Trump v. Republicans in Congress

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

Trump is acting without regard for the political needs of Republicans in Congress.  An unpopular war is just part of it. Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Axios:

• The big picture: Trump has spent his second term steamrolling his own party, confident the lawmakers he humiliates will keep voting his way. You see it everywhere:He canceled the signing of a landmark bipartisan housing bill just hours before the ceremony — trying to strong-arm the Senate into passing the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter ID bill with no realistic path to 60 (or even 50) votes.
• He dismissed the housing bill — which his own White House had called "one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history" — as "of minor importance."
• He berated the "Four Republican Losers" in the Senate who voted this week to rein in his Iran war powers, calling the rebuke "poorly timed and meaningless." (Hours after his barrage, Republicans passed a symbolic reversal.)
• He blew up a bipartisan scramble aimed at renewing the government's FISA surveillance powers, demanding the SAVE Act on voting rules be bolted on. He let the authority lapse rather than back down.
• He yanked his own intelligence nominee, Jay Clayton, from a confirmation hearing hours before it began, leaving the nation's spy agencies under an acting director both parties distrust.
• He refused to brief Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and other senators on his Iran deal until after the text was finally released, leaving them to defend terms they hadn't seen.
• He blindsided senators by proposing a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund just as they moved a $70 billion immigration package, defending Jan. 6 rioters who attacked the building where the senators work.

Good Economic News

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the politics of economic policy.  Objective indicators are doing great. Perceptions, less so.

Rachel Siegel at WP:

Inflation eased again in August, dropping to the lowest level in more than three years and locking in expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates next week for the first time since the pandemic’s early days.

Data released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed prices climbed 2.5 percent in the 12 months ending in August. That was a noticeable improvement over the 2.9 percent notched in July, in part because of falling gas prices. Prices also climbed 0.2 percent over the previous month.

Scott Sowers at WP:

Mortgage rates fell on Thursday to their lowest level since April 2023 — 6.2 percent for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, down from 6.35 percent a week before, according to Freddie Mac.

That’s a sharp drop from the high of 7.8 percent recorded last October and welcome news for would-be home buyers who have been priced out of the property market, as well as homeowners who bought at high rates and are eager to refinance. It also comes as the Federal Reserve gets ready for its next policy meeting next week, when it is expected to announce the first interest-rate cut since it began hiking rates in March 2022 to combat spiraling inflation.

Housing Costs in 2024

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the politics of economic policy

Peder Schaefer at Politico:

By nearly every metric, it’s never been more expensive to buy a home in America.

The average sale price for a home in 2024 is a record high $513,100, the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage is near 7 percent and the ratio of the median single-family home sale price to household income — a good proxy for tracking nationwide home affordability — is 7.68 to 1, an all-time record.

Naturally, housing concerns loom large in the race for the White House: An April Michigan Ross/Financial Times poll showed that 27 percent of Americans assess housing costs as one of their top three economic issues as they make their vote for president, ranking higher than government spending, the national debt, wages or even interest rates.

Younger voters are especially energized around housing issues, the poll showed, with 31 percent of all voters 18-44 marking it as a top economic issue, tied with gas prices and wages.

Suburban Blues

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update -- recently published -- looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.  Suburbs are an important part of the story.

At CalMatters, Ben Christopher writes of the suburban collapse of the California GOP.

Your average suburban voter has clearly soured on President Trump. But the definition of “average suburban voter” has changed over the last two decades, as the suburbs swelled. Much of that population growth has been driven by immigrants and lower-income migrants from nearby cities.

The electoral flipping of the suburbs has been particularly dramatic in Southern California’s inland regions.

The most dramatic example: California’s 60th Assembly district, centered around the City of Corona in the western Inland Empire. When Republican Eric Linder won the seat six years ago by 23 percentage points, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 5 points.

But in 2016, the district swung. Democrats now topped Republicans — and voters replaced Linder with the current Democratic Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes. At last count, district Democrats hold at 11 percentage point lead over Republicans.

The trend away from the GOP may have been supercharged by the state’s housing crunch as younger people, renters, Black and brown Californians — in other words, the Democratic Party’s base — have fled inland seeking cheaper shelter.

