stevenkesslar

This is a continuation of my debate with myself. This new NYT/Siena poll has some numbers on abortion that are very close to the Pew findings. Which is to say, something like 60 % of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. All year long, the NYT/Siena polls have been a bit more conservative (or favorable to President Toxic) than the poll averages. What struck me about this poll is that Trump's net disapproval is only - 4 % (46/50), which is better than the current poll averages. So, if anything, this poll's assumptions are a little more favorable to President Toxic than the average poll. They are NOT as favorable as Rasmussen, which has President Toxic at net approval of 4 % So if this poll's findings are perhaps skewed a little bit conservative, this is mostly just awful news for Republicans, I think. Here's what the abortion numbers say (on Page 5). Do you think abortion should be .................... ? Always legal 31 % Mostly legal 29 % Mostly illegal 19 % Always illegal 14 % Independents, who I assume are the only undecided/swing voters left, are slightly more pro-choice. 71 % of them say abortion should be legal all or most of the time. These numbers are even more favorable to abortion being legal than the Pew survey I posted above. Both suggest that 60 % of Americans are not sympathetic to Amy Coney Barrett's rulings and views on abortion. As I said above, the Gallup poll draws a different picture and suggests more support for severe restrictions on abortion. But having seen two polls by good pollsters with almost the same results, it seems likely that Pew and the NYT are right and Gallup got different results because they used different and vaguer wording. In this survey, 62 % of voters support Roe v. Wade and only 20 % oppose it. 51 % of Americans, including 48 % of Independents, think it is very or somewhat likely that Roe v. Wade will be overturned if President Toxic is allowed to fill this seat. That suggests to me that this may help Democrats more than Republicans in two ways: 1) getting pro-choice people to vote, and 2) getting Independents to vote for Biden. There's one other area that this poll suggests could hurt Democrats, but probably won't. Asked what they think should happen if President Toxic tries to fill the seat, which we know he will, the country is split. 48 % say the Senate should NOT act on the nomination, and 47 % say the Senate should. Not surprisingly, almost all Republicans think the Senate should act on the nomination, and almost all Democrats think the Senate should not. I am surprised that Independents skew to having the Senate NOT act by a 52/43 margin. That's kind of good news for Democrats, too. Independents usually seem like voters who say, "Yeah, you got screwed. But be a good sport, for the good of the country, and don't make a big deal about it." This poll suggests that the majority of Independents will be okay with Democrats making a big deal about it. The history of the ACA was that it was somewhat unpopular until the Republicans actually tried to kill it. Now it has majority support. So these numbers may actually underestimate the trouble the Republicans could get into. They already have process working against them. In this poll, 56 % of voters say the President elected in November should fill the seat. So they are not listening. But that's even worse when they are driving this through to do something a very solid majority of Americans oppose. People were much more split on Justice Rapist, and it still hurt the GOP in 2018. I think this has the potential to hurt the GOP even more than in 2018. Like the ACA, legal abortion may look better than ever now that Republicans have a real chance of killing it. Speaking of the ACA, this poll data reinforces some of the things I said on earlier posts. In this poll, 57 % of voters support the ACA, and 38 % oppose it. Independents support the ACA by an even wider margin, 63/31. So Ron Brownstein is right. The Democrats should go nuts about how the Republicans don't give a shit about helping Americans through the pandemic, but they are hellbent on killing the ACA. That said, at least in this poll support for legal abortion is even stronger than support for the ACA. So I'm not sure I agree with Brownstein that it might be better for Democrats to downplay abortion. Here's another thing that works very badly for Republicans. The last question in the poll, on Page 10, asks Americans if they support a "new 2 trillion dollar stimulus package to extend increased unemployment insurance, send stimulus checks to most Americans, and provide financial support to state and local government." That's basically the House Democrat's compromise. They started at $3 trillion this Summer, Republicans said $1 trillion, and then Pelosi said let's do $2 trillion. Americans support this, 72/23. Independents support it, 69/26. In other words, support for pretty much exactly what the House Democrats want to do is even stronger than support for the ACA, or for legal abortion. The hearings are on filling a SCOTUS seat. But this will be part of the Democratic rant. Why are we rushing to fill a seat that Americans don't want filled? When we should be rushing to help them survive the pandemic - which is what they overwhelmingly want. Going back to 2018, I checked from the 538 summary of the partisan lean of each state. So here are the three Senate seats Republicans flipped in 2018, ranked by partisan lean. (The # 1 most Republican state is Wyoming. So the lower the number the more Republican) 7. North Dakota +34.2 % Republican lean 16. Indiana + 19.3 % Republican lean 18. Missouri + 18. 8 % Republican lean So, yeah. This helped Republicans. But only in very red states. Now here's the three Senate seats that Democrats either held, or flipped in 2018, where the Senate candidate opposed Justice Rapist being confirmed. 15. Montana + 21.1 % Republican lean 25. Arizona + 7.4 % Republican lean 33. Nevada + 1.0 % Democratic lean Democrats had 24 seats to defend, compared to 9 Republican seats. So the bottom line is no Democrat in a blue state came close to losing. Democrats actually made inroads in red states like Arizona and held red states like Montana. There's one other factor that probably matters. Charlie Cook nailed it in 2018 when he said that the Justice Rapist fight was a "color intensifier". That 538 chart proves it. Part of the reason Democrats lost Senate seats in Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota is that in 2016 all three seats got more red than in 2012. Meanwhile, Arizona and Nevada got more blue. Montana got more red, too, but Tester survived it. Probably because he comes off as a decent, independent guy. Mostly, what happened is that 2018 just intensified whatever the trend was from 2012 to 2016. So here are the Senate seats that are up for grabs, like above ranked in order by partisan lean. I also included whether the trend from 2012 to 2016 was more blue, more red, or little change. 15. Montana + 21.1 % Republican lean (moderately more red in 2016 than 2012, Democrats won Senate seat in 2018) 20. South Carolina + 15.9 % Republican lean (no significant shift between 2016 and 2012) 21. Texas + 13.2 % Republican lean (significantly more blue in 2016 than 2012, Republicans won Senate seat in 2018) 22. Georgia + 8.3 % Republican lean (slightly more blue in 2016 than 2012) 23. Iowa + 8.1 % Republican lean (significantly more red in 2016 than 2012) 25. Arizona +7.4 % Republican (significantly more blue in 2016 than 2012, Democrats won Senate seat in 2018) 35. Colorado +2.5 % Democratic lean (no significant shift between 2016 and 2012) 36. Maine +3.5 % Democratic lean (significantly less blue in 2016 than 2012) My assumption is that Doug Jones in Alabama has almost no chance of winning. Meanwhile, I think Democrats have some chance of winning any of these nine seats. I decided I'd send money to candidates in all but Texas, since Cornyn is a popular incumbent and it would take a 1980-like landslide to knock him out. I think Beto fucked up. I was desperately hoping he'd run for Texas Senate again in 2020. Had he done that, I think he could have been like John Tower way back when. The second time might well have been the charm in a blue year. With the exception of Montana, which Democrats won in 2018, all nine seats are LESS Republican than the three seats Democrats lost in 2018. In terms of partisan lean, Georgia is a lot like Arizona, except it is moving toward blue more slowly. There's four things Republicans are doing that are toxic. 1) They are not listening to the solid majority of Americans who oppose filling this seat. 2) They are trying to kill the ACA. 3) They are trying to kill Roe v. Wade. 4) They are doing things Americans don't want them to do and not dealing with a Democratic House proposal on the pandemic which 3 in 4 Americans support. Once again, everything President Toxic touches dies. Any of the four by themselves would be toxic. As a Republican brew, I won't be surprised in the least if this wipes out the Republican Senate majority and sends President Toxic packing.

This is an extension of what I posted directly above. Kind of morbid, but I think over six months in the death rates tell us a lot about what has worked and what hasn't worked. These are the deaths per million citizens for various countries, and then several US states, ranked from deadliest to least deadly. New York - 1707 dead per million Spain - 668 dead per million Brazil - 665 dead per million Florida - 653 dead per million USA - 631 dead per million Texas - 546 dead per million California - 394 dead per million Canada - 245 dead per million Germany - 114 dead per million Australia - 34 dead per million South Korea - 8 dead per million Here's also some relevant statistics for GDP decline in the second quarter of 2020 Germany - 10.1 % GDP USA - 9.5 % GDP Australia - 7 % GDP South Korea - 2 % GDP When the dust settles, I think we'll learn that the countries that had the least deadly health impacts also had the least painful economic impacts. China is # 1 on that list. Since there is doubt about the credibility of their numbers, I didn't post any. But there's all kinds of evidence from external numbers that their economy took less of a hit, and it is growing again. South Korea is basically a different version of the same thing. They were on masks and contact tracing and containment from Day One. As a result, their economic contraction was not as deep as many other countries that had to shut everything down. There was no avoiding taking a huge economic hit for countries that have had way better health outcomes so far, like Germany and Australia. In fact, that was partly the point. To hammer it into control with an abrupt and effective shut down, and meanwhile put all kinds of mitigation steps into place. It has not stopped the virus from rebounding, which is not a shocker. But if you just go by number of deaths Germany and Australia spared their countries of lots of sick and dead people as a result of the measures they took and the economic hit they absorbed. It will always be a mystery to me why New York got hit so much harder than California. Maybe the China travel ban helped, but it was leaky. California shut down earlier, but only by about a week I think. So mostly it was probably just bad luck for New York, which was flooded with Europeans when the virus was silently spreading like crazy. I was more optimistic about how things would go in California. When the virus spread through the Sunbelt states, it essentially worked the same way. Florida took less precautions, California took more. But in both states, infections spike. I blame part of that on President Toxic. We didn't have the "Liberate The Virus" crowds with guns at the state Capitol like Michigan did. But California was not immune from the right wing pushback. And part of it is that even the most obedient children - like Germany and Australia and South Korea - have learned that this virus is not easy to contain. The difference is those three countries have a national consensus to relentlessly try to contain it. More than anything, in California it's disproportionately Hispanics that have to go to work and risk their lives. 61 % of the cases and 48 % of the deaths in California are Latinos, which are 39 % of the state's population. If California had the same death rate as New York, there would be 50,000 or so more dead Americans in California alone. It was just sad, and cruel, when President Toxic went after the "blue states". It is true that Cuomo and DeBlasio could have acted earlier. Like I said, the slightly earlier shut downs in California is one reason our death rate was lower than New York. But Cuomo was not get briefings like President Toxic was every day, which we now know from Woodward President Toxic understood very well. We'll never know what would have happened in February if Trump did his job and actually warned Americans of the wave of death that was coming. This sad, sorry, incompetent, and miserable excuse for a leader will lose in November, and lose very badly. His name will be remembered by history for being exactly as bad as he was. The only question left, really, is whether the poor pathetic man goes to jail before he goes to hell. I wouldn't bet either way on that one.

It is interesting. The thing that is obvious is that while some countries - like Spain and France - are having as many or more infections as the first wave, they have a small fraction of the deaths they had in the Spring. Meanwhile, other countries - like India and Argentina - are in a very different place. Their pattern is like what happened in the first wave almost everywhere - more infection simply means more death. The US is more like India than like Europe. More infection means more death. But what might be called our "second wave" involved more infections but fewer deaths than the first wave. Some of that has to be that the people who are most affected are now better informed and playing it safe. Some of it is because of states like New York. Whatever they are doing to mitigate infection - and death - seems to be working. New York, unlike France or Spain, has kept the number of infections low. So New York's deaths are a very small fraction of what they were this Spring. Like 10 deaths a day now on a bad day, as opposed to 1,000 deaths a day this Spring. It all fits into what seems to be the global mantra for managing this: The Hammer And The Dance. If you haven't read that, it's worth reading it or glancing through it. Tomas Pueyo, the author, published several papers this Spring as we were just starting to become aware. As far as I can tell, the most influential one was Why You Must Act Now, which hit on March 10 and motivated the idea of immediate shut down - like today. Which is exactly what California did, starting in the Bay Area. (Pueyo used to be a data analyst at Facebook, I think.) In retrospect, everything important Pueyo argued turned out to be correct. That was back when President Toxic was still saying "only a few cases" ..... "miraculously go away" ... blah blah blah. Pueyo said this is way deeper and broader than we suspect, as New York and New Jersey sadly learned within a matter of weeks. This phrase "hammer and the dance" is being used all over the world to describe government efforts. The most recent I can remember is watching some interview of John Kasich where he was asked about the conflict between keeping people safe and alive, and the economic impact of keeping things closed. He immediately referenced the idea of "the hammer and the dance" and said we have to all get as good as we can at "dancing" around the virus. Masks and social distancing are the basics, of course. But after the initial "hammer" - which pretty much all of Europe did well - now they are doing a bunch of things. None of it is awful news. Spain and France fall in one category, and the case and death charts I hyperlinked tell the story visually. In Spain the number of infections climbed back to its Spring peak. But the number of deaths is maybe 10 % of what happened in Spain this Spring. Everyone seems to agree its because young adults are getting infected a lot more. But they are not dying. That said, some of them may be dying, or they may be spreading it to more vulnerable adults who are dying. There is a spike in the number of deaths, but nothing like what happened this Spring. France is even more extreme. They've blown way past the number of infections they had this Spring - like 15,000 a day now versus 5,000 a day this Spring. But, again, the number of deaths is maybe 10 % of what they had this Spring. It seems like this is a natural experiment that could go well, or be really bad. As far as I can tell the message in Spain and France to young people is be responsible, and don't spread this virus. So far, it seems like it is being contained among parts of the population that mostly don't get very sick, or die. Whether that can last through Winter is a whole different question. It could get very ugly again. That said, a more optimistic view is that once these young adults get sick and recover, they are immune and can no longer spread the virus. Like I said, it seems like it's an unplanned experiment in herd immunity, mostly driven by the fact that young adults are not as concerned about following the rules. It's too early to know what the outcome will be. Germany could be the poster child for "the hammer and the dance". They did crush the virus as effectively as any country. They were probably too optimistic after doing that in thinking they could effectively make Germany COVID-free. The number of case loads has gradually risen. But so far it is staying at a plateau much lower than what was going on in the Spring. And the number of deaths is maybe 2 or 3 % of the number they had this Spring. So business is picking up again, and they seem to have it contained more like a very bad flu year than like the Spanish flu. By comparison, India and Argentina just look sad. It is what you'd expect with an uncontained and deadly virus. The number of daily infections just keeps going up, and as that happens the number of deaths just keeps going up. The shape of the infection curves and death curves look exactly the same. So for some reason, in some parts of the world a lot more infection means a lot more death. In Europe, so far, a lot more infection does not mean a lot more death. Our neighbor Canada looks a lot more like Europe than the US. Their daily caseloads are climbing substantially, and they are definitely into a second wave. But, unlike the US, the death curve looks very low. People are getting "sick", but mostly not dying. I think the main explanation is that some countries are way better than others, both at the initial "hammer" of crushing the virus - which President Toxic never really even tried to do - and now in the continuous "dance" around keeping it contained and not letting it kill lots of people.

Since I mentioned that ABC/WaPo poll in the post above, I'll add a few more things that are good news for Biden. overall, Biden is leading by 10 points, 54/44. Independents in this poll say they favor Biden 59 to 37. That is mind boggling. Independent women say they favor Biden 77 to 20, a 57 point spread. In 2016, Hillary won Independent women with a 4 point spread. In the last three elections, Independents broke for Obama, then Romney, then Trump. In each case, the winner had maybe a 5 % spread among Independents. So I doubt Biden will win Independents by 20 %. But anything even remotely close to that would be a major blow out. In this poll 11 % of voters say they care about the SCOTUS appointment more than anything else. Those voters favor Biden 54/46. That's a reversal from 2016. I don't remember the exact numbers. But Trump won the voters who cared most about SCOTUS, something like 54/45. What really matters is how this plays out in swing states, including in Senate races. But it's not a bad sign that this may be helping Democrats at the margin, not Republicans.

Like President Toxic, you flood the zone with so many specific things that are not even remotely true that it's impossible to respond. I look at the polls all the time, and they don't say 70 % of Americans want single payer. But if you want to believe that, you go right ahead. Let's talk about The Green Party. They say they are for Medicare For All. They say they want to do something about climate change. They say they want to pay reparations to Blacks and advance racial justice. Good for them. Here's the thing. President Toxic is against all those things. He dumped the Paris climate agreement. He almost completely killed the ACA. Now he will have a 6-3 conservative court, whereas with Hillary it possibly would have been a 6-3 liberal court. This court will spend the next 10 or 20 years being where climate change goes to die, where civil rights goes to die, where economic justice goes to die, where wealth taxes go to die. Is that The Green Party platform? Is that what they want? Because by getting President Toxic elected, that is what they got. I think the statement, "I fucked up. I need to rethink what I did.", is a good statement. I think that way about 2016. I think I should have gone with my heart and voted for Bernie. Would he have lost? Probably, I think. I say that only because I think Lichtman is right, and it was an election Republicans were likely to win. My point is, there's no harm in saying maybe I fucked up. So I don't see the harm in asking Greens to think about whether they fucked up and helped President Toxic win a tiny Slavery Electoral College victory. It undermines 100 % of what The Green Party says it wants. Kyle seems to think it's okay to ask people like me to question why they supported Hillary, but it's off limits to ask Greens to do the same. Kyle is cute, but stupid. Apparently, Green Party leader Howie Hawkins is stupid, but not even cute. A new ABC/WaPo poll says Biden is leading by 10 points, 54/44. Add Libertarian Jorgensen and "How About More Trump?" Howie and that changes to a 6 point spread, 49/43, with Jorgensen getting 4 % and "How About More Trump?" Howie getting 3 %. I'd guess most of "How About More Trump?" Howie's 3 % is coming out of Biden. So as the pollster says. So the path to reparations and climate change and Medicare For All is to make it so that maybe President Toxic wins in The Slavery Electoral College again. I guess I'm stupid, too. I just don't get the logic of that. I'm mostly ignorant about Germany. But I know that The Greens in Germany have spent decades building from the bottom up. So now they are a coalition player in federal and state and local government. And they have been willing to compromise to get some of what they want on energy policy and climate change and other issues. They created a model of how you win and actually accomplish some of what you wanted to do. The US Green Party has not done that. Running someone for President will not achieve that goal. The Green Party has something like 143 officeholders in the US, mostly in California. Oh, and they have a very nice platform. Saying they have a very nice platform is another way of saying they have not won shit. Well, there is this. Their biggest win is getting a Mayor elected in Richmond, CA, population of about 100,000. It's a start. But it probably is not a very good platform to take on the global fossil fuels industry. Having three SCOTUS seats would be a much better platform. But those seats are taken by right wingers, thanks in part to Jill Stein. I have a friend you should talk to about this. Maybe you could advise "How About More Trump?" Howie to talk to him, too. My friend's name is Bernie Sanders. Ever heard of him? Bernie spent 10 years running for offices like Governor on third party platforms and got nowhere. Then he ran for Mayor, which is a seat he could win. Then he ran for House. Then he ran for Senate. Only then did he use those platforms to run for President - as a Democrat. Some people feel strongly that even that was a decisive nail in Hillary's coffin. They may be right. But mostly what I think is that he created a model for how you run and win and actually move the debate. I'm not surprised a democratic socialist lost. I am surprised he almost won the nomination. So it is 0 % cute and 100 % stupid that the Green Party and "How About More Trump?" Howie are saying they want Medicare For All, but they are actually undermining what Bernie "Medicare For All" Sanders is trying to do. He is trying to help Biden win, just like he was trying to help Hillary win in 2016. Taking votes away from them in Pennsylvania is not helpful. It should be a big clue that in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court 5 Democrats ruled to keep "How About More Trump?" Howie off the ballot, and 2 Republicans ruled to keep him on the ballot. Geez. What does that tell us? They've been at this thing running for President for decades. On the minus side, they may have contributed to the loss of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. On the plus side, they did elect a Mayor in Richmond, CA. Something tells me that might need to rethink how they build power and win.

First, I like that definition. Foster awareness of the downside of lots of people following authoritarian leaders. And find ways to diminish the flames, not fan them. On a less serious note, I was thinking if we're going to put a committee together, Don, Jr. would be a great Chairman. That way, he can get some experience as a leader. What do you think?

