Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, brought to you by the three person team of myself, Killer300 and Bhu. I hope everyone had a good Mother’s day (I didn’t really, I had to work a six hour shift out in the rain, but that’s neither here nor there).
But whether you’re having a good Mother’s day or not, I can tell you whose been having a good couple of months: President Joe Biden, who continues to crush it as our President, and meanwhile the GOP continues to sink into civil war as they bizarrely continue to attach themselves to biggest loser and biggest liar Donald Trump.
So without further ado, lets get on with the news.
Rep. Liz Cheney on Monday issued a forceful rebuke of claims made by former President Donald Trump and his supporters that his loss in the 2020 election was the result of fraud.
Cheney’s message came shortly after Trump reiterated his unsubstantiated claim that his loss to President Biden in November was not legitimate.
So finally one of the GOPer’s finally came out and said it, I don’t hold much hope of others following her lead, but it looks like the GOP civil war is starting to heat up.
When I first met Stacey Abrams 10 years ago, I knew right away that the work she was doing in Georgia had great potential. While Stacey has graciously credited my wife and me as being among her first national supporters—even joking that we supported her before it was logical—the ingredients for success in Georgia were there all along, if you knew what to look for. Now that the world has come to marvel at the Georgia miracle, we should be thinking about what states are next and what lessons from the Georgia journey can be applied to the political transformation of other states.
The next state that is most clearly poised for a Georgia-like trajectory is Texas.
I know every year we hope we can turn Texas blue and it keeps not happening, but that doesn’t mean we can give up. Georgia was the proof of concept. It proved we can do it, and if we can do it in Georgia, with a little elbow grease we can do it anywhere, don’t give up the fight.
When the 2020 Census numbers were released, it was an open question as to whether the Republican effort to insert a citizenship question into the census had hampered counting in three red states with large Hispanic populations. Many number-crunchers expected Arizona to gain one seat, Florida to gain two and Texas to gain three; instead, Arizona stayed even, Florida gained one seat and Texas gained two.
It turns out, Republicans may have undercut their own census counts, and it was not simply a result of the failed gambit to insert a citizenship question. As former Obama administration speechwriter David Litt writes in Democracy Docket: “In places like Texas, Florida, and Arizona, many local and statewide officials supported the Trump Administration’s unconstitutional attempt to add a citizenship question to the census, even though the people most likely to be deterred by such a question live disproportionately in those states.” He also noted that the “Florida GOP underfunded census outreach” and that “[Texas’s] outreach campaign operated on what the New York Times described as ‘a shoestring.’” The most remarkable finding was this: “even before the pandemic hit, 24 states were not planning to spend a single dime of their own money encouraging residents to sign up — and 17 of those 24 states were run entirely by Republican politicians.”
Yep, what the GOP fail to realize is that their voter suppression tactics are not targeted, so they hurt their own people as well as their enemies (And their enemies are even more determined to oust them now).
That’s because the consequences for congressional representation largely mirror the regional differences in the census results. Each of those three states received one fewer seat than had been expected from pre-census estimates: Texas gained only two seats, Florida gained one seat, and Arizona gained none. As a result, these three states will send fewer members than expected to the House — and have fewer electoral votes for the presidency.
So basically, because the GOP tried to scare Latinix voters away from the census, they reduced the number of seats they could get in red stats, and will also have fewer electoral votes.
In the words of DJ Khaled: “You played yourself.”
The Republican Party might be high on Donald Trump, but key voters are not, The Washington Post reported Saturday.
Internal GOP polling data revealing Trump’s weak numbers in key battleground districts was kept under wraps by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) at recent retreats for Republican lawmakers, sources told the Post. NRCC staffers reportedly held back the bad news, even when a member of Congress asked directly about Trump’s standing at a retreat last month.
I really don’t understand the GOP’s continued infatuation with that man. I mean the Honeymoon is long over, I think most people are over the Trump thing at this point, I think they really need to give it up.
And with that this weeks GNR comes to a close, I wish everyone a happy Monday, as we look forward to the rest what is shaping up to be a better year than the last few.