World War G: Republicans Score Wins in VA and TN

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Sabrina Moreno at Axios:

The Virginia Supreme Court overturned the results of the state's redistricting referendum, which voters narrowly approved last month.

Why it matters: The ruling upends one of the most closely watched redistricting fights in the country.It follows months of legal challenges over whether the referendum was unconstitutional.

The big picture: The decision effectively blocks Democrats from redrawing congressional maps mid-decade.That's after the state spent $5.2 million to pay for the special election, and outside groups raised nearly $100 million to sway voters.

The new map would have been in effect for the November midterms and was expected to shift the state's congressional split from 6-5 favoring Democrats to 10-1.

 Katherine Chui and Emily Cochrane at NYT:

When the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965 last week, Republicans saw new political opportunities across the South. Congressional districts that were considered strongholds for Democrats, often with majority Black populations, could be redrawn for the first time in decades.

Among Southern states, Tennessee was the first to redo its map, which Gov. Bill Lee signed into law on Thursday. The new map breaks the Ninth Congressional District — a longtime Democratic base encompassing Memphis — into three Republican-leaning districts.

The new map divides areas of Memphis where most of the population is Black among three districts with overwhelmingly white populations, eliminating the state’s sole majority Black district in the process.

Voting Rights And World War G

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog::

The Supreme Court on Wednesday, in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. By a vote of 6-3, the justices left in place a ruling by a federal court that barred the state from using the map, which had created a second majority-Black district, in future elections. Although Wednesday’s ruling did not strike down a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, as Louisiana and the challengers had asked the court to do, Justice Elena Kagan suggested in her dissent (which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson) that the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito had rendered the provision “all but a dead letter.”

Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns at POLITICO:

Excitable Republicans hailing the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act as the start of a golden age of neverending House majorities may need to pause and take breath.
...

How far can they go this year? With the ruling less than 24 hours old — and with the midterms just six months away — there’s uncertainty about what’s possible. But even in a maximalist scenario for Republicans, none of the experts Playbook spoke to believed this ruling will net the GOP more than a handful of House seats in November.

...

ABOUT THAT UNCERTAINTY: Four big factors will ultimately decide the extent of further Republican redistricting this year.

1. TIME PRESSURE: This was an extraordinary moment for the Supreme Court to drop this ruling. (In Louisiana, absentee ballots for next month’s primaries have already been sent out.) Those Southern states keen to redistrict before November are in for an almighty scramble. What’s possible will vary state to state.

2. GOP APPETITE: Not every state-level Republican will want to redraw maps on short notice. Some may see 2028 as a more realistic target. Others may be reluctant to move mid-decade at all. Don’t forget that state legislatures in Republican-run Indiana and Democratic-run Maryland already resisted pressure to accept redrawn maps this cycle.

3. TRUMP: The president remains the decisive factor. How hard the White House pushes for new maps this cycle remains an unknown factor, but may prove critical in how many states move immediately. Trump sounded keen yesterday —- “I would think that they would want to do it,” he told reporters — but had only just learned about the ruling.

4. LEGALITY: This wasn’t the “clean kill” Republicans hoped for, watering down rather than completely gutting Section 2 of the VRA. Experts believe there are legal uncertainties still to be ironed out. Pro-VRA litigation — even if ultimately fruitless — could slow the process down.

Democrats will likely retaliate.  (And after the midterms, they might control more legislative chambers.)

Reid J. Epstein at NYT:

Some Democrats who backed new redistricting commissions in the 2010s now look back on those efforts as tying one hand behind their back for the future.

“It seemed like a pitchfork moment. It did seem good,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The lesson is that there are some states that are never going to be able to do this. If you’re not going to do it nationally, you’re going to have an unlevel playing field.”

The California and Virginia referendums to let Democrats seize redistricting power represented mea culpas about political idealism that could spread to other blue states.

One of the nation’s oldest redistricting commissions is in Washington State, where voters in 1983 adopted a provision to shift map-drawing power from elected officials. Now Shasti Conrad, the state’s Democratic Party chairwoman, said that it could be undone if Democrats were to flip a handful of seats in the State Legislature and seize supermajority control next year.