My favorite community organizing mantra is Saul Alinsky's "the action is in the reaction". The more I read about this SCOTUS nomination, and its potential long term consequences, the more I think this could be the mother of all political reactions for much of the 21st century. So far, the title of Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson's book has been more right than wrong. In 2018, the Republican House majority died. No one is even suggesting they'll get that back in 2020. For the next month we'll hear endlessly about the amazing mandate the Senate Republicans were given in 2018 to do what they're about to do. One big clue that they had no mandate is that the majority of Americans oppose Republicans filling the seat now. Another big clue is that in 2018 Democrats had 24 seats to defend, and Republicans only had 9. So Republicans netting 2 seats isn't a mandate. They won Missouri and North Dakota and Indiana - red states - in 2018. But losing red states like Montana and purple states like Arizona wasn't exactly a huge Republican victory. 2020 will be the real test of Wilson's book title. As of now, it's looking like the Republican Senate majority will die. And the grand prize - the Toxic Presidency will die, too. Boo hoo. Boo hoo. Now there's a new question. If Barrett is seated, President Toxic will definitely have touched the Supreme Court. So will it die, too? My guess is it will. It will die in the sense that in a decade it will have lost much of the legitimacy it has today. This article is a good compilation of what a bunch of legal scholars think about the likely impact of Barrett (and President Toxic's other justices). I'm quoting two of scholars, who express one of the strongest themes of the various prognostications. How Amy Coney Barrett Would Reshape The Court - And The Country Of course, we don't know whether Barrett will be confirmed, let alone what she'll do. But this seems to me like a grim and realistic prognosis. If correct, it suggests that the legitimacy of SCOTUS will diminish. Depending on how far they go, SCOTUS could simply be seen as an appendage of the Republican Party. Or of corporate America. Or of climate change deniers. Or even the most right-wing religious organizations in America. None of these legal scholars mention anything about political reactions if their predictions come true. But the reactions could be massive. It's one thing to be a conservative bulwark that blocks what even many Republicans in 2020 would view as progress: child labor laws, minimum wage laws, income taxes that fund popular social programs. It's another thing to actually roll back progress, or repeal it. I assume that a 6-3 conservative court will do everything they can think of to NOT repeal Roe. v. Wade. Instead, they will incrementally kill it in all but name. That won't work as easily with the ACA. They've already killed part of it. But now it's sort of all or nothing. Another one of the themes of the Politico piece is that this is probably the end of the line for efforts by Justices like Kennedy and Roberts to zig zag in a way that kept SCOTUS near the center of American political gravity. No matter how well they try to disguise it, Americans will figure out that the Court has swung hard to the right. That will likely cause a huge political reaction. A lot of that reaction will happen at the state level. Including in the state elections of two US Senators. Long term, this could address the Democrats' biggest structural problem. There's a lot of data being put up right now about how the Senate naturally favors Republicans. I'll post some of it below. My point is that a far right SCOTUS might have the effect of gradually loosening the Republicans' hold on some of those states, and thus the Senate. I'll use abortion as an example. I don't think anyone knows what the political implications of a repeal of Roe v. Wade will be. I cited poll data above from Pew that suggests that right now 61 % of Americans support legal abortion in all or most cases, and 38 % oppose abortion in all or most cases. Pew also found no difference between men and women - 60 % of both sexes support abortion in all or most cases. This Gallup poll which is also recent provides a significantly different picture. It is perhaps a classic example of the answer depending on how you ask the question. When you ask about "pro-choice" or "pro-life", it's much more of a 50/50 split. And a gender gap appears. A slight majority of women are "pro-choice", and a slight majority of men are "pro-life". On the bottom line question of whether it should be legal, Gallup's numbers suggest that as few as 43 % of Americans support abortion that is legal in most cases. And up to 55 % of Americans want abortion to be legal "in only a few circumstances", or not at all. If you believe the Pew numbers, Republicans appear to be asking for massive long-term pushback in most states, with the exceptions being ones like Alabama. If you believe the Gallup data, it might explain why McConnell and The Divine Miss Graham are pushing full speed ahead. They may believe this will help them in all red states, and most purple states. The 2018 Senate results don't suggest that. Nor do the polls in 2020, so far. But nobody knows. We will have a very good indication when we know what happened in Senate races in Montana, Kansas, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Texas. (Of those purple to red state, three had Senate elections in 2018. Democrats won Montana and Arizona, and came closer than expected in Texas. Like I said, 2018 was not a Republican mandate.) The same goes for the ACA and a long list of other issues. My guess is that Mitch McConnell is politically unassailable in Kentucky. But Andy Beshear just won the Kentucky Governor seat back in part because of the ACA, basically avenging his Dad's loss to a one-term right wing Governor. If SCOTUS repeals the ACA, it's not completely clear what reaction that will cause even in a deep red state like Kentucky. If we are doomed to repeat the obstructionist conservative court of the 1930's, it's even less clear what the political reaction will be when they throw out whatever watered-down parts of the Green New Deal Biden and Democrats are able to pass. I agree with the authors I cited above. The Supreme Court will likely revert to being what it was for much of US history: a block against democratic and progressive majorities, and a protector of powerful minorities and elites. The reaction at the state level could be to move more states to the left, driven by social issues like abortion and economic issues like health care and minimum wages. If that happens, I could also see it eliminating any structural advantage Republicans have in the US Senate. The Senate’s Rural Skew Makes It Very Hard For Democrats To Win The Supreme Court That article has good data on two things: the partisan lean of all 50 states, and the urban/rural geography of all 50 states. I don't buy the idea the the Senate is the biggest obstacle to Democrats "winning" SCOTUS. I think it's obvious the Slavery Electoral College is the biggest obstacle. Were Hillary Clinton the winner in 2016, we'd potentially be looking at a 6-3 liberal majority (assuming Kennedy resigned.) If you also assume Gore was President in 2000, there would never have been a Bush second term during which he appointed two justices. Arguably, up to 8 of the 9 SCOTUS justices would have been appointed by Democrats. What screwed Democrats (and democrats) first and foremost is not the Senate, or McConnell. It's the Slavery Electoral College. If we want democratic politics in America, we have to get rid of the Slavery Electoral College. The idea that the woman who wins the most votes is the winner is NOT a radical idea. I'm assuming any court packing scheme designed to give liberals a court majority will be politically toxic. An effort to restructure the Senate to look like more like the House would be even more politically toxic. What Democrats should be thinking about is getting and keeping a 50+ vote majority in the Senate. And then getting rid of the Senate filibuster, which relied on a level of bipartisanship and comity that is now just dead. I've read a bunch of good articles this year that suggest that "it's the geography, stupid" is even more important today than "it's the economy, stupid." The way I understand the first phrase is that it incorporates the economy. Areas that are more rural and Whiter tend to be more culturally conservative as well. They tend to be the areas that feel, and often are, left behind economically. Everything about the sunny and outward optimism of Reagan (California, pro-trade, pro-immigrant) is now associated with the Democratic Party. Reagan was the one who said Hispanics are Republicans, but they just don't know it yet. The post-Trump Republican Party fits more into the pessimistic tradition that America and American values have been lost. I love the phrase "coalition of restoration" to describe the Republican Party as it will probably exist for a long time to come. So if all that is accurate, if you look at that 538 list of states by partisan lean the Democrats can probably just forget about states that are the most rural. They already have been the least Democratic: like Wyoming and Idaho and perhaps Montana. That said, Tester survived 2018, right after voting against Justice Rapist. And they have a Democratic Governor that may be their other Senator soon. There are only three states that have 0 % of their population in the big urban cores and small cities that are supposed to favor Democrats. They are Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Given that Vermont is both one of the most rural AND the most Democratic, it's obviously more than just the geography, stupid. Here's numbers 20-24 on the list of states by Republican partisan lean, in order: South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio. If those five states were always in play for Democrats, plus the next 25 states that are most favorable to Democrats, that would mean Democrats ought to be able to have realistic chances to get up to 60 Senate seats in any cycle. Right now, it looks like Iowa and Georgia and even South Carolina are toss ups. Again, what happens in 2020 will give us a really good read on how hospitable those states are to Democrats. But my basic premise is that when the SCOTUS turns hard right, there will be a broad and deep reaction. My guess is that as this plays out it will make it easier, not harder, to win Senate seats and state legislatures in states like Ohio, Georgia, Texas, and maybe South Carolina. I'm actually most pessimistic about Iowa, which used to be a pretty solid Democratic state. It has neither significant concentrations of urban areas, nor significant concentrations of non-Whites, which are the the trends favoring Democrats the most. South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and Ohio do have concentrations of either urban areas, or minorities, or both. So if Iowa is going to stay Democratic, it's going to be despite the trends rather than because of them. I'm trying to get my head around the bright side of a 6-3 conservative SCOTUS. It pisses me off, because but for the Slavery Electoral College Democrats won 6 of the 7 last Presidential elections, and therefore should have "won" the SCOTUS as well. But being pissed off isn't a good place to be. For a lot of US history slave owners and robber barons and corporate interests used SCOTUS and the Slavery Electoral College to dominate and secure their interests, including owning Black people as property. I don't have a big conceptual problem with letting them go back to being just that. In a system of checks and balances, it will create a reaction. The more conservative a little club of nine people gets, the more liberal the nation's reaction will likely be. At least in a majority of states, which are the ones Democrats should target. Arizona, Ohio, Georgia, Texas - those should all be in play. In the last three Senate election cycles (2014, 2016, 2018), Republicans won a total of 57 seats, and Democrats won 46 (that includes special elections). Meanwhile, Republican Senate candidates in those elections won a total of 100 million votes, whereas Democrats about 125 million votes. That right there speaks to the structural advantage of Republicans winning all these smaller, Whiter, and rural states like Wyoming and Idaho. I think Democrats have to elevate the issue of democracy and legitimacy. I'm now ready to let the SCOTUS damn themselves. Let them be the opposite of the Warren Court. Let Blacks and Hispanics and lesbians and liberals and progressives see this club of nine as the place where religious bigots thrive, White racism has a welcome home, civil rights legislation is viewed with hostility, and progressive ideas go to die. It would be consistent with much of US history. It really did not have to be that way. But the Slavery Electoral College, Gore and Hillary would have been elected. And it would not have been that way. But, as President Toxic says, it is what it is. There is no mandate for conservatism. So whenever Republicans say "mandate", we should do what President Toxic does and say, "No, assholes. You stole it. In a democracy, the person who gets 3 million more votes wins. So yeah, asshole. You stole it. If Democrats get 125 million votes and Republicans get 100 million votes, that's not a Republican mandate. Even if it means you got more Senate seats. Mostly, I think what Democrats need to do is lock down the Presidency and the Senate. Time and demography is on our side. We ought to be able to win and hold both a lot more than Republicans do. And a hard right wing SCOTUS ought to be able to help Democrats do it as this plays out. It probably won't work in Alabama or Idaho. But it should help tip states like Georgia and Texas. We'll know a lot better whether I'm right or wrong two months from now.

