Mimi Rocah and Eli Honig/Daily Beast:
After Getting Flipped By Mueller, Manafort Is Existential Threat to Trump
Indeed, Manafort seems uniquely positioned to deliver extraordinary—perhaps even historic—cooperation. Manafort is situated differently than the other cooperators who have given information to Mueller thus far. Manafort sat in the inner sanctum of Trump world, while prior cooperators like former campaign official Rick Gates and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos were more like B-listers. Ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen (who, according to recent reporting, may be speaking with Mueller as well) both had insider access to Trump.
But Manafort looks to have been Trump’s primary conduit to Russia, while Flynn had more limited Russian contacts and Cohen dealt more with Trump’s local and domestic finances. Of all the people in Trump’s orbit, the one who most likely has information about a possible conspiracy with the Russian government—aside from Vladimir Putin himself—is Paul Manafort.
Scared, bro? You look scared.
The Hill:
Dems' confidence swells with midterms fast approaching
The party controlling the White House has lost seats in 36 of the 39 midterm cycles going back to the Civil War. The average loss, according to the analysts at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, an election handicapper at the University of Virginia, is a whopping 33 seats.
Democrats, though, see signals well outside of civics textbooks that are fueling the optimistic sense that they’ll control the chamber next year for the first time since they were clobbered at the polls in 2010.
The most recent generic poll, a gauge of how voters feel about the parties without naming individual candidates, found the Democrats with a 14 point advantage — an enormous gap predicting the House would likely flip.
Don’t even start with bullshit about overconfidence. No one is overconfident. Dems think they’ll win and R’s think they’ll lose. That’s a fact. So put some goddamn swagger in your step and make it so.
NY Times:
As Democrats enter the fall midterm campaign with palpable confidence about reclaiming the House and perhaps even the Senate, tensions are rising between the White House and congressional Republicans over who is to blame for political difficulties facing the party, with President Trump’s advisers pointing to the high number of G.O.P. retirements and lawmakers placing the blame squarely on the president’s divisive style.
Yet Republican leaders do agree on one surprising element in the battle for Congress: They cannot rely on the booming economy to win over undecided voters.
Nothing helps Republicans win Congress like Trump blaming them for everyth… oh, wait… maybe it won’t help. Seriously, many folks think Congress does worst when Trump attacks them. So, right on cue...
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
Identity, Not Ideology, Driving the Democratic Party
White progressives badly underachieved in Democratic primaries for governor. African-American progressives dominated.
The demographic patterns in these races are clear. African-American candidates were able to build an energized Democratic coalition of black voters, white liberals and younger voters to swamp more-established candidates in primaries. But white liberal candidates struggled to expand their support beyond the most predictable precincts, unable to build racially-diverse coalitions for their progressive messages.
When looking at conservative analysis of the Democratic 2018 primaries, watch for these themes:
- — conservatives all *know* Ds are socialists or secret socialists but win because of identity politics (it *can't* be policy ).
- everything you see in 2018 is really 2020, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O'Rourke are running for president of the Socialist America we must prevent
- winning red area candidates like Conor Lamb and Doug Jones are the exception. There are too many exceptions to list.
- Democrats *must* have something to run on other than *be a check on trump* even though the majority of voters wants a check on Trump
- Democrats *must* have something to run on other than *be a check on trump* even though most are running on health care and local issues
- the fact that D's are winning and are now expected to take the House, and that the Senate is in play, and that there really is a wave that will hot state races, all means they are doing it wrong (I'll explain why in my next column or tweet)
Dan Balz/WaPo with the now conventional wisdom that it really was the racism, stupid:
A fresh look back at 2016 finds America with an identity crisis
In 2016, Clinton should have done a bit worse than Obama across the board. Instead, in some states — Arizona, California, Georgia, Massachusetts and Texas — she did better. In others she did about the same. And in some, Ohio and Iowa among them, she did “substantially worse.”
Oddly, she did better, comparatively, in red states — such as Georgia and Texas — than she did in a swing state like Iowa.
The cause for this was a divide among white voters, well documented during and since the election, a division that saw those with college degrees moving one way and those without college degrees the other. Sides, Tesler and Vavreck go step by step through the reasons for what they call the “diploma divide” among white voters….