If they do, Ms. Conrad said, Washington voters are likely to be asked in 2027 to allow lawmakers to enact a new congressional map. Now, Democrats hold eight of 10 House seats in the state.

“People have been asking, ‘What can Washington do with redistricting?’” Ms. Conrad said. “They’re seeing other states like Virginia do it, so why can’t we?”

Democratic regrets over their redistricting hurdles tend to quickly morph into the party’s most reliable political stance over the last decade: blaming Mr. Trump.

Sheriffs

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

Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti at NYT:

An influential network of conservative activists fixated on the idea that former President Donald J. Trump won the 2020 election is working to recruit county sheriffs to investigate elections based on the false notion that voter fraud is widespread.

The push, which two right-wing sheriffs’ groups have already endorsed, seeks to lend law enforcement credibility to the false claims and has alarmed voting rights advocates. They warn that it could cause chaos in future elections and further weaken trust in an American voting system already battered by attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies.

One of the conservative sheriffs’ groups, Protect America Now, lists about 70 members, and the other, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, does not list its membership but says it conducted trainings on various issues for about 300 of the nation’s roughly 3,000 sheriffs in recent years. It is unclear how many sheriffs will ultimately wade into election matters. Many aligned with the groups are from small, rural counties.

But at least three sheriffs involved in the effort — in Michigan, Kansas and Wisconsin — have already been carrying out their own investigations, clashing with election officials who warn that they are overstepping their authority and meddling in an area where they have little expertise.

“I’m absolutely sick of it,” said Pam Palmer, the clerk of Barry County, Mich., where the sheriff has carried out an investigation into the 2020 results for more than a year. “We didn’t do anything wrong, but they’ve cast a cloud over our entire county that makes people disbelieve in the accuracy of our ability to run an election.”

In recent years, sheriffs have usually taken a limited role in investigations of election crimes, which are typically handled by state agencies with input from local election officials. Republican-led state legislatures, at the same time, have pushed to impose harsher criminal penalties for voting infractions, passing 20 such laws in at least 14 states since the 2020 election.

Last fall, Adam Rawnsley reported at The Daily Beast:

The MAGA think tank at the vanguard of pro-Trump public intellectuals is recruiting sheriffs with ties to the far right and a dubious devotion to the “rule of law” to be academic “fellows” as part of a new program launched by the conservative institute this week.

The Claremont Institute, a far-right research group that’s home to a number of former Trump administration officials, announced a new crop of eight “sheriffs fellows” selected from across the country on the basis of their “character, aptitude, accomplishments, zeal, and community reputation” to visit Claremont’s California campus and study a syllabus of standard conservative political catechism.

The coursework, Claremont says, is fairly anodyne—lectures on Locke, the Federalist Papers, and English legal history—but the Institute’s choice of students is far more radical. Of the eight fellows announced this week, six have some affiliation with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an organization labeled as an anti-government extremist group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center for its endorsement of the idea that sheriffs can pick and choose which laws to enforce based on their own personal beliefs about what the Constitution allows.

In that spirit, members of Claremont’s first crop of sheriff fellows have vowed not to enforce pandemic restrictions, vaccine mandates, gun laws, and basically any laws they disagree with. For far-right groups like the Claremont Institute, those efforts to sidestep the rule of law and the will of democratically elected governments are a feature, not a bug.

 

Texas GOP Platform

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 rebellion, coups, and secession.  

The 2022 Texas GOP platform:

• All attempts by the judiciary to rule in areas not constitutionally granted to the judiciary, including abuses of the “commerce clause,” the “general welfare clause,” and the “supremacy clause,” should be nullified. 
• We oppose all executive orders, whether by a president, a governor, or a loca official, that go beyond administration of executive authority and have the effect of legislation. We call upon the Texas Legislature or local lawmakers to nullify such executive orders.
• Repeal and/or nullify the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968.
• Pursuant to Article 1, Section 1, of the Texas Constitution, the federal government has impaired our right of local self-government. Therefore, federally mandated legislation that infringes upon the 10th Amendment rights of Texas should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified. Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.
• The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment creating an electoral college consisting of electors selected by the popular votes cast within each individual state senatorial district, who shall then elect all statewide office holders.
• We urge that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, codified and updated in 1973, be repealed and not reauthorized.