Thomas Beaumont and Julia Carr Smyth at AP:

Republican lawmakers and strategists in Ohio say they are seeing research that shows a near-uniform drop in support from his 2016 totals across every suburban region of the state.

They say that Trump, who won Ohio by 8 percentage points in 2016, maintains a yawning advantage in more rural areas and small towns. Still, Republicans are concerned that if he is losing badly in suburban areas in Ohio, it is a signal that Trump’s hold on other states in the industrial heartland that delivered him the presidency may be in peril.

“The million-dollar question becomes, how does that translate in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania?” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist who managed Ohio Sen. Rob Portman’s 2016 reelection campaign. “It translates into probably not a very good night.”

Ohio has long been a bellwether. No Republican has won the White House without carrying the state since the advent of the modern two-party system, and no Democrat has since 1960.

Trump is faring worse than four years ago in communities in essentially all suburban areas around Ohio, from its major cities to its several mid-size metro areas, more than a half-dozen Republican operatives tracking races across Ohio say.

Trump has slipped in suburbs to the east and west of Cleveland, where he narrowly edged Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, they say. In the blue-collar suburbs of Youngstown, where Trump won by double digits, the same appears to be true.

In affluent suburbs, such as Dublin northwest of Columbus, 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney won by almost 20 percentage points. Four years later, Trump narrowly lost to Clinton. Less than two months before the 2020 election, Republicans were concerned about signs the trend in Dublin has continued, according to several GOP operatives following legislative and congressional races.

 

 

Trump and Housing

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character and relations with the African American community.

In 1972, New York city proposed to build low-income housing in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills. Residents pushed back, fearing crime, lower property values and  "white flight." A young attorney named Mario Cuomo helped craft a deal that let the project proceed.
This past week, Trump said that Biden would abolish suburbs. He referred to Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), a legal requirement that federal agencies and federal grantees further the purposes of the Fair Housing Act.

Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference, July 14, 2020:

Abolish — in the suburbs, you’re going to abolish the suburbs with this. Enforce Obama-Biden’s radical AFFH — that’s the AFFH regulation that threatens to strip localities of federal affordable housing funds unless they change their zoning laws to fit the federal government’s demands. So what you have — I mean, I’ve been watching this for years in Westchester, coming from New York. They want low-income housing built in a neighborhood.

Well, I’m ending that rule. I’m taking it out, so — I spoke with Ben Carson the other day. We’re going to be taking it out. I’ve watched that whole thing go, and now they want to make it twice as bad in the suburbs — in the suburbs.

Mothers aren’t happy about that. Fathers aren’t happy about that. They worked hard to buy a house, and now they’re going to watch the housing values drop like a rock, and that has happened. It dropped like a rock. So we’re not going to do that; we’re going to do the exact opposite.

Two days later, he said:

 The Democrats in D.C. have been and want to, at a much higher level, abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs by placing far-left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning decisions. They are absolutely determined to eliminate single-family zoning, destroy the value of houses and communities already built, just as they have in Minneapolis and other locations that you read about today. Your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise.

Scandalabra 2018

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss  Trump's record of scandal. 

 
  David A. Fahrenthold,  Matt Zapotosky and Seung Min Kim at WP:

Two years after Donald Trump won the presidency, nearly every organization he has led in the past decade is under investigation.

Trump’s private company is contending with civil suits digging into its business with foreign governments and with looming state inquiries into its tax practices.

Trump’s 2016 campaign is under scrutiny by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whose investigation into Russian interference has already led to guilty pleas by his campaign chairman and four advisers.

Trump’s inaugural committee has been probed by Mueller for illegal foreign donations, a topic that the incoming House Intelligence Committee chairman plans to further investigate next year.

Trump’s charity is locked in an ongoing suit with New York state, which has accused the foundation of “persistently illegal conduct.”

The Trumps cheated on their taxes At NYT Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig explain the effect on building tenants.

As it turned out, a hidden scam lurked behind the mysterious increases. In October, a New York Times investigation into the origins of Mr. Trump’s wealth revealed, among its findings, that the future president and his siblings set up a phony business to pad the cost of nearly everything their father, the legendary builder Fred C. Trump, purchased for his buildings. The Trump children split that extra money.

Padding the invoices had a secondary benefit for the Trumps, allowing them to inflate rent increases on their father’s rent-regulated apartments.

