Why The Media Must Continue to Report of Trump's Misogyny and Racism

Two Trump supporters at a Trump rally in Ohio last weekend.

At times I feel like I spend a disproportionate number of posts on the daily outrages, homophobia, racism and general inhumanity of the Trump/Pence regime.  Thankfully, a column in the New York Times makes the argument that relentless reporting on the ugliness of Trump/Pence is critical and needs to continue full bore in the lead up to the 2018 midterm elections and beyond.  The reason?  Such coverage is crucial because it is eroding the ability of some independents and the remaining moderate Republicans to continue to hold their revulsion for Trump in check and, just maybe, will help insure a blue wave in November. Personally, I have long argued that moral, decent people cannot support Trump - or Pence.  Morality and decency on the one hand and Trump's lies, racism,homophobia, and moral bankruptcy on the other hand are mutually exclusive.  Slowly, some Republicans are belatedly coming to this realization.  Here are column highlights:

Some healthy soul searching is taking place in newsrooms across the country these days over whether the mainstream media should be covering President Trump’s every tweet and rally. My answer: Absolutely! It’s the right thing for us to do professionally, and, as last night’s election results indicated, it’s the right thing to do politically if you want to see a check on Donald Trump’s power.

It appears that it’s the toxic lying, bullying and unpresidential behaviors that Trump exhibits most in his rallies and tweets — which we in the media so incessantly cover — that is turning off the very moderate, best-educated Republicans and suburban women that Trump will need to hold the G.O.P. majority in the House, let alone get re-elected. So bring on the coverage.

[T]he latest RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Trump having a personal approval rating of only 43 percent, with 53 percent disapproving of his performance. And in a special election in Ohio held on Tuesday, the G.O.P. House candidate — whom Trump and the entire Republican establishment went to bat for — is barely ahead of his Democratic rival in a district that has not sent a Democrat to Congress in more than three decades.

That does not speak well for Trump or his midterm prospects, but it does for the American people and for thinking Republicans. It turns out there is still a cohort of Republicans who have not sold their souls to Trump the way virtually every one of their elected representatives in Washington has done.

It turns out that there are thinking Republicans for whom character, decency and truth-telling still matter in a president. It turns out that there are thinking Republicans who have watched Trump’s twitter rants, his disturbed performance at Helsinki and the unrestrained bile that he emits at his rallies — and the blind, ecstatic response of his core base — and found them unnerving and unworthy of their support. That is what the polls and polling stations last night are telling us. . . . So bring on the coverage.

The dominant political fact of Trump’s first 18 months in office is that despite some good economic trends in the country (and yes, his precise role in engineering them remains debatable), [Trump] the president has not been able to widen his coalition beyond his core 40 percent to 45 percent. It is partly because he has not even remotely tried. But it is also because the very applause lines and abusive and divisive behaviors that appeal to his base turn off more-moderate and more-educated suburban Republicans, and do nothing to attract independents or conservative Democrats.

Yes, I want every American to know that two Trump supporters were spotted at the president’s last rally, in Ohio, wearing T-shirts that read, “I’d rather be Russian than a Democrat.” That’s an interesting data point. That’s whom you’re voting with when you vote for Trump.

I want every Republican running for office to hear every syllable of Trump’s bullying arrogance, when he warned at his Ohio rally that he destroys any G.O.P. politician who dares to defy him, saying, “I only destroy their career because they said bad things about me and you fight back and they go down the tubes — and that’s O.K.”

I want all of this heard and spread from sea to shining sea. Because though these words do rally Trump’s base, they also rally Democrats and evidently embarrass Republican moderates and alienate independents.

In a close election it doesn’t take many uncomfortable moderate Republicans to just stay home to make a big difference. That’s all I am looking for, not a tsunami — that’s not in the cards. Just a little wave of disgust among G.O.P. moderates is all that is needed to turn several key districts from red to blue.

Veteran GOP Strategist Quits GOP Over Trump and "Cowardly" Republicans

It seems that as Donald Trump and his racist followers double down, more thinking Republicans are abandoning the GOP which has become something ugly and hideous and filled with spineless wonders who prostitute themselves to any lengths to avoid a primary contest against challengers who not that many years ago would not even have been allowed on a county or city committee much less be allowed to be a candidate backed by the GOP.  Once Trump claimed the GOP nomination in 2016 it became clear that the GOP no longer has any standards unless those standards are comprised of narcissism, perpetual lying, rank racism, and objective fact free delusions.  The latest exodus from the GOP involves long time GOP strategist and former George W. Bush White House staffer and John McCain campaign staffer Steven Schmidt.   Schmidt even went to state that in its current form, the Republican Party is a threat to American democracy.  Huffington Post looks at Schmidt's exodus from the GOP:

Veteran GOP strategist Steve Schmidt renounced his Republican Party membership on Wednesday and pledged to vote for Democrats in an effort to preserve “what is right and decent” in the United States.

In a series of scathing tweets, Schmidt blasted the GOP as “corrupt, indecent and immoral” and “fully the party of Trump.”

“It is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders,” tweeted Schmidt, an MSNBC political analyst who has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump. “Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and our values.”

Schmidt, who served as an adviser in the George W. Bush White House, strongly condemned the Trump administration’s policy of separating families caught illegally crossing the border into the U.S.

“This child separation policy is connected to the worst abuses of humanity in our history,” he tweeted. “It is connected by the same evil that separated families during slavery and dislocated tribes and broke up Native American families. It is immoral and must be repudiated.”

Schmidt, who said in July that Trump had the “impulse control of a little child,” joins a growing chorus of political pundits and lawmakers to rebuke the administration’s practice of separating children from parents facing prosecution for illegally crossing the border.
 

Schmidt also lashed out at Republicans who either are apologists and or his enablers saying "With the exception of a few Governors like Baker, Hogan and Kasich it is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders."  Another former Republican taking aim at Trump enablers within the GOP is columnist Jennifer Rubin. In a column in the Washington Post, she lambasted Paul Ryan and others:

This is moral madness, a betrayal of universal human values that marks the lowest point in the Trump presidency — or any presidency since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

There is no point, ever, at which Fox News executives stop raking in money and sending their hosts out to pander to ignorant anti-immigrant audiences. