Steve Inskeep/NY Times:
Immigration. Race. Demographic change. Political demagogy. That year’s presidential race had it all. What can it tell us about 2020?
These attacks played out across a deeply divided nation. Beyond the clash over slavery, a movement against immigration was reshaping politics. Native-born citizens voted out lawmakers sympathetic to foreigners and promoted conspiracy theories that the pope would use Irish Catholics to control the country. They led marches into immigrant neighborhoods, deliberately provoking violence. Some politicians saw anti-immigrant fervor as a perfect distraction, which they could use to unite proslavery and antislavery voters against a common foreign enemy. But slavery was too much for the hatred of outsiders to obscure.
In theory, new technology could have brought the country together. The recent invention of the telegraph miraculously sped communications, making it possible for newspapers across the country to print the same news almost simultaneously. In reality, voters were horrified by what they learned about one another.
The above is an amazing essay, give it a look.
Kevin Robillard/HuffPost:
New Poll Shows It’s Anybody’s Race In Iowa
Sanders rises and Buttigieg falls, but no candidate has a clear edge in the first contest of the Democratic primary.
The poll shows plenty of potential for movement in the race’s final four weeks. Just 40% of voters said their minds are definitely made up on which candidate to support, while 45% said they could be persuaded to back another candidate and 13% haven’t settled on a first choice yet. (At the same point before the 2016 caucus, nearly 60% of voters had made up their minds.)
The last iteration of this poll was conducted in mid-November. Since then, Sanders has improved his position, jumping from 15% to 20%. Buttigieg has fallen after leading the field with 24% of the vote. Neither Warren nor Biden saw significant movement.
DMR on yesterday’s IA poll:
Selzer said she typically eschews the idea of political “lanes,” arguing that caucusgoers don’t approach their decisions that way.
“But you look at these data and you kind of go, ‘Well, these look like lanes,’ ” she said.
Sanders and Warren are battling for progressive caucusgoers, and Biden and Buttigieg are attracting a more moderate crowd.
Higher proportions of Biden and Buttigieg supporters — 75% and 72%, respectively — say choosing a candidate with the superior chance of defeating Republican President Donald Trump is extremely important to them, personally. It’s 54% among Sanders supporters and 53% among Warren supporters.
Seventy-eight percent of Biden's supporters and 84% of Buttigieg's supporters say that a candidate’s ability to unite the country is extremely important in their choice. That factor is extremely important for 65% of Sanders' supporters and 58% of Warren's.
And 64% of Biden supporters and 61% of Buttigieg supporters say having a candidate who can bring Republicans and independents on board is extremely important. Just 38% of Sanders' supporters and 46% of Warren's supporters feel that way.
Further, a plurality of Biden's supporters, 29%, say Buttigieg is their second choice; a plurality of Sanders' supporters, 44%, say Warren is theirs; and a plurality of Warren's supporters, 31%, say Sanders is their second choice. Buttigieg's supporters are split on their second choices, with 20% saying Warren and 18% saying Biden.
“This poll really displays the Sanders-Warren connection and the Biden-Buttigieg connection,” Selzer said.
Sarah Posner/TNR:
The Evangelicals Who Pray for War With Iran
Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, who urged Trump to kill Qassem Soleimani, are ardent proponents of Christian Zionism.
Last Friday, a day after Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and nine others were killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, the Christian Zionist advocacy group Christians United for Israel emailed its millions of supporters to praise President Trump’s move. “This Decisive Action Will Save Countless Lives,” read the subject line, echoing the assessment delivered that morning by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Fox and Friends. The bombing showed that Trump would take “swift and decisive” action to protect Americans, Pompeo had told the president’s favorite morning news program. Vice President Mike Pence later claimed that Americans are “safer today.”
...