“The higher the markup would be, the higher the rent that might be charged,” Robert Trump, the president’s brother, once admitted in a sworn deposition obtained by The Times.

The president and his siblings have long since sold their father’s buildings and moved on with their inherited fortunes. But for tenants, the insidious effects of the scheme continue to this day.

The padded invoices have been baked into the base rent used to calculate the annual percentage increase approved by the city. The sum total of the rent overcharges cannot be calculated from available records. As a way to appreciate the scope of the impact, a onetime $10 increase in 1995 on all the 8,000 apartments involved would put the total overpaid by tenants at more than $33 million to date, an analysis of approved rent increases shows.

Rich People are Better Off. Everyone Else...

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House.  Those divides, however, are now working against him. Despite reports of robust economic growth, Trump's approval rating is sagging and Republicans are in serious danger of losing the House.  What is happening?

At NYT, Nelson D. Schwartz writes about the aftermath of the 2008 crash.

A decade later, things are eerily calm. The economy, by nearly any official measure, is robust. Wall Street is flirting with new highs. And the housing market, the epicenter of the crash, has recovered in many places. But like the diary stored in Ms. Swonk’s basement, the scars of the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession are still with us, just below the surface.

The most profound of these is that the uneven nature of the recovery compounded a long-term imbalance in the accumulation of wealth. As a consequence, what it means to be secure has changed. Wealth, real wealth, now comes from investment portfolios, not salaries. Fortunes are made through an initial public offering, a grant of stock options, a buyout or another form of what high-net-worth individuals call a liquidity event.

Data from the Federal Reserve show that over the last decade and a half, the proportion of family income from wages has dropped from nearly 70 percent to just under 61 percent. It’s an extraordinary shift, driven largely by the investment profits of the very wealthy. In short, the people who possess tradable assets, especially stocks, have enjoyed a recovery that Americans dependent on savings or income from their weekly paycheck have yet to see. Ten years after the financial crisis, getting ahead by going to work every day seems quaint, akin to using the phone book to find a number or renting a video at Blockbuster.

...

When the bubble burst, the bedrock investment for many families was wiped out by a combination of falling home values and too much debt. A decade after this debacle, the typical middle-class family’s net worth is still more than $40,000 below where it was in 2007, according to the Federal Reserve. The damage done to the middle-class psyche is impossible to price, of course, but no one doubts that it was vast.

In December reported at Bloomberg:

President Donald Trump is trying out a new campaign slogan: “How’s your 401(k) doing?” The answer for more than half of Americans is that they don’t have one.

Trump has tested out the line this month at a fundraiser, a campaign rally and in a White House meeting, predicting that the rising U.S. stock market will help him win re-election. But only about 45 percent of private-sector workers participate in any employer-sponsored retirement plan, and the lower-income workers in Trump’s political base are the least likely to hold money in such an account, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Ditto the GOP tax cut.  Quentin Fottrell at MarketWatch:

Approximately 76.4 million or 44.4% of Americans won’t pay any federal income tax in 2018, up from 72.6 million people or 43.2% in 2016 before President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, according to data released Thursday by the Tax Policy Center, a nonprofit joint venture by the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, which are both Washington, D.C.-based think tanks. That’s below the 50% peak during the Great Recession. They still obviously pay sales tax, property taxes and other taxes.

Carson Culture of Corruption

 In  Defying the Odds, we discuss  Trump's record of  scandal.  HUD Secretary Ben Carson fits right in.  Among other things, he used to hawk dubious nutritional supplements.

Juliet Eilperin and Jack Gillum at WP:

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson allowed his son to help organize an agency “listening tour” in Baltimore last summer despite warnings from department lawyers that doing so risked violating federal ethics rules, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter.

Career officials and political appointees raised concerns days before the visit that Carson’s son, local businessman Ben Carson Jr., and daughter-in-law were inviting people with whom they potentially had business dealings, the documents show.

Carson Jr. put people he’d invited in touch with his father’s deputies, joined agency staff on official conference calls about the listening tour and copied his wife on related email exchanges, according to emails.

“I expressed my concern that this gave the appearance that the Secretary may be using his position for his son’s private gain,” Linda M. Cruciani, HUD’s deputy general counsel for operations, wrote in a July 6 memo, describing her reaction upon learning of Carson Jr.’s involvement from other staff members.

The two-page memo, obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), details conference calls and meetings that Cruciani and her colleagues had with Carson, his son and other senior HUD officials to urge that Carson Jr. not be involved in the listening tour, an event intended to give the secretary a chance to see federally supported housing projects firsthand and to convey his policy vision to the public.

Our book says that the 2016 election was a Coen Brothers version of the 1992 election, featuring a slightly scrambled cast of characters:  a Bush, a Clinton, a bombastic billionaire.  The pattern continues.  During the Bush 41 administration, Paul Manafort got into trouble over a HUD scandal.  Paul Manafort is now in deeper trouble, and there is a HUD scandal, though the two things are not directly connect.


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Democrats and Republicans Like to Live in Different Places

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

One reason for GOP control of the House is deliberate gerrymandering.  Another is partisan clustering, that is, the tendency of Democrats to huddle up in cities, where they create huge margins for their party, which means wasted votes.

A new Pew poll confirms that Democrats and Republicans like to live in different kinds of places.

Our studies of political polarization and partisan antipathy both found that the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats go far beyond political values and issues. They also have markedly different preferences about where they would like to live. Most Republicans (65%) say they would rather live in a community where houses are larger and farther apart and where schools and shopping are not nearby. A majority of Democrats (61%) prefer smaller houses within walking distance of schools and shopping.

Home Values and the 2016 Election

At The Wall Street Journal, Laura Kusisto reports on trends in home values:

Much of the spoils have been concentrated on the high end. A study by Weiss Analytics, a housing-data firm, found homes in ZIP Codes where the median value is $500,000 to $1 million are now worth 103% more than they were 16 years ago, before a boom in the mid-2000s was followed by the worst housing crash since the Great Depression. Home prices in those areas have shot up 39% since the bust.

Yet many places around the U.S. missed out on the recent boom, with prices remaining essentially flat during the same period. In ZIP Codes where the median home was worth $100,000 to $150,000, prices have risen 16% since the trough of the market and are now worth 24% more than they were in 2000.

The contrast offers one explanation for the frustration building in the mostly rural, middle-American areas that helped propel Donald Trump to victory in the presidential election. In counties that voted for Mr. Trump, home prices have been largely flat for the past 15 years, according to a county-by-county analysis of home values and voting patterns by real-estate tracker Zillow.

In areas that went for Hillary Clinton—mostly coastal urban areas such as California’s major markets—home values plunged from 2006-2012 but have roared back since.

Trump Sleaze

At Bloomberg, Zeke Faux and Max Abelson report on The Trump Building:

“Iconic and wonderful,” Donald J. Trump said at a South Carolina town hall event last year, praising the 86-year-old Art Deco tower as one of his great possessions. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee also told fans in Maine that critics who mock his failed companies should focus instead on the Manhattan skyscraper. “They don’t want to talk about 40 Wall Street,” he said.

But the 72-story building has housed frauds, thieves, boiler rooms and penny-stock schemers since Trump took it over in 1995 in what may be the best deal of his career. No single property in his portfolio is more valuable than 40 Wall St., according to a Bloomberg valuation of his assets last year. And no U.S. address has been home to more of the unregistered brokerages that investors complain about, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s current public alert list.

...
Trump wrote in his 2008 book “Trump Never Give Up” that tenants at 40 Wall St. are “many of the top-notch businesses in the world.”

That was once the case. Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton’s nemesis, took an office at that site after founding the Manhattan Company, a forerunner of JPMorgan Chase & Co., in 1799. Work began on that spot 130 years later for the bank’s new tower, which was supposed to be the world’s tallest. It was bad timing. Not only did it lose the height race to the Chrysler Building, but Wall Street’s 1929 crash made renting out space difficult.

Seema Mehta reports at The Los Angeles Times:

As millions of people were losing their homes in the depth of the recession, instructors at Trump University were urging students to seek out anxious or desperate sellers to reap a financial windfall, according to recently released documents in the federal class-action lawsuit against presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The now-defunct for-profit real-estate school, founded by Trump and two associates in 2004, offered workshops on how to take advantage of the foreclosure crisis in some of the hardest hit states, including California.

