Politics of the Gaza War

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

Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

The Hamas attack also shook internal Democratic politics. In California’s Senate race, Congressman Adam Schiff is the only one of the three leading Democratic candidates to voice unambiguous support for Israel. By contrast, Representative Katie Porter condemned the loss of lives on both sides. Representative Barbara Lee called for a ceasefire and offered her prayers for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Yet it was in New York City where the left’s not-so-subterranean skirmishes over Israel burst into the open. On Sunday, several hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators chanted “Globalize the intifada,” and “Smash the settler Zionist state.” They also taunted Israel over the number of people killed. The Democratic Socialists of America was an event sponsor. Expect middle-America to be turned off by these antics.

Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, blasted the rally as “abhorrent and morally repugnant”. Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx congressman, wrote: “There is a special place in hell for those who glorify the cold-blooded murder of civilians and children.”

Joe Biden may yet be the last unalloyed pro-Israel Democratic president. But right now, it is he who sets the tone of US policy.

Playbook:

The relationship has been further tested in his presidency. The key episode to revisit is Israel’s May 2021 incursion into Gaza after a major Hamas rocket attack. Biden backed Netanyahu unequivocally: “Israel has a right to defend itself when you have thousands of rockets flying into your territory,” he said.

But with each passing day of the conflict, as violence in Gaza mounted, the criticism from some Democrats in Congress escalated, and Biden felt more pressure in his private conversations with Netanyahu to push for a ceasefire, which came 11 days after the initial attack.


The scale of Hamas’s attack on Saturday is far greater and more barbaric than any recent violence against Israel, but several House Democrats we spoke to last night are convinced that this political cycle will repeat itself.

“For the last couple of days we’ve seen all the pictures of girls who were killed at this festival and the children and the parents and the Holocaust survivor and the elderly, and the hundreds of people who are dead and the stories about them being raped,” one Democratic congressman told Playbook. “That’s over. Okay? The media is going to turn from all of that real soon. And the only images we’re going to see for the next couple of weeks are dead Palestinians.” The member added, “So that’s when the Progressive Caucus will get all ginned up.”

The left is forgetting one big thing:  the terrorists killed and captured Americans. 

 

Background on McCarthy's Fall

Our 2020 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.  

On Saturday morning we had no idea what was happening. Scalise told the GOP they were moving bills that signaled imminent shutdown. This is what we expected. Then McCarthy suddenly and unexpectedly did an about face and announced a vote on a CR. We didn't know what to make of it pic.twitter.com/m3eyB1eB0k

— Aaron Fritschner (@Fritschner) October 4, 2023

David Weigel at Semafor:

But the vote that empowered Gaetz empowered the new conservative media, too, becoming the latest in a decade-long run of stories about Republican leaders underestimating their insurgents. On One America News, Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs condemned the “uniparty” of Democrats and Republicans who’d funded the government without deep cuts; on Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” Biggs and other conservatives who’d deposed McCarthy were saving the country from weak, unserious party leaders.

...

In the mainstream and older conservative media, McCarthy’s prolific fundraising — he raked in more than $260 million to help Republicans win the House in 2022, including some of the members who ousted him — was one of his chief strengths. Among the newer MAGA personalities, it was a source of deep suspicion and resentment.

The latter ecosystem has grown in influence and audience since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which he renamed X; Laura Loomer, an activist banned from the site for much of the Trump presidency, was reinstated last year, and kept her nearly 600,000 followers informed of the donations McCarthy was routing to Republicans like Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, implying that he was buying off support to keep his job.

...

After Gaetz’s gambit against McCarthy succeeded, his many enemies inside the GOP conference went to mainstream media outlets to denounce him. Gaetz isn’t allergic to that; Republicans have vented all week about outlets giving him so much time when they should be skeptical of what he’s saying. “You all know Matt Gaetz,” McCarthy said, sourly, at the press conference where he confirmed that he wouldn’t try to get the gavel back.

But Gaetz and the rest of the GOP’s rebels kept up a direct line of communication with conservative activists and influencers, who could not be mollified by McCarthy. Not by the impeachment inquiry, which Gaetz and Bannon agreed was set up to fail; not by the threat of retaliation, which they relished, after a 2022 cycle when Republicans who’d defied Trump and voted to impeach him were nearly wiped out. (The two Republicans who voted for impeachment and remain in the House come from states with all-party primaries, not states where only GOP primary voters decide who’s nominated.)

“Rep. Gaetz has always been more in tune with younger audiences, and good with social media, and he often hops on X Spaces with the public,” said Alex Lorusso, who posts across different social media networks as ALX — and was restored to Twitter/X last year after a lengthy ban. “I would describe most of the online action as encouraging him to file the motion to vacate, rather than him having to build support… Republicans will be doing next week what I believe they should have done from the beginning.”

The Fat Lady Is Clearing Her Throat

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  The 2024 race has begun.

 Sophia Cai at Axios

State of play: Win It Back, a political action committee (PAC) affiliated with the conservative group Club for Growth, says it burned through $6 million creating 40 anti-Trump messages — none of them effective, the New York Times reported

• .Republican Accountability PAC — a group of former Trump voters dedicated to moving beyond the former president — is giving up on the primary after spending $1 million on ads in Iowa. "We have stopped spending money in the primary," the PAC's leader, Sarah Longwell, told Reuters.
• Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) — who clashed with Trump when he refused to go along with Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump in Georgia — said last week that he'll support Trump if he gets the GOP nomination.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, once generally seen as the best prospect to take down Trump in the primaries, has been in a downward spiral since July.

• Two of his biggest donors in the primary and Florida's gubernatorial race have paused their support or have decided to stop backing him.
• Hotel entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, the biggest individual donor to the DeSantis-aligned Never Back Down PAC, won't donate more money for now.
• Billionaire and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin — who previously said "our country would be well-served by [DeSantis] as president" —now is not supporting DeSantis.

Between the lines: In a sign of DeSantis' struggles, Trump — obsessed with blasting the Florida governor for much of this year — is now taking aim at former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, who's done well in the two GOP debates and is outpolling DeSantis in New Hampshire.Thursday morning, Trump complained on Truth Social that Fox News "has been pushing Nikki 'Birdbrain' Haley" after having "totally given up on Ron DeSanctimonious."

Fundraising and the Fall of McCarthy

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses campaign finance. Some state Republican parties have problems.  And now, so do the House Republicans.

As speaker, Kevin McCarthy had effective control of NRCC and the Congressional Leadership Fund. At WP, Michael Scherer reports on what comes next.

CLF, the centerpiece of House Republican efforts, has grown increasingly dependent on just a few donors in recent years, mostly billionaires who are driven to give more for ideological reasons. The group raised at least $88.5 million last cycle from just eight families and millions more from McCarthy’s own California donors. After McCarthy was toppled, the NRCC announced it was postponing a fall gala event next week in Dallas.

“The happiest people in Washington this week are the people at the DCCC and House Majority PAC who just saw the number one fundraiser in the Republican field taken off the field,” said Mike Shields, a McCarthy ally and campaign strategist who previously ran CLF and worked as political director of the NRCC, referring to two pro-Democratic committees.

Groups connected to McCarthy spent millions to defend incumbents against far-right challengers in primaries, sometimes using spending vehicles that were designed to conceal the identity of donors. They also weeded out Republican candidates that they thought did not belong in Washington, even if they could have won office.

McCarthy allies were involved in 2022 in raising money for a group called Results for N.C. that helped to defeat one of McCarthy’s own members, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), after the freshman lawmaker infuriated his colleagues by talking on a podcast about seeing cocaine use in Washington and being invited to sex parties.

Other groups, with names like American Liberty Action and the Eighteen Fifty-Four Fund, were deployed to take out the primary campaigns of Anthony Sabatini, a Florida friend of Rep. Matt Gaetz, and former New York state party chair Carl Paladino, who suggested in a 2021 social media post that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler is “the kind of leader we need today.”

CLF, under the guidance of McCarthy’s team, intervened in a Florida primary to help defeat Laura Loomer, a political activist who has described herself as being “pro-white nationalism” and a “proud Islamophobe.” CLF also spent heavily, through vehicles that were difficult to track, in a failed effort to defend Rep. Jamie Herrera-Beutler (R-Wash.), a supporter of former president Donald Trump’s second impeachment. After she lost, Democrats were able to pick up the seat on the southern Washington state border.

Trump and Violence, 2023

Our book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.  Trump posted a picture of himself holding a baseball bat, right next to a picture of DA Bragg. 

Maggie Haberman, Nicholas Nehamas and Alyce McFadden at NYT:

Former President Donald J. Trump had a lot to say on the first day of the fraud trial against him and his company. Speaking to reporters at a Manhattan courthouse on Monday, he dismissed the judge as a “rogue” justice and said he did not “think the people of this country are going to stand for it.” And he focused on the official who filed the lawsuit against him, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.

“This is a disgrace,” he said, “and you ought to go after this attorney general.”

The remark urging people to “go after” a top elected official in New York, by a former president whose invective has become a familiar backdrop of American life, was part of a pattern of increasingly sharp language from Mr. Trump.

Days earlier, he told hundreds of Republican activists in California that shoplifters should be shot. Not long before that, he insinuated that the military general he personally appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed for treason.

Oliver Knox at WP:

No one served longer as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff than retired general John Kelly. So when he confirmed to CNN this week that the former president had made all manner of wildly disparaging comments about military members and veterans, he made waves.

But tucked away in Kelly’s wide-ranging yet sharp denunciation of his former boss — not an afterthought, surely, but not the headline-grabber — was a stark warning about Trump’s public attacks on anyone he thinks has crossed him personally, professionally, or politically.

When the former president accused the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, of treason and suggested he should have been put to death, he did so “in expectation that someone will take action,” Kelly told CNN’s Jake Tapper in a written statement.

 

Violence is Trump's brand. Inciting violence is central to his political project - it's how he got his Jan 6 army. It's why he kicked off his campaign at the Waco, TX extremist pilgrimage site and why he visited a gun shop. My Lucid essay: https://t.co/4cbY3xMVdc

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) October 6, 2023

Water's Edge: Reflex Reactions to War in Israel

Trump on Hamas attacks on Israel: pic.twitter.com/POqIvnwPfF

— Meridith McGraw (@meridithmcgraw) October 7, 2023

 

Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel today is an assault on Western Civilization.

The truth is though, Joe Biden funded these attacks on Israel.

America's weakness is blood in the water for bad actors, but this is worse than that. We didn’t just invite this aggression, we paid for…

— Tim Scott (@votetimscott) October 7, 2023

Israel is now under attack by Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists. Iran has helped fund this war against Israel and Joe Biden's policies that have gone easy on Iran have helped fill their coffers.

We are going to stand with Israel as they root out Hamas and we need to stand up to… pic.twitter.com/FENQtAxiDE

— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) October 7, 2023

This is not just an attack on Israel—this was an attack on America.

Finish them, @Netanyahu.

They should have hell to pay for what they have just done. pic.twitter.com/0KKDwvOITS

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) October 8, 2023

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel says the deadly attack on Israel is a “great opportunity” for Republicans pic.twitter.com/hfcZhHG4Mu

— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) October 7, 2023

Inside Game, Outside Game

 Our 2020 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.  

POLITICO Playbook:

INSIDE VS. OUTSIDE — The speakership race between Reps. STEVE SCALISE and JIM JORDAN is turning into a test of two very different strategies.

Scalise is running the way successful speakers always have: by focusing assiduously on the inside game of member-to-member lobbying. In Scalise world, the way to win next week’s secret ballot election is to break down the conference into granular Scalise-friendly factions that he can cobble together into a majority.

Scalise is the second-most-prolific GOP fundraiser after KEVIN McCARTHY, and his team is making sure the recipients of his largesse remember that. He’s a former whip in a chamber where serving on a whip team is a bonding experience. He’s a southerner in a party that is dominated by that region of the country. He’s targeting colleagues who sit with him on the Energy and Commerce Committee. He’s counting on committee chairmen who are close to leadership and wary of Jordan’s Freedom Caucus roots. And despite the fact that he once led the Republican Study Committee, the jovial Scalise is wooing moderates freaked out by the idea of making Jordan the face of their party.

There are lots of ways that members bond that defy the typical GOP categories, and you hear a lot about these relationships from Scalise world. “@SteveScalise and I were elected to Congress together through special elections and became close friends,” Rep. ROB WITTMAN of Virginia said on X last night. “I am proud to support him for Speaker of the House.”

It’s not that Jordan doesn’t have similar pockets in the House to target. He does. He’ll do well with most of the nine other Republicans in the Ohio delegation, with the MAGA right, with Judiciary Committee colleagues who will want to support their chair, with some McCarthy allies who had beef with Scalise.

But Jordan is running much more of an outside game, trying to leverage the modern conservative media world and its best-known influencers to pressure Republicans to back him. And early this morning, he won the backing of the ultimate GOP outsider: DONALD TRUMP.