Saturday, December 16, 2023
Optimism: Why Trump Won’t Win
Over the past few weeks, warnings about the threat posed by Donald Trump’s potential reelection have grown louder, including in a series of articles in The Atlantic. This alarm-raising is justified and appropriate, given the looming danger of authoritarianism in American politics. But amid all of the worrying, we might be losing sight of the most important fact: Trump’s chances of winning are slim.
Some look at Trump’s long list of flaws and understandably see reasons to worry about him winning. I see reasons to think he almost certainly won’t.
Yes, recent polls appear to favor him. Yes, Joe Biden is an imperfect opponent. And yes, much could change over the next 11 months, potentially in Trump’s favor. But if Biden’s health holds, he is very likely to be reelected next year. It’s hard to imagine any Republican candidate galvanizing Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans to vote for the current president in the way that Trump will.
I’m not arguing that anyone who wants President Biden to win—and, more important, anyone who wants Trump to lose—should relax. To the contrary, Democrats, and any other sensible voters who oppose Trump, need to forcefully remind the American people about how disastrous he was as president and inform them of how much worse a second term would be. Thankfully, that is not a hard case to make.
The former president enjoys some clear advantages. About a third of Republicans are fiercely loyal to him, meaning that he has the unwavering support of a small but potent segment of the broader electorate. . . . Large numbers of Americans will vote for anyone running as a Republican against a Democrat.
Trump’s media supporters, above all at Fox News, will offer support, propagating a set of myths about his record in office, particularly the supposedly great economy over which he presided. Trump will be able to run as both an incumbent, because he’s a former president, and an “outsider,” as in 2016, because he is out of office. That will make his attacks on the “deep state” and his own persecution narrative more convincing. . . . . A certain segment of the public will buy into these messages.
Trump might also enjoy a relative advantage in the Electoral College because of the counter-majoritarian aspects of the U.S. political system. . . . if the race is close enough in the right places, the undue power of rural voters in smaller or less populated states could tilt the outcome in his favor.
Finally, Biden is not the candidate Trump ran against four years ago. He is older, his approval rating is suffering, and, during his four years in office, he has given certain segments of the public reasons to be dissatisfied with him.
All of that notwithstanding, when the general election gets under way, and presuming that Americans are faced with a binary choice between Trump and Biden, Trump’s chances will start to look much worse. Even if most Republicans unite behind him, a significant portion of both Republicans and independents will have a hard time pulling the lever for him. Some Republican voters might well stay home.
Trump’s flaws look far worse today than they did eight years ago. To take one example that should concern conservative voters: his behavior toward and views of service members. In the 2016 campaign, Trump’s attacks on Senator John McCain and on the Gold Star Khan family were bad enough. Now we have a litany of testimonies that he expressed contempt and disgust for wounded veterans . . . describing them as “suckers” and marveling, “What was in it for them?” According to an Atlantic report, when he was scheduled to visit a World War I–era American cemetery in France in 2018, Trump complained, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Trump has always posed as a patriot, but he has proved himself unpatriotic, anti-military, and ignorant of the meaning of sacrifice.
Now he has been held civilly liable by a New York jury for sexually abusing the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996. A federal judge has said that the jury concluded that what Trump did to Carroll was rape in the common sense of the term. Some Americans will shrug that off, but many won’t be able to.
Trump hopes that his legal troubles will prove a boon to his campaign, allowing him to paint both law enforcement and the judicial system as part of a massive conspiracy against him. . . . . but many other Americans simply won’t be impressed, inspired, or persuaded by someone who faces 91 felony counts, in addition to civil cases. Trump already has been found liable for fraud and sexual abuse in New York. To that may well be added a criminal conviction at the federal level. Even if none of the trials has concluded by next fall, much of the evidence that prosecutors have accumulated is already in the public record and will be powerful fodder for anti-Trump attack ads. And Democrats will benefit from the attention Trump draws to the election-subversion cases.
On top of all this, Trump has a strong record of electoral losses, with his 2016 upset, which apparently surprised even him, as the lone exception. His party suffered the standard midterm defeat in 2018. Then he lost the 2020 election. Then Republicans lost control of the Senate after Georgia’s runoff in early 2021. Then his party was denied the standard midterm victory in 2022, barely eking out a four-vote House majority . . . . There is no obvious reason that 2024 should constitute a sudden break from this pattern of MAGA defeat.