Alabama Redistricting

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

Robert Barnes at WP:

A divided Supreme Court on Monday restored an Alabama congressional map that creates only one district favorable to a Black candidate, and put on hold a lower court’s order that said a second district was necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

Over the objections of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberals, its five most consistently conservative justices halted a decision last month by three federal judges. The panel threw out Alabama’s new congressional map, which included only one congressional district with a majority of Black voters even though they make up more than a quarter of the state’s population.

The court’s ruling was a blow to voting rights advocates and Democrats after a series of redistricting wins over the past several weeks. It means the 2022 congressional elections in Alabama will take place under a map drawn by the state’s Republican leaders.

But it also signaled that the court’s more conservative majority is suspicious of a Voting Rights Act precedent that Alabama said requires legislatures to prioritize race over traditional redistricting techniques.

The majority — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — did not provide a reason for stopping the lower court’s decision, which is common when the Supreme Court considers an emergency petition. But Kavanaugh, joined by Alito, wrote separately to say the changes ordered by the lower court came too close to qualifying and primaries for the fall election and could create “chaos.”

Voting Rights: Not a Big Issue with the General Public

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.   Democrats are trying to make a big issue of voting rights and procedural reform.  They have a problem.

Karlyn Bowman at AEI notes that the public puts other issues ahead of voting rights as a priority for Congress.

First, Americans are clearly focused on issues such as inflation and coronavirus. Just 6 percent in the latest AP/NORC poll volunteered “voting laws, voter fraud, or voting issues” as the top problem the government should be working on in 2022.

Second, most Americans have not been paying much attention to the debate on the legislation. The latest NPR/Ipsos poll explored public awareness of various voting reforms included in the legislation without mentioning the legislation by name. Fifty-three percent said they were very or somewhat familiar with the proposals to allow any eligible voter to vote by mail. This was the only issue tested that showed majority awareness. Forty-four percent were familiar with state proposals reducing access to absentee ballots, limiting early voting times, or reducing the number of voting locations. Forty-one percent were familiar with proposals standardizing voting rules across states, 39 percent with state legislatures changing election laws to give them the power to determine election outcomes, 36 percent with state legislatures limiting the independence of elected election officials, and separately, with proposals moving redistricting authority to nonpartisan commissions. Finally, 32 percent were familiar with proposals to give the vice president the right to decide which electoral votes should be counted. Democrats were more familiar than Republicans with each of these, but the low levels of overall familiarity don’t suggest a groundswell of public interest.

In the Morning Consult/Politico poll, a substantial 28 percent of registered voters responded “don’t know” or “no opinion” when asked whether they supported the Senate’s filibuster rule, and 27 percent gave that response in another question about changing the filibuster rules to pass voting rights legislation. In the first of these questions, 42 percent supported the filibuster rule (30 percent were opposed), and in the second one, people were split evenly, 37 percent to 36 percent, about changing it now. I’m less confident about the support and oppose scores than I am about limited public awareness of complexities of the issue.

There is the third reason most Americans may not see the urgency or necessity of passing legislation that would give Washington more control in this area. Neither the NPR poll nor the Morning Consult poll asked Americans about their personal experience with voting, although NPR has asked these questions before in its polling with PBS NewsHour and ­­­­Marist. As Samantha Goldstein and I showed in a report for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, very few Americans have faced impediments to voting such as being told they didn’t have the correct identification, that they weren’t on the registration list. Very few say they did not receive their mail-in ballot in time. Most Americans say it very easy to vote, and in the Pew Research Center’s trend, most say they are confident their own vote was counted accurately.

An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy

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.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.  


[This open letter is being published simultaneously by The Bulwark and the New Republic.]

We are writers, academics, and political activists who have long disagreed about many things.

Some of us are Democrats and others Republicans. Some identify with the left, some with the right, and some with neither. We have disagreed in the past, and we hope to be able to disagree, productively, for years to come. Because we believe in the pluralism that is at the heart of democracy.

But right now we agree on a fundamental point: We need to join together to defend liberal democracy.

Because liberal democracy itself is in serious danger. Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse. All of these are now in serious danger.

The primary source of this danger is one of our two major national parties, the Republican Party, which remains under the sway of Donald Trump and Trumpist authoritarianism. Unimpeded by Trump’s defeat in 2020 and unfazed by the January 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters actively work to exploit anxieties and prejudices, to promote reckless hostility to the truth and to Americans who disagree with them, and to discredit the very practice of free and fair elections in which winners and losers respect the peaceful transfer of power.

So we, who have differed on so much in the past—and who continue to differ on much today—have come together to say:

We vigorously oppose ongoing Republican efforts to change state election laws to limit voter participation.

We vigorously oppose ongoing Republican efforts to empower state legislatures to override duly appointed election officials and interfere with the proper certification of election results, thereby substituting their own political preferences for those expressed by citizens at the polls.

We vigorously oppose the relentless and unending promotion of unprofessional and phony “election audits” that waste public money, jeopardize public electoral data and voting machines, and generate paranoia about the legitimacy of elections.

We urge the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass effective, national legislation to protect the vote and our elections, and if necessary to override the Senate filibuster rule.

And we urge all responsible citizens who care about democracy—public officials, journalists, educators, activists, ordinary citizens—to make the defense of democracy an urgent priority now.

Now is the time for leaders in all walks of life—for citizens of all political backgrounds and persuasions—to come to the aid of the Republic.

Todd Gitlin
Professor of Journalism, Sociology and Communications
Columbia University

Jeffrey C. Isaac
James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science
Indiana University, Bloomington

William Kristol
Editor at Large, The Bulwark
Director, Defending Democracy Together
Cosigners

Affiliations listed for identification purposes only.

Sheri Berman
Professor of Political Science
Barnard College

Max Boot
Senior Fellow
Council on Foreign Relations

James Carroll
Writer

Leo Casey
Assistant to the President
American Federation of Teachers

Mona Charen
Policy Editor
The Bulwark

Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jelani Cobb
Professor of Journalism
Columbia University

Eliot A. Cohen
Robert E. Osgood Professor
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

David Cole
National Legal Director
American Civil Liberties Union

Laura K. Field
Senior Fellow
Niskanen Center

Carolyn Forché
University Professor
Georgetown University

Francis Fukuyama
Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University

William A. Galston
Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb
Michael E. Gellert Professor Emeritus
New School for Social Research

Hahrie Hahn
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science
Director, SNF Agora Institute
Johns Hopkins University

Roya Hakakian
Writer

John Judis
Writer

Ira Katznelson
Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History
Columbia University

Michael Kazin
Professor of History
Georgetown University

Randall Kennedy
Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard University

Steven R. Levitsky
Professor of Government
Harvard University

Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.
Psychiatrist and author

Susie Linfield
Professor of Journalism
New York University

Damon Linker
Senior Correspondent
The Week

Dahlia Lithwick
Senior Editor
Slate

Jane Mansbridge
Charles F. Adams Professor, Emerita
Harvard Kennedy School

Win McCormack
Editor in Chief
The New Republic

John McWhorter
Professor of Linguistics
Columbia University

Deborah Meier
Educator

James Miller
Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies
New School for Social Research

Susan Neiman
Director
Einstein Forum

Nell Irvin Painter
Edwards Professor of American History Emerita
Princeton University

Rick Perlstein
Writer

Katha Pollitt
Writer

Claire Potter
Professor of History
New School for Social Research

Jedediah Purdy
William S. Beinecke Professor of Law
Columbia University

Jonathan Rauch
Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution

Adolph Reed
Emeritus Professor of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania

Kim Lane Scheppele
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Princeton University

Charles Sykes
Founder and Editor at Large
The Bulwark

George Thomas
Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions
Claremont McKenna College

Michael Tomasky
Editor, The New Republic
Editor, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas

Jeffrey K. Tulis
Professor of Government and Law
University of Texas

Joan Walsh
Writer
The Nation

Michael Walzer
Professor Emeritus of Social Science
Institute for Advanced Study

Dorian T. Warren
President
Community Change

Sean Wilentz
George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History
Princeton University

Benjamin Wittes
Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution

Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey C. Isaac, and William Kristol
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism, sociology and communications at Columbia University. Jeffrey C. Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. William Kristol is the editor at large of The Bulwark and the director of Defending Democracy Together.

Thoughts on Trumpism

Our forthcoming book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.

The state of the GOP is not good.

