GOP's Beef with Trump

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

The beef issue is a classic concentrated-losers/diffuse-gainers situation.  The GOP was in a similar bind in 1986 with oil prices.

Grace Yarrow at POLITICO:

President Donald Trump’s latest effort to lower beef prices ahead of November’s midterms has rattled cattle markets, infuriated beef industry groups and alienated some conservatives. And it’s not clear the move will pay off at the meat counter.

Trump said Friday that he plans to remove duties on 300,000 metric tons of imported beef, which he said suppliers have agreed to sell at a 25 percent discount that will be passed on to consumers. He’s set to sign an executive order to that effect within the next two weeks, according to a White House official who was granted anonymity to discuss the plans.

But growing backlash to Trump’s beef import plan illustrates the stakes of a White House political gamble to confront high food prices that threaten Republicans at the ballot box, despite the risk of sparking industry resistance that has previously derailed similar plans.

Many of Trump’s supporters cite the cost of living as the biggest failure of the president’s second term. Yet many ranchers and Republicans argue boosting imports from foreign countries won’t tangibly lower beef prices in the short term — raising the prospect that Trump’s still-pending order could alienate ranchers without delivering noticeable relief to voters.

“You don’t put America first by putting U.S. cattle producers last,” said Justin Tupper, president of the United States Cattlemen’s Association, in a statement after Trump’s announcement.

The increased imports will last 90 days — just through November’s midterm elections.

...

“This is Donald Trump in purgatory,” said one ag industry representative who was granted anonymity to candidly discuss the plan. “He’s trading his long-term strategy for a short-term sugar fix, and it’s not going to do enough to alter the price of beef or any other higher elevated costs in the economy to help them in the election. It’s going to just piss off farmers and ranchers.”

It’s not the first time Trump has been caught between pleasing ranchers, a loyal GOP constituency, and addressing affordability. But the price of a summertime hamburger has continued to climb: Ground beef cost close to $7 a pound on average last month. Prices have skyrocketed due to high demand and a decades-low cattle inventory diminished by severe weather, industry consolidation and high operating costs.

Senate GOP Recruitment

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

 Al Weaver at The Hill:

Senate Republicans’ string of major recruiting wins could soon be coming to an end as the party prepares for less-than-welcome entries in two races that could help decide the fate of the Senate majority next year.

Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) and former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake are widely expected to launch bids for the upper chamber in Montana and Arizona, respectively, in the coming months.

That’s creating headaches for GOP leaders in their quest to flip two seats and retake control of the Senate after four years in the minority.

Republican leaders in the Senate haven’t been shy about calling out “candidate quality” as a major issue for the party in 2022 and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.) vowed to more aggressively recruit and back candidates with a better shot of winning a general election.

Thus far, those efforts have borne fruit in a number of key contests.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) is the leading contender to take on Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) next year (if Manchin runs), Tim Sheehy entered the race in Montana to unseat Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Sam Brown launched a campaign in Nevada. Manchin and Tester, who represent states former President Trump carried by a wide margin, are at the top of Republicans’ target list.

The party also has a number of acceptable candidates in Ohio to take on Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), though none are considered to be sterling by GOP operatives.

But it’s the potential coming pair of Rosendale and Lake that has Republicans worried.

Election 2022

Likely outcome one: Democrats prevail in California statewide elections.

Likely outcome two: most ballot measures lose.

Likely outcome three: Republicans win a majority in the US House.

• The midterm effect
• The generic ballot
• The economy

Other outcomes are harder to predict because of polling challenges:

• Most people have caller-ID, either through cellphones or landlines.  And most people won't answer calls from unknown numbers.
• Partisan nonresponse bias.
• Screening for likely voters is an inexact science.
• And all of these issues come in addition to the regular margin of error  (plus or minus 2 or 3 points). So any race in low single digits is a tossup.

Senate tossups: average poll margins (as of this morning)

• Arizona: Kelly (D) 1.3%
• Georgia: Walker (R) 0.4%
• Nevada: Laxalt (R) 1.9%
• New Hampshire: Bolduc (R) 0.3%
• Ohio: Vance (R) 3.3%
• Pennsylvania: Fetterman (D) 0.2%
• Washington: Murray (D) 3.0%
• Wisconsin: Johnson (R) 3.2%

If all the tossups go R, Republicans get a net gain of 5.

If all tossups go D, Democrats get a net gain of 3.

Prospects for 2023:

In California, the political alignment is clear, but the economic outlook is cloudy.  A stock market downturn could severely affect state revenues.

In Washington, divided government will hinder basic decisions such as passing spending bills and raising the debt ceiling.

Expect lots of investigations.  Some Republicans will push for Biden's impeachment.

Weaponizing the Federal Government

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.  

Martin Pengelly at The Guardian:

The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network.

After a repentant Trump voter's one-man protest, what happened next?

Barr’s meeting with Murdoch, at the media mogul’s New York home in October 2019, was widely reported at the time, with speculation surrounding its subject. According to Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, by CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, subjects covered included media consolidation and criminal justice reform.

“But it was also about Judge Andrew Napolitano.”

Stelter’s in-depth look at Fox News, its fortunes under Trump and its links to his White House will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept:

IN THE final months of its first term, the Trump administration is cutting career government employees out of the process of apportioning federal funds, according to a memo reviewed by The Intercept, sent to staff on August 12 by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.

...

For decades, OMB’s career staff have been responsible for signing off on the legality of the apportionment of funds to agencies and for projects. Political appointees, meanwhile, worked within the bounds the career staff set.

Under the new regime, however, program associate directors — political appointees known as PADs — will sign off on disbursements themselves. The rationale behind the shift is that apportionment decisions are fundamentally policy decisions and therefore, should be the responsibility of political aides who are ostensibly accountable to voters, rather than government bureaucrats immune from such democratic responsiveness.

...
Vought’s memo also gives him the ability to exercise the decision-making authority himself. “The delegation supersedes any previous delegation of such authority and will remain in place until revised or revoked,” the memo reads. “The Program Associate Directors may re-delegate this authority as necessary in writing. The delegation does not limit the authority of the director to exercise the delegated authority.”

Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic:

Beyond his recent efforts to impede mail delivery, Trump has:

• rapidly purged inspectors general across the federal government, replacing five of them within a short period, including the intelligence-community IG who forwarded to Congress the whistleblower complaint that triggered Trump’s impeachment.
• openly pressured the Justice Department to back off the prosecution of his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and to request more lenient sentencing for his ally Roger Stone. Trump later commuted Stone’s sentence outright.
• deployed federal law-enforcement officials from the Department of Homeland Security to confront protesters in Portland, Oregon, and other cities over the explicit objection of governors and mayors.
• enlisted the military into his campaign against protesters, drafting Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to accompany him during his walk to St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C., after armed personnel forcibly cleared out peaceful protesters. The decision prompted so much concern in the military that Milley later apologized.
• taken repeated steps to manipulate the results of the decennial census in a manner that could undercount people of color and benefit the Republican Party. The Supreme Court stopped Trump from adding a citizenship question to the census, but the administration now says it intends to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population counts used to apportion congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states. It also announced it will cut off efforts to contact households that haven’t responded to the census on September 30, despite the disruption caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Census experts and former Census Bureau directors have said that such a truncated schedule is guaranteed to undercount minorities.

“Trump has long fixated on the Postal Service, complaining it gives preferential treatment to Amazon. A review launched by the board concluded there was nothing untoward about the relationship, and that the Postal Service was making money on the contract” https://t.co/kNIpaga920

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) August 23, 2020

Infiltration

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.

Philip Ewing at NPR:

Charges accusing a woman of trying to build bridges between the Russian government and American political leaders via the National Rifle Association have delivered a breakthrough in understanding one aspect of the attack on the 2016 election: "infiltration."

After months of questions and speculation as to how or whether the NRA connection might have worked, prosecutors proffered an answer on Monday: The Russian woman, Maria Butina, was the intermediary between Russian government officials and Americans, both in the NRA and elsewhere in politics, according to court documents.
The government says she was acting as a foreign agent without registering. Her attorney called the charges overblown, as NPR's Carrie Johnson reported.

A grand jury in Washington D.C. returned an indictment against Butina on Tuesday afternoon.

Butina allegedly serves or served as the deputy to someone identified in court papers only as a "Russian official," who is probably Alexander Torshin, a now-sanctioned Kremlin official who cultivated relationships with American political leaders and the NRA over several years.

The two "took these steps in order to infiltrate these groups and advance the interests of the Russian Federation," FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson said in an affidavit that accompanied the criminal complaint.