Jonathan Martin reports at The New York Times:

As with Trump University, the Trump Institute promised falsely that its teachers would be handpicked by Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump did little, interviews show, besides appear in an infomercial — one that promised customers access to his vast accumulated knowledge. “I put all of my concepts that have worked so well for me, new and old, into our seminar,” he said in the 2005 video, adding, “I’m teaching what I’ve learned.”

Reality fell far short. In fact, the institute was run by a couple who had run afoul of regulators in dozens of states and been dogged by accusations of deceptive business practices and fraud for decades. Similar complaints soon emerged about the Trump Institute.

Yet there was an even more fundamental deceit to the business, unreported until now: Extensive portions of the materials that students received after forking over their seminar fees, supposedly containing Mr. Trump’s special wisdom, had been plagiarized from an obscure real estate manual published a decade earlier. 

Michael Finnegan reports at The Los Angeles Times:

The Trump Baja fiasco fits a pattern in the Republican presidential candidate’s business record. Over decades of building a business empire in real estate, casino gaming, golf resorts, reality television and the sale of clothing and other merchandise, Trump has left a long trail of angry customers and vendors who accused him in court of cheating them.

Housing, Marriage, and Voting

George Hawley,  "Home Affordability, Female Marriage Rates and Vote Choice in the 2000 US Presidential Election: Evidence from US Counties," Party Politics 18 (September 2012):  771-789.

This article tests the hypothesis that differences in the housing market can partially explain why some American counties are strongly Republican and others strongly Democratic, and that this phenomenon can be largely attributed to the relationship between home values and marriage rates within counties. Specifically, I test the hypothesis that, in the 2000 election, George W. Bush did comparatively better in counties with relatively affordable single-family homes, even when controlling for other economic, demographic and regional variables. Using county-level data, I test this hypothesis using spatial-lag regression models, and provide further evidence using individual-level survey data. My results indicate a statistically significant relationship between Bush’s percentage of the vote at the county level and the median value of
owner-occupied homes, and that at least part of this is explained by the relationship between home values and marriage rates among young women.

In The Weekly Standard, Jonathan V. Last spells the practical implications for Republicans.  Specifically, they should back populist-minded policies that contain housing costs and promote marriage.

 This isn’t a heavy lift. There’s an enormous amount of research demonstrating that marriage makes people happier, healthier, and wealthier. The most recent addition to the literature came just a few weeks ago in the form of a report titled Knot Yet, by Kay Hymowitz, Brad Wilcox, Jason Carroll, and Kelleen Kaye, which examined the same delayed-marriage phenomenon that Hawley was studying in his model.

The Knot Yet authors have put together a list of policy ideas that could help Americans get to marriage earlier. For starters, Republicans could champion nontraditional degrees and vocational training instead of robotically pushing the universal four-year degree, which these days too often comes with a crushing load of debt. When Republicans talk about reforming the tax code they ought to advocate measures that will make family formation more affordable—like increased child tax credits—and be wary of plans—like removing the mortgage-interest deduction—which could make it more difficult.

Other ideas abound. Lately some Republicans have become obsessed with trying to outbid Democrats on issues, such as immigration and same-sex marriage, which do not offer any obvious political advantages. If they’re going to get into bidding wars, why not do it over a suite of issues that could actually bear electoral fruit? For instance, today Democrats are the only ones promoting family-friendly workplace policies. Hawley’s research suggests that Republicans ought to be competing in this space, too, helping to mitigate the professional costs young men and women incur by entering marriage and family life, and thus encouraging more of them to take the plunge.

Filling Gaps in the White House Website, Part 9

Interview with Associated Press:

Q: News out this morning: unemployment rate up to 9.5 percent, and it's of course expected to go higher, as you've said that it probably would. What do you tell Americans who are worried that this really will be a jobless recovery, that they may not be able to find jobs, even if the economy gets better?
Obama: Well, obviously we are deeply concerned about the employment rate. It's one of the things that I am most focused on when I think about long-term economic policy. We have successfully stabilized the financial markets, and that's important, because that was a huge drag that helped precipitate the crisis. We've started to see some stabilization on housing. But what we're still seeing is too many jobs lost, too many families who are worried about whether they're going to be next in terms of job loss ...