Televangelist John Hagee launched CUFI in 2006, calling for military action against Iran, then led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom Hagee compared to Hitler. At the time, Hagee had been claiming that Iran would soon “have the nuclear capability to make a bomb, a suitcase bomb, a missile head, or anything they want to do with it.” That was untrue, given contemporaneous expert assessments of Iran’s projected nuclear advances. But for Hagee, a more militaristic approach was necessary in order to avert “an American Hiroshima.” He urged his supporters to take a stand, as they were meant to “for a time such as this,” a common evangelical reference to Queen Esther, celebrated on the Jewish holiday of Purim, who saved the Jews from extermination at the hands of Haman, the genocidal adviser to the Persian king.
In his 2006 book, Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee imagined an elaborate scenario in which a U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran would trigger an “inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” Faced with scrutiny over his apocalyptic theology, he strained to create a discrete image for his new political organization, insisting that his extensive writings on biblical prophecy about the Rapture and Second Coming were distinct from CUFI’s lobbying agenda. But it was a rocky start for the organization. In 2008, while running for president, John McCain first accepted, then rejected, Hagee’s endorsement. The rebuff was seen as damaging to the political neophyte and a brave stance by McCain against fringe elements within the GOP’s evangelical base. At CUFI’s annual Washington Summit, held just two months later, only three members of Congress attended.
John Sides/WaPo:
Incumbent presidents usually get more popular when they run for reelection. Will Trump?
Trump’s best-case scenario could be what happened to Barack Obama.
A second pattern is the one Trump wants to avoid: declining approval in the election year, leading to a loss. This befell both Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. But both dealt with recessions either in the election year or the year before. If a recession doesn’t come in 2020, Trump’s approval rating may not decline as theirs did.
The third pattern is the one Trump needs: increasing approval numbers throughout the election year. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton are the clearest examples. Nixon’s average monthly approval increased from 49 percent to 61 percent between January and October 1972. Clinton’s increased from 47 percent to 56 percent over the same period in 1996.
Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barack Obama experienced more modest increases, but increases nonetheless. Reagan’s approval had already increased significantly in 1983 as the country recovered from the punishing 1982 recession. But it increased about three more points in 1984 before he was easily reelected.
George W. Bush’s approval rating dropped a few points in the first part of 2004, but then edged up. It was enough for a narrow victory. Obama’s approval rating, which was also relatively stable despite the economic recovery, increased about five points while he was battling Mitt Romney.
Ben Terris/WaPo:
Seeing fatal flaws in every Democratic candidate for president? You’ve got Pundititis.
How, exactly, can anyone tell who the strongest candidate is before an election? The simple answer is, they can’t. Americans have a terrible track record when it comes to determining who is “electable.” Before Hillary Clinton entered the 2016 election, her approval rating rose to 66 percent while she was secretary of state. She was so “electable” that she nearly cleared the field.
Then she wasn’t elected.
The ensuing months were the perfect incubator for the Pundititis. Democrats spent hours watching cable news; listening to the endless yammer of “political analysts,” learning about exit polling and being haunted by talk of “invisible Trump voters.” The pundits had gotten 2016 all wrong, but instead of dying out, they multiplied.
NY Daily News has been on this story for a while:
Trump administration gives crooked Brazilian meatpacker another taxpayer-funded bailout despite bipartisan outrage
As first reported by the Daily News, JBS USA received at least four similar contracts last year, making it the single biggest beneficiary of President Trump’s farm bailout program, which was drawn up to alleviate financial burdens of American agricultural producers struggling to make ends meet because of the administration’s tariff-heavy trade war with China.
Accounting for the latest contract, JBS USA has received at least $100.8 million in farm bailouts, according to a previously undisclosed Agriculture Department document reviewed by The News.
The taxpayer-funded bailout program — which Trump replenished with $16 billion in May after the first $8.6 billion ran out — is designed to buy up excess products that farmers aren’t able to sell because of the trade war and then distribute those goods to domestic food programs.
Members of Congress from both sides of aisle have shredded the administration’s payments to JBS, questioning how subsidizing a foreign-owned company helps American farmers.
Adding to such concerns, JBS SA remains, via a holding company, under the control of Wesley and Joesley Batista, a couple of notoriously corrupt Brazilian brothers who have spent time in jail and admitted to bribing hundreds of government officials in their home country. The Batistas’