More Friday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Republicans’ 2028 Presidential Map Just Blew Up

For many the magnitude and depth of the Democrat blue tsunami is still sinking in. Yes, the Felon's hubris, terrible tariffs and Iran war and general misrule powered much of the revolt and revulsion by voters literally across the country.  Add in the corruption of the Felon and those around him and the arrogance of the billionaire and oligarch set while millions of Americans struggle and there was even more fuel for the fire burning down the GOP.  As for congressional Republicans and in state legislatures that saw themselves go down to defeat, their blind allegiance to the Felon and refusal to check his excesses played a role, but so did their decades long push of the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda that harmed the many while pandering to the wealthy and white "Christian" nationalists.  The likes of Elon Musk have forgotten that the excesses of the Gilded Aged helped usher in the progressive era as the American public seems to be waking to the reality that this group has nothing to offer them and seeks only to pick their pockets and push even more transfer of wealth to the few.  Yes, over two years things could change again, but at the moment the GOP presidential map for 2028 has been blown up as laid out in a piece at Politico.  The other looming issue will be who can be the GOP presidential standard bearer. A piece in the New York Times predicts that JD Vance is toast. Marco Rubio sold his soul to the Felon and most other Republicans blatantly prostituted themselves to the Felon, something that may haunt them. Here are highlights from Politico:

The Democratic landslide Tuesday was not just a rebuke of President Donald Trump but a political earthquake that could fundamentally transform the country’s electoral map.

Suddenly, the Republican path to 270 electoral votes appears considerably narrower. But that’s not all. The red-and-blue presidential map as we know it is crumbling.

“After a generation, it looks ossified — there’s just more swing states now,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa), the incoming House Budget Chair and student of political history. “We had the same map for a quarter-century but that’s changed.” The transition starts in Texas, where after more than a decade of rosy predictions of blue, the GOP Alamo finally fell.

Democrats’ success there was stunning. Not only did they flip a Senate seat with a double-digit win, they claimed nearly every statewide office and took control of the state House. It’s plain as day: the GOP’s largest presidential prize is now an unambiguous swing state. And if they can’t retain Texas’s 40 electoral votes, Republicans have virtually no path to the presidency.

Yet that’s only the beginning of the cold new reality Republicans face as they climb out of the political wreckage of a historically bruising midterm and contemplate how they’ll retain the White House in 2028.

Democrats are effectively forming a pincer maneuver, meeting from east and west toward Texas and squeezing Republicans from either coast inward.

The Democratic hold along the Pacific remains impregnable and they showed renewed strength in the interior west on Tuesday, easily retaining governorships in Arizona and New Mexico while reclaiming it in Nevada. Arizona — the state of Barry Goldwater, John McCain and Jon Kyl — just reelected somebody derided four years ago as an accidental governor with a 13-point margin.

Colorado hasn’t been truly at risk for over two decades and only continues to grow a deeper shade of blue, light years from the conservatism that prevailed there for so much of the 20th century. Gov.-elect Phil Weiser won by nearly 30 points against an extremist Republican Tuesday. And now Kansas appears to be closer to its western neighbor than its Plains cousins. Adam Hamilton didn’t just win a Senate seat, he defeated an incumbent by five points and appeared to help Democrats prevail in a governor’s race there was still too close to call well after Midnight there.  . . . With the booming growth in the Kansas City suburbs, Kansas could become the battleground state that Missouri was for so many years.

Moving north, Iowa, which Trump carried three times, showed unmistakable signs of returning to the battleground it was for decades. Democrat Rob Sand won the governorship by 10 points, a remarkable margin in a red-tinted state; Josh Turek won the Senate race by about four and Democrats picked up three House seats in a state that only has four altogether.

Democrats handily retained governorships in the so-called blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and won the governorship and a Senate seat in Ohio, which some in the party were convinced had become a hopelessly red state.

[T]o move east and south is to find only more devastation for Republicans. Their only real footholds in the Northeast are the governorships of New Hampshire and Vermont — and Pennsylvania Sen. David McCormick, who may be a presidential candidate perhaps sooner than planned. With Sen. Susan Collins’s defeat in Maine, Republicans have no senators in New England for the first time since the founding of the GOP.

This is a long way of saying, Republicans almost certainly won’t be finding electoral votes in the Northeast. Headed South, Virginia is an Atlantic cousin of Colorado, a suburbs-heavy state that is thoroughly Democratic now. And North Carolina looked a lot like Virginia Tuesday, electing Roy Cooper as senator with a staggering 20 point margin and turning out a handful of GOP House members.

In the past, the Deep South grew safer for Republicans, but South Carolina elected Annie Andrews — its first Democratic senator since 1998 on Tuesday. And Georgia demonstrated that it has firmly become a Democratic-leaning swing state now, closer to a Midwestern Blue Wall state than its Southern neighbors. The first Black woman to become governor in American history? Keisha Lance Bottoms did it with ease, winning by six points. Sen. Jon Ossoff won by an extraordinary 18 points and, in fact, Georgia Democrats won every state office and took back the state House for the first time since 2002.

Yes, Republicans remained in control across much of the rest of the South, but the “Blacklash” nearly cost the GOP a Senate seat in Louisiana and it may yet in Mississippi, the most heavily Black state in America.

So where on the map do Republicans put together 270 electoral votes?  Just six reliably blue states — New York, New Jersey, Illinois and the three West Coast states — hand Democrats 135 electoral votes, getting them halfway there.

If the Sun Belt, including Texas and Florida, is up for grabs there is no obvious path for Republicans even in a slightly better political environment — one where Gov. Greg Abbott loses by, say, four rather than seven.

But, to be fair this could be a low ebb for the party: a historically bad midterm driven by an increasingly despised president, unpopular war and the high gas prices it wrought. But will the demographic challenges Republicans faced with Hispanics, Black voters and suburban white voters on Tuesday be appreciably different in two years, should President Trump still retain his grip on the party?

Put more directly, would Vice-President JD Vance fare better than Tuesday’s GOP candidates in Georgia, Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada? It’s hard to see. Tuesday shows, however, that political coalitions today can quickly shift — and the so-called red states Republicans thought they could count may be as elusive in 2028 as they were in 2026.

Georgia and Arizona will become what Virginia and Colorado are today if Republicans don’t pursue a post-Trump reformation and find a way to appeal to educated and more diverse voters. “There are no permanent majorities in American politics,” said Boyle, reviving a truism as glaring and hard to miss as Texas going blue.

More Friday Male Beauty

 

Even Where MAGA Won, MAGA Lost

If one looks at the racial and religious make up of candidates who won office in the 2026 mid-terms, it was a victory for a multi-racial America and a defeat for white supremacist and "Christian" nationalist Republicans. While white evangelicals voted roughly 82% for Republican candidates, the shifts away from the GOP were huge, with young voters, especially young white males, swung sharply to Democrats.  Part of this huge shift was due to horrible policies of the Felon and the GOP that have driven the economy into a ditch through the illegal Iran war, insane tariffs, and the "big beautiful bill" that showered tax breaks on the very wealthy while largely screwing the rest of the American populace. The sea change shift to Democrats may well not be permanent - Democrats need to deliver on voters' concerns and need put bills on the Felon's desk and dare him to veto them - but as a piece lays out in The Atlantic, the elections were a defeat for white supremacist MAGA members even in places where Republicans managed to squeak out wins.  We now have black, Hispanic and Native American governors and a very multi-ethnic group of U.S. Senators (we may yet see a black senator from Mississippi) and members of the House of Representatives who are the antithesis of the white privilege world pushed by the Felon and the MAGA base.  Here are article highlights: 

One of the biggest Republican wins in an otherwise-terrible midterm night for the GOP was the victory of the Trump-supporting Byron Donalds in Florida’s race for governor. Donalds will become the first Black governor of that state. If you could resurrect Jefferson Davis and tell him that the governor of Florida will be a Black Republican married to a white woman, he would crawl straight back into his coffin.

That this was MAGA’s big win in a night of defeats is remarkable, given the movement’s hostility toward diversity, and its nostalgia for an America where rigid race and gender hierarchies were enforced by the state. Even where Republicans won, in other words, President Trump’s racially exclusive conception of American citizenship lost. Trump could browbeat corporate America into eliminating DEI programs; he could threaten colleges to let in fewer students of color; he could direct the full power of the federal government toward deporting immigrants. But he could not will away the America that actually exists.

The America that emerges from the midterm elections is not the monochrome world of Madison Avenue ad campaigns from the 1950s. It is a diverse country, made up of many different kinds of people, all of whom are American. The victories of Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Aaron Ford in Nevada, and David Crowley in Wisconsin, in addition to that of Donalds, mean that there will be more Black governors than ever in U.S. history. In Texas, where Mexican Americans were subject to legalized forms of racial discrimination until the mid-20th century, Gina Hinojosa will become the first Hispanic governor. Xavier Becerra is the first Hispanic governor to be elected in California, and Deb Haaland will become New Mexico’s first Native American governor. Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota will become the first Native American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. And Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan will become the first Muslim U.S. senator.

This happened despite the president, and the many Republicans who followed his lead, trying to make the midterms about a familiar theme: the country being invaded by strange people who do not belong here, let alone in the halls of power.

President Trump and others called El-Sayed a “jihadist,” and Vice President Vance said he should “show a little gratitude to the country that gave him everything.” (Like Vance, El-Sayed was born here.) After El-Sayed won, he told Trump, “I know you struggled with my name. You can just go on and call me Senator.” Republicans fearmongered about “Sharia law” before losing every major statewide office in the Lone Star State. In Minnesota, candidates attacked Somalis, running spots about “Somali gangs” taking over.

Trump won in 2016 and in 2024 while leaning into this strategy of scapegoating ethnic and religious minorities, which convinced many politicians and media figures that the strategy was deviously effective, or at least that it didn’t turn too many people off. After all, in 2020 and 2024, Trump grew his coalition, gaining support among Black and Hispanic voters as well as white ones. But the strategy could not overcome the economic headwinds Trump himself created with tariffs and the arguably illegal, inarguably ill-advised war in Iran. Many voters in 2024 also believed that Trump would focus immigration enforcement on criminals, instead of on a violent and indiscriminate campaign that would involve schoolchildren and their families hiding in their homes and masked gunmen shooting Americans dead in the streets.

I am not going to make the same mistake as the Trump Republicans after 2024 did and declare a permanent realignment of the U.S. electorate toward my policy preferences. Economic mismanagement and the war were clearly the primary drivers of Democratic success. What these wins do say, however, is that the real America is not the “Real America” of conservative fan fiction inspired by the years 1945 to 1964. Real Americans are not just those whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, or whose ancestors served in the Revolution or Civil War, or who describe themselves with pathetic euphemisms such as “Heritage American.” As Abraham Lincoln once said, newcomers who believe in the principle that “all men are created equal” have “a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration; and so they are.”

As soon as the returns made the extent of the bloodbath clear, MAGA personalities began blaming the nation’s diversity for Republicans’ losses. The conservative podcaster Benny Johnson posted, “In 1970, the White population in Texas was 89%. In 2000, it was 50%. Now it’s less than 39%. Demographics is destiny.” The Trump adviser Laura Loomer declared, “America was always intended to be a majority White country. Not a cesspool for third world minorities. America was founded as a Christian country. Not a Muslim country.”

Contrary to Johnson, demographics is not destiny—if it was, Texas would have flipped a long time ago and Trump would not have won there by double digits in 2024. Millions of nonwhite Americans have conservative beliefs, and most of them would be happy to vote for Republicans who treated them as Americans instead of invaders. As for Loomer, not only was America explicitly not founded as a Christian country, but we also fought a civil war over whether it was a white country—and the side taken by Loomer lost.

You cannot call for people to be exiled because of their ethnic background and expect them to vote for you.

In September, Trump said, “America does not belong to those who hate it. America belongs to those who love it.” But the way MAGA talks about the America that actually exists—as opposed to the one it imagines once existed—doesn’t sound like love at all. Whether or not Americans believe in multiculturalism, we are multicultural. One is an ideology; the other is a fact.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Trump Gets His Orbán Lesson

Election results from Tuesday's mid-term election continue to trickle in and it is becoming ever more clear just how badly Republicans - deservedly - suffered at the hands of voters.  In Texas, the results are nothing short of a cataclysmic earthquake: Democrats swept almost every state wide office including Senate, governor, Lt. Governor and attorney general, and took control of the Texas House spelling the end for horrible Republican backed legislation.   In North Carolina Democrats likewise took control the North Carolina House and numerous Republicans who likely thought they had safe seats went down to defeat. Here in Virginia, a number of congressional Republicans went down to defeat and three progressive constitutional amendments - covering abortion access, same sex marriage and voting rights of former felons - all passed with comfortable margins. Indeed, the Republican losses were so massive that it appears the Felon's previous plans to challenge the results may come to naught. Meanwhile, JD Vance is trying to distance himself from the Felon seemingly realizing that hooking his future to the Felon's star may have been a truly bad idea.  With luck, Republicans who survived the GOP rout will feel no need to further prostitute themselves to the Felon. A piece at The Atlantic compares the Felon's humiliation with that of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán whose efforts to turn Hungary into an autocracy crashed and burned earlier this year.  Here are article excerpts:

The president of the world’s greatest democracy admires autocratic leaders. He speaks with great affection about Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. But the model that he and his MAGA acolytes have long apparently hoped to emulate was that of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who ruled for some 20 years by boring into Hungary’s democratic institutions, including the media and the courts, and either gutting or corrupting them.

Trump tried his best, and it has now led him to the same dead end. Last spring, Hungary experienced the highest voter turnout since the country’s 1990 transition to democracy. Voters threw out Orbán and his party, Fidesz, in favor of a former Fidesz member, Peter Magyar, who’d tied Orbán to autocracy, corruption, and decreasing living standards. Orbán, who was widely expected to do whatever he could to subvert the vote, realized he faced a result too big to challenge. The numbers were overwhelming in every corner of Hungary, and Orbán could not remotely make even a laughable case for casting doubt on the result.

Trump and his party experienced a similar fate as they suffered the consequences of their brazen attacks on American democracy, of allowing the stench of corruption to envelop the White House, of starting a foolish and unpopular war, and of promising a better economy and instead delivering inflation and high gas prices. Like Orbán, he had to sit helplessly and watch his party take beatings from the Democratic Party in places where Democrats were supposedly almost extinct.

The president’s reaction to this crushing loss has been remarkably muted. As vote counting began, Trump spent his time excoriating not the Democrats but, for some reason, Fox News. . . . and claimed that Fox’s ratings were down “because they’re spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats.” In fact, Trump said, Fox was ignoring a CNN poll that showed him to be more popular among Republicans than Abraham Lincoln.

As the night wore on and Republican losses piled up, Trump, who often posts barrages of messages, was unusually quiet. Shortly after 10:30 p.m. eastern time, he reacted to the accelerating bad news by donning the suit of armor made of his high-tensile-strength narcissism. “I wasn’t on the Ballot,” he whined, “and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” . . . The problem is that Trump, over the past weeks, challenged Americans to vote as if he were on the ballot, and millions of people apparently took him up on the offer.

By late evening, Trump’s transformation into Orbán was complete. He said—again without his characteristic combativeness—that he would accept the outcome of the election and that he would be willing to work with Democrats. Whether he means to hold to those commitments is anyone’s guess.

 Whether Trump has sincerely accepted the victory of the Democrats and intends to cooperate with them in governing the country is, in a sense, irrelevant: The more important reality is that he faces an electoral result too decisive to challenge, as Orbán did. I was among the many who feared that he might inundate state election authorities with lawsuits or even try to seize ballots, but those possibilities evaporated before midnight. So many votes had been cast, even in red states, that any attempt to undermine the result would look either violently dictatorial or patently ridiculous.

Trump, like Orbán, wanted to seize power using democratic means, and then eviscerate any future challenges to his power by destroying those same practices and institutions. Like Orbán, Trump’s arrogance, contempt for the law and toleration of corruption, and staggering incompetence pushed even former supporters beyond their limits. Unlike Orbán, he does not have to leave office, and he could provoke any number of crises between now and the 2028 elections. But he seems genuinely deflated by the scale of punishment that the American people have inflicted on his party and his chosen candidates.

The Hungarians, many of whom perhaps thought Orbán was destined to be a permanent fixture in their life, relearned the lesson of their Cold War liberation: Mobilization, organization, and voting can bring down an autocracy. Last night, Americans proved that the same methods can forestall one.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Virginia Approved A Constitutional Amendments to Protect Same Sex Marriage

My husband and I got married in 2014 in the District of Columbia before same sex marriage became legal in Virginia.   Since the reversal of Roe by the extremist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, many gay Virginians have feared that the Obergefell ruling striking down bans on same sex marriage could suffer a similar fate, throwing thousands of marriages in limbo at best.  To address this concern and also to protect abortion rights and restore voting rights, three constitutional amendments were on the ballot. Amendment 2 which repealed the 2006 ban on same sex marriages and added guaranties to protect same sex marriages passed with over 57% of the votes cast.   A piece in the Virginia Mercury looks at these constitutional amendments.  Here are excerpts:

On Election Day, Virginians approved three amendments to enshrine reproductive, marriage and voting rights for former felons into the state’s constitution, the culmination of a multi-year journey through the state legislature galvanized by lawmakers, advocates and major federal shifts. 

Over 61% of voters answered yes to Ballot Question 1 as of 10 p.m. Tuesday, according to unofficial results from the Virginia Department of Elections. It asked if access to contraception, fertility treatment and abortions should be protected. 

On Ballot Question 2, which asked if a defunct ban on same-sex marriage should be removed from the constitution, 56% of voters replied affirmatively.

The third ballot question asked whether the voting rights restoration process for formerly incarcerated people should become automatic or remain petition-based. 55% of voters said yes. 

The second amendment voters approved will lift a technical ban on gay marriage and affirm “that two adults may marry regardless of sex, gender, or race.” These unions must receive equal protection under the law. 

Since 2006, Virginia has technically banned gay marriage. 

The prohibition has been rendered moot since the Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges, which has upheld such unions nationally since 2015. 

But after federal abortion protections were removed by the Supreme Court, Virginia lawmakers set to work enshrining state-level protections moving forward. 

“Tonight’s victory belongs to generations of Virginians who organized, advocated and fought for equality, often without knowing whether they would live to see this day,” said Narissa Rahaman, Executive Director at Equality Virginia.