feels like he got fucked. He has no consistent goal or strategy. Other than to be a dilettante and alternate being feeling like he ate shit and feeling like he got fucked. It simply ensures that nothing gets done. Every step forward is matched by a step back when he changes his mind. That's what an "Independent" is. It's a strategy for gridlock. Obama 2012 is a good case in point to me. As I said, Obama won Independents 2008. But in 2012, Obama lost the Independent vote by 5 % to Romney. How could Obama win anyway? Because Romney's Republican turnout was inferior to Trump's. And Democratic turnout in 2012 was good. I've read several analyses that said that Blacks, who exceeded even their record 2008 turnout, really carried Obama over the top in 2012. And Obama would publicly say that in thanking them at Black events. It's the opposite of dilettante to me. Blacks were screwed by The Great Recession more than anyone else. You might argue that Obama himself and his corporate pals like Summers and Geithner screwed Black home owners by bailing banks out, but not Blacks. I might partly agree. And yet they were loyal to Obama. Part of the reason Obama couldn't get things done from 2010 to 2016 is in 2010, 2012, and 2014 the Independents who supported him in 2008 turned on him. My question is this: if Independents flip from Obama to Romney to Trump to Biden, how the fuck do you ever get anything important done? Like Obamacare? Independents I know will blame it on all kinds of things other than themselves. And I agree with some of the things they blame. But the practical impact of Independents on US politics is to create gridlock and make sure nothing can get done. And if somethings does get done, in two years everything is reversed and we just try go right back to where we started. I think 2020 is the Tea Party/Trump people's turn to get fucked by the Dilettante Party. In 2016 Independents gave Republicans what they needed to do tax cuts for the fat cats and conservative judges. In 2018, they took it back. In 2020, my guess is they'll wipe it out. Some polls say Biden is leading with Independents. Other say President Toxic is. I'd bet that Biden will win Independents narrowly, like 5 % more than what Trump gets. If I'm right, in 2022 they'll probably turn around and punish Biden for whatever he actually got done. President Toxic is another example of something else. Anybody even remotely "Independent" from the left or right has to run as a Democrat or Republican. Trump and Bernie are both perfect examples. So outside the two political parties, they can't run for office and they can't win. Of course, Bernie tried to. And failed. And failed. And failed. And failed. You can argue that all that would change if we could just elect more Independents. That was tried, too. It failed. And failed. And failed. So an "Independent" like AOC can run and win. But, to date, only in a place that is a solid Democratic powerhouse. So what they do is take some Establishment White liberal Democrat or Establishment Black Democrat out. Good for them. But that's not a strategy for building an Independent Party. It's a strategy for replacing a small number of Democrats who are left of center with "Independents" elected as Democrats who are even further left of center. Part of the reason I think Independents are dilettantes is they are all over the map. There's no evidence that Democrats would be doing better with Independents if Bernie were the nominee. In Florida, where 18 % of voters in the Democratic primary were Independents, that group voted for Biden 48/32. In North Carolina, where 27 % of primary voters were Independents, they went Bernie 34 %. Biden 29 %, Bloomberg 15 %, Warren 10 %. My read is that's an even split between centrists and left wingers. In Michigan, where 29 % of voters were Independents, Bernie won them narrowly over Biden, 46 % to 42 %. Unfortunately, there's no exit polls for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, since that was after COVID hit I'm guessing. I don't see any of that as evidence that either Bernie or Biden give Democrats some advantage with Independents voters. What I still don't fully understand is why Biden trounced Bernie in every county in Michigan (and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania). Maybe those Bernie 2016/Biden 2020 voters are mostly Democrats who didn't like Hillary. But my impression is some of those people were Independents who for some reason liked Bernie better than Hillary, but Biden better than Bernie. I've read a theory that they voted for Bernie in 2016 because they are low information voters who preferred the old White guy who talked about union stuff to the woman who talked about implicit racism. How progressive is that? Here's another little factoid. In Michigan the 29 % of primary voters from a union household voted for Biden over Bernie 56/36. The 71 % who are non-union households voted for Biden 51/38. Either way, Bernie got clobbered. But if the idea is to build a bottom up coalition of Democrats and Independents who are for the working people, shouldn't Bernie be winning the union vote? I focused here on all the things I think suck about Independents, looking at it as a loyal Democrat. I could make endless abstract arguments about the great things about Independents. They are part of the checks and balances. They are less inclined to buy into any party's orthodoxy. Whether they are centrists or not, the net effect of their going back and forth is they do tend to draw things to the center rather than the extremes. More than anything, if you don't have Independents, you just lose. My sense is that both Biden and Bernie, having survived for half a century, know that deep in their bones. It seemed clear to me that they both ran primary campaigns that would allow them to reach out to Independents in the general election. Bernie's problem was the opposite. I think one of the bigger nails in his coffin was one he drove in himself. It just didn't work well to run for Democratic nominee by attacking the Democratic Party. The biggest thing that I think killed him on Super Tuesday was that lots of Democrats just decided that Biden was the better shot at beating President Toxic than Bernie. I think Biden played every card he could with endorsements and media and the stampede of schmooze with Klo and Pete and Kamala to help that along. But that's when Bernie was saying that he was running against the Democratic Establishment. How well did that work for him? My hope is that Bernie will be a prophet. I can now look back and say that Harold Washington for Chicago Mayor in the 80's and Jesse Jackson for President in the 90's were part of the chain that led to Barack Obama in 2008. In 20 years if we have a Democratic Socialist President I hope I can look back and say Bernie 2016 and 2020 laid the groundwork to get there. That right there was why I voted for Bernie this year. It was more a vote for the future than the present. I also give Bernie this. Whatever he did to help pave the way to a more progressive Democratic Party, or a democratic socialist movement, he did it in the Democratic Party. As I said, I think his anti-party rhetoric mostly hurt him, not Biden or the party. But the big difference is with Nader and Stein. Sorry, but a vote for Nader in Florida in 2000 was a vote for President Bush. A vote for Stein in the Rust Belt in 2016 was a vote for President Toxic. Bernie did not do that to Democrats in either 2016 or 2020. Hopefully, he helped set up Biden to win, and Schumer to be Majority Leader. Which means Bernie set himself up to be a serious power broker and legislator in 2021. Maybe somewhere down the line, some strategy for a third party that can actually take power and move agenda will make sense in America. Like the Green Party has in parts of Europe, But in this last 20 years, all it does is help Republicans win. And thwart the agendas the Naders and Steins say they are running to advance.

There was voting data in that article I posted above by Reggie Jackson that I think is a silver lining on this cloud. He chronicled voter participation going back to the beginning of popular voting for President in the US. So back when America was great, or something like that, White men who owned slaves, like Andrew Jackson, won the Presidency with the support of as little as 11.5 % of the voting age population. Too bad poor President Toxic can't figure out a way to make America that great again! It would solve all his problems. The all time high in the US was the 1960 election, when 62.8 % of all Americans of voting age voted. It fell to a low of 49 % in 1996. Obama was elected in 2008 with 58.2 % of the voting age population. Interestingly, we beat that in 2016 when 59.3 % of the voting age population voted. A lot of people think 2020 will break all turnout records. So it's possible that we could break the 1960 record of 62.8 % this year. On the face of it, that's good for democracy. On the face of it, whatever I think about the Slavery Electoral College, this deep conflict between two tribes has probably helped drive turnout up. Better to cast a ballot than pick up a musket like we did in the Civil War. So, arguably, this is all relatively good news. Democracy is alive and well. Maybe. I think for anyone who says they believe in democracy, it's interesting to compare those voting participation numbers to the chart above. It's from Pew research that tracks the percentage of Americans that trust "the government in Washington". Probably most people would agree with the idea that a healthy democracy is one in which most people vote. And in which people feel they are voting for a government they can actually trust. Not surprisingly, partisanship factors into this. This other chart which asks the question somewhat differently shows that when there's a Republican President, Republicans feel better about government. When there's a Democratic President, Democrats feel better. That's been more true in the 21st century than in the less polarized 1990's. So there's two big things that jump out at me, that are divergent trends. From about 1960 to 2000, trust in government gradually went down. And voting participation mostly tracked it. The big decline in voting, as Jackson documents in his essay, happened between 1960 and 1980. From 1980 to 2000 or so it went sideways. Same with trust in government. It makes sense that people who trusted government less might have had less motivation to even bother with voting. There's only two Presidents in my lifetime who increased trust in government during their time in office: Reagan, and then Clinton. It's not clear that people feeling better about government made them more likely to vote. 1996, at 49 % voting participation, was a low point in voting during this 60 year period. Even though it was relatively good times. Maybe people felt they didn't need to vote, because things were going well. Since 9/11, the two trends - trust in government, and voting participation - seem to have diverged. The level of public trust in government only gets worse. Again, if you look at the other chart I hyperlinked there were partisan differences. But the way I feel about it is that trust in government is about as low as it gets. Under President Toxic, we are scraping along the bottom of the barrel. The bizarre thing to me is that Republicans seem to trust President Toxic not because he's there to lead an effective government. It's more like he's there to torment government agencies Trump supporters don't trust. That said, under President Toxic the majority of Republicans do feel they trust the federal government to "handle domestic problems". Before COVID-19, at least. Meanwhile, voting participation is clearly heading back up. It broke a near-term record in 2008 with Obama, and then again in 2016. I'm pretty sure that if we break the 1960 record in 2020, that means Biden wins. Simply because there are more Democrats than Republicans. Republicans do well mostly when Democrats don't vote. It's not 100 % clear that the surge in voting participation has anything to do with government, or trust in government. But I'd argue it probably does. Blacks broke records in 2008 and then broke them again in 2012 because under Obama I think they were looking for a government that represented and worked for them. Despite their distaste for "The Deep State", it seems like that's what Trump voters wanted in 2016. And are planning to vote for again in 2020. That said, the chart above suggests that we're not doing very well at actually electing a government that most people trust. I have a theory of what a political version of "survival of the fittest" is trying to work out here, in a very messy way. My theory is no doubt colored by my liberal pro-government bias. But my theory is that we're trying to work out how to get back to feeling like people did in 1960. How do we get to a place where most Americans vote, and most Americans feel they are voting for a government they trust? Here's another way I think about the long-term problem. I don't believe Putin has been trying to destroy US democracy ever since he came to power in 2000. But just imagine for a minute that he's been at this for 20 years now. If he's trying to destroy democracy, he's not doing a very good job. We went from 49 % voting participation in 1996 to 59 % in 2016. If the goal was to make people feel like democracy and voting aren't worth it, that just hasn't happened. US democracy may be a mess. Everyone I know in Canada looks down with sympathy and says, "What the fuck is happening to you poor people?". But we are probably preparing to break voter participation records in 2020. Here's another thought I've had for years which I feel is hysterical, but also does get to the nature of our long-term challenge. Why don't we just go ahead and have World War III with China, and let them win? If American democratic capitalism now means the predatory lending meltdown, the Great Recession, and electing Donald Trump, could being a colony of China actually be worse? I've doubled down on this hysterical thought since COVID-19. Like him or not, Xi stamped out a plague (for now) and got the Chinese economy growing again. He did that with minimal deaths. Some of it was heavy handed. But most reports I've read - mostly from Western journalists - state that in Asia in general, and China in particular, there was a huge degree of civic/communal spirit and national pride that went into wearing masks and following reasonable measures to contain the virus. Meanwhile, in the US, maybe 1 in 3 Americans believe freedom means never having to say you're sorry for not wearing a mask. Even if it could kill someone. When told that 100,000 fewer Americans would have died if we wore masks, and over 100,000 won't die by year's end if we start now, many people feel that's fake news. Or socialism. Please, Chairman Xi. Just bomb the fuck out of us, okay? At least then we'll all have to wear masks and we can go to work. Again, I'm being dramatic and hysterical. But this thinking does reflect our real, huge national challenges. More than ever before, I feel like if we have either a Cold War or a hot war with China, the US is just going to lose. And the main driver is that we can't get out shit together. You can't win World War III when you don't trust your government to fight it. And if anyone thinks President Toxic could be a good Commander In Chief! Let's not even go there. I know how I hope this goes. But I don't have a clue how we get there. I hope that in 20 years we have Millennial Presidents and Governors. I hope we have a national and global consensus that we do have serious common threats, and climate change tops the list. I hope in the US we have a majority of people in both parties that trust their national government to work with industries and citizens to create technologies and jobs that deal with our problems. I hope Republicans feel that while they didn't vote for Democratic President Harris, she did a reasonably good job. I hope Democrats feel that while they didn't vote for Republican President Hogan, he did a reasonably good job. (Please, leave Tom Cotton and the entire Trump family out of my fantasy.) The goal I like is that we end up back where we were in 1960. Again, if we're saying democracy is a good thing, it seems like we should be saying that most people should vote. And most people should feel they are voting for a competent government that they trust. I read a comment by a Republican Senator a few years ago that stuck with me. I can't recall which one. But I know it was a non-Trumpian Republican I've always thought of as being a decent and smart leader. He was talking about the huge degree of polarization today. And the fact that the country is basically split in two. He said at some point something is going to happen that will force people to come back together. He didn't speculate about what it might be, or when it might happen. But he said that it's inevitable that at some point it will. I wondered when COVID-19 started if that could be the thing. You'd think the combination of a once-in-a-century pandemic and a Greater Recession - if not a Depression - would do the trick. It hasn't. We can't even agree about wearing a mask. As a Democrat, I wonder if it would have been different if Biden were President. We'll find out soon enough, I think. My guess is that the Toxic Trumpian types will double down on the idea that masks are bad, guns are good, we don't trust a vaccine if it's a Democrat vaccine, and we'll just obstruct and wait it out. In my wildest liberal dreams, I'd like to think that we're headed into a realignment election like 1932 or 1980. Lots of Democrats, and more than a few Republicans pols I respect, are using the New Deal to describe where we may be headed. And in my dreams, I'd like to think that such a thing would get us back to a point where at least half of all Americans actually felt they trusted their government, and voted on that basis. My Dad's generation went through the New Deal and World War II and the Cold War. I'm pretty sure that did build this feeling that whether you're a Democrat or Republican, we fundamentally trust our government. That's my explanation for why the polling in the late 50's and early 60's shows that something like 3 in 4 Americans trusted their government. Obama tried that "we're all Americans" stuff in 2008, at least on a rhetorical level. According to Pew, we didn't crack 1 in 4 Americans actually trusting government under Obama. "Make America Great Again" is an even bigger flop. We haven't cracked 1 in 5 Americans trusting government under President Toxic. Although some "Deep State" haters would perhaps argue that was actually the goal. Historical Timeline That's an interesting tool that lets you quickly click through the Slavery Electoral College outcome for every US Presidential election. Check out 1854 to 1900. It's a different way to think about a country divided in two. There's several things about that period that seem relevant to today. More than anything, it's a model for how a nation can remain fundamentally divided for a long time. In that period, the basic division was geographic: North and South, free states and former slave states. There were nine Republican Presidents from 1860 to 1900, with interruptions by two nonconsecutive terms of Democrat Grover Cleveland. Race, slavery, The Civil War, Reconstruction, and resistance to Reconstruction were all at the core of the conflict. Norm Brownstein's words for the two tribes in our current conflict - the "coalition of transformation" and the "coalition of restoration" - actually describe a lot of the economic, political, and racial conflicts of that period as well. Earlier in this thread I posted this article by Sean Trende about why Minnesota has stayed Democratic. It offers a theory that fits in well here. In a nutshell, it's the geography, stupid. It's a bit more complicated than the geography from 1860 to 1990, when it was almost as simple as "North and South". All you had to do then is draw one straight line to show the key geographic variable. Today, you need to know the concentration of large cities and what Trende calls "mega cities". (Rahm Emmanuel's political phrase for the same concept is "metropolitan alliances" between cities and suburbs.) That's the geography of the future for Democrats, Trende argues. Where those exist, Democrats will do well. Since so much of Minnesota's population is in The Twin Cities, it will tilt hard to Democrats, Trende argues. Iowa, where there's a much higher percentage of rural areas and small towns, and no megacity, will more likely continue its trend the other way. There are clear racial and "identity politics" elements to this formulation. Blacks, Muslims, and drag queens live in one part of America. Old White cowboys with bug gun collections live in another. One part has Silicon Valley. The other part has small towns, and many smaller cities with dead factories, and feels left behind. People in mostly White areas fear mosques and Black Lives Matter. Even though the nearest mosque or Black protester may be 100 miles away. If you buy that, which I mostly do, you can extrapolate out an electoral map something like the one from 1860 to 1900. There was no year like 1932 or 1936 or 1980 or 1984, when one coalition was so dominant it pretty much won it all. But there was a dominant party, the Republican Party, rooted in the North. Several of the Never Trump Lincoln Project types basically see a long period of Democratic nomination, rooted as it has been on the technocratic and liberal coasts. My read of what they are doing is a play for some role in what they view as the dominant coalition, at least for a while. It's very hard for me to imagine a Republican Party in the next decade or two that gets excited about the idea of a Green New Deal. Or racial justice as most Blacks would define it. Or "immigration reform" as most mainstream immigrants would define it. As I posted earlier in this thread, climate change and racial justice are at the absolute bottom of the Republican's list of priorities in 2020. They're more interested in law and order, and the right to bear arms. Black Lives Matter? They probably mostly feel like President Toxic. "You sure drank the Kool Aid, didn't you?" To go back to my point about trust in government, this does not paint a very rosy or unifying picture. If you imagine a dominant Democratic coalition that pursues a Green New Deal and racial justice, among other priorities, a future Republican Party would have to completely reject Trumpism to feel like that's a government they trusted. If anything, it would be a reason for them to double down on the idea that they don't trust government at all. Which is pretty much what eight years of Obama and Obamacare made them feel, I now think. It wasn't red America or blue America. It was socialist, radical America. They don't want anything to do with it. This is a recipe for continued division. Not unity. If Biden does in fact win, maybe after a few years of Uncle Joe Decent things will look and feel very different. But I won't be holding my breath. I'd bet on deep irreconcilable differences. And an electoral map that is something like the ones that played out for decades in the late 19th century. Not a clean line between North and South. But race, rural and small town versus urban, and transformation versus restoration would be some of the same core dynamics I would bet on. If any of this is right, I won't get my wish. As an American and a patriot, I feel like it would be a nice thing to have 3 in 4 Americans saying they trust their government again before I die. It would also be nice to have 3 in 4 Americans who are of voting age actually vote. I'm less confident than I was in the Glory Days of Fall 2008 that I will ever get my wish of the America that I thought I saw back then.

They are stunningly accurate lately. I'm being schizo. Because I do believe Lichtman is right. Polls don't matter. And barring extraordinary circumstances, President Toxic will lose base on fundamentals. And yet, I keep wetting my pants about the polls. So the one freaking me out now is Rasmussen. As of yesterday, they showed President Toxic with a + 6 % net approval rating (52/46). That's an outlier for even Rasmussen. It's about 15 points off from the 538 average Trump approval rating, which is now about - 9 % net disapproval (43/52). I'm pretty sure Rasmussen's sample is screwed up. I read somewhere Rasmussen is saying 1 in 4 or even 1 in 3 Blacks approve of President Toxic. That's wildly higher Black approval than almost any other poll. So I checked. In this Dec. 2016 article Rasmussen bragged about calling it right. Their final polling (Nov 2- 6, 2016) showed Hillary would win the popular vote by 2 %. She won by 2 %. The final RCP average showed that Hillary would win by 3 %. That was close, too. Part of the issue is these averages use polls taken usually over the last week. With state polls, which have larger margins of error, the polls may be more than a week old. In a race like 2016, where we know BEFORE Election Day that the final trend was moving in President Toxic's favor, a week can make a big difference. In 2018, on the other hand, Rasmussen did the worst of anyone. Harry Enten aka "The Wizard Of Odds" at CNN pointed out that "the President's favorite pollster was the least accurate in the midterms." They said Republicans would win the