The Day After Super Tuesday

 Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun. The nomination phase has effectively ended.  After losing everywhere except DC and Vermont, Haley will drop out. 

At Politico, Zach Montellaro reports:

Former President Donald Trump paved the way for Mark Robinson.

Robinson, a candidate in North Carolina’s GOP primary for governor Tuesday, has done all the things that would normally make someone a toxic general election candidate: He’s called homosexuality “filth,” made antisemitic remarks about Hollywood controlling Black people and expressed retrograde views about women.

The presidential primary in MN had an unpleasant surprise for Biden:

But it was in Minnesota, which hasn’t gone for a Republican for president since Richard Nixon in 1972, where Biden saw a less surprising but more threatening setback. The “uncommitted” option on the ballot there had as big a night as it did in Michigan, winning 19 percent of the vote with 89 percent counted. The state’s politically significant Somali population, concentrated around the Twin Cities, rebuked Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

The Akin ploy worked in California:

Schiff may have ticked off liberals by elevating Republican Steve Garvey, but the gambit worked. Garvey easily beat out Democratic Rep. Katie Porter for the second spot in the general election — which means an almost-certain Schiff victory in the fall.

CA Dems may have avoided a top-two lockout:

In addition to Schiff successfully dragging Garvey into the general election, Democrats appeared to have avoided a lockout in one of the state’s most competitive congressional districts, in the Central Valley, though the race for the seat currently held by GOP Rep. David Valadao was still too close to call early Wednesday morning.

Broke State Republican Parties

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

Jim Geraghty at NRO:

On the menu today: The seemingly frozen-in-amber GOP presidential primary is getting most of the attention and headlines, but under the radar, in at least a quartet of key states, the state Republican parties are collapsing — going broke and devolving into infighting little fiefdoms. Even worse for the GOP, these aren’t just any states — Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota all rank as either key swing states or once-purple states that would be tantalizing targets in a good year. Meanwhile, the Georgia state Republican Party is spending a small fortune on the legal fees of those “alternate” Republican electors from the 2020 presidential election. If Republicans are disappointed with the results of the 2024 elections — for the fourth straight cycle, mind you — a key factor will be the replacement of competent, boring, regular state-party officials with quite exciting, blustering nutjobs who have little or no interest in the basics of successfully managing a state party or the basic blocking and tackling involved in helping GOP candidates win elections.

State Legislatures 2022

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

Liz Crampton at Politico:

Democrats took control of the Michigan legislature this week, handing the party full power over the state government for the first time in nearly 40 years as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer beat back a Republican challenger Tuesday night.

In Michigan and elsewhere, Democrats not only held onto governorships in battlegrounds like Wisconsin and Kansas but also outperformed expectations in many key statehouse races, delivering a blow to Republicans who have dominated many of the chambers for a decade or more.

Democrats flipped the Republican stronghold in the Minnesota Senate, notching a trifecta as Democratic Gov. Tim Walz won reelection. The unified government in St. Paul opens the door for Walz and his allies in the statehouse to reach a deal on how to spend a $12 billion budget surplus. The Legislature adjourned earlier this year after gridlock stalled spending negotiations.

Democrats are also threatening the Republican majorities in the Pennsylvania House and Senate. And while results in Arizona — another top target for Democrats — remain unclear, Republicans just hold narrow two-seat majorities in both the Arizona House and Senate.

Unforced Errors by Trump

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well underway.   It unfolds  as Coronavirus presents unprecedented challenges to public policy and the electoral process.   

During COVID, rallies mostly have to take place outdoors. In late October, therefore, attendees in many places have to wait for hours in cold weather. If a campaign is going to put supporters in that position, it must ensure their safety. 

 Tim Elfrink at WP:

By the time President Trump finished speaking to thousands of supporters at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield on Tuesday night and jetted away on Air Force One, the temperature had plunged to nearly freezing.

But as long lines of MAGA-clad attendees queued up for buses to take them to distant parking lots, it quickly became clear that something was wrong.

The buses, the huge crowd soon learned, couldn’t navigate the jammed airport roads. For hours, attendees — including many elderly Trump supporters — stood in the cold, as police scrambled to help those most at-risk get to warmth.

At least seven people were taken to hospitals, according to Omaha Scanner, which monitors official radio traffic. Police and fire authorities didn’t immediately return messages from The Washington Post early Wednesday and declined to provide reporters on the scene with precise numbers of how many needed treatment.