Jane Coaston at NYT:

He did not have a coherent policy platform, because he was the policy platform, the middle finger to perceived enemies and the bulwark against real or imagined progressive assault. Many Republican presidents would have moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem or supported a capital-gains tax cut or attempted to wage a Kulturkampf against “cancel culture” or any other wedge issue that provided an unwinnable and unlosable political war to be fought in the Twitter trenches. It is telling that as president, Mr. Trump became a remarkably standard Republican on many issues (his opposition to raising the minimum wage, for example) and received no penalty from his voters or allies. He did not need to fulfill the promises of Trumpism to win their support. He merely needed to be Donald Trump.

At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson quotes Jennifer Hochschild:

“A lot of nonreligious liberals can’t tune into the frequency on which Donald Trump is speaking to the right,” Hochschild said. Throughout his term, the president has been laser-focused, not so much on the day-to-day tasks of the job, but rather on calling out his political enemies—the press, the bureaucracy, the far left, the impeachers, the vote-counting software. But although liberals might see pathological anger here, Hochschild’s sources have told her they perceive something deeper than rage. They see suffering. “‘I’m suffering for you,’ is a profound message,” she said. “Suffering consolidates and strengthens belief. It puts an ism to the word Trump and gives a political project the shape of a religious movement.” Perhaps in part because Trump considers himself godlike, he is absorbing the underlying religious paradigm of voters who are seeking some new creed to explain the broken line and mend it.

More Republicans tend to think of Democrats as enemies right now than as just political opposition. pic.twitter.com/TtGGzVMSJP

— CBS News Poll (@CBSNewsPoll) February 9, 2021

 

Dana Milbank at WP:

You don’t have to study demography to see that race is at the core of the GOP’s tilt toward the authoritarian. You need only look at what happened this week.

On Monday, the Georgia state House passed a bill brazenly attempting to deter Black voters. The bill proposed to scale back Sunday voting — taking direct aim at the longtime “Souls to the Polls” tradition in which Black voters cast their ballots after church on Sundays. The bill also would increase voter I.D. requirements — known to disenfranchise Black voters disproportionately — and even would make it illegal to serve food or drinks to voters waiting in long lines outside polling places; lines are typically longer at minority precincts.

Georgia Republicans clearly are hoping they can suppress enough Black votes to erase the Democrats’ narrow advantage that gave them both of the state’s Senate seats and Joe Biden its electoral votes. But Georgia is just one of the 43 states collectively contemplating 253 bills this year with provisions restricting voting access, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s majority signaled it would be open to more such voting restrictions. In oral arguments, the conservative justices indicated they would uphold two Arizona laws that would have the effect of disproportionately disqualifying the votes of non-White citizens. One law throws out ballots cast in the wrong precinct, a problem that affects minority voters twice as much as White voters because polling places move more frequently in minority neighborhoods. The other law bans the practice of ballot collection — derided by Republicans as ballot “harvesting” — which is disproportionately used by minority voters, in particular Arizona’s Native Americans on reservations.

Representing the Arizona Republican Party in Tuesday’s argument, lawyer Michael A. Carvin explained why the party supports laws tossing out ballots: “Politics is a zero-sum game.”

Panel Study of the MAGA Movement:

Turning to perceptions of the 2020 election cycle, we find that the MAGA movement refuses to accept the election results. We assess this in a number of ways, from survey questions that invoke fraud claims made by Trump, to perceptions of the congressional elections. When we asked our respondents about whether or not they agreed with Trump’s fraud claims, 98 percent believed them valid. We then asked, absent Trump’s claim, whether or not they trusted the election results. Again, 98 percent of respondents distrust the results. However, when we shift to perceptions of the congressional elections, the attitudes move a bit. Instead of 98 percent who take issue with the election outcome at the presidential level, distrust of the down-ballot (congressional) results decline by roughly 20 percentage points to 78 percent. The disparity between our findings on the first two questions, and the last one, suggests that movement members are less upset with gains made in the House versus losing (illegitimately) the presidency. We were also curious about other issues surrounding the 2020 election cycle: attitudes surrounding making it easier for people to vote, and if they’d support Trump for a third term. Recall that, at the time the first wave was in the field, the outcome of the election remained in doubt. In response to the first question, roughly 90 percent of our respondents disagreed with making it easier for people to vote. Replying to the second, it’s clear that, were it possible, roughly 70 percent would’ve supported Trump for a third term.