The problem is we have too many corporate Democrats like Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly. If we could just get rid of them, and replace them with Republicans like Josh Hawley and Mike Braun, America could heal. And we could stop right wing Justices from being confirmed. What scares me is that we never seem to learn. There are actually people in 2020 that think that electing a Black corporate Democrat like Jaime Harrison would be a good thing. As if it would really make a difference. Quite honestly, I sent $50 to Harrison a few days ago. And then when I read the tweet from the Movement For A People's Party I broke down in tears. I now realize my $50 donation is the type of thing that keeps America from healing. Until we have candidates like Jill Stein running in every state, the nation can not heal. Granted, having a Black Jill Stein in South Carolina right now could help Lindsey Graham win in 2020, and 2026, and 2032. But that is only temporary. Only Jill Stein can produce the kind of fundamental change that will heal the nation, and make her unelectable. Sure. In the short run, we might lose. But in the long run, we retained our moral purity. Isn't that all that really matters? I commend you for urging people to think long and hard about this, @tassojunior.

And, by comparison, President Toxic has made America great again. Other than the fact that if you're an American, you suck. U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly Not surprisingly, 88 % of Germans think their country has done a good job dealing with COVID-19. 9 % of Germans think the US has done a good job. Schade! Citizens in a bunch of the 13 countries polled say they did a similarly "good job": Demark (95 %), Australia (94 %), Canada and Germany (88 %), South Korea (87 %), and Netherlands (86 %). The median for the 13 countries polled is 74 % say they did a good job. On average, 15 % of people in these 13 countries say the US did a good job. These countries were all of course poster children for how to attack the virus quickly and effectively with aggressive national leadership. Germany under Merkel is the opposite of Hitler and authoritarianism. It's noteworthy that she opened the debate as probably the bluntest of any global leader, saying maybe 70 % of Germans would get the virus. She is center-right. But she basically decided to listen to her citizens. And to science. Hitler bent over backwards to figure out how to leave his country in a shambles. Merkel bent over backwards to figure out how to keep people alive and healthy, and get the economy back on track. If the US deaths had occurred at the same rate as Germany, adjusted for population, there would be 37,800 dead Americans - as opposed to 208,000. In effect, Merkel kept it like a particularly bad flu season. President Toxic is well on his way to making it like World War II in terms of the number of Americans who died in combat. Germany's economy slowed down less. Schools reopened quicker. Their economy is recovering more quickly. Merkel is not unique. That's good news. You don't have to be a rocket scientist. Or even a chemist. A lot has been written about the style of managing this used by female European leaders. That works for me, if you look at the countries that have done the best. That said, it's hard to argue that Scott Morrison is a woman, or a feminist. But Australian leaders did quickly reach a consensus and acted, as did JT's Canada. To stretch the analogy, South Korea and even China acted like a country of women. They were more open to putting the needs of their family and community first. I have a really tough question to ask you guys that I can't answer. Why am I completely NOT surprised that in the US the fucked up response that led to unnecessary mass death was associated with men, and guns? @lookin, there's a question in there you will like about authoritarianism. Not a shocker, but President Toxic is actually pretty well liked by one type of European: the ones who are members of the most authoritarian, right-wing party in each country. I guess authoritarianism is a global language. Authoritarianism is also still globally unpopular. It now turns out that these 13 capitalist democracies trust President Toxic even less than Putin or Xi. Only 16 % said Trump will do the right thing. That said, all three authoritarian leaders are wildly unpopular. No surprise, Merkel is far and away the most popular of the bunch, with 76 % confident she'll do the right thing. This made me think about some other things about authoritarianism, which are mostly just armchair theories. For several years I've asked a trick question to friends or people I know: "If you could change history and simply replace Bush with Gore, or Trump with Clinton - but only one - which would you pick?" Liberals almost always say they'd replace Trump with Clinton. My oldest brother who voted Obama/Obama/Trump predictably said he'd dump Bush for Gore. He is a poster child for the "truck driver" brand of Republican. When I asked him why, he said "the Iraq War." Here's the trick. When we had this conversation last year, I surprised a lot of my family by agreeing with him. I'd replace W. with Gore. Mostly because it would have wiped out the Iraq War and all the tragedies that followed. I've now changed my mind. From 2017 to 2019 I got the fact that the economy was growing and we were not into new wars. Everything that happened this year now makes me think that President Toxic turned out to be even worse than W. based on lots of objective standards. It was probably just a matter of time and luck, anyway. Those charts about views on the US in each country are interesting. In France and Germany, the centers of global opposition to the Iraq War, we are now back to being as unpopular as we were under W. In other countries that were not as opposed to Iraq, like Canada and Australia and the UK, the US is viewed more unfavorably than ever. I keep going back to John Dean's phrase about how to deal with authoritarians: "They understand defeat." We did not "lose" the Iraq War. But we kind of did. Just like we kind of lost the Viet Nam War. One way to understand what President Toxic did is he took a party that was ready to admit Iraq was a sort of defeat and gave them another scapegoat to fear and punish. In his case, it's more like a Superman comic book. The list of villains is long, and it keeps changing. The good news is that lots of Republicans now agree that W. did not "keep us safe" on 9/11. Like my brother, they don't view the Iraq War as a good thing. The bad news is that they've kind of swapped one brand of authoritarianism for another. It goes to your point, and Dean's point, that these people won't just go away. This begs the question you keep asking: what do you do with them? In a sense, they were persuaded that W. and his ideas about safety were wrong. But getting them to that point did involve a type of defeat. They did agree W. did not "keep us safe". They did agree Iraq was a debacle. And then they chose another authoritarian leader who gives them Muslims and Mexicans and the China virus to fear and hate. Merkel is an alternative model. She gave people a feeling of safety and security, and jobs. More work in factories and shops, less COVID-19. They still have the AfD. But they haven't gotten close to taking power nationally. At least not yet. As you stated, there was Adenauer. He had authoritarian tendencies. He used Marxists as his whipping boy. But he also got people focused on building Volkswagens. I think there are lessons in that for Biden. He is just not going to convince "Trump Republicans" that their fearless leader is the problem, not the solution. But he can at least try to focus them on another problem: their safety, and their jobs. That will happen gradually, if it happens, when he has the soapbox and ex-President Toxic doesn't. It's 80 years past the start of World War II. But Merkel does offer a model for how you get there. All this data reminds me of the story I posted about a week ago about these interviews with people waiting in line for President Toxic's unsafe rally in Nevada. There was the woman who said it seemed like Trump had done a better job managing COVID-19 than "any other country around here". Maybe she never heard of Canada. But my guess is if you showed her the numbers of COVID-19 in Canada and these polls about views of the US, she'd still insist with no hint to irony that America is stronger. After all, who cares what socialists think anyway? Some of these authoritarian followers are just not going to change. The good news is that President Toxic is getting more desperate. He went to Nevada because he needs some blue state he can actually flip, since the ones he flipped in 2016 are back to being blue it seems. When he held his rally on Sept. 14, he was losing Nevada by 5.8 % in the poll averages. Today he's losing it by 6.5 %. Everyone quoted in that article at the rally said it was perfectly obvious Trump was going to win. How could he lose? So we'll see. They are not prepared for defeat. We'll see if they understand it when it happens.

Democrats’ SCOTUS Message Could Really Work in Swing States Another great article by Ron Brownstein. It's a little bit of an opposing view from what I said about abortion above. As always, Ron goes straight for the data. And he grounds his argument in state data on abortion, although the references he hyperlinks don't actually give the state data. His point is that there are solid (55 % +) majorities for what he calls "favoring abortion rights" in Arizona, Colorado, and Maine. He quotes a left-of-center strategist as saying that Democratic focus on abortion is "net unhelpful" to Democrats in Iowa, North and South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Montana, Kansas. One reason that makes sense is that Rich Mitch is not stupid. I have to presume that they thought pushing ahead was going to help them win, rather than lose. That said, all the numbers he cites are around 50 %. Like 52 % favor abortion rights in Iowa. 49 % in North Carolina and Georgia. The worst case is Alabama, where only about 40 % favor abortion rights, and poor Doug Jones is now even more likely to lose. But even in most of these purple or red states it seems like this could just go either way. Because at the statewide level you have an even split. You'd need highly disaggregated data to figure out which voters in either camp this might move in any of these states. Brownstein's other assumption is that focusing on the ACA and pre-existing conditions is cleaner. But he states he has no state-level polls on that at all. This very recent Kaiser study says 57 % of voters "disapprove" of President Toxic's effort to overturn the ACA. Swing voters overwhelming side with Biden over Trump - like by 52 to 29 on who would be better to determine the future of the ACA. Those are obviously all very good numbers for Democrats. But the polls I posted above say even more people, 60 %, are in favor of abortion rights. The real no brainer on this issue is pre-existing conditions. As Brownstein points out, that clearly helped the Democrats in 2018. The Kaiser poll says 72 % of voters think it is "very important" that the protections for pre-existing conditions in the ACA stay in place. Some of this data reinforces my views about Biden I expressed above. Simply by virtue of his Catholicism and his legislative history, he's not going to come off as a radical abortionist. So if there is a danger of hitting some hot button with moderate Republicans on abortion, Biden is not the one likely to hit it. As Brownstein notes, Biden hit exactly the right button for Independents. Instead of arguing to ratchet up the tone from nuclear to apocalyptic, he argued we should slow down and calm down. It's a good thing Biden has little hair. Because he's doing a pretty good job of letting President Toxic be the one to always light his hair on fire. There could be a way for the Democrats to have their cake, and eat it, too. The motto might be: when you're attacking you're winning, and when you're explaining you're losing. If there's any issue for Democrats to go to war on, Brownstein is probably right. It probably is the ACA. That's first up on the SCOTUS agenda after the election. And if 72 % of Americans say pre-existing conditions are very important, that's almost certainly a majority in every state. Other polls I've seen over a period of years suggest it is of particular concern to the part of President Toxic's base that is not well off - a big chunk of the Whites without college educations. I think ACB has also made some statements that pretty much said Roberts' ruling to NOT overturn the ACA was wrong. So it may be a cleaner way to attack her, based on her own words, as well. With abortion, it could be that when you're explaining, your losing. Democrats can ask her all kinds of questions without sounding radical. She will have the phrase "precedent" pasted on her forehead, just like Justice Rapist did. And a few of her rulings suggest that at least at the level she was at, she was willing to follow the SCOTUS precedents. Anything beyond that is speculation. But the very fact that we're talking about making abortion illegal or impossible should help get the message through to anyone who is paying at least a little bit of attention. This reminds me of what Morning Joe said during the Justice Rapist fight in 2018. He said that often in politics the winning side loses, and the losing side wins. I would argue he was right about 2018. The Democrats lost the confirmation fight. But they won the House. Republicans are very likely, if not certain, to confirm ACB on whatever timeline they want. But all these numbers suggest to me it will contribute to them losing the Senate, and The White House. Poor President Toxic. He just can't catch a break.

Exactly. After winning both the House and Senate in 2016, President Toxic gave $1 million + tax cuts to billionaires. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi earlier this year followed Bernie's lame-brain idea of sending low- and moderate-income workers $600 a week. This is not only essentially what Republicans would have done. It is worse. I'm quite sure Ritch Mitch would have sent $1 million to every low- and- moderate income worker in America. The Democrats are obviously exactly the same as Republicans. Although Nancy has better taste in masks than President Toxic. But, as you say, that's just optics.

This is going to be interesting. I am assuming, and hoping, that we won't have the ambiguous sexual shenanigans and character quandaries we did with Justice Rapist. The good news is that you can be a left-wing woman, or a right-wing woman, and you can be powerful in America 2020. Both RBG and ACB sound like really good human beings, spouses, and parents. I am also assuming, and hoping, that "the dogma lives loudly within you" is a preview of what is to come. Republicans, being the paragons of decency and fairness they are, will of course complain about the attacks on religion. And Catholicism in particular. Let them. As long as we're somewhere in the ballpark of abortion and the ACA, that's the debate I want. This comment relates more to the Presidential debates than the hearings. President Toxic didn't look so bad standing next to Hillary in part because Bill Clinton was always in the picture. President Toxic standing next to Joe Biden is just a very different thing. This is especially an area where I think voters are quite capable of figuring it out for themselves. It's not about complicated or obscure policy. It's about what kind of people Americans want leading them. Simply by being a devout lifelong Catholic, Biden brings a whole different slant to this. He's been on the national scene pretty much just as long as Roe v. Wade. Go back to the 1970's or 1980's in particular and he said and did plenty that sounds like undermining Roe v. Wade. Maybe President Toxic will try to use that against him. But it undermines the idea that Biden is a radical. Mostly I think it will be easy and natural for Biden to look like a devout man of faith who over time has developed a strong conviction about a woman's right to chose. President Toxic is the opposite. He's not a man of faith, and he used to be in favor of abortion. Not only is Trump on the wrong side of this issue. It goes back to the basic idea that he has no principles, other than empowering and enriching himself. My guess is that neither man can pretend to be someone he is not. Simply by being who they are, Biden wins this debate. People don't want the seat filled now. And they don't want it filled by someone who will either overturn Roe v. Wade, or substantially weaken it. If anyone in America can say, "The dogma lives loudly in me, too, and I'm for a woman's right to choose," it's Joe Biden. That's a good place for Democrats to be. As the poll posted below shows, 56 % of Catholics think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. As does a majority of every religious affiliation except White evangelical Protestants. Public Opinion on Abortion Views on abortion, 1995-2019 That's a very handy summary of where various segments of the US population have been on abortion, and are today. The only thing that surprised me is that there's very little difference in views on abortion between men and woman. So maybe Republicans are thinking this could help them with center-right women who are drifting away from the party. And in some cases, I'm sure it will. That said, 60 % of women and 61 % of men think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. As that first chart in Pew's research shows, that's the highest it's ever been. Those are bad numbers for Republicans. As are these: 75 % of conservative/moderate Democrats think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Meanwhile, 57 % of liberal/Republicans think the same. That Pew study doesn't tell us what percentage of Americans are in each group. But the number of anti-abortion Democrats who could tilt to President Toxic are probably way smaller than the number of pro-choice Republicans who could tilt to Biden. Not surprisingly, the young - who are least likely to vote and most likely to become pregnant - are most in favor of abortion being legal all or most of the time, 70 to 29. Right out of the gate, ACB is on the wrong side of more than 2/3rd of 18 to 29 year olds. That can't hurt Democrats in terms of turnout. The thing I find scary is that right now Rasmussen Polls says President Toxic has a + 4 (52/48) approval rating. That's compared to a - 8 % (45/53) RCP average net disapproval for President, and an outlier - 14 % disapproval for him in one CNBC polls. So there's an almost 20 % margin between the best and worst polls for Trump. (As an aside, this morning Willie Geist on Morning Joe read part of a long ranting tweet by Trump about polls. Geist ended by saying, "And the President's long tweet ends by saying something .......... something ................ Rasmussen. Joe Scarborough just laughed.) In the last few election cycles, the poll averages were very close to the final results, including the 2016 Presidential race and the 2016 and 2018 House Congressional vote. So odds are the averages are right. And as of today Biden would win. I was reading this long and dry academic analysis of which prediction models (not polls) got it right in 2016. Allan Lichtman was one of the few. In the report, pollster John Zogby was quoted as saying something like this in Fall 2016: "I can't tell you who is going to win the election. If you tell me who is going to vote, I can tell you." He gave a range for turnout and said if it's "x" Clinton will probably win and if it's "y" Trump will probably win. As it turned out Democratic turnout was flat and Republican turnout was up 2 million in 2016. My own guess is that the revolt of Whites without college degrees in the Rust Belt states had way more to do with that than abortion. The crumbling of the Blue Wall in the Rust Belt pretty much screams that. My guess is also that the Justice Rapist fiasco in 2018 helped Democrats a lot more than it hurt them - first and foremost simply by driving up Democratic turnout. The smart people in the room are saying there's no way to predict how this will turn out. I agree. But the polls are flashing lots of red warning signs for Republicans. And they seem to be listening to them about as well as they are listening to the American people.