It’s not that economic issues didn’t matter. But racial attitudes “shaped the way voters understood economic outcomes.” The authors describe this as “racialized economics” rather than economic anxiety. “Voters’ attitudes on racial issues accounted for the ‘diploma divide’ between less and better educated whites,” they write. “Economic anxiety did not.”
Remember this from March:
Perhaps most significant, a March 20 Pew Research Center public opinion survey found that 33 percent of Democratic voters and Democratic leaners are whites without college degrees. That’s substantially larger than the 26 percent of Democrats who are whites with college degrees — the group that many analysts had come to believe was the dominantconstituency in the party.
According to Pew, this noncollege white 33 percent makes up a larger bloc of the party’s voters than the 28 percent made up of racial and ethnic minorities without degrees. It is also larger than the 12 percent of Democratic voters made up of racial and ethnic minorities with college degrees.
So the trick is to not abandon your base while not giving up on non-college whites. You won’t win them all and you don’t need to, but you need to minimize losses. You can do that with good candidates, who preach health care and oversight, and that is not “identity politics’.
NY Times:
The Democratic tickets in the Sun Belt are more diverse and more liberal, led by candidates such as Andrew Gillum, the progressive Tallahassee mayor who seized the nomination for Florida governor in an upset; David Garcia, a professor-turned-activist challenging Gov. Doug Ducey in Arizona; and Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic leader in the Georgia House. All three candidates are counting on mobilizing voters who have not typically turned out in midterms, to transform these Republican-leaning states into purple swing states ahead of 2020.
Democrats are likely to gain across both regions [midwest and sun belt], over all. But if they fare markedly better in one than another, it could heavily shape Democrats’ thinking about 2020 and bolster either the primary candidates more focused on mobilizing Democrats or those determined to win back Trump voters.
And it might be that different regions (ie more or less non college voters) need different things.
Understand that as Trump loses popularity, and as the GOP sees themselves losing, they will go full out white nationalist, and it’s gonna be messy.
It’s that white nationalist stuff that loses the GOP moderates. They may not vote for us but they may well stay home. Remember, the Trump base is not big enough to win on its own.
PS Only awful people work for Trump:
Yeah, and maybe they all spontaneously combusted. Maybe they ate each other. Not Trump's fault, he was at a golf course. Could be it was space aliens. Whatevers, amirite?
Brett Kavanaugh
And now Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser is now on the record:
California professor, writer of confidential Brett Kavanaugh letter, speaks out about her allegation of sexual assault
Earlier this summer, Christine Blasey Ford wrote a confidential letter to a senior Democratic lawmaker alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago, when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. Since Wednesday, she has watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without her name or her consent, drawing a blanket denial from Kavanaugh and roiling a nomination that just days ago seemed all but certain to succeed.
Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.
So Senators like Susan Collins need to take a vote to end Roe v Wade based on elevating an accused rapist to the Supreme Court… and Republicans think this is a good idea to have her testify? This year? With an all male Senate Judiciary? With an election on 50 days? #MeToo? Really??
McConnell may pull it regardless of what the WH wants. And you know what? He was right when he advised the WH to pick someone else. But now it’s all about raw power, so who knows what they’ll do.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” the newspaper quoted her as saying. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.” That’s from the NY Times version: Brett Kavanaugh’s Nomination in Turmoil as Accuser Comes Forward
David Lat/NY Times:
Delay the Vote — for Kavanaugh, for His Accuser and for the Court
Christine Blasey Ford deserves to be heard. And the judge deserves a chance to clear his name.
The way in which Ms. Ford’s allegations came to light was, to put it charitably, deeply unfortunate. These claims should have been thoroughly and discreetly investigated weeks ago, by nonpartisan F.B.I. agents and bipartisan Senate investigators, in a way that protected Christine Ford’s privacy and Brett Kavanaugh’s good name. But here we are.
It is quite possible — or even likely — that hearings won’t prevent Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed given the equivocal evidence against him and, perhaps even more important, the number of Republicans and red-state Democrats in the Senate. But due process, which ought to matter when it comes to filling the critical seat on the highest court in the land, calls for nothing less.
And that’s a wrap. Phew. Glad nothing happened this weekend. Well, cheer up in any case and look at this crowd: