Disillusioned Trump Staff

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.

One thing is certain about the current campaign:  Trump isn't getting any younger.  He is sundowning.

Tim Alberta at The Atlantic:

Entering the final weekend of October, I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation. They had long since become accustomed to working in the high-intensity, zero-margin-for-error environment created by Wiles and LaCivita. But this home stretch of the campaign hadn’t just been hard and stressful; it had been disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House. Now those same people were telling me—as paperwork was being distributed internally to begin the process of placing personnel on the transition team and in the prospective administration—that they’d had a change of heart. The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.

The Stakes of State Legislative Elections

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

Robert Gebelhoff and Amanda Shendruk at WP:

National politics getting you down? Are you tired of reading about the same old presidential and Senate races?

Good news: Legislatures in 44 states are also up for election this year, and they feature a bushel of nail-biters. Even more important: What happens in these races will reverberate in American politics for years to come.

Though Republicans enjoy a considerable state-level advantage — they control 28 state legislatures, to Democrats’ 20 — a healthy number of chambers are toss-ups. If Republicans have a good night, they’ll fortify their grip on state governments. But if Democrats outperform expectations, they could cut into the GOP’s 770-seat lead in state legislative seats nationally — and might even break some supermajorities in Republican strongholds.

Why does this matter? Because states are where much of today’s political action happens. Consider some of the top hot-button political issues of the past few years. Congress rarely passes bills on any of these topics, but state legislatures have enacted a flood of laws on them:

The Weighting Game

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  In both elections, however, polls tended to overstate Democratic margins. 

 Josh Clinton at Good Authority:

Many pollsters now worry whether survey respondents are too Democratic-leaning relative to the electorate. In this survey, 40% of the respondents identify as Democrats and 31% identify as Republicans, even after weighting the data to match the demographics of the 2020 electorate.

But it’s not clear whether this Democratic-leaning sample is a problem. It does not match some other polls, which suggest a narrower party divide. But if Democrats end up being more mobilized to vote in 2024, this partisan imbalance could be a feature of this year’s electorate.

Or maybe not. It could be that Democratic voters are just more likely to take this poll – as was the case in 2020.

If it’s the latter, then the sample is “too Democratic” and needs to be adjusted further. Two common approaches are to weight the sample by partisanship or by self-reported vote in the last presidential election. But again, the right benchmark isn’t obvious.

For partisanship, pollsters often rely on benchmarks such as the Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Research Sample, which suggests that the country is evenly split – 33% Democrat, 32% Republican, and 35% independent – or Gallup’s tracking survey, which suggests that 28% are Democrats, 31% are Republicans and 41% are independents. If I adjust the raw data by both the demographics of the 2020 electorate and these party identification benchmarks, Harris’ margin is greatly reduced relative to the raw data and demographics alone:


Raw data: +6.0 Harris
2020 demographics: +9.0
2020 demographics + Pew party identification: +3.9
2020 demographics + Gallup party identification:+0.9

Trump and Epstein

In Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics, we look at Trump's dishonesty and disregard for the rule of law.

 Our next book will look at the 2024 campaign and the impact of Trump's legal problems. New York courts have found that he is a rapist and a fraud.

 Hugh Dougherty at The Daily Beast:

Jeffrey Epstein described himself as Donald Trump’s “closest friend” and claimed intimate knowledge of his proclivity for sex, including cuckolding his best friends, according to recordings obtained exclusively by the Daily Beast.

The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now-wife Melania by claiming, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” which was dubbed the Lolita Express.

Epstein spoke at length about Trump with the author Michael Wolff in August 2017, two years before being found dead in his jail cell. Wolff was researching his bombshell bestseller Fire and Fury at the time.

...

On the tape Epstein can be heard saying, “He’s a horrible human being. He does nasty things to his best friends, best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust and uses it to do bad things to them.”

On one occasion, Epstein alleged, Trump took a woman to what he called “the Egyptian Room” in an Atlantic City casino. Epstein alleged, “He came out afterward and said, ‘It was great, it was great. The only thing I really like to do is f--- the wives of my best friends. That is just the best.

