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Divided We Stand

Divided We Stand
New book about the 2020 election.

Monday, October 31, 2022

Lying About the Pelosi Attack

Our book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellioncoups, and secession. 

A man allegedly broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home  and bashed her husband with a hammer

 Devlin Barrett, Eugene Scott and Holly Bailey at WP:

The innuendo about the attack that billionaire Elon Musk and right-wing personalities spread on social media this past weekend showed no signs of abating Monday, as elected officials and other conservatives perpetuated wild theories.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) retweeted a thread from far-right activist Matt Walsh challenging the notion that the alleged assailant was a militant right-winger, despite his blog in which he appears to have been deeply drawn into election falsehoods and political conspiracy theories.

Cruz quoted the thread dismissing DePape as “a hippie nudist from Berkeley” with one word: “truth.”

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) tweeted and deleted a post Sunday that pushed a conspiracy theory about the violent attack and included a photo of Nancy Pelosi.

During a campaign event Monday, Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor who opposes most forms of gun control, was talking about how Democrats demand to protect children in schools.

“Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C., but apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection,” Lake said, as some in the crowd and the man interviewing her laughed.


Sunday, October 30, 2022

Demonizing Pelosi

 Our book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellioncoups, and secession. 


Ashley Parker, Hannah Allam and Marianna Sotomayor at WP:
In 2010, Republicans launched a “Fire Pelosi” project — complete with a bus tour, a #FIREPELOSI hashtag and images of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) engulfed in Hades-style flames — devoted to retaking the House and demoting Pelosi from her perch as speaker.

Eleven years later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joked that if he becomes the next leader of the House, it will be hard not to hit Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel.

And this year, Pelosi — whom Republicans have long demonized as the face of progressive policies and who was a target of rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — emerged as the top member of Congress maligned in political ads, with Republicans spending nearly $40 million on ads that mention Pelosi in the final stretch of the campaign, according to AdImpact, which tracks television and digital ad spending.

Other public figures, across the spectrum, have faced threats and violence.

But the threats against Pelosi have often been particularly ferocious and date back more than a decade, when Republicans worked to make her one of the faces of former president Barack Obama’s health-care law.

More recently, CNN reported that in 2018 and 2019, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — who was elected to Congress in 2020 and quickly became known for her conspiracy theory-laden views — repeatedly expressed support for executing prominent Democratic politicians, including Pelosi.
Greene liked a Facebook comment that said “a bullet to the head would be quicker” as a way of removing Pelosi as speaker, CNN found. And in a video of a speech Greene gave promoting a 2019 petition she’d launched to impeach Pelosi for “crimes of treason,” Greene calls Pelosi “a traitor to our country” and says the speaker could be executed for treason.

“It’s a crime punishable by death — is what treason is,” Greene says in the video, according to CNN. “Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.”


;

Even though the speaker has angered the Beijing regime by supporting Taiwan...



 

Saturday, October 29, 2022

The Pelosi Attack, QAnon, and Trump

Our book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellioncoups, and secession. 

Michael Biesecker and Bernard Condon  at AP:
The man accused of breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home and severely beating her husband with a hammer appears to have made racist and often rambling posts online, including some that questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.


David DePape, 42, grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, before leaving about 20 years ago to follow an older girlfriend to San Francisco. A street address listed for DePape in the Bay Area college town of Berkeley led to a post office box at a UPS Store.

...

A pair of web blogs posted in recent months online under the name David DePape contained rants about technology, aliens, communists, religious minorities, transexuals and global elites.

An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q,” displayed a scatological collection of memes that included photos of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and made reference to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that espouses the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals.


 

WWG1WGA means "Where We Go One, We Go All"  -  the QAnon slogan. Trump has quoted it before: His embrace of QAnon has become more explicit in recent months.

Friday, October 28, 2022

Perceptions of Crime


Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses issues such as crime.  In the 2020 congressional elections, Republicans gained seats because some prominent progressives talked about "defunding the police."


Megan Brenan at Gallup:

Americans are more likely now than at any time over the past five decades to say there is more crime in their local area than there was a year ago. The 56% of U.S. adults who report an increase in crime where they live marks a five-percentage-point uptick since last year and is the highest by two points in Gallup's trend dating back to 1972.

Public perceptions of an increase in crime at the national level have also edged up since last year, as 78% say there is now more crime in the U.S. This is tied with the 2020 measure. The record high was 89% in 1992, when crime rates soared in the U.S.


 

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Fetterman's Impaired Debate Performance

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

Ryan Lizza and Eugene Daniels at Politico:
The conventional wisdom over the summer was that Oz was a deeply flawed candidate who couldn’t win, but the race is a toss-up. Republicans just decided to pour an additional $6 million into Pennsylvania to help Oz. “We believe if we win Pennsylvania, we win the majority,” STEVEN LAW, who runs the most important Senate GOP super PAC, told POLITICO Tuesday.

And then Fetterman failed to meet even the low expectations his own campaign set for him Monday in a memo that predicted “awkward pauses, missing some words, and mushing other words together” as well as “temporary miscommunications at times.”

...
It’s obvious that Rep. DAN CRENSHAW is sightless in one eye or that Sen. TAMMY DUCKWORTH lost her legs. Nobody questions whether those injuries have an impact on their ability to serve in Congress.

But Fetterman’s disability is different. It prevents him from performing adequately in a candidate ritual — the campaign debate — that has long been associated, correctly or not, with electability and effectiveness in Congress. The plain fact is that Fetterman was not capable of debating Oz. He could have skipped the debate, as some Democrats suggested he should have after it was over, but the Fetterman campaign gambled that the media would educate voters about his auditory issues and then referee any attacks on him with charges of ableism.
...

BUT, BUT, BUT — There are two well-worn cliches about debates: (1) They are rarely won but can sometimes be lost. (2) They are decided by the coverage in subsequent days rather than on debate night itself.

Fetterman clearly lost last night. ”[T]he biggest issue was John Fetterman's health and his ability to comprehend speech, and to then speak coherently on the issues of the day," said LELAND VITTERT of NewsNation, which sponsored the debate, in what was typical of the immediate coverage.

But the Fetterman campaign is betting that Oz will lose the all-important post-debate conversation. Fetterman has a potent weapon: Oz’s statement that abortion should be left up to “women, doctors, local political leaders.”


Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Trump and Alaska

 Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the partiesThe state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.    

Monday, October 24, 2022

Ultimate Election Denial

 Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the partiesThe state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.   

Daniel Dale at CNN:
Jim Marchant, the Republican candidate for Nevada elections chief, has repeatedly promoted false conspiracy theories about elections in his closely contested state.

Now, with the November 8 midterms fast approaching, Marchant is going further – pushing a preposterous claim that prominent congressional Democrats in California and New York did not legitimately win reelection, though they actually won fair and square by overwhelming margins.

Marchant is one of at least 11 Republican candidates for state secretary of state in 2022 who have rejected, questioned or tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He is the first, though, to run a campaign ad rejecting the legitimacy of the dominant victories earned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff of California and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York.

Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political science professor who studies political misinformation and co-organizes an initiative that monitors the state of democracy in the US, tweeted that the Marchant ad is “terrifying.” Nyhan explained in a message to CNN that he finds it “chilling” that a secretary of state candidate is running an ad “questioning the legitimacy of Democrats winning *any* elections.” He said Marchant “could easily throw the 2024 election into chaos.”

Sunday, October 23, 2022

Darkness in October

 Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the partiesThe state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.   

David French at The Dispatch:
Whereas the far left sees America as irredeemably racist, the far right sees America as irredeemably woke. All of the institutions of American life are “captured” by the left—from the academy, to corporate America, to the military, to pop culture. Even our churches and religious schools are infected by wokeism. Conservatives have conserved nothing.
Here’s a version of that argument by John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist:
After all, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving? In just my lifetime, they have lost much: marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law.
Here’s Michael Anton, the author of 2016’s notorious Flight 93 essay, writing in American Greatness:

Have we conserved [the American regime]? Does it function as it was designed to do? As a political scientist, and as a historian of sorts before that, I find the question laughable. If any of you want to make the case that we still live in the founders’ regime, go ahead.
...
The radical left seethes with fury at the America that was and believes that the America that is cannot escape its horrific past, at least not without revolutionary change. The radical right longs for the America that was, loathes the America that is, and believes the America that will be is doomed, at least not without revolutionary change.

This is the postliberal call. This is where nationalist conservatives want to wield power to “reward friends and punish enemies.” This is where Davidson says, “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life—and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.”

That means, in his words, “a dramatic expansion of the criminal code.” This means draconian restrictions on free speech and on parents’ rights. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Again, here’s Davidson:

To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.
Anton, for his part, calls for rediscovering “the right of revolution”:

I maintain it as axiomatic that you can’t have natural rights without a right of revolution, just as you can’t have the founding without an actual revolution, and since you can’t have the regime of the founders without natural rights, you can’t have the founding principles or the founders’ regime without a right of revolution.

Saturday, October 22, 2022

Trump's Secrets


Our most recent book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and Trump's disregard for law.

Destruction of government documents is a crime.  So is the retaining classified material.

 Devlin Barrett at WP:

Some of the classified documents recovered by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club included highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China, according to people familiar with the matter. If shared with others, the people said, such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world.

At least one of the documents seized by the FBI describes Iran’s missile program, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Other documents described highly sensitive intelligence work aimed at China, they said.


Friday, October 21, 2022

Eroding Confidence and Trust

 Our book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the partiesThe state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.  

Trump has succeeded in sowing distrust among his followers

Gary Fields and Christina A. Cassidy at AP:
Only about half of Americans have high confidence that votes in the upcoming midterm elections will be counted accurately, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, though that’s an improvement from about 4 in 10 saying that just before the 2020 presidential election. Just 9% of U.S. adults think democracy is working “extremely” or “very well,” while 52% say it’s not working well.

In a reversal from two years ago, Republicans are now more likely than Democrats to say democracy is not working well. This year, 68% of Republicans feel this way compared with 32% two years ago. The share of Democrats with a sour outlook on how democracy is functioning in the U.S. dropped from 63% to 40%.

...

The poll shows 47% of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that the votes in the 2022 midterm elections will be counted accurately. Confidence is highest among Democrats, 74% of whom say they’re highly confident. On the Republican side, confidence in elections is decidedly mixed: 25% have high confidence, 30% have moderate confidence and 45% have little to no confidence.

Megan Brenan at Gallup:

Americans' trust in the media remains sharply polarized along partisan lines, with 70% of Democrats, 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents saying they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence.

There has been a consistent double-digit gap in trust between Democrats and Republicans since 2001, and that gap has ranged from 54 to 63 percentage points since 2017.

 

Thursday, October 20, 2022

Education Polarization

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.

Eric Levitz at MSN:
In political-science parlance, the collapse of the New Deal–era alignment — in which voters’ income levels strongly predicted their partisan preference — is often referred to as “class dealignment.” The increasing tendency for politics to divide voters along educational lines, meanwhile, is known as “education polarization.”

There are worse things for a political coalition to be than affluent or educated. Professionals vote and donate at higher rates than blue-collar workers. But college graduates also comprise a minority of the electorate — and an underrepresented minority at that. America’s electoral institutions all give disproportionate influence to parts of the country with low levels of educational attainment. And this is especially true of the Senate. Therefore, if the coalitional trends of the past half-century continue unabated — and Democrats keep gaining college-educated votes at the expense of working-class ones — the party will find itself locked out of federal power. Put differently, such a development would put an increasingly authoritarian GOP on the glide path to political dominance.

And unless education polarization is substantially reversed, progressives are likely to continue seeing their reform ambitions pared back sharply by Congress’s upper chamber, even when Democrats manage to control it.

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

McCarthy to Senior Citizens: Drop Dead

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the partiesThe state of the GOP is not good. Even as some polls indicate GOP gains, Kevin McCarthy is handing a big gift to Democrats.

Eugene Scott at WP:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said that if Republicans win control of the House the GOP will use raising the debt limit as leverage to force spending cuts — which could include cuts to Medicare and Social Security — and limit additional funding to Ukraine.

“You can’t just continue down the path to keep spending and adding to the debt,” the California Republican told Punchbowl News in a recent interview. “And if people want to make a debt ceiling [for a longer period of time], just like anything else, there comes a point in time where, okay, we’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior.”

“We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right,” he added. “And we should seriously sit together and [figure out] where can we eliminate some waste? Where can we make the economy grow stronger?”
Pressed on whether changes to the entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security were part of the debt ceiling discussions, McCarthy said he would not “predetermine” anything.

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Save Democracy? Meh!

 Our book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the partiesThe state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.  

Nick Corasaniti, Michael C. Bender, Ruth Igielnik and Kristen Bayrakdarian at NYT:
Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.

...

Seventy-one percent of Republicans said they would be comfortable voting for a candidate who thought that year’s election was stolen, as did 37 percent of independent voters and a notable 12 percent of Democrats.

Even among voters who think Mr. Biden won legitimately, 19 percent were comfortable casting a ballot for a candidate who believed the election was stolen. That number included 10 percent of Democrats, 22 percent of independents and 43 percent of Republicans who believed the 2020 election was fair.

Voters also signaled a bipartisan willingness to support a president who goes “outside of existing rules”: A third, including similar shares in both parties, said presidents should do what they think is best, even if it might flout the rules.

Twenty-six percent of voters said they had heard about “2000 Mules,” a widely debunked movie purporting to show that absentee ballots were “stuffed” in drop boxes to help Democrats in 2020. Of those who had heard about the film, 34 percent found it to be believable, and 45 percent said they did not know enough to say. Just 2 percent of Republicans who had heard about the movie found it not believable.

Only 4 percent of all voters said they found QAnon conspiracy theories, which make bizarre false claims about a satanic cult of Democrats, to be believable, but the vast majority of Republicans, 73 percent, said they did not know enough about the theories to say, rather than rejecting them outright.



Monday, October 17, 2022

Deniers

 Our book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the partiesThe state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.  

Karen Yourish et al. at NYT:

More than 370 people — a vast majority of Republicans running for these offices in November — have questioned and, at times, outright denied the results of the 2020 election despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, according to a monthslong New York Times investigation. These candidates represent a sentiment that is spreading in the Republican Party, rupturing a bedrock principle of democracy: that voters decide elections and candidates accept results.

This skepticism has stretched into political races in every state and is still frequently being raised as a campaign issue, The Times has found, nearly two years after Donald J. Trump was defeated. Hundreds of these candidates are favored to win their races.

Caroline Vakil at The Hill:

Data from the pro-Democracy nonprofit States United Action have shown several key findings: that a candidate that the nonprofit has categorized as an election denier will appear on the ballot for nearly half of the country’s secretary of state races. For attorney general races, that percentage stands at one-third. More than half of the gubernatorial races will also see an election denier on the ballot.


Sunday, October 16, 2022

Trump to Jewish Americans: Show Appreciation, Or Else!

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the partiesThe state of the GOP is not good. 

In 2016, Michael Wilner wrote in The Jerusalem Post:
Over the course of a months-long investigation of that relationship by The Jerusalem Post – resourcing court documents, media archives and original interviews with campaign aides, close personal confidantes, past lawyers, business partners and employees – both supporters and detractors of the Republican nominee agreed on one critical revelation: Trump seems to have something of an affirmative prejudice toward Jews.
They believe he considers Jews a group of rich, smart, successful and generally powerful deal makers – all traits which Trump himself aspires to, and has sought to emulate, while simultaneously touching on tropes described by historians of the topic as classically antisemitic.

“In some ways, Donald Trump and his relationship with the Jews is the latest chapter in a very long history of ambivalence and dichotomous relations,” Jonathan Sarna, author of American Judaism: A History, said in an interview. “The line between philosemitism and antisemitism is often a difficult one – the line is thin. It’s not bright red. Often you can find within the same person both tendencies, and Trump is a study in that.”

Saturday, October 15, 2022

The Politics of Affirmative Action

 As we note in Divided We Stand, the defeat of California's Proposition 16 was the most underreported political story of 2020.

John Ellis at WSJ:
What nobody realized was that the entire country had become increasingly hostile to the use of race in such decisions. A 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that 74% of Americans oppose the use of race in college admissions. Even more surprising, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 59% of blacks also opposed it. The same applied to both political parties, with 87% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats objecting.

But as the public attempted to slam the door shut on racial preferences, the universities were busy trying to open it wide. The stealthy end-runs around the law gave way to support for “equity”: the desire for racial proportionality in all things—never mind that the Supreme Court has held that quotas in college admissions are unlawful. Accordingly, many colleges have begun to abandon the use of test scores in applications.

In line with this hardening of campus attitudes, increasingly powerful diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies arose to achieve these aims. Consider The University of California, Berkeley, which now has a Division of Equity and Inclusion, a title that gives it a standing on campus equivalent to its Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. The university’s division has an array of highly paid managers. Eight have the title “director,” one of which is for “diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging,” and there are several assistant vice chancellors. Similar offices abound on campuses across the country, where they are major actors in promoting all manner of progressive causes, from social justice to critical race theory and anticapitalism.

Friday, October 14, 2022

Trump and J6

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.   

Thursday, October 13, 2022

Laxalt Family Values

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

Gabe Stern at Yahoo:
Less than a month before Election Day, 14 members of Nevada Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt’s family sent a letter endorsing his opponent, Democratic U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

“We staunchly believe that Catherine is well equipped with her own ‘Nevada grit’ — a quality that she will take forward in representation of our home state for six more years across the halls of Congress,” the letter states.

The letter, first obtained by The Nevada Independent, does not mention Laxalt by name.

Instead, it talks of Cortez Masto’s understanding of “the daily realities of dogged hard work” and mentions her experience in public education as well as her commitment to law enforcement.

The family members also wrote that Cortez Masto’s career demonstrates she is "an authentic advocate of Nevada.”

It marks the second time that some of Laxalt’s family has endorsed his opponent. During his unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2018, a dozen family members endorsed Democrat Steve Sisolak in an op-ed to the Reno Gazette-Journal. That letter more explicitly criticized Laxalt, saying he “leveraged and exploited” the family name throughout his campaign.

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Russian Stooge


Andrew Stanton at Newsweek:
During an interview on Real America's Voice, a right-wing network favorable to Trump, the former president criticized the Biden administration. He argued that their "rhetoric" in the months leading up to the Ukraine invasion contributed to Putin's decision.

"They actually taunted him, if you really look at it. Our country, and our so-called leadership, taunted Putin. I said, you know, they're almost forcing him to go in with what they're saying. The rhetoric was so dumb."


 

And just as Ukraine is winning...

Brett Samuels at The Hill:

With potentially hundreds of thousands of people dying, we must demand the immediate negotiation of the peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in World War III and there will be nothing left of our planet all because stupid people didn’t have a clue,” Trump told supporters Saturday at a rally in Arizona. “They really don’t understand … what they’re dealing with. The power of nuclear. They have no idea what they’re doing.”

Monday, October 10, 2022

Buckeye Scamster

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

David A. Fahrenthold at NYT:
J.D. Vance was not running for office. He said it irked him when people assumed that. Instead, in 2017, he said he had come back to Ohio to start a nonprofit organization.

Mr. Vance gave that organization a lofty name — Our Ohio Renewal — and an even loftier mission: to “make it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.” He said it would dispense with empty talk and get to work fighting Ohio’s toughest problems: opioids, joblessness and broken families.

“I actually care about solving some of these things,” Mr. Vance said.

Within two years, it had fizzled.

Mr. Vance’s nonprofit group raised only about $220,000, hired only a handful of staff members, shrank drastically in 2018 and died for good in 2021. It left only the faintest mark on the state it had been meant to change, leaving behind a pair of op-eds and two tweets. (Mr. Vance also started a sister charity, which paid for a psychiatrist to spend a year in a small-town Ohio clinic. Then it shuttered, too.)

Mr. Vance is now the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, running on a promise to tackle some of the same issues his defunct organization was supposed to have. On the campaign trail, he has said his group stalled because a key staff member was diagnosed with cancer.

...

During its brief life, Mr. Vance’s organization paid a political consultant who also advised Mr. Vance about entering the 2018 Senate race. It paid an assistant who helped schedule Mr. Vance’s political speeches. And it paid for a survey of “Ohio citizens” that several of the staff members said they had never seen.

The collapse of Mr. Vance’s nonprofit group was first reported last year in Insider. Now, Ohio Democrats use the group as an attack line. “J.D. Vance was in a position to really help people, but he only helped himself,” says an ad created by Mr. Vance’s opponent, Rep. Tim Ryan.


Sunday, October 9, 2022

Trumpworld October

Our book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the partiesThe state of the GOP is not good. 

And just as it is looking as if Ukraine might win the war outright...

And Gym Jordan's crack staff at House Judiciary:




 

Saturday, October 8, 2022

Problematic Candidate Update

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.  In a normal year, Republicans could be confident of regaining a majority in the Senate.  But in some places, they are running abnormal candidates.

Friday, October 7, 2022

Election Deniers Take Over GOP

 Our book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the partiesThe state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.  

Amy Gardner at WP:
A majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 299 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Candidates who have challenged or refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory — 53 percent of the 569 analyzed by The Post — are running in every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in three states nominated election deniers in all federal and statewide races The Post examined.

Although some are running in heavily Democratic areas and are expected to lose, most of the election deniers nominated are likely to win: Of the nearly 300 on the ballot, 173 are running for safely Republican seats. Another 52 will appear on the ballot in tightly contested races.
...

The Post has identified candidates as election deniers if they directly questioned Biden’s victory, opposed the counting of Biden’s electoral college votes, expressed support for a partisan post-election ballot review, signed on to lawsuits seeking to overturn the 2020 result, or attended or expressed support for the Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington that preceded the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Thursday, October 6, 2022

Walker Update

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