Poll: 57 percent say election winner should fill Ginsburg's seat Republicans thus far have not been deterred in their effort to reshape the ideological balance of the Supreme Court. I'm hardly objective. But I have a feeling this is going to work out real bad for Republicans. They knew the momentum was NOT on their side. So maybe this is a political Hail Mary pass. Maybe they think it will help them, like they think it did in 2018. Except, it hurt them in 2018. As I said, they may have taken out McCaskill and Donnelly. But it may have won Democrats Arizona and Nevada. And as Sen. Tester pointed out in that quote a few posts up, most of the vulnerable seats in 2018 were Democrats. In 2012 Obama did help drag every vulnerable Senate Democrat over the line. So gaining a House majority and losing "only" two Senate seats was not really a loss. This time it is the Republicans who are all the vulnerable ones, except for Doug Jones. McCaskill herself said on MSNBC that now it is all Republicans that are in the position she was in in 2018. One fundamental aspect of the 2018 fight was ignorance. I will die still enraged about what I view as the Justice Rapist fiasco. That said, if I were on a jury, I would never have convicted Kavanaugh. How could anyone? The defining thing was you had two credible people but no fully credible evidence. Absent that, it forced everyone to come down on two sides of the culture war. There was no middle ground. President Toxic made it radioactive by being the poster child for how to portray an alleged female victim as a ditzy shrew who just wants to castrate men, with some billionaire Jew like George Soros backing her. There's another thing about 2018 that may be worth mentioning. At the time, I recall reading that right after the floor vote, Chuck Grassley left the Senate floor and went into a cloak room and started crying. I've read his full final committee report, and I'll also die feeling like it was a shoddy cover up. It brushed known facts under the rug and adamantly refused to look for any other facts that might not fit President Toxic's narrative. But if what I read is true, I have to assume Grassley's tears were genuine. I would guess the driver was relief. I'd also guess Grassley felt justice was served. I don't view him as an "I just don't give a shit" guy like McConnell is. My point is that I've read stories about how that whole experience "radicalized" Republicans. It's very hard for me to be objective about that, because it also radicalized me. Then again, that's what President Toxic has done. He took every significant rift in America and turned them all into a Grand Canyon. I'm not sure that the Republicans are being very clear-eyed right now. They did not "win" in 2018. They may be surprised what happens in 2020. However this plays out, this isn't about ignorance. More the opposite. The Republicans know very well that the majority of Americans don't want them to do what they are about to do. That poll above seems like an even wider margin than the first snap polls. Biden's RCP average right now is about 50/43, a seven point margin. Voters are against filling the seat now 57/38, a 19 point margin, at least in this poll. So as this plays out it seems like Biden has room to grow, and President Toxic has room to shrink. Wow. The incredible shrinking asshole. Sounds great for a porn movie. But this is a horror story. That's just based on the idea that the Republicans are not listening. Add all the stuff about overturning Roe v. Wade, repealing Obamacare, letting people with pre-existing conditions suffer, making it still harder for everyone but Trump cult members to vote, and it doesn't look very pretty to me. The Republicans are counting on the hearings being a "circus". They may simply be a daily reminder that Republicans are 1000 % better at being cruel than they are at listening. We'll see. In addition, they will potentially be a daily reminder that President Toxic's sole reason for existence is to tear America apart unnecessarily, and then go directly to hell. I read some article I won't post about Democratic Senate candidates like Kelly and Cunnigham that just made me laugh my ass off. They are all saying that of course they are against court packing. So if the idea was that this kills Democrats in swing states, good luck with that, Rich Mitch. McSally was actually quoted as saying that Kelly is another radical Democrat and he's lying about court packing. She sounded desperate to me. At least she got the "l" in lying right. This is about listening. She was on the wrong side of this issue in 2018. Now she's on the wrong side again. She lost in 2018. And what makes 2020 different? She's still a sorry excuse for a Senator who listens to voters. I decided to add Jaime Harrison to my list of donations. South Carolina is a long shot. And in red states I have to assume this will help Republicans like The Divine Miss Graham. If this is 57/38 nationally, that probably means voters in South Carolina are a toss up on whether they should fill the seat now. Which is exactly what the Harrison/Graham horse race polls show. A tie. So if Graham's committee just ignores voters and forces this through, I would not be so sure. Harrison is using this brilliantly to tie it back to the ACA and Graham's original sin of giving a shit only about himself - and the racist who he thought was a racist in 2016 but now thinks is a great golf buddy. I made a math error above about possible Constitutional amendments that everyone may have caught, anyway. Having each President appoint two justices with 16 year terms fits with an 8 justice court. I meant to say 18 year terms, since that would be a nine justice court. There would still be premature vacancies from retirements or heart attacks. But that could be figured out if a majority agreed we want a bipartisan court and we want people to serve for 18 years, not try not to die while serving. That poll above notes that voters are against "increasing the size of the nation's court" 54 to 32. It confirms what I think we already knew. "Court packing", defined as such, would be political suicide for Democrats. After the election, I think it's a great debate. The 1 in 3 or so voters who like the idea, no doubt mostly Democrats, can be loud about it. What I thought about after posting above is that if Democrats do anything, it should be to put Merrick Garland on the bench as a temporary 10th member, hearkening back to what Republicans did a few times in the 19th century with Lincoln and Johnson. To me the wise position for Democrats, like I said above, is to fight for a bipartisan or nonpartisan 9 Justice Court that is appointed fairly. Perhaps by adding an amendment to The Constitution. That's not inconsistent with saying that McConnell did lots of things that were wrong and divisive. And that what happened in 2016 was just wrong. On a partisan level, it was a wrong to Democrats. On a personal level, it was a wrong to Garland. The majority of Americans felt in 2016 that he should be seated. He's a center-left or "moderate" unifier. And the debate around seating him, and the act of seating him, would send a very clear signal that we don't want a conservative SCOTUS to veer hard right. I think that's a good debate to have.

All I can say is I'm glad I'm not the only verbose guy around here. I mean, Schmidt could have just said, "Don't believe a word Donald Trump says." Thankfully, there are plenty of Republicans like Schmidt and his former boss who are decent, and stand up for what's right.

Or maybe not. I think it's better to be alarmed. So let's just assume that he won't be willing to lose and November is going to be a nightmare. I'd rather be safe than sorry. The thing that is weird about this is that his rhetoric may drive his base into a frenzy, so they walk through the fires of hell to vote. But they were going to do that anyway. The roughly 40 % of Republicans who say they are "party" Republicans rather than "Trump Republicans" are probably turned off by this rhetoric. I also would guess Independents are turned off by rhetoric that sounds like the US is a banana republic. I can't be objective about what Democrats might do, because I'm very passionate about this stuff. But this just seems like more reason that Millennials who are skeptical at best about Biden will go vote. Today Bernie used this as an opportunity to urge young people to vote. Good for him! So, yeah. Maybe the best explanation is that President Toxic is just real fucking stupid. One thing I sure don't believe is that President Toxic is a genius. Exhibit A that he has brains is what happened in 2016. But that could be just as much luck. A broken clock is right twice a day. Lichtman's model of why Presidents win and lose changed my thinking a little about 2016. In September 2016 Lichtman said that this is basically the Republican's election to lose. He also said Trump is such an abnormal and bad candidate that he may lose it. Even though, based on his so far 100 % accurate model, any generic Republican should win. That is a way to think about 2016. Not that he won because he's President Toxic. But that he almost lost (by 80,000 votes) because he's toxic. Here's what Lichtman said, verbatim, in Sept. 2016: Morning Joe was on a fine rant this morning about President Toxic's banana republic rhetoric about not being willing to state he would transfer power peacefully. Joe had a different reading of the subtext. He said he thinks President Toxic knows he is going to lose. They put a few of the latest polls up showing Trump 10 points behind Biden nationally. I tend to agree with Morning Joe's take on it. He mentioned that no Republican other than President Toxic - like all the Republican Senate candidates in tight races - are going along for the ride on the rhetoric about mailed ballots being vote fraud. Just today Mitch McConnell essentially disavowed Trump and said there will be an orderly transition of power. So President Toxic is off on his own on that. Why am I 100 % not surprised? So Theory A for me is that he's laying the groundwork for the loss he expects. He'll say he really won, but the election was rigged with all those mail in ballots. It sounds like the basis for a post-2020 TV show on Fox. Or a 2024 comeback. Or maybe a 2024 Don, Jr. run. Or God knows what else? We should probably assume Plan B is to get the SCOTUS to turn the US into a banana republic. But that may be be a little bit above the pay grade of a moron like President Toxic to pull off.

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.