Under Nebraska's district system for choosing electors, the congressional district surrounding Omaha has one electoral vote.  By screwing up logistics, Team Trump may have thrown it away. 

Even without hypothermia, Trump rallies are dangerous.

Shawna Chen at Axios:

The Minnesota Department of Health has traced nearly two dozen coronavirus cases to three campaign events held last month, an official told Axios on Monday. Why it matters: The Trump campaign has come under repeated fire for being lax about mask requirements and not adhering to social distancing and other local guidelines at its events. Minnesota has also seen a surge in COVID-19 cases in recent weeks, with nearly 1,600 new COVID-19 cases reported on Monday, per MPR News. 

Paul LeBlanc at CNN:

President Donald Trump offered his latest appeal to suburban women Tuesday evening, promising to get their husbands "back to work" if he's reelected.

Claiming he was "saving suburbia" at a campaign rally in Lansing, Michigan, the President pitched himself as the candidate for suburban women voters because he's "getting your kids back to school" and "getting your husbands -- they want to get back to work. We're getting your husbands back to work."

While Trump focused on "husbands" during his speech in Michigan on Tuesday, the coronavirus pandemic has had a much larger effect on women in the work place.

The International Monetary Fund warned in July that the pandemic recession is hurting women more than men, and job losses during the economic downturn are happening in sectors of the economy where women are disproportionately represented. The annual Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org showed one in four women reporting they are considering downshifting their career or stepping out of the work place entirely, partly due to the demands the pandemic has placed placed on working mothers.

 

State Capitals, Polarization, and the Shutdown Conflict

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.   

Coronavirus presents unprecedented challenges to public policy and the electoral process. 

Trump’s ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ tweets incite insurrection. That’s illegal. https://t.co/uu42tfIeqJ

— David Laufman (@DavidLaufmanLaw) April 18, 2020

Christopher Cadelago at Politico

Republican legislators in multiple presidential battleground states are amping up pressure on Democratic governors to reopen their economies — clashes that are certain to shape the views of a critical slice of the electorate in November.

Democratic officials across Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota are resisting overtures to roll back public health closures: Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers just extended his state’s stay-at-home order despite legal threats from Republicans, and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf recently announced he will veto a GOP bill to expand which businesses are deemed too important to shutter.

The showdowns between emboldened Republican officials and Democratic governors are emerging as an undercard to the fall contest between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The GOP drumbeat comes as Democrats are seizing on Trump’s uneven handling of the virus to win the presidency and flip several statehouses.

Trump himself is stoking the angst on the right, urging in a Friday tweet to “LIBERATE” Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia. Those are among the states where protests of stay-at-home orders issued by Democrats are unfolding. But at the state level, the partisan standoffs are complicated by a tangle of Democratic directives that Republican lawmakers have struggled to unwind.

...
Minnesota is the last state in the country with a divided Legislature: Democrats won a majority in the state House two years ago and need just two seats to win the Senate.

Salvador Hernandez at Buzzfeed:

While thousands of demonstrators swarmed the Michigan State Capitol to protest the governor's stay-at-home order Wednesday — honking horns, waving flags, and bringing traffic to a halt — dozens of Facebook groups were already springing up to organize similar rallies across the country.

"Indiana Citizens Against Excessive Quarantine," "Operation Gridlock Tennessee," and other groups with similar names drew people calling an end to stay-at-home orders, measures that health officials say are essential to stopping the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Protests against the guidelines are being planned across the country. The Michigan Conservative Coalition, the same organization that planned the Lansing protest against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Wednesday, is helping organizers.

...
Organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund, the protest has drawn criticism over its links to Betsy DeVos's family.

"I think it's really inappropriate for a sitting member of the United States president's cabinet to be waging political attacks on any governor," Whitmer said, referring to the education secretary.

The Michigan Freedom Fund was founded by Greg McNeilly, a political adviser to the DeVos family, who has provided financial support to the organization.

...
Meanwhile, more groups organizing protests across the US continue to show up on Facebook. Some have garnered only a handful of supporters, while others have quickly built up hundreds of followers.

"Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine" has garnered more than 48,000 members, while "Minnesotans Against Excessive Quarantine" has more than 17,000.
Both groups have nearly identical descriptions...And while some groups are receiving guidance from Michigan about how to organize their own protests against stay-at-home orders, they too are passing the playbook to other states, urging them to replicate the demonstrations.

 A release from Notre Dame:

If you identify as blue in a red state or red in a blue state, you might not be complying well with advice given by your governor that is meant to keep you healthy during the coronavirus pandemic. Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Economics Kirsten Cornelson and her co-author Boriana Miloucheva of the University of Toronto found that in states with governors who won by close margins, compliance with stay-at-home orders and other health advice is lower among people with the opposite party affiliation.

The researchers surveyed about 1,000 individuals across 12 states using Amazon’s Mturk crowdsourcing platform, and resurveyed about 200 people they initially surveyed in 2019 about political polarization. Cornelson noted that they intentionally used data from states where elections were barely won by the leading party, so that they could compare the response among people in the same party, who lived in similar political environments.

Trump v. Somalia

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character and record of bigotry. The update -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. This past summer, he told several Democratic congresswomen to "go back" to their countries.

Allyson Chiu at WP: 

For roughly six minutes Thursday night, President Trump predictably singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) during his campaign rally in her home district of Minneapolis. As photos of Omar wearing a headscarf flashed across jumbo screens at the Target Center in the city, Trump ramped up his broadsides against the freshman lawmaker, slamming her as an “America-hating socialist” and a “disgrace.” But he didn’t stop there.

The president soon widened his attack to target Somali refugees in Minnesota, a group that includes Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in the East African country. He promised rally attendees, who booed loudly at the mention of the state’s Somali residents, that he would “give local communities a greater say in refugee policy and put in place enhanced vetting and responsible immigration controls.”

“As you know for many years leaders in Washington brought large numbers of refugees to your state from Somalia without considering the impact on schools and communities and taxpayers,” he said as some in the crowd jeered, adding, “You should be able to decide what is best for your own cities and for your own neighborhoods and that’s what you have the right to do right now, and believe me, no other president would be doing that.”

...
 In recent years, Trump also reportedly “raged” at former acting homeland security secretary Elaine Duke “asking why he could not ban refugees from ‘f------ Somalia,’” New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear wrote in their new book, “Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration.”

Random Moments on Twitter

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

 Harley Rouda

Harley Rouda is running against 'Putin's favorite congressman' who calls climate change a fraud pic.twitter.com/NycRQsIigC

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 18, 2018

Jason Lewis

After we reached out to GOP Rep. Jason Lewis’ campaign about the audio mocking women who were traumatized by unwanted touching/kissing, we got a letter threatening legal action if we used the audio. We are still embedding it in the article under fair use: https://t.co/UhLZggTdxq

— 💀andrew👻kaczynski🎃 (@KFILE) October 19, 2018

French Hill

Worth noting this ad comes from a group whose treasurer is a guy with no connection to French Hill's campaign who has a history of running provocative content just for attention and making money in the process https://t.co/Yg9qDusb60

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) October 18, 2018

Obamacare Problems Persist into February

The New York Times reports:

With the federal online insurance exchange running more smoothly than ever, the biggest laggards in fixing enrollment problems are now state-run exchanges in several states where the governors and legislative leaders have been among the strongest supporters of President Obama’s health care law.

Republicans have seized on the failures of homegrown exchanges in states like Maryland, Minnesota and Oregon — all plagued by technological problems that have kept customers unhappy and enrollment goals unmet — and promise to use the issue against Democratic candidates for governor and legislative seats this fall.

“People see incompetence when they look at this,” said Michael Short, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “Everyone that’s associated with it is going to have to deal with the consequences of this terrible law, including the state legislators who created these exchanges and the governors in charge of running them.”

Last month, the Republican National Committee filed public-records requests in Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon seeking information about compensation and vacation time for the exchange directors, four of whom have resigned. All five states have Democratic governors whose terms end this year. Three of them — Gov. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota and Gov. John Kitzhaber of Oregon — are seeking re-election.

Amy Goldstein reports at The Washington Post:

Tens of thousands of people who discovered that HealthCare.gov made mistakes as they were signing up for a health plan are confronting a new roadblock: The government cannot yet fix the errors.

Roughly 22,000 Americans have filed appeals with the government to try to get mistakes corrected, according to internal government data obtained by The Washington Post. They contend that the computer system for the new federal online marketplace charged them too much for health insurance, steered them into the wrong insurance program or denied them coverage entirely.
...

The Obama administration has not made public the fact that the appeals system for the online marketplace is not working. In recent weeks, legal advocates have been pressing administration officials, pointing out that rules for the online marketplace, created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act, guarantee due-process rights to timely hearings for Americans who think they have been improperly denied insurance or subsidies.

But at the moment, “there is no indication that infrastructure . . . necessary for conducting informal reviews and fair hearings has even been created, let alone become operational,” attorneys at the National Health Law Program said in a late-December letter to leaders of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that oversees HealthCare.gov. The attorneys, who have been trying to exert leverage quietly behind the scenes, did not provide the letter to The Post but confirmed that they had sent it.

Crossroads GPS Up in Minnesota and New Mexico

CNN reports:

With just four days to go until Election Day, Republican-leaning super PAC American Crossroads and its affiliate Crossroads GPS announced a pair of ads Friday hitting President Barack Obama for the national debt and for lacking a good case for a second term.

CNN reported Tuesday that major Republican-leaning groups would spend almost $50 million in the final week before the election on ads, including $28 million in ad time from American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS.

The American Crossroads spot will hit all of the swings states in a $4.5 million national ad buy while the Crossroads GPS buy will total $1.4 million airing on local broadcast in Minnesota – a state thought to lean Democratic but recently Republicans have made a late campaign advertising push there.

Previous posts have mentioned the national ad, "Debate." Here is the Minnesota ad:

 

Crossroads GPS is up against Heinrich in New Mexico:

 

Santorum's Unexpected Hat Trick

Byron York writes of Santorum's surprising victories in the (nonbinding) Missouri primary and the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses:

The shift to Santorum was fast and overwhelming. In the end, Santorum beat Romney by 27 points in a state Romney had won by 19 points back in 2008. Santorum scored an even bigger victory in Missouri's beauty-contest, nonbinding primary, beating Romney by 30 points. And even in Colorado, where the race was closer, Santorum came out ahead. For a candidate who hadn't won since his narrow and belated victory in Iowa, it was three victories in one night. Santorum has now won four contests to Romney's three and Gingrich's one.

...
Romney's team knew defeat was coming. On Tuesday morning, as it became clear Romney would not have a good night, his campaign's political director, Rich Beeson, sent out a memo trying to put things in perspective. "John McCain lost 19 states in 2008, and we expect our opponents to notch a few wins too," Beeson wrote. "But unlike the other candidates, our campaign has the resources and organization to keep winning over the long run."

....
After the returns came in, I asked Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley what he thought about Rich Beeson's message. Sure, Santorum did well on Tuesday, but doesn't Romney have the money and infrastructure to outdistance Santorum, and everyone else, in the long run?

"What an inspiring message," Gidley said sarcastically. "That is really inspiring. I can't wait to put a bumper sticker on my truck that says MONEY-INFRASTRUCTURE 2012."

"No one had more money and infrastructure than Hillary Clinton, and hope and change wiped her off the map," Gidley continued. "We'll have money, and we'll have infrastructure, but our nominee has to have a message that people can get behind and inspires people."

Actually, Obama did have more money and infrastructure than Hillary Clinton. 


Although Missouri was nonbinding, it still added greatly to Santorum's psychological boost.  In hindsight, Gingrich's failure to meet the filing deadline -- which kept him off the ballot completely -- seems to be a significant blunder.

Convention Cities

National party committees pick convention sites with an eye to influencing the electoral votes of the host state. By drawing media attention and helping local business, the thinking goes, the convention will sway nearby voters to support the party's nominee. This approach seldom works. In the flat world of new media, locals get as much convention news as people on the other side of the world. And as for the "gratitude" factor, the enormous hassle that goes with a convention more than outweighs any local business benefit. The St. Paul Pioneer Press looks back:

The 2008 Republican National Convention hardly left a mark on Minnesota's political landscape.

It didn't turn the state from blue to red. On the contrary, Barack Obama carried Minnesota by the largest margin of any Democrat in recent history.

And the convention, which started a year ago today, didn't boost the fortunes of Republican candidates down the ticket.

"From a political standpoint, I'm not sure there's any lasting impact," Ron Carey, the state Republican Party chairman who stepped down this spring, said Monday.