 

 

Trumpism

Our forthcoming book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.

The state of the GOP is not good.

Jonathan Martin at NYT:

In his remarks later in the day, Mr. Trump sought to explain “Trumpism” — “what it means is great deals,” he ventured — but his would-be heirs plainly recognize that the core of his appeal is more affect than agenda.

Beyond the former president, no two Republicans in attendance drew a more fervent response than Mr. DeSantis and Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, two former House members turned first-term governors.

Neither sketched out a new policy agenda or presented a fresh vision for a party that has won the national popular vote just once in over 30 years. Rather, they drew repeated ovations for what they share in common: a shared sense of victimhood over media criticism for their handling of the coronavirus crisis and a pugnacious contempt for public health experts who have urged more aggressive restrictions in their states.

“I don’t know if you agree with me, but Dr. Fauci is wrong a lot,” Ms. Noem said in her remarks, referring to the country’s top infectious disease expert. The statement brought attendees to their feet, even as she glossed over her state’s high mortality rate during the pandemic.

[In the 2016 cycle, Noem -- like Nikki Haley -- was an early supporter of Marco Rubio.] 

Michael Gerson at WP:

The party has been swiftly repositioned as an instrument of white grievance. It refuses to condemn racists within its congressional ranks. Its main national legislative agenda seems to be the suppression of minority voting. Trumpism is defined by the belief that real Americans are beset by internal threats from migrants, Muslims, multiculturalists, Black Lives Matter activists, antifa militants and various thugs, gangbangers and whiners. And Zubatov is correct that this viewpoint implies and requires dehumanization; resisting our animal instincts is the evidence of political correctness. The whole Trump movement, and now most of the Republican Party, is premised on the social sanctification of pre-cognitive fears and disgust.

Yet the largest single group within the new GOP coalition is comprised of people who claim to be evangelical Christians. And the view of human beings implied by Trumpism is a direct negation of Christian teaching (as well as many other systems of belief). Christians are informed — not by political correctness, but by Jesus — that every addict and homeless person you might encounter on a nocturnal walk in New York is the presence of Christ in disguise. And the parable He told in Matthew 25 illustrating this point is a rather stern one. Those who follow their pre-cognitive disgust and refuse to treat the hungry, the stranger, the sick and imprisoned as they would Christ are told: “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

 

Mail Ballots, Voting Rights, and the Census

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.  

Top WH Econ Adviser Larry Kudlow weighs in on stimulus negotiations, says "voting rights … that's not our game.” pic.twitter.com/OkE8nWfpJC

— The Recount (@therecount) August 13, 2020

Chuck Todd, Carrie Dann, Ben Kamisar and Melissa Holzberg at NBC:

• Trump installed a new Postmaster General (who was a campaign donor) who instituted new cost-saving measures that have slowed mail delivery nationwide and sparked fears about absentee ballot delays.
• He explicitly said yesterday that he would block proposed emergency funding for the Postal Service, adding that USPS doesn’t “have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess.
• He appeared to put more stock in an intelligence report finding that China prefers a Biden presidency than in Russian efforts to denigrate Biden, despite intelligence officials saying that pro-Trump election interference from Russia “was the far graver, and more immediate, threat.
• He equated foreign interference from Russia to Democrats “meddling” in the election because they are promoting mail-in balloting during the pandemic.
• He suggested in a tweet that Florida’s mail-in ballots are more trustworthy than other states’ because Florida has had “two great Republican governors.”
• The president’s son-in-law reportedly met in person with Kanye West, who is trying to get on ballots nationwide and recently did not deny that he’s doing so as a spoiler to Biden’s campaign.
• GOP operatives in at least four states have aided West’s attempts to get on the 2020 ballot

William H. Frey at Brookings:

Two weeks ago, the Trump administration issued a memorandum seeking to remove undocumented immigrants (“illegal aliens” in the memo’s words) from the census headcount that serves as the basis for reapportioning House of Representatives members among states. Then, on Monday, the Census Bureau announced that they would be cutting short the headcount by a month. In both cases, these changes will result in an undercount of demographic groups that are not part of Trump’s political base.

The plan to omit undocumented immigrants for congressional reapportionment falls in line with the administration’s failed proposal to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last year. After the ruling, Trump ordered the development of a database—using federal sources such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration—which could be used to identify undocumented immigrants.

"You Know What I'm Talking About"

The Hill reports:

 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday urged the crowd gathered at his rally to both vote and "watch" when the general election comes around.

"You've got to get every one of your friends. You've got to get every one of your family. You've got to get everybody to go out and watch. And go out and vote," Trump said at the end of a rally Monday in Akron, Ohio.

"And when I say watch, you know what I'm talking about, right? You know what I'm taking about. I think you got to go out and you got to watch."

The poll watching could amount to intimidation that violates a consent decree. 

Trump again encourages voters to be poll vigilantes, to vote & "watch."
"When I say watch, you know what I'm talking about..."

— Candace Smith (@CandaceSmith_) August 22, 2016

Voter ID Backlash, Backfire

State-level voter identification laws:

1. Lost in court;
2. Overlooked the far more serious problem of mail-ballot fraud; and
3. Triggered a backlash that increased black turnout.

National Journal reports:

For African-Americans in Ohio, coming out to vote during this election was personal. Many saw the state’s voter-ID bills as a direct threat to rights denied their ancestors decades earlier. Fueled as much by angst against the ID mandate as enthusiasm for a black president, African-Americans voted at a rate so much higher than 2008 that they may have been the decisive voting bloc.

President Obama captured Ohio, arguably the most important battleground state, thanks to record African-American turnout. The Resurgent Republic, an independent not-for-profit organization that gauges public opinion, pointed out, “If African-American turnout was in line with 2008, Romney would have won Ohio,” according to Politico.

Ohio, with its complex melting-pot populace that crosses many socioeconomic levels, has long been a battleground. National Journal’s Ron Brownstein asserted that Obama took Ohio by focusing on income equality and fairness, a strategy that attracted enough working-class whites and blacks to swing the election. But some observers also point to a 2011 effort to spur blacks to vote.

That plus anger stirred by the still-pending voter-ID bill that passed the Ohio House last year became the impetus that reenergized many African-American voters, said E. Faye Williams, president of the National Congress of Black Women. During a Washington event on the minority vote weeks before the election, Williams told a small group that such laws would likely push minorities to come out in droves.

The exit poll showed that African Americans made up 15 percent up the Ohio electorate in 2012, compared with 11 percent in 2008.  From the Politico story:

LUKE FRANS of Resurgent Republic sends this fascinating analysis of Ohio exit polling: “Romney won the white vote 58-41 (2008: McCain won 52-46). Romney won white men 63-36 (2008: McCain won 53-45). Romney won white women at about the same margin as four years ago, 53-46. But the white vote overall was 79% of the turnout, down 4 points from 2008 (white men: 3 points; white women: 1 point). The Ohio population is about 84% white. Ohio has a low percentage of Hispanic population (3%) compared to the national average (17%) and the exit polling had the Hispanic vote at 3%, a 1-point decrease from 2008. Obama made up the margin by turning out the African American vote, which increased from 11% in 2008 to 15% yesterday. He won these voters 96-4 and the higher turnout more than made up for any slight movement from his 2008 97-2 margin. What's more notable, African Americans make up 12% of the Ohio population, but they represented a higher share of the electorate yesterday. …

“This resulted in a +8 Democratic turnout advantage in the state. And it's difficult to overcome that margin, even considering that Romney won independents by 10 points (53-43) -- which is a net 18-point swing away from Obama since 2008. … If African American turnout was in line with 2008, Romney would have won Ohio. That's how both sides truly believed they were narrowly winning Ohio on Election Day.

2008 Money/Voting Rights Act

The Monkey Cage has some useful data on the number of Americans who contributed to political candidates in 2008.

In Epic Journey, we discuss the congressional elections as well as the presidential contest. In this respect, we take note of today's Supeme Court decision, which held that the Voting Rights Act
"does not require state officials to draw election-district lines to allow a racial minority that would make up less than50 percent of the voting-age population in the redrawn district to join with crossover voters to elect the minority’s candidate of choice."