Congressional vote by 1 %. Democrats won the Congressional vote by 8.4 %. They were off by almost 10 points. Meanwhile, in 2018 the RCP Congressional average in 2018 predicted the Democrats would win by 7.3 % . So they were one point off. The 538 Congressional average was almost right on the money. Their final poll average was that Democrats would win by 8.7 %. Obviously all these pollsters are making different assumptions about who is going to vote. And obviously nobody knows for sure. In 2016, reality aligned well with Rasmussen's Republican-friendly model. In 2018, Rasmussen and Republicans blew it. In practice, it has worked out lately that the poll averages have been remarkably close to the actual results. Especially in the well polled national races. The easiest explanation is that it's the wisdom of crowds. Right now it probably helps the pollsters that the country is so polarized. The vast majority of voters are cemented on one side or the other. That's even true with Independents and Millennials who don't identify with either party. RCP has now had these poll averages going back to I believe 2004. So I checked. In the 2004, 2008, and 2016 elections the final average correctly predicted the national vote winner. And they got the winning margin right within about 1 % of the final national vote total. The only exception was 2012. The final poll average showed Obama winning by 0.7 %. He won by 3.9 %. Even that's not very remarkable. Romney had a big surge starting late September after Obama bombed the first debate. So through much of October the race was basically tied. At various points in October Romney had a slight lead. But the final average showed the race slightly for Obama at 49/48. It ended up at 51/47. Obama basically seems to have gotten most of the undecided vote. And if you look at the trend in the last seven days of polling, Obama was the one who had the trend at the end. He gained two points in the final week of the race that was polled, from Oct. 28 to Nov. 5. Romney just went sideways. 2016 was very different. And anyone who was surprised was just engaged in wishful thinking. I remember this extremely well. I was in Puerto Vallarta with a Republican. (Sadly, that will never happen again on Election Day, I suspect.) On October 28th, the day of The Second Coming Of Comey, Hillary had a lead of almost 5 % in the RCP average. To be very precise, it was 47.1/42.5. By Nov. 2, she had a 1 % lead of 46.6/45.3. If the election had been held a few days earlier, it's possible Hillary might have lost Minnesota. This was the period her staff described as being when Comey "blocked out the sun". Nothing else could get through. The thing that freaked me out was that on that linked chart for about four days - right before the election - Trump's poll numbers were a straight line going straight up. And Hillary was a straight line coming down. Anybody who knows "the trend is your friend" would know this was not good news for Hillary. If you look at those numbers above it also seemed clear that the undecided were starting to break. And they were headed in President Toxic's direction. Again, not good news for Hillary. This last part is very relevant to 2020. That post about Sean Trende above says that for Trump to be in the ballpark of winning, his approval needs to go up to 46 to 47 % by November. As I said above, there's only one time he cracked 47 % in his Presidency: in March 2020 when COVID hit hard and the approval rating of leaders all over the world were going up due to the "rally around the flag" effect. I don't think it's very likely President Toxic will crack 47 % again before November. That said, what actually happened in 2016 is he ended up with 46 % when all the votes were counted. That's the percentage he got only one time in the entire year of polling in 2016. He was at 46 % in July 2016, right at the end of his post-convention peak. So when it all was said and done, he managed to end up at exactly the highest point he'd been in the polls all year. Everyone who at any point approved of him or considered voting for him ended up voting for him. It could happen again. Trump's at 43 % in the horse race polls. The highest his horse race number has been this year is 46 %. Again, his highest approval rating was 47 %. If he did it in 2016, he can do it in 2020. President Toxic could end up at 47 %. Whether that's good for an electoral college win if Biden has a 3 or 4 or 5 % winning margin is a whole different matter. I'd rather be safe than sorry. All of this stuff I'm posting is obviously my own intellectual masturbation. But if I was working on a Democratic campaign, I'd be sounding the fire alarm and shouting, "Trump can win!" All I'm doing instead is masturbating and sending money to Democrats. Better them than porn, I figure.

Okay. I'll run with you on this one. But do we at least get to have a big old orgasm by the time it's all over? Or is this going to be one of those ghastly episodes where we basically all end up getting fucked in the end? If it is, you know me. I at least want to make sure I'm stocked up with lots of lube.