In Defying the Odds, we discuss demographic and partisan gaps in the 2016 election.
Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:
In 2019, on average, 47% of U.S. adults identified politically as Democrats or said they were independents who leaned toward the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, 42% identified as Republicans or were Republican-leaning independents.
Americans' political leanings have been quite stable since 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected president. The Democratic figure has not changed in the past four years, and the Republican figure has been 41% or 42% each year since 2012.
The latest results are based on aggregated data across all Gallup Poll surveys in 2019, which include interviews with more than 29,000 U.S. adults.
John DiStaso at WMUR:
Former Republican U.S. Sen. Gordon Humphrey and former New Hampshire First Lady Dorothy Peterson are among 100 independent Granite State voters announcing their support for former Vice President Joe Biden on Monday.
The Biden campaign said 93 of the 100 “New Hampshire Independents for Biden” are making their support for the former vice president known for the first time. The other seven have been previously announced and are reaffirming their support as members of the grassroots coalition.
The campaign said it intends to make a broad, concerted effort to speak to independent voters over the next six weeks leading to the first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 11.
View the full list of “New Hampshire Independents for Biden” here.
Independents, formally known as undeclared voters, make up the largest voting bloc in the state. As of Oct. 30, they comprised 42 percent of the registered voters in the state, while Republicans were 29.5 percent and Democrats were 28 percent of New Hampshire voters.
Independents can take either a Democratic or a Republican ballot in primary elections and then are able to return to undeclared status if they wish.
In 2016, Sanders got 70 percent of the independent vote in the New Hampshire primary.
In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House.
Jack Jenkins at the Religion News Service:
Donald Trump insisted that he is favored by God during a speech to evangelicals on Friday evening (Jan 4), in which he also went through a roll call of evangelical rallying points and challenged the faith of his Democratic rivals as he kicked off a new campaign initiative aimed at conservative Christians.
“I really do believe we have God on our side,” Trump told the crowd of roughly 5,000 gathered at El Rey Jesús Church in Miami, Florida.
...
The president repeatedly characterized religion itself as under attack or “under siege” in the United States, saying that people of faith have no greater champion than him. He noted a recent shooting at a church in Texas and the stabbing of Jews worshiping in New York, adding that he would strive to combat anti-Semitism.
He did not mention his controversial travel ban — which was originally proposed as a ban on Muslims entering the country — or attacks on Muslim Americans and their houses of worship that have occurred during his presidency.
However, Trump did take shots at the field of Democratic candidates vying to replace him.
“As we speak, every Democrat (sic) candidate is trying to punish religious believers, and silence our churches and our pastors,” Trump said. “Our opponents want to shut out God from the public square so they can impose their extreme anti-religious and socialist agenda on America.”
It is unclear what Trump meant by “punish religious believers,” although he made reference to a short-lived proposal by former candidate Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who once suggested faith-based institutions should lose their tax-exempt status if they don’t support same-sex marriage. O’Rourke later clarified that he was referring only to religious institutions that provide public services, not individual houses of worship.
Trump also mocked South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has referenced faith repeatedly during his presidential campaign. The president joked that “nobody can pronounce (Buttigieg’s) name” before questioning the authenticity of the Democrat’s religious beliefs.
“All of a sudden he has become extremely religious,” Trump said. “This happened about two weeks ago."
At The Dispatch, David French explains that Pete Buttigieg's deep and sincere Christianity is not necessarily appealing to Evangelicals.
All of that may sound hair-splitting and esoteric to those who aren’t Christian, but these theological differences create profound cultural differences. For example, a Mainline Christian looks at an Evangelical and simply can’t understand how someone who calls themselves “loving” or “kind” or “compassionate” could possibly believe that the loving sexual union of two men or two women is in any way immoral. An Evangelical wonders how a person who calls themselves “loving” or “kind” or “compassionate” could excuse or rationalize conduct that God rejects. Does that not harm the souls of the very people they love? (To his credit, Buttigieg frequently acknowledges the good faith of competing Christian ideas.)
Or, to put it another way, at his or her best an Evangelical declares (to quote the esteemed theologian Kanye West), “Jesus is King,” and then seeks to follow what the King commands through the “God-breathed” scriptures that represent the final word and ultimate authority in any religious contest. They (we) are of course subject to comprehensive critique in the way in which we uphold our own professed principles, but those are the principles, that’s the language, and that’s one reason why not all “God talk” is created equal in the eyes of the faithful.
I appreciate Mayor Pete for putting his faith front and center in his campaign. Truly, I do. It’s a welcome act of transparency. After all, we all get our code of ethics from somewhere, and it’s worth knowing the source of Buttigieg’s forceful moral arguments. But if mainstream media figures believe that Mayor Pete speaks the same Christian language as Trump’s Evangelical base, they need to think again. He’s a sincere proponent of a faith that is very different from theirs.
Andrew Kaczynski at CNN:
In media appearances prior to the 2012 election, Donald Trump repeatedly predicted that then-President Barack Obama would start a war with Iran in order to win reelection.
A CNN KFile review found Trump made the claims throughout 2011 and 2012 in radio and television appearances as well as in a since-deleted YouTube blog and on Twitter.
Now president and facing his own reelection battle later this year, Trump ordered a drone strike on Thursday that killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, in a major escalation between Iran and the US. Trump celebrated the news on Thursday night by tweeting a picture of an American flag, adding on Friday, "Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation!"
In Defying the Odds,we discuss Trump's approach to governing. The update --recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.
Aaron Blake at WP:
The United States killed a top-level Iranian military leader in Iraq early Friday local time, and the questions on everyone’s mind are: Are we now at war? What happens next? And what is President Trump prepared to do?
The decision to take out the powerful military commander, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, was a huge one. Reporting suggests he is indispensable to Iran-backed forces across the Middle East, and the move will be seen as a remarkable escalation of tensions between Iran and the United States — even after supporters of an Iranian-backed militia stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad this week. Iran has responded to the Trump administration’s pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and implementing heavy sanctions with increasing provocations, and Trump has now lodged a major response.
In Defying the Odds, we discuss campaign finance and campaign technology. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.
Former Vice President Joe Biden raised $22.7 million in the fourth fundraising quarter of 2019, his campaign announced Thursday, his best number yet of the 2020 cycle-- figures that come a week after his campaign disclosed the names of their "bundlers", individuals that helped raised more than $25,000 for the candidate.
Biden’s current fundraising numbers put him third so far compared to other 2020 campaigns who have already released their numbers for the fourth quarter of 2019. Sen. Bernie Sanders announced a staggering $34.5 million in Q4, and former Mayor of South Bend, Ind Pete Buttigeig, who raised $24.7 million."Biden for President doubled its online fundraising and increased its overall fundraising by 49% compared to last quarter, demonstrating financial momentum at the same time as Vice President Biden’s lead nationally has grown," a press release sent out by the Biden campaign Thursday afternoon said.
Throughout his campaign, Biden has not shied away from high-dollar fundraisers and held more than 100 fundraisers in 2019 alone.
Late last month, following the lead of fellow candidates N.J. Sen. Cory Booker and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the Biden campaign, released the names of more than 200 bundlers-- a group that spans well connected Hollywood figures such as movie executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and current or former elected officials that have endorsed Biden.
The bundlers include Delaware Senator Chris Coons, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and former Florida Rep. Patrick Murphy.
(MORE: Pete Buttigieg releases list of 113 bundlers for his campaign)
Former top Obama economic adviser Jeff Zients, International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) President Harold Schaitberger, and Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky, are also on the list.
In
Defying the Odds, we
discuss social media,
fake news, and
Russian involvement in the
2016 campaign.
The Russian-sponsored Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) use of social media to influence U.S. political discourse is undoubtedly troubling. However, scholarly attention has focused on social media, overlooking the role that news media within the country played in amplifying false, foreign messages. In this article, we examine articles in the U.S. news media system that quoted IRA tweets through the lens of changing journalism practices in the hybrid media system, focusing specifically on news gatekeepers’ use of tweets as vox populi. We find that a majority of the IRA tweets embedded in the news were vox populi. That is, IRA tweets were quoted (1) for their opinion, (2) as coming from everyday Twitter users, and (3) with a collection of other tweets holistically representing public sentiment. These findings raise concerns about how modern gatekeeping practices, transformed due to the hybrid media system, may also unintentionally let in unwanted disinformation from malicious actors.
From the article:
IRA “specialists” were instructed to intensify political disunity by supporting political extremist groups, social movements, and “users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation” (p. 14). Specialists were also told to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them)” (p. 17).
...
In our corpus of 314 articles, 198 (63.1%) articles referenced an IRA account as an average American or social media user. In this category, journalists typically described IRA tweets as representative of “Twitter” opinion or backlash (using phrases like “Twitter trolls,” the “Twitterati” “The Internet,” or simply as “Twitter”)15 or representative of supporters for a politician or political issue (e.g., “Trump supporters,” “Leftists,” or “LGBT users”).
