House Elections Final Score

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

Bridget Bowman and Scott Wong at NBC:

 Republicans will have a narrow majority in the House next year with Democrats flipping one final seat in California, leaving GOP leaders with even less margin for error as they try to advance President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda.

Democrat Adam Gray has defeated GOP Rep. John Duarte in a rematch in California’s 13th District in the Central Valley following weeks of ballot counting, NBC News projects, meaning Republicans won 220 House seats in the 2024 elections to Democrats’ 215. The GOP can lose just two votes on legislation in the House in the next Congress if Democrats all vote in opposition, giving them little wiggle room for absences, internal fighting and vacancies.

Duarte told the Turlock Journal that he had called Gray to concede on Tuesday evening.

Thanks to Gray’s victory, Democrats netted one seat in the House elections, flipping nine Republican-held seats, mainly in blue states, as Republicans flipped eight Democratic-held seats.

The 13th District is one of three Democratic pickups in California alone, with Democrats Derek Tran and George Whitesides defeating GOP Reps. Michelle Steel and Mike Garcia. Democrats also flipped three seats in New York and one in Oregon, and they gained one seat each in Alabama and Louisiana because of new congressional maps in those states.

Republicans, meanwhile, picked up three seats in North Carolina because of the state’s new congressional map. They also defeated two Pennsylvania Democrats, Reps. Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright, as well as Democratic lawmakers in Alaska and Colorado, and they flipped an open seat in Michigan

President-Senate "Mismatches"

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

Drew DeSilver at Pew:

Four states that Republican Donald Trump carried in this month’s presidential election also elected Democratic senators. That may not seem like a lot, but it’s twice as many “mismatches” between states’ presidential and U.S. Senate results as in all Senate elections held in 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined.

• This year, the states that chose Trump for president and sent a Democrat to the Senate were:Arizona: Rep. Ruben Gallego won the seat that independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is vacating.
• Michigan: Rep. Elissa Slotkin will succeed retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow.
• Nevada: Incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen fended off political newcomer Sam Brown.
• Wisconsin: Incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin edged out financier Eric Hovde.

No states had mismatches in the other direction, electing Republican senators but picking Democrat Kamala Harris for president.

The four mismatches, out of 34 Senate elections this year, made for a “mismatch rate” of nearly 12%. That’s the highest since the 2017-18 cycle, when the mismatch rate was 22%, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of results going back to 1980. Along with a Democratic win in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, seven out of 35 Senate races in the 2018 midterms (including two special elections) went to a different party than the state’s 2016 presidential vote did.

President-Senate mismatches of this sort used to be fairly common. But since 1990, fewer than half of Senate elections have diverged from their state’s most recent presidential vote – and over the past dozen years, the trend has been for fewer and fewer to do so.

BUT the AZ, MI, and NV results ended with same-party delegations in each state. WI remains split-party.  

Hannah Recht and Eric Lau at WP:

Voters in Montana, Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania — states that Donald Trump won on Nov. 5 — also voted for Republicans to take over Senate seats currently held by Democrats, helping Republicans secure control of the upper chamber.

After these flips, only Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will send a split-party delegation of one Democrat and one Republican to the Senate. That is the lowest number since Americans began directly electing senators more than a century ago.

 

Russia Applauds Trump's Picks

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book is about the 2024 election. The consequences of that election are coming into view.

Julia Davis at The Daily Beast:

The incoming Trump administration fills Russian state TV propagandists with glee. In mid-November, when president-elect Donald Trump started to announce his future appointees, state TV host Olga Skabeeva gushed, “All of them are totally wonderful!”

Evgeny Popov, Skabeeva’s husband and the co-host of Russia’s 60 Minutes, concurred, describing Trump’s picks as his “radical dream team” and gleefully noting, “All of them personally despise Zelensky.” He cautiously added, “They aren’t friends of Russia, except for Tulsi Gabbard.”

For years, Gabbard’s propensity for spouting talking points that neatly aligned with the Kremlin’s agenda was seen as a boon for Moscow, with state TV host Vladimir Solovyov referring to the former congresswoman as “our girlfriend” and agreeing with pundits who described her as “Putin’s agent.”

Her planned appointment is not the only one that is being celebrated in Russia. Putin’s mouthpieces are even more excited about Trump’s choice of an FBI director—Kash Patel.

Patel, a lawyer and conspiracy theorist, served in roles at the National Security Council, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense during Trump’s previous term.

During Sunday’s broadcast of a state TV show The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov—a program that Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly watches on a regular basis—host Vladimir Solovyov rejoiced about Trump’s picks.

“What an excellent team is coming along with Trump! Not with respect to Ukraine, but as far as everything else goes. If they are allowed to get in, they will quickly dismantle America, brick by brick. They are so great!” he said.

After airing a clip of Patel threatening to upend the FBI’s operations, Solovyov continued, “Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, Kash Patel, is simply on fire... He’s tremendous! Really, really good.”

An Anti-RFK Coalition?

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  In 2024, RFK Jr. initially looked as if he might be a consequential independent candidate. But after Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, his support collapsed.  He pulled out and endorsed Trump, who is nominating him to head HHS.

 RFK Jr. will probably win confirmation on a party-line vote. But if he doesn't, his downfall could result from a coalition of vaccine supporters, Republicans who oppose his stance on abortion and regulation, and farm-state senators who object to his plan to stop high-fructose corn syrup.

Mary Kekatos at ABC:

Ever since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was picked by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, he has been vocal about his plans to "Make America Healthy Again."

Kennedy has vowed to crack down on dyes in the food industry and to reduce pesticides in the farm and agriculture industry.

He has called for restrictions on ultra-processed foods as part of an initiative to address the high rates of chronic disease in the United States, and he's said more research needs to be conducted on vaccines.

"I think where you would see the challenges would be on allocation of money," Shana Gadarian, a professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York, told ABC News.

"If all of a sudden HHS is now in the business of passing more regulations on the food industry, on agriculture, we might see that a Republican Senate majority and a Republican House is less interested in allocating a budget to HHS that then would be under a different leadership," she continued.

The Senate Rejected John Tower for a Lot Less

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book is about the 2024 election. The consequences of that election are coming into view. Trump is nominating Fox pundit Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense.

Jane Mayer at The New Yorker:

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

In response to questions from this magazine, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Hegseth, replied with the following statement, which he said came from “an advisor” to Hegseth: “We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”

Judd Legum:

Hegseth published a column in college that claimed having sex with an unconscious woman is not rape

While he was a student at Princeton in 2002, Hegseth was the publisher of the Princeton Tory, a right-wing student newspaper. In the September 2002 edition of the publication, flagged for Popular Information by Will Davis of Arc Initiatives, Hegseth published a column that claimed having intercourse with an unconscious woman was not rape. The columnist claimed that rape required both the failure to consent and "duress," and women who are passed out cannot experience "duress":

[A] bemusing yet mandatory orientation program, revolved entirely around whether an instance of sexual intercourse constituted “rape.” The actual instance portrayed in the skit was in fact not a clear case of rape – at least not in my home state. (In short, though intercourse was not consented to, there was no duress because the girl drank herself into unconsciousness. Both criteria must be satisfied for rape. Unfortunately, the panelists never cited any legal definition of rape.) Yet the panel – all females in the session I attended – claimed that rape it was.

In an introductory note to students in the September edition, Hegseth wrote that he hoped the Princeton Tory would "help shape the way you view the world." 

 

The Pardoner's Tale

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Our next book covers the 2024 election.  The pardon of Hunter Biden is a discordant coda to an issue that the GOP had hoped to use against Joe Biden in the general election.

Betsy Woodruff Swan at Politico:

Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.

President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.

Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.

“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.

“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.

Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.

So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.

Kash Patel

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Our next book looks at the return of Donald Trump.

He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.

Eight years ago, Benjamin Wittes wrote:

The soft spot, the least tyrant-proof part of the government, is the U.S. Department of Justice and the larger law enforcement and regulatory apparatus of the United States government. The first reason you should fear a Donald Trump presidency is what he would do to the ordinary enforcement functions of the federal government, not the most extraordinary ones.

 Timothy Snyder:

In a class by himself is Kash Patel, whom Trump would like to see as director of the FBI. This, of course, requires Trump to fire Christopher Wray, whom he himself appointed, and who has three years left to serve. Firing Wray for no reason would be unprecedented and would itself have been an outrage in a more sane time. Giving Patel authority over the national police force is nothing less than a promise of authoritarian rule.

Patel is a narcissitic zealot with zero qualification for such a post, as even hard-right Trump insiders such as Bill Barr have said (“over my dead body” were his words when Trump proposed Patel for a lesser position of authority in 2020). Patel got Trump’s attention for his efforts to denounce the entirely correct proposition that Trump was supported by Russian in 2016. Patel was then one of the most active and outspoken participants in Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-2021. Patel has since become a pitchman for a clothing line as well as pills that, he claims, will detox your body from the harmful effects of vaccinations. Patel said both that he would shut down the FBI and that he would use it to prosecute journalists and people who deny the untrue conspiracy theories in which he believes, and to prosecute people who say true things, such as that Russia supports Donald Trump when he runs for office. Russian trolls have been, understandably, very excited in their support of Patel.