Republican Candidates Are Falling Flat in In Trump Country

In politics, one should never allow them-self to feel over confident.  It is always essential to act as if one is behind and must turn out every possible voter so that one either wins by a small margin or, better yet, wins by a landslide,  That said, things appear to be looking up for Democrats in the Mid-West where much of Donald Trump's promised economic resurgence is falling flat.   The result is that Republican candidates are likewise filling flat in midterm election contests.  Indeed, the Des Moines Register has endorsed Democrat candidates complaining" the GOP has failed to govern,"  Here are highlights from that papers argument that Republicans need to be sent into retirement:

When Republicans achieved the trifecta in 2016, winning the presidency as well as holding the House and Senate, it seemed the country was poised to move beyond the GOP-engineered partisan gridlock that had characterized much of the previous six years.Not so much, as it turned out. The Republican majority in Congress tried and failed to dismantle the Affordable Care Act without offering a plan of their own that a majority of their own members — let alone a majority of the American people — could support.  Instead, they have allowed the system to become increasingly unstable, leading to a lack of competition and rising premiums.

Republicans in Congress have not only failed at comprehensive immigration reform, but their action allowed protection to expire on young, undocumented Americans brought here as children. They haven’t even fully funded President Trump’s border wall. They stood by as the administration tried to bar Muslims from certain countries from entering the United States. They looked the other way as the administration shocked and dismayed the nation by separating young children from their parents at the border, holding them in detention and losing track of some of the kids.

Republicans promised fiscal responsibility, yet they have punted on putting the nation back on sound financial footing. Their one major legislative success, the 2017 tax cut, is projected to add $1.9 trillion to the debt. This, after Republicans howled endlessly about the comparatively meager deficits created during the Obama administration. The Congressional Budget Office said in August that these tax cuts and spending increases would become “unsustainable” if extended. But the House GOP, including Iowa’s three Republican representatives, voted last month for another $3.8 trillion in tax cuts.

In becoming the party of Trump, the Republicans have forsaken traditional conservatism and given voters no rational alternative to the Democrats. The party needs to be voted out of power and spend a few years becoming again the party of Lincoln, not the party of Trump.

Nothing short of a change in party leadership in Congress will move this country forward. That’s why we’re recommending that Iowa voters send home Reps. Rod Blum, David Young and Steve King and return Rep. Dave Loebsack to the House.

Thankfully, Republican problems extend far beyond Iowa and, as in Iowa, Trump appears to be a major obstacle for many voters.  These highlights from the Washington Post looks at the situation:

Polling shows [GOP Congressman Lou Barletta] well behind Democratic Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. Indeed, it has become increasingly hard for Republicans to remain optimistic about the chances for him and other GOP candidates across the industrial Midwest.

Republicans running for governor or senator in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, including several who hitched their wagon to Trump’s political movement, are behind in polls by double digits, a remarkable turnabout in swing states that were key to the president’s 2016 victory.

If current polling averages hold, Democrats will maintain all their Senate seats in those states, pick up a handful of House seats and, in some cases, retake the governors’ mansions. In nearby Iowa, a state Trump won by nearly 10 points, the Democratic candidate for governor was running about even with the Republican governor in a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll. Polling this week found Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) trailing his Democratic opponent, Tony Evers.

The dramatic shift has forced political strategists to reevaluate their post-mortem lessons from the 2016 election, while raising new questions about Trump’s staying power in 2020. Democratic strategists, who worried that Iowa and Ohio were slipping away from them in presidential years, are now heartened and have begun to return their attention to the traditional bellwethers.

“One false assumption that was made was that a Trump voter from the 2016 election was necessarily a Republican voter,” said John Brabender, a GOP consultant who is working with Barletta.

There is a clear historical precedent for such a shift. Then-candidate Barack Obama swept the industrial Midwest in the 2008 elections, only to find his party battered in his first midterm contest two years later, when Republicans retook governorships in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin, along with Senate seats in Indiana and Wisconsin. Obama was nonetheless able to come back and win those same states, with the exception of Indiana, in his 2012 reelection.

Still, the short-term impact is dire for Republicans. After surprising the nation in 2016, Trump appears to be driving turnout this year that will largely benefit Democrats, as moderate voters, and college-educated women in particular, seek an outlet for their frustration with his policies and behavior. Trump’s aggressive campaign schedule for Republicans in these states has so far failed to turn the tide.

“They thought they had unlocked some formula that would make them successful. But it was only Trump and only that year,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said of the 2016 election. “What the Republicans are doing now isn’t working for union members or struggling families. It’s not working for young people. It’s just not working.”

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), who began the year as a leading target for conservative super PACs but is besting Republican challenger Leah Vukmir by about 10 points in recent polls, attributes her success to the return of an energized Democratic voting base, driven by issues such as health care and sustained by how the party, in her view, has built a case that’s bigger than just opposing Trump. . . . . They are saying, ‘No more sitting on the sidelines.’ ”

That same pattern is playing out in Michigan, where Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D) and the Democratic candidate for governor, Gretchen Whitmer, have both had comfortable margins in recent polling. Trump won the state by a whisker-thin margin of 10,704 votes in 2016.

“Everything I am seeing in my numbers is revolving not around his [Trump's] job approval but whether you view him favorably or unfavorably,” said pollster Richard Czuba, who runs a statewide survey for the Detroit News and WDIV. “Donald Trump doesn’t have an opponent, and that is his problem right now. ”

The result is a sharp overall surge in voter enthusiasm in the state compared to 2016, and big swings in suburban areas such as Oakland County, the state’s wealthiest region, outside Detroit. “We are finding it difficult to find college-educated women in Oakland County who will call themselves Republicans,” Czuba said.

In many of the Great Lakes states, candidates like Barletta who most tied themselves to the Trump agenda are still flailing. In Ohio, Rep. James B. Renacci (R), whose first Senate campaign ad was about his tight bond with Trump, has yet to come within 10 points of incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) in a major public poll.

“We have lost millions of members of our party in the last year,” said John Weaver, a Republican adviser to Ohio Gov. John Kasich and a Trump critic, reflecting on how Trump’s bid split the party. “A MAGA candidate who runs as a junior member of the walking dead and wins the primary is going to find themselves shot in the general election.”

Complicating things further is the devotion of the Republican base to Trump’s take-no-prisoners approach, which can make it dangerous for GOP candidates who seek to create some distance.

Trump was able to win in 2016 by contrasting himself with Clinton, who was boasting of an economic resurgence under Obama, in the stock market and unemployment rate, that many voters did not feel in their daily lives.

“Now he is falling into that same line of argument and people are saying, ‘Not so much,’ ” Ryan said. “There is no substantial change.”

Trump's Clueless About Pittsburgh - Just Like Everything Else

If there is one thing that one can depend upon, it is that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der  Trumpenführer, doesn't know what the hell he is talking about and that his facts and figures are more or less pulled out of his ass.  A case in point is his comment about Pittsburgh when he was declare that the United States would be withdrawing from the Paris climate accord.  Specifically, he said he was more concerned about the citizens of Pittsburgh than the citizens of Paris.  The reality, however, is that Pittsburgh cared little for Trump and Hillary Clinton garnered 56.4% of the vote as  opposed to Trump's measly 40% (Gary Johnson got 2.5% of the vote).  Stated another way, almost 60% of Pittsburgh voters did not want Der Trumpenführer.  And then there's they myth that Pittsburgh longs for the "good old days" of coal and steel.  As a piece in Politico points out, the city has long since moved on and now has one of the most educated and truly is indifferent about Trump's false claims that he will revive the moribund coal industry.  Here are article excepts:

Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords was framed as his obligation to “represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” The line conjures an image that a reindustrialized Pittsburgh will return to its smokestack roots, becoming once again the center of the nation’s steel production, fueled by Appalachian coal, and delivering raw material to vastly expanded American manufacturing industries. And it seems to suggest that this blessed future awaits not just Pittsburgh, but virtually all of the American Rust Belt, once crippling environmental regulations have been vanquished.

But Pittsburgh is not muddling through a post-industrial funk. In fact, it is a leading example of a city, and a region, that has rebuilt itself to compete in the post-industrial 21st century economy. Much of that transformation has only been possible because of the concerted efforts to clean the land, air and waterways damaged by virtually unregulated industrial use for over a century. Yet Pittsburgh has been able to generate new jobs, attract new workers and successfully compete against the world.

This truth got lost in the 2016 election which radically oversimplified the debate about how to strengthen America’s manufacturing industries and declining regions.

Three decades ago, a handful of macro-economic forces—the mass obsolescence of industrial capital, contractionary monetary policy, global over-capacity and disruptive technology within the steel industry—came together to eviscerate Pittsburgh's historic advantages in producing steel. Until then, few regions had fought harder, or failed more dramatically, to retain their industrial base than Pittsburgh. Moving forward was made all the more difficult by the scale of the collapse that the region endured in the 1980s. Over 150,000 manufacturing jobs permanently disappeared from southwestern Pennsylvania, and the Pittsburgh metropolitan region contracted by 176,000 people—the single largest population loss of any metropolitan region over the decade.

A lot has happened in Pittsburgh in three decades that followed the worst of the job destruction. Pittsburgh has been forced to redefine itself, a transformation that started with its workforce. Where once Pittsburgh was possibly the most blue-collar city in the nation, the region today relies on a workforce that is one of the most educated in the nation. . . . . . Once dependent on a singular industry, Pittsburgh has created new jobs across a range of industries. Building upon a core of stability in both the health and education sectors, employment has been shifting into finance and a broad range of professional service industries. Of late, Pittsburgh has attracted new technology-based investment by the likes of Google and Uber and looks to become a center of self-driving cars.

One pole of the city’s growth has been the expansion of both academic research and enrollment at Pittsburgh’s universities and colleges. Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh—the city’s two largest universities—together expanded their annual research and development expenditures to over $1 billion dollars for the first time in 2010. Much of that growth has been fueled by federal research funding that appears to be at risk in the new priorities coming from Washington. Take into account that Pittsburgh’s university-based research is focused in the fields most agree are economic drivers for the nation: life sciences, information technology, robotics and more, the potential harm of diminished research funding is even greater.

More than anything else, the public has been told relaxed environmental regulations will aide a beleaguered coal industry. Yet, peak employment in the coal industry in both Pennsylvania and West Virginia came a full century ago. Today, less than a thousand coal miners are still employed across the Pittsburgh metropolitan region. Fewer than 6,000 coal miners are employed across Pennsylvania, and this is less than were employed in the state before the Civil War.

The hope that a reinvigorated coal industry will in the long run help Pittsburgh, or its neighbors across northern Appalachia is a false one. Regulation is easy to blame for coal’s continuing decline as a fuel choice, but new domestic supplies of natural gas have put coal at a competitive disadvantage that will be almost impossible to offset short of direct subsidies.

Make no mistake, Pittsburgh’s transformation is incomplete, uneven and ongoing, but there is no rational reason for the region to turn back on the progress it has made.

Unlike Pittsburgh, much of Trump country will not be able to transform itself through education and recruitment of new industries.  In contrast to Pittsburgh, they eschew education, reject scientific knowledge and have few reputable colleges and universities. I'm sorry, but unaccredited bible colleges will not make a positive impression of progressive and innovative business.  Nor will right wing Christian extremism and open racism and bigotry. Pittsburgh demonstrates the route to economic improvement and an embracing of the 21st century.  Sadly, most of Trump country wants to return to the 1950's - something that will not happen - and the war against modernity and diversity will only accelerate the economic death spiral for these regions.  Bigotry and the embrace of ignorance (much of it Bible inspired) carries a huge economic cost. .