He alleged that he and Trump would pick up women by combining to split them from their male companions. “We always used to go to Atlantic City to try to find girls in the casino,” he said. “And if there was a guy, I would say, ‘I’m here to invite the guy to go out to dinner.’ And he’d say, [to the woman], ‘Let me show you the casino.’ And as he walked out, he put his arm around the girl’s shoulder, and the bodyguard would walk up and Donald, whoosh, take the girl away.”

Epstein also alleged that Trump had an elaborate scheme to procure sex with his friends’ wives. He would call the men into his Trump Tower office to ask them about their sex lives and offer them sex with beauty pageant contestants, the pedophile said. He would do this while the wives were—unknown to their husbands—listening on speakerphone, so that he could then seduce the wives on the basis their husbands had betrayed them, Epstein claimed.

Trump Closer: A Mashup of Tom Dewey and Linda Lovelace

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.

One thing is certain about the current campaign:  Trump isn't getting any younger.  He is sundowning.

Ben Blanchet at HuffPo:

Former President Donald Trump used apparent technical issues during a Friday rally to toy with the idea of attacking people working the event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“You’ve got to be kidding. Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?” asked the GOP presidential nominee, who called it a “pretty stupid situation” after rallygoers chanted “fix the mic” during his speech.

In 1948, Tom Dewey lost support from railroad workers and other blue-collar voters with a similar comment. Time, 10/25/1948

 A slight misadventure at Beaucoup, Ill. almost spoiled that stop. Engineer Lee Tindle, who improved the time at these railway siding stops by taking on water, had overshot the water tank. Without realizing what he was doing, he backed the Victory Special into a gathering of admirers at the rear end.

The crowd fell back in panic. Dewey, startled, yelled “Whoops!” But the train moved only a few feet and Dewey, smiling wryly, addressed himself to the microphone. “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” he declared. “He probably ought to be shot at sunrise but I guess we can let him off because no one was hurt.”

Disinhibition is a sign of dementia., Trump also simulated sex acts on a microphone:

 

Wow wtf is he doing pic.twitter.com/TNHFsQF2OH

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 2, 2024

State Legislative Races: the 2010 Legacy

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

At Politico, Paul Demko and Liz Crampton report on the long-term effects of the state legislative elections of 2010:

Republicans won a staggering 680 seats across the country and took control of 22 state legislative chambers in a single night.

When President Obama acknowledged that Democrats took “a shellacking” in the midterms, he may have been primarily speaking about congressional races, but it was an even more apt description of the electoral carnage they suffered in state capitals across the country.

The ramifications of that GOP wave are still being felt today in state capitals across the map. In states like Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio, Republicans seized on their newfound power — and fresh Census data — to craft new legislative maps tilted decisively in their favor and dominate state House and Senate races for a decade. That’s enabled them to push through major conservative policy priorities like toughening voter restrictions, scrapping environmental protections and stoking culture wars over issues like LGBTQ rights and school curriculums.

Democrats have made steady inroads in recent cycles, pushing the balance of power in statehouses back in their favor. A huge shift occurred in 2022 when they secured ruling trifectas in Michigan and Minnesota, while flipping the Pennsylvania House. They are counting on taking another important step forward on Tuesday.

But Republicans begin with an edge. They currently hold 55 percent of state legislative seats,according to Ballotpedia , and maintain majorities in 56 legislative chambers, compared to 41 for Democrats. While Democratic gains in 2022 were centered mostly on the Midwest, Republicans strengthened their power in the South, widening margins in states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Florida and the Carolinas.

Violent Messages

Our most recent 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. 

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

Trump on Liz Cheney: "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face." pic.twitter.com/Mtx1fbLtwE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 1, 2024

Kamala Harris depicted as chained up behind golf cart during Pennsylvania Halloween parade https://t.co/dtdSXtngbI

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) November 1, 2024