Slotkin v. Identity Politics

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. Our next book will discuss the extraordinary fight between an elderly white ex-president and a younger Black/Asian woman. 

Marc Rod at Jewish Insider:

Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said Wednesday that the Democratic Party needs to abandon “identity politics” to succeed in the future, and discussed her strategy to appeal to both Jewish and Muslim voters in Michigan on a webinar with the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

“I feel very strongly that identity politics — we need to have it go the way of the dodo,” Slotkin said on the webinar. “The idea that you can say ‘this group, because of their race or religion or ethnicity, is going to do this predictable voting behavior’ is not right. Coalitions are changing. Voters are changing.”

Slotkin said that she experienced this personally on her campaign, giving an example of an event with a group of Pakistani-American doctors she assumed would be reliable voters for Vice President Kamala Harris, but were actually all voting for Trump. She said the Democratic Party has also made mistaken assumptions about Latino and African American voters.

“You’ve got to appeal to people’s core issues regardless of their historical voting patterns, and you can’t get lazy,” Slotkin said. “And I think Donald Trump was not lazy.”

She described pocketbook issues as the key question in the race, and said her campaign had tackled the issue head-on. Voters, she said, were “confused” about what Democrats’ priorities were, especially at the presidential level, following President Joe Biden’s departure from the race.

Immigration, Politics, and Wages

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the politics of immigration, as will our book on the 2024 election.

David Leonhardt at NYT:

The scale of recent immigration helps explain why the issue has played a central role in American politics over the past few years.

Mayors and governors, both Democratic and Republican, have complained about the strain on local government. In Chicago and elsewhere, residents have filled public meetings to make similar criticisms. In Denver, where tens of thousands of migrants have arrived, homeless people say that shelter spots are harder to find. In Queens, residents say that an influx of street vendors has created chaos in some neighborhoods.

Some of the biggest effects have occurred in South Texas, and Mr. Trump made big electoral gains there. Eight years ago, he won less than 30 percent of the vote in a strip of six counties along the Rio Grande. This year, he won all six counties.

Elsewhere, Democrats who managed to outpace Vice President Kamala Harris and win tough congressional races — including in Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New York and Wisconsin — frequently criticized Mr. Biden’s border policies. Polls suggest that the immigration surge was Ms. Harris’s second biggest vulnerability, after only the economy.

Voters expressed particular frustration with the high recent levels of illegal immigration. Of the roughly eight million net new migrants who entered the U.S. during the Biden presidency, about five million did so without legal authorization, according to Goldman Sachs.

Some Republican politicians, including Mr. Trump, have spread falsehoods about recent immigrants, claiming that they have caused a crime wave. In truth, immigrants have historically committed crime at lower rates than native-born Americans, and crime fell nationwide over the past few years as immigration levels spiked.

Similarly, academic research suggests that the immigrants of recent decades, who have come primarily from Asia and Latin America, are climbing the economic ladder and assimilating into American society. Their children and grandchildren have made progress at a pace similar to that of the predominantly European immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

But high levels of immigration do have downsides, including the pressure on social services and increased competition for jobs. The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that wage growth for Americans who did not attend college will be lower than it otherwise would have been for the next few years because of the recent surge. On the flip side, higher immigration can reduce the cost of services and help Americans, many with higher incomes, who do not compete for jobs with immigrants

Bernard Yaros Jr., a lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, a research firm, described the recent increases as “something that we really haven’t seen in recent memory.” Mr. Yaros said that they had “helped cool wage growth.”

More on State Legislative Results

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Paul Demko and Liz Crampton at Politico:

Republicans controlled 55 percent of the 7,000-plus state legislative seats going into Election Day, and they’re poised to hold almost exactly that — 55.25 percent — when legislatures gavel in next year. That’s a shift of only about 50 seats – far below the average of 195 over the past two decades, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

...


Michigan Republicans flipped four state House seats, giving them a six-seat advantage. That will empower them to hit the brakes on the policy goals of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer – widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential contender -- and the Democratic-controlled state Senate.

Exact control of the Minnesota House remains up in the air — the results led to an even split, with each party controlling 67 seats. But Republicans are contesting the outcomes in two races, and seemingly have plausible arguments for why the results might be challenged. Whatever happens, the disappointing results for Democrats were a further blow to Gov. Tim Walz, who enjoyed a stratospheric rise over the summer to become the (doomed) vice presidential nominee.

Republicans also made big gains in some Northeastern states. In New Hampshire, for example, they expanded majorities in both chambers, picking up two seats in the 24-member Senate and 25 seats in the chaotic 400-member House (although there were 11 vacancies heading into Election Day).

Perhaps the most surprising gains for Republicans came in deep-blue Vermont, which accounted for close to half of all GOP state legislative gains across the nation. Republicans gained 28 seats across both chambers, significantly eroding Democratic majorities and strengthening the hand of popular GOP Gov. Phil Scott, who was elected to a fifth term by a landslide margin and campaigned heavily on behalf of Republicans in the state legislature.

For Democrats, the party’s biggest victory was arguably not winning a chamber but rather holding the Pennsylvania state House — an accomplishment that speaks to the bruising night Democrats in state legislatures faced throughout the country. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro will continue to do business with a divided legislature: Democrats control the House and Republicans manage the Senate.

Democrats are also celebrating picking up 14 seats in Wisconsin, thanks to new maps that give them hope they’ll be able to flip the legislature in the near future. New maps in Montana also helped Democrats gain nine seats in the state House and two seats in the state Senate, taking away Republicans’ supermajority.

And Democrats broke the GOP’s supermajority in the North Carolina state Assembly, taking away Republican power to override the governor’s vetoes. That will spare Democratic Governor-elect Josh Stein from the treatment received by his predecessor, Roy Cooper: Republicans overturned all 11 of Cooper’s vetoes in his final year in office.

Yet those modest successes were tempered by disappointments elsewhere. Before the election, Democrats were optimistic about their chances in purple states like Arizona, where Democrats believed this cycle was their best shot at flipping the Legislature in years. But Democrats ended up losing seats in both chambers in the state.

Another disappointment for Democrats was Idaho, where the party bragged about recruiting a candidate to run in every district for the first time in at least 30 years, believing they had an opportunity to bring over voters alienated by the rightward turn of the GOP. Instead, they lost seats in both chambers, and now will control just 15 out of 105 legislative seats

Uncontested Elections

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Brianna Ryan at Ballotpedia:

Sixty-five percent of more than 40,000 elections across the country on Nov. 5, 2024, were uncontested, meaning that the sole candidates on the ballot were virtually guaranteed to win each election.

In five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, and Michigan—more than 75% of elections were uncontested. Iowa topped the list: of the 1,902 elections held there, 1,614 (85%) were uncontested. Conversely, the five states with the lowest uncontested rate were New Jersey (0%), New Hampshire (11%), Virginia (19%), Connecticut (23%), and Utah (26%).

The map below shows the percentage of uncontested elections by state out of the 40,646 elections we covered on Nov. 5. Of those, 26,218—or 65%—were uncontested.

Congressional and state elections made up 15% of the roughly 40,000 elections covered. Thirty-one percent of those elections were uncontested.

That leaves local elections as the largest group of elections on a given major election day and the level of government with the highest percentage of uncontested elections.

For several office types—including district and city attorneys, who prosecute crimes, and clerks and auditors, who often run elections—more than 90% of elections were uncontested.

Overall, on Nov. 5, a majority of elections were uncontested across every type of local office we covered, except those for boards of regents (46% uncontested), fire boards (46%), and school boards (45%).

Same-Day Registration Flipped a Seat

 

Merced County, CA - Precinct 27101 (UC-Merced)#CA13

TOTAL
Adam Gray (D): 396 (87%)
John Duarte (R-Inc): 59 (13%)

Gray +337

SAME-DAY REGISTRATION

Adam Gray (D) 267 (85%)
John Duarte (R-Inc) 47 (15%)

Gray +220

Final margin: Gray +187 pic.twitter.com/PIK5LBgNp2

— Rob Pyers (@rpyers) December 7, 2024

Trump Wants to Jail the J6 Committee

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Our next book looks at the return of Donald Trump.

He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.

Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:

Trump sat for an exclusive interview that aired on Sunday morning’s edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, during which Trump lashed out at the members of the committee that investigated the January 6 riot and the circumstances surrounding it. Trump has nominated staunch loyalists Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to lead the Department of Justice and the FBI, respectively.

After Trump repeatedly said they should “all go to jail,” Welker asked him “Are you going to direct” his Justice Department to move against his opponents, and even as he denied he would Trump said “they’ll have to” look into it:

KRISTEN WELKER: We’re going to —

PRES.-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: For what they did –

KRISTEN WELKER: Yeah –

PRES.-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: – honestly, they should go to jail.

KRISTEN WELKER: So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?

PRES.-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: For what they did –

KRISTEN WELKER: Everyone on the committee you think –

PRES.-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: I think everybody –

KRISTEN WELKER: – should go to jail?

PRES.-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: – on the — anybody that voted in favor –

KRISTEN WELKER: Are you going to direct your FBI director –

PRES.-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: No.

KRISTEN WELKER: – and your attorney general to send them to jail?

PRES.-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: No, not at all. I think that they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill.

Watch above via NBC’s Meet the Press.

Gabbard Is Dangerous

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book is about the 2024 election. The consequences of that election are coming into view.  Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's pick for DNI, is a clear and present danger to national security.

Tim Snyder on Tulsi Gabbard:

In June 2015, as a congresswoman from Hawai'i, Gabbard visited Syria. During her stay, she was introduced to girls who had been burned from head to toe by a regime air strike. Her reaction to the situation, according to her translator, was to try to persuade the girls that they had been injured not by Syrian forces, but by the resistance. But this was impossible. Only Syria (at the time of her visit) and Russia (beginning weeks later) were flying planes and dropping bombs.

Either Gabbard was catastrophically uninformed about the most basic elements of the theater of war she was visiting, or she was consciously spreading disinformation. Those are the two possibilities. The first is disqualifying; the second is worse.

And if she was spreading disinformation consciously, she was also doing so with a pathological ruthlessness. Anyone who would lie to the child victims of an air strike to their burned faces would lie to anyone about anything. In January 2017, she visited Syria again, this time to speak to Assad. She began thereafter to deny that his regime had used chemical weapons on its own people. That was a very big lie.

... 

As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would do enormous harm, unwillingly or willingly. She is not just completely unqualified for this role -- she is anti-qualified. She is just the sort of person enemies of the American republic would want in this job. This is not a hypothetical -- Gabbard is the specific person that actual enemies of the United States do want in the job. The Russian media refers to Tulsi Gabbard as a "Russian agent" and as "girlfriend," with good reason.

Gabbard is worse than unfit. Her public record is as a disinformer and apologist for mass murderers. And there is nothing on the other side of the ledger. There are no positive qualifications. (Yes, she wrote a bestselling book. It became a bestseller because she scammed her followers into donating to a PAC which bought the book in bulk.)