“You'll get debunked within the first 2 comments.” That’s us.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Can the Democratic Party rise again? Yes — and here’s the first big thing to watch.
2018 Governor’s races. Go for it. And see Josh Barro below.
Josh Barro:
So here are three places Trump opponents can productively focus their energy:
- The Louisiana Senate race. Congressional elections aren't quite over yet, because Louisiana will elect a senator in a runoff election on December 10. This race will determine whether Republicans have 51 or 52 seats in the next Senate. Yes, Democrats are very unlikely to win this election, but they're more likely to win it than Trump is to lose through recounts or Electoral College shenanigans, so on a relative basis it's less of a waste of liberals' energy and money. More importantly, if Democrats are going to beat back Republican majorities in Congress in 2018 and 2020, they're going to have to start campaigning and winning in places they haven't been winning lately. Louisiana's runoff offers the first opportunity to practice.
- Cabinet confirmations. The Republican majority in the Senate will be narrow, and Trump will need to hold nearly all Republicans together to confirm controversial picks for jobs that require confirmation. Organized efforts to lobby senators could help stop Trump from creating the Cabinet of your nightmares. But it will be best to focus your opposition on his stranger, more Trumpian picks. Liberals have good reasons to be upset about the choice of Betsy DeVos to lead the Department of Education. But she's the sort of pick you might have also seen in a Jeb Bush administration, and it's unlikely any Republicans can be convinced to oppose her. But if Trump follows through on nominating Ben Carson to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development or Rudy Giuliani to be Secretary of State ...
- Medicare. One of Paul Ryan's longstanding goals has been to transform federal entitlement programs in a way that reduces the generosity of their benefits, including by transforming Medicare so that it would (ironically) look a lot more like the Affordable Care Act, with seniors receiving a fixed subsidy toward the purchase of a private insurance plan. Some Republicans in Congress are signaling an intention to move forward early with a transformation of Medicare. This would be very unpopular, and Trump insisted through the campaign that he doesn't want to cut Medicare, in part because it would be very unpopular. This is an issue where Democrats can apply political pressure that will divide Republicans and push them into infighting — perhaps ending with a Trump veto of a Republican Medicare reform bill. There are lots of good reasons to dislike Steve Bannon, but on this issue Democrats may be able to capitalize on Bannon's desire to punish and humiliate Ryan.
WaPo:
Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say
There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.
It was among the decisive factors in a race decided by around 100K people or less in key states. So was voter suppression (FL, NC, WI) and James Comey. They all mattered. We know that not just from those numbers but form the 20 million more votes Clinton got nationally.
That’s not to say mistakes weren’t made by the campaign, or that Clinton didn’t have flaws (we know that going in) but without those extraneous factors she wins anyway.
Here’s one of those underlying problems for Democrats: more banksters needed to go to jail.
David Leonhardt/NY Times:
A Jolt of Blue-Collar Hope
Trump won the presidency with huge margins in places left behind. He lost the popular vote, but won 26 of the 30 lowest-income states, including the old powerhouses of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.
These places are stuck in what I call the Great American Stagnation. Tens of millions of people have experienced scant progress for decades. Median net worth is lower than in the 1980s, and middle-aged whites, shockingly, aren’t living as long as they used to. Ending this stagnation is the central political problem of our age: It fuels Trumpian anger and makes every other societal problem harder to solve.
I came here to New Castle looking for a jolt of hope after the terribly dispiriting presidential campaign. I came to see one of the more promising attacks on the Great American Stagnation.
In the wake of the financial crisis, Delaware’s new governor, Jack Markell, and other officials did obvious things, like using stimulus money to stem the damage and even managing to reopen the refinery. But Markell, who’d run as an insurgent Democrat, understood that nostalgia alone wouldn’t help families pay their bills. So he began looking for ways both to save old jobs and to create new ones. His answer wasn’t original — but that’s O.K., because it was right.
Rebecca Traister/NY Magazine:
Blaming Clinton’s Base for Her Loss Is the Ultimate Insult
Those voters watched as Trump promptly appointed white nationalist Steve Bannon as a senior White House adviser and proposed Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a man once deemed too racist to serve as a judge, to succeed Loretta Lynch as attorney general. They have shuddered as, across America, hateful expressions of white-nationalist victory have proliferated: “You can kiss your visa good-bye, scumbag; they’ll deport you soon, don’t worry, you fucking terrorist,” screamed one man in Queens at a Muslim Uber driver. A dugout wall in upstate New York was decorated with swastikas alongside the words “Make America White Again.” In Ann Arbor, a man threatened to set a Muslim student on fire with his lighter unless she removed her hijab. At Canisius College in New York, students posted photos of a black doll hung from a curtain rod. The nation’s white supremacists have been rolling in their own affirmations of power, while those proven again to have less of it stand witness.
And now, the women and people of color who made up Clinton’s base and were the most enthusiastic supporters of her campaign, the ones who have the most to lose under the Trump administration, have found themselves on the receiving end of the lion’s share of the blame for our recent national cataclysm.
Think Progress:
Trump’s disavowals of white nationalists ring hollow to white nationalists — and everyone else
Why his “disavowal” isn’t convincing.
Michael Tesler/waPo:
Views about race mattered more in electing Trump than in electing Obama
In the first and second posts of this series, I showed that racial attitudes became strongly connected to whether whites identified as Democratic or Republican during Barack Obama’s presidency. That, by itself, meant that racial attitudes would matter a great deal in 2016 — even above the powerful impact of partisanship itself. There is now a stronger partisan divide than ever between racially sympathetic and racially resentful whites.
Indeed, the divide is so large it exceeds what was true in 2008 and 2012 — when there was an actual African American candidate on the ballot. The graphs below suggest that the effects of racial attitudes were greater in the 2016 election than their historically strong impact on Obama’s two presidential elections.
White people: OMG. Race mattered! Black people: Umm…
Vox:
The radically simple reason Hillary Clinton didn’t run a different campaign: she thought she was winning
How was Clinton’s campaign so tone-deaf to a growing populist movement among the white working class? Why did she ignore Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin? Why didn’t she campaign where it mattered?
But there is a simple explanation for all of this. The country — even some in Trump’s own campaign — thought Clinton was going to win. So did Clinton’s campaign. They were more confident than the general public, one staffer told me. And they strategized accordingly.
Comey mattered tremendously.
But that part mattered, too.
Steve Benen/MSNBC:
With the far-right nominee’s confirmation effectively assured, I was reminded of
this Washington Postpiece from a few days ago.
President-elect Donald Trump announced Friday that he will nominate Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to run the Justice Department. A few years ago, this would have a startling pick.
Sessions has always been one of the most conservative senators in the GOP, a fringe figure perhaps best known for his hard-line views on immigration. Now, if confirmed as attorney general, he will become the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.
The mainstreaming of Sessions reflects just how much politics has changed of late.
It does, indeed. The
Post piece added that Sessions, whose judicial nomination was rejected in 1986 because he was considered too racist, arrived in the Senate 20 years ago as one of the chamber’s most extreme members, along with Republican colleagues like Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). In recent years, however, Sessions has found himself “moving closer to the center of the GOP” – not because of his own shifts, but because other Senate Republicans “are getting more extreme.”
What’s striking about reports like this one is how easy it is to swap out Jeff Sessions’ name with others’ and make the identical observation.
Never forget the mainstreaming of the Republican fringe is first and foremost done by Republicans.