Presidential elections are usually decided by a relatively small group of swing voters in six or seven swing states. The most important are independent voters and suburban voters, two groups that appear to have turned away from Trump since 2016. He hasn’t done anything to win them back since 2020, instead running in recent months on a platform that’s more radical, extreme, and openly authoritarian than ever
With Trump promising vengeance, retribution, and dictatorship, at least on “day one,” as he recently told Sean Hannity, will these swing voters be wooed back into his camp? Are Americans so fed up that they will want to elect someone who has advocated for the “termination” of the Constitution in order to keep himself in power?
Biden has a strong record to run on. In his first two years, with a tiny House majority and only a tiebreaker in the Senate, he managed to pass more progressive, consequential economic legislation than, arguably, any president since Lyndon B. Johnson. Unemployment is low, and inflation is cooling. Perhaps the public has not fully felt these positive developments yet, but they will almost certainly have registered by next November.
Americans have reported to pollsters that although they believe that the economy is bad for others, they themselves feel economically secure. Biden should ask voters Ronald Reagan’s classic question: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? The answer can only be yes, given the dire situation the nation found itself in during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic
The abortion issue, opened up by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, has consistently played in Democrats’ favor, and that’s unlikely to change next November. . . . . Trump claims responsibility for the decision overturning Roe by virtue of his Supreme Court appointees. That, plus Trump’s treatment of women, gives Biden a huge opportunity with female voters.
Biden’s pro-Israel policies during the ongoing war in Gaza might cost him support from Arab and Muslim Americans, but probably not enough for him to lose Michigan, for example, to Trump. Voters in those groups seem unlikely to support the author of the “Muslim ban,” who is threatening to reimpose similar restrictions . . .
The 2024 election will be a referendum on democracy, with both candidates claiming to stand for freedom and American values. On this matter, Biden’s claims are obviously stronger: He has been governing as a traditional president, whereas Trump promises authoritarianism and openly says he wants to be dictator . . .
Biden is old, but so is Trump. Biden has grown unpopular, but so has Trump. Biden has liabilities, but Trump’s are considerably worse. Biden has lost the backing of plenty of voters, but the results of the past few elections suggest that Trump has lost more. Meanwhile, Trump’s record as president and since—January 6, the devastating testimony from his former senior officials, the ongoing trials, and whatever additional self-inflicted wounds he delivers—will contrast very poorly with Biden’s track record and steady leadership. By November, enough Americans will surely understand that they aren’t voting for Biden over Trump so much as voting for the Constitution over a would-be authoritarian.
The case against Trump’s reelection is obvious and damning. As long as his opponents prosecute that case—and they will—Trump isn’t going to win.
Friday, December 15, 2023
Republicans' Christmas Gift to Putin
A year ago, when Volodymyr Zelensky received a hero’s welcome in Washington, Joe Biden stood beside him and promised to be with Ukraine “as long as it takes” to beat back Russia’s invasion. Biden promised this again in February, when he made a dramatic visit to wartime Kyiv to mark the first anniversary of the invasion. Over the summer, as Zelensky ordered an ambitious counter-offensive against Vladimir Putin’s forces, boosted by billions of dollars in military assistance from the U.S. and other Western allies, Biden repeated his pledge. He said it again—in June, in July, and in August. In September, when both the counter-offensive and continued U.S. aid to fund it began to look wobbly, Zelensky flew to Washington to try to convince wavering Republicans—and Biden once again reiterated America’s commitment to standing with Ukraine for the duration of its war against Russian aggression.
Which made what Biden had to say this week—when Zelensky returned to the U.S. capital to try to break loose more than sixty billion dollars in emergency assistance for Ukraine, currently being held hostage in Congress by Republicans demanding sweeping changes to border and immigration policy—all the more striking. This time, Biden stood alongside a visibly weary Zelensky but did not muster the formulaic words of reassurance. Instead, he said, “We’ll continue to supply Ukraine with critical weapons and equipment as long as we can.” As long as we can. What a comedown. Both the U.S. President and his Ukrainian counterpart warned of the dangers of congressional inaction, while essentially acknowledging that there was little they could do to prevent it. If lawmakers left for congressional recess without approving additional money for Ukraine, Biden said, they would be giving Putin “the greatest Christmas gift.”
By Thursday, as the House headed out of town and the Senate, despite ongoing talks, seemed far from a deal, Putin was ready to collect his present. “There will be peace when we achieve our goals,” he said at his annual press conference, a four-hour extravaganza of anti-Ukraine propaganda and bluster.
His stated goals, it should be noted, remain what they were when he invaded—the evisceration of Ukraine as an independent state. He also seemed well aware of what was happening on Capitol Hill. “Ukraine produces almost nothing today—everything is coming from the West,” he said. “But the free stuff is going to run out someday, and it seems it already is.” Conventional wisdom has held that Putin would push to keep his war going until at least next November, given the increasingly real prospect of victory by the Putin-admiring, Ukraine-skeptic Donald Trump. Instead, the unravelling is happening faster than anyone anticipated.
If Putin’s strategy has been to wait out the West until its commitment to Ukraine wavers, the week’s events in Washington suggest that it is working—and is even, quite possibly, ahead of schedule.
And yet, to a remarkable degree, this is a story not about Russia’s war on its neighbor so much as it is about America’s internal battles over what kind of superpower it wants to be. Even Republicans who say they are staunch supporters of Ukraine—and of Israel, for that matter, which is also part of the emergency supplemental bill—now say they will not relent unless Biden agrees to demands about the border.
For Ukraine, it’s only the latest terrible twist of fate that has linked its seemingly popular cause with the U.S. border debate—perhaps the single most toxic, Trumpified issue in American politics today.
Alina Polyakova, who, as head of the Center for European Policy Analysis, attended the session, told me that Zelensky had a deep and “nuanced” understanding of the “minefield of U.S. politics” in which Ukraine finds itself. “I would venture to guess there’s no better analytical lens on our domestic politics right now than the Ukrainians,” she said. “This is life-and-death for them.”
A few weeks ago, Biden’s advisers were insisting that the bipartisan backing for aid in both chambers meant that, somehow, it would get to a vote before year’s end—a prospect that, on Thursday, the Republican Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, laughed off as “delusional.” That’s because this is not just about Ukraine, of course. It’s about the weakness of the Republican leadership in Congress . . . .
Should Trump win next year, there are many more unravellings to be expected. After his unlikely election in 2016, much of Trump’s first two years in office was about undoing commitments made by his predecessor—most notably, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and blowing up the Iran nuclear deal. Trump threatened even more disruptive actions, including pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea and exiting NATO altogether. Few expect him to have advisers who will try to stop him from carrying through on such threats in a second term. As far as Ukraine goes, there is not even a formal treaty or agreement to withdraw from.
Throughout his tenure, and especially since Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine, Biden has periodically issued stentorian calls for the democracies of the West to rally against the dangers posed by revisionist authoritarian powers such as Russia and China. But, with American democracy so threatened from within, such rhetoric has often sounded discordant, implying a resolve and unity that the West simply does not possess. Biden . . . . now offers a more realistic—and chilling—assessment. “The world is watching what we do,” he said at his White House press conference with Zelensky, “which would send a horrible message to an aggressor and allies if we walked away at this time.” On Thursday, listening to as much of Putin’s press conference as I could take, it seemed fair to conclude that the message had already been received.
The Republican Party has become the party of betrayal and treason.
Thursday, December 14, 2023
The Coming GOP Double Speak on Contraception
Kellyanne Conway is going to Capitol Hill on Wednesday with a message for Republicans: promote contraception or risk defeat in 2024.
The former senior counselor and campaign manager for President Donald Trump is part of a group set to brief Republicans on how they might get ahead of Democrats’ attacks that the GOP is anti-woman by talking more about protecting contraception and less about banning abortion.
The visit comes as GOP presidential and congressional candidates have struggled to craft a salient message on the fallout from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
Trump himself has blamed anti-abortion groups and the strict laws they support for electoral defeats in 2022 and 2023. And several prominent conservatives have implored Republicans in the post-Roe era to focus on issues such as contraception and maternal care to improve perception of the GOP’s approach to women’s health as Democrats have wielded the issue to notch several election wins. Conway, lobbyist Susan Hirschmann and Independent Women’s Voice CEO Heather . . . . warn that if they don’t talk about birth control and work to make it more accessible, they risk losing voters and confirming arguments from the left that the party that outlawed abortion in much of the country is coming next for contraception.
The group will share polling commissioned by Independent Women’s Voice and conducted by KA Consulting, Conway’s firm, that shows overwhelming public support — including from Republicans and people who identify as “pro-life” — for policies that make contraception cheaper and more available, including implantable long-acting versions like IUDs that some conservatives view as akin to abortion.
The longtime GOP pollster told POLITICO that while it’s no shock that contraception is popular, particularly as states move to outlaw most abortions, she was struck by some of the poll results, including how many conservatives believe Congress should ensure access to contraception regardless of cost.
“I’ve been doing this for over three decades and I’m very surprised that over 8 in 10 independents and over 8 in 10 pro-lifers would agree with that,” she said. “Because some people say: ‘You may have a right to contraception but why am I paying for it?’ That’s the classic libertarian argument.”
Conway plans to tell Capitol Hill Republicans that they “will lose precious political currency and votes” if they do nothing or take steps to put contraception further out of reach — pointing to the poll’s finding that nearly half of conservative women “would consider voting for a candidate from a different political party” if Republicans back birth control restrictions.
But progressives preparing for battles in 2024 to hold the Senate and White House are skeptical Republicans can cast themselves as champions of birth control heading into 2024.
“It won’t work,” said Sara Spain, the spokesperson for the group EMILYS List, which funds and coaches candidates who support reproductive rights. “Actions speak louder than words and voters know which lawmakers stand with the majority of Americans and which don’t. So efforts like this attempted rebrand won’t do much, because we’ve all seen their record and we’ve seen they are willing to ban abortion and contraception.”
Organizations like EMILYS List plan to keep that record firmly on voters’ radar going into next year.
For example, House Republicans’ spending bills, set to come up for a vote early next year, would eliminate funding for the Title X family planning program and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program — both of which provide contraception to millions of people who might not otherwise be able to afford it. And last summer, Senate Republicans blocked the House-passed Right to Contraception Act, which would have enshrined the right to contraception into federal law.
Democrats have also highlighted Justice Clarence Thomas’ call for the high court to “reconsider” the decades-old federal precedent guaranteeing the right to contraception.
Higgins hopes the survey convinces Republican members of Congress that these efforts do not reflect their constituents’ views and play right into Democrats’ hands.
“If any conservatives believe that this is what the pro-life world actually wants, it might help break through to them and explain to them that even among the most pro-life conservatives, you find this strong support for safe, modern, effective, accessible contraception ... available for everyone,” she said.
Wednesday, December 13, 2023
The GOP Doesn’t Really Want a Deal on Border Security
For two years, the Ukrainians have fought heroically to defend their country against Russia’s invasion. The United States and other allies have funded that defense. But Russia has not given up, and past rounds of U.S. aid are nearly exhausted. For Ukraine to keep fighting, it urgently needs more aid.
The Biden administration has sent Congress a request for $61 billion in new funds for Ukraine and $14 billion to help Israel defend itself against Hamas and Hezbollah. The package also includes humanitarian assistance to people displaced by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as assistance to Indo-Pacific allies, and $14 billion for border security (for a total of $111 billion).
Republicans in the House and Senate are resisting this request. The ostensible reason is that they want more radical action on the border than the Biden administration has offered. The whole aid package is now stalled, with potentially catastrophic consequences for Ukraine. Ukrainian units are literally running out of ammunition. If supplies of military equipment are interrupted, restarting them will take a while, which means that Ukraine could be left unaided over the winter unless Congress acts in time. And with both the House and the Senate scheduled to go into recess at the end of this week for their Christmas break, very little time remains in which to act.
How is any of this happening? On past evidence, a clear majority of Senate Republicans sincerely want to help Ukraine. Probably about half of House Republicans do too. In a pair of procedural test votes in September, measures to cut or block aid to Ukraine drew, respectively, 104 and 117 Republican votes of the 221 then in the caucus.
The offer that President Joe Biden is making regarding the border represents a meaningful opening bid. The fundamental reason for America’s present border crisis is that would-be immigrants are trying to game the asylum system. The system is overwhelmed by the numbers claiming asylum. Even though the great majority of those claims will ultimately be rejected, their processing takes years, sometimes decades. In the meantime, most asylum seekers will be released into the United States. This makes claiming asylum a rational bet for would-be immigrants to try their luck, and millions of people are doing just that. The $14 billion of proposed additional funding would pay for some 1,600 new staff in the asylum system.
[I]n the multilateral negotiations among the White House and Republicans in both houses of Congress, the normal process of offer and counteroffer seems to have broken down altogether. I stress the word seems because getting clarity on the state of play is very difficult—as the response I received from the congressional staffer suggests.
On December 6, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer issued the following invitation to Republicans: Write an amendment detailing everything you want, and the Democratic Senate majority will let you bring it to the floor for a clean vote. That offer was rejected by Senate Republicans. How do you get to “yes” when the other side refuses to state its terms?
In a letter to Biden dated December 5, House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that nothing less than “transformative” border policies would do. The House Republican vision is contained in a bill known as H.R. 2.
H.R. 2 is certainly transformative. It would rewrite the asylum system from top to bottom; . . . H.R. 2 was an easy vote to please the Fox News audience without any need to weigh potential negative consequences.
[T]he impasse on the Republican side is powered by four main impulses:
PLAYING TO THE GALLERY
A lot of House Republicans do not much care about enacting laws and solving problems. They are in Congress to strike poses and score television hits. They do not want to make deals. They want to position themselves as the one true conservative too pure for dealmaking. The only things they’re willing to say they want are the things they know to be impossible.
THE POLITICS OF DOMINATION
On December 4, Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas told reporters: “There’s a misunderstanding on the part of Senator Schumer and some of our Democratic friends. This is not a traditional negotiation, where we expect to come up with a bipartisan compromise on the border. This is a price that has to be paid in order to get the supplemental.” For many Republicans, what mattered was not what they got but how they got it: We demand, you comply; we win, you lose.
INTENTIONAL FAILURE
The border is Biden’s single greatest political vulnerability. A recent NBC poll puts the Republican advantage on immigration at 18 points and border security at 30 points. Suppose Republicans did extract a big border concession in 2023; suppose they got everything they wanted. Then suppose their policy worked, and the flow of asylum seekers really did taper off dramatically in 2024. Would not the result of that success be only to strengthen Biden’s reelection chances and hurt Donald Trump’s? Maybe the reason Democrats are having so much difficulty getting to “yes” with Republicans is that many Republicans are committed to “no,” regardless of what the offer is.
ANIMOSITY TOWARD UKRAINE
The premise of much of the reporting about the negotiation is that Republicans sincerely care about the border and are using Ukraine and Israel as leverage in order to get their way on their higher priority. But for some Republicans, at least, stopping aid to Ukraine seems a priority in itself. A few actively subscribe to the pro-Putin politics of the far right. Others—including Speaker Johnson himself—started as supporters of Ukraine but have bent their view under the influence of anti-Ukraine party spirit.. . . Whatever each member’s motives and story are, the result has delivered them to the point where immigration-for-Ukraine no longer looks to them like a win-win deal.
The story’s not over yet. A last-minute reprieve for Ukraine and for the national honor of the United States may come through. Majorities in both the House and the Senate want this deal to happen. Significant counteroffers for immigration control are on the table, and agreement can surely be found. But the malign forces are strong, and they will not vanish on their own.
We’re headed to a “no” that will doom Ukraine and disgrace the U.S., while doing nothing to remedy the crisis at the border. A “yes” on both Ukraine and the border is still within reach, if only pro-Ukraine Republicans will press their colleagues to grasp it. If leadership was ever needed, it’s needed now.
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
Red States Push for a Dystopian Return to the 1950's
It seems obvious to say, but if you want a real sense of the differences between America’s two major parties — and if you want a sense of what the future could bring if either party wins full control of the federal government next year — all you have to do is look at the states.
Where Republicans have gained this kind of full control over state legislatures and statehouses, they have used that authority in pursuit of policies meant to curtail the ability of people in their states to live as they please.
You know what this looks like. It’s the “anti-woke” policymaking of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida, from laws that stigmatize L.G.B.T.Q. students and teachers in public school classrooms to an assault on higher education that has driven professors out of state. “What we are witnessing in Florida is an intellectual reign of terror,” LeRoy Pernell, a law professor at Florida A&M University, said in an interview with a special committee of the American Association of University Professors.
It’s not just Florida, of course. Republican trifectas in states across the country have introduced and passed dozens of bills aimed at the public existence of trans and other gender nonconforming people. Republicans in Oklahoma banned the use of nonbinary gender identifiers on birth certificates; Republicans in Tennessee, similarly, banned trans people from changing their gender on their birth certificates. Republicans in Arkansas and Alabama have passed laws that ban gender-affirming care for young trans people and Republicans in Texas have gone as far as to say that under state law, gender-affirming care can legally constitute child abuse.
New abortion restrictions in Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas — to name just a few states — have left millions of American women without access to abortion services, even in the face of life-threatening complications. Republicans in Texas, in fact, waged and won a legal battle against Kate Cox, a 31-year old woman who sought to terminate her essentially nonviable pregnancy or face potentially deadly complications. This week, she left the state to receive care. Or put another way, Texas decided that Cox’s life was not threatened enough to relent.
The state-level Republican agenda also includes efforts to restrict voting or gerrymander political opponents out of representation. Taken all together, you could say that Republicans are engaged in a comprehensive effort to limit the freedom of entire categories of people.
Compare this with the legislation passed in states that, after the 2022 elections, became Democratic trifectas.
Late last month, Michigan Democrats overhauled the state’s election laws, with a set of bills designed to increase access to the polls. Most groundbreaking is a bill that would automatically register incarcerated people upon release from prison, unless they opt out.
Within months of the start of the new legislative session, Whitmer had already signed laws to increase the state earned-income tax credit, expand anti-discrimination protections for sexual and gender identity, repeal the state’s right-to-work law — which hindered the ability of unions to organize — and repeal a 1931 statute criminalizing abortion care.
Upon winning their trifecta in 2022, Minnesota Democrats — led by Gov. Tim Walz — embarked on a similar effort to make life better for most people in the state. In the face of largely united Republican opposition, Minnesota Democrats mandated paid family and medical leave, barred employers from holding anti-union captive audience meetings, strengthened workplace protections in warehouses and meatpacking plants, curtailed wage theft and gave free breakfast and lunch to all children in Minnesota public schools.
Maryland Democrats, for their part, have used their new trifecta to speed up the state’s transition to a $15-per-hour minimum wage, expand tax credits for low-income residents, limit where people can carry firearms in public places and protect abortion rights.
Over the long term, state-by-state policies have a measurable impact on life expectancy. Writing for The American Prospect, Paul Starr summarizes the results of a 2020 paper looking at the disparity in life expectancy between the most liberal states and the most conservative states, singling out Connecticut and Oklahoma as two states where policies shifted the most, either to the left or to the right. “Their model,” Starr writes, “indicated that if all states’ policies were the same as Connecticut’s in 2014, U.S. life expectancy would have been two years longer for women and 1.3 years longer for men — and if all states’ policies were like Oklahoma’s, Americans’ lives would have been shorter.”
Americans are often taught to think of the differences between Republicans and Democrats as a set of reasonable disagreements over how to tackle agreed-upon problems. But what we can see, in the divergent agendas of Republican-led states and Democrat-led states, is how the differences have far more to do with the actual purpose of government. For Democrats, that purpose is usually the public good. For Republicans, that purpose is harsh social regulation, with little apparent regard for the lives of those who have to endure these policies.
Monday, December 11, 2023
Hallmark Movies and the Red State Brain Drain
Hallmark's popular, if painfully corny, Christmas movies, definitely have a casing formula for their heroines: Mostly white, clean-cut, and of an in-between age. That is, young enough to be plausibly short of middle age, but old enough to sell the standard Hallmark plot: Urban professional leaves the city to get a new lease on life, by returning to her parents in small town America and marrying the boy next door. But the women who actually watch Hallmark movies are much older than the stars. Over 70% of the Hallmark audience is past 50 years old. This breakdown of the most popular Hallmark Christmas movies shows they're mostly a hit with the Medicare crowd, with over half of the audience aged 65 and up.
The audience for Hallmark movies, in other words, doesn't look quite like its heroines, but more like their mothers. It's also a very white audience that is more concentrated in Republican-voting areas.
A lot of the critical reaction to the popularity of Hallmark movies assumes they are selling a comforting, if reactionary reverie of retreat from urban life to small town simplicity. In light of these demographics, however, I'd argue the story being sold is even narrower than that. Hallmark is selling a fantasy to older, mostly Republican viewers: That their wayward daughters will give up on life in the big city and return home to live near their mothers.
[T]he actual daughters in question are way more invested in the Taylor Swift narrative: Daughters who have flown the coop and are very happy living their busy lives with a cat in the big city.
The sad irony in all this is that the Hallmark-loving grandmothers of America, by voting for Republicans, are working against their own dreams of having adult children — and grandchildren — who live next door. As Timothy Noah wrote recently in a cover article for the New Republic, the increasingly authoritarian policies passed by Republican leaders are leading to what he deems the "Red State Brain Drain": "an out-migration of young professionals" from GOP-controlled states to the more welcoming pastures of blue state America.
There are many reasons the under-50 set are taking their college degrees and robust contributions to the tax base out of red states into blue ones. The biggest concerns are for their own school-age children. They want their kids to go to schools without book bans, to have access to reproductive health care, to be safe from violence and, should they identify as LGBTQ (as many in Gen Z do), that they will be affirmed instead of bullied. But for people in professions like teaching, medicine, science or the arts, it's just increasingly hard to feel safe and supported in red states. So they leave.
Noah's focus is on how the brain drain is impacting life in red states, which are seeing massive shortages in teachers, doctors, and other necessary educated professionals. "And much as Republicans may scorn Joe (and Jane) College, they need them to deliver their babies, to teach their children, to pay taxes," he writes. But, if the popularity of Hallmark movies is any indication, there's another loss a lot of Republicans have brought upon themselves by relentlessly electing authoritarian leaders: The loss of their own children's presence.
The first couple that Noah profiles — Kate Arnold and her wife, Caroline Flint — are a good example. The two were both doctors serving in Oklahoma, which is in desperate need of more medical professionals. They lived in the state because they have roots there. But after abortion was banned, the familial connection to Oklahoma could not overcome their anger and fear at living in a place that makes it so hard to live their lives and do their jobs. So they moved to D.C. They easily named four other friends who had left Oklahoma for similar reasons recently.
There's a lot of angst in red state America over the loss of young people in general, but especially with those MAGA voters whose adult children have moved to far-flung places. Right-wing media outlets clearly understand this, because they churn out an endless stream of propaganda about how all those young white people who go to college and move to the big city are brainwashed idiots who will rue the day they left their hometowns behind.
Fox News is an endless drumbeat of stories falsely painting American cities as hellscapes where residents have to hopscotch over sleeping junkies in between enduring armed robberies at the hands of Black Lives Matter protesters. This narrative has long been a mainstay of the right-wing noise machine. . . .
In these segments, the villains are educated white "elites" — like many of the children of Fox viewers — whose supposed youthful idealism has allowed crime, drug addiction, and homelessness to run amok. Another flavor of this hate comes in right-wing scare stories about dystopian police states created by liberal overreach in the name of public health or environmentalism.
And, of course, the increasingly loud right-wing war on education is a big part of this.
The Republican attacks on college professors, the fear-mongering about "woke" college kids, and the substantive efforts to run off faculty and/or deprive them of free speech flow directly from years of conservative messaging treating college itself as a threat. A big part of this is that it's college, of course, that freed so many young people to get the hell out of red state America.
It's messaging that fits with Donald Trump's "retribution" style of politics. Rather than asking why young people are leaving and how to get them back, it's about lashing out at them and entertaining fantasies of revenge.
The truth is a lot of younger professionals would be open to living in red states if the political situation weren't so terrifying. The housing is cheaper and often the job opportunities are more plentiful, especially in education and health care. And many people would like to be closer to aging relatives, to help them out and have them in their grandkids' lives.
But by voting for Republicans, red state denizens are making sure their Hallmark dreams will never come true. In the real world, your harried urban professional daughter will never come home to Oklahoma or Texas or Florida, because, for one thing, she can't get an abortion if she needs one. Or her own child will be punished for saying "gay" in school. Or she will worry every day about her kid getting killed in a mass shooting. . . . . The word they use for blue states is "safe."
Sunday, December 10, 2023
Americans Continue to Believe Falsehoods About the Economy
There are two big questions right now about the U.S. economy. One is why it’s doing so well. The other is why so many Americans insist that it’s terrible.
I have no illusions about persuading conservatives that the economy is in good shape; their minds are made up, and pointing out facts at odds with their views just makes them angry.
But there also seem to be a significant number of progressives unwilling, for different reasons, to accept the good news. And this group, at least, might be willing to listen to arguments that President Biden has accomplished more than they realize, as well as the proposition that half a loaf is better than none and much better than what Biden’s opponents will do if given the chance.
About the good economic news: This week two excellent economic reports were added to the pile. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the third quarter, labor productivity rose at an annual rate of 5.2 percent, which is really, really fast. It’s too soon to call a trend, but there is increasing reason to hope that our economy is capable of growing considerably faster than we previously thought.
Oh, and unit labor costs are up only 1.6 percent over the past year, another indicator that inflation is coming under control.
Another report showed that unfilled job openings are down. Last year many economists were arguing that the high level of vacancies meant that we needed high unemployment to control inflation. That gap has now largely disappeared, one of many signs that the economy is healing from the disruptions brought on by the Covid pandemic. And this process of healing explains why we’ve been able to get inflation down without a recession or a surge in unemployment.
Nonetheless, many Americans continue to have very negative views of the economy. Some of this may reflect the fact that while inflation has come way down, prices are still high compared with the recent past. This effect may wear off over time; as I wrote not long ago, there has to be some statute of limitations on how far back people look for their sense of what things should cost. One interesting recent analysis suggests that it takes around two years for lower inflation to be reflected in consumer sentiment, in which case Americans might be feeling better about the economy in time for next year’s elections.
On the other hand, inflation has been a global phenomenon, but the huge gap between favorable economic indicators and grim public perceptions is unique to the United States, where people believe many bad things about the economy that simply aren’t true.
I can report from experience that talking about these issues with people on the right is basically impossible. Point out that most workers’ earnings have significantly outpaced inflation since the eve of the pandemic, and they’ll say you’re a member of the elite who has no idea what things really cost. Point out that Americans are more likely than not to express positive views about their family’s own financial situation and that strong consumer spending belies claims that families are suffering, and they’ll say you’re a snob telling people how to feel. It’s a no-win situation.
One group that might be amenable to persuasion, however, is progressives unwilling to acknowledge good economic news because they say that there’s still a lot wrong with America. I don’t know how large this group is, but I seem to know a lot of them, and their negativity may be affecting the general tone of conversation.
To be sure, Biden’s America isn’t a progressive paradise. Too much wealth and power is still concentrated in the hands of a few people, even as millions of this rich nation’s citizens still live in poverty and lack adequate health care.
But there has nonetheless been real progress. . . . And things would look even better if Democrats had won even a slightly bigger victory in the 2020 elections. Notably, just one or two more Democratic senators would have meant a permanent extension of the expanded child tax credit, which would have sharply reduced child poverty — and still could, if Democrats find a way to win big in 2024.
Furthermore, consider the alternatives. Over the past few months, Republican policy discourse has taken a hard right turn, with renewed pledges to repeal Obamacare — threatening health insurance coverage for more than 40 million Americans — and a push for cuts to Social Security.
So here’s how I see it: The results of Biden’s victory in 2020 have fallen well short of progressives’ dreams, but a Biden defeat next year would be the stuff of progressive nightmares. Are left-leaning Americans able to hold both facts in their minds and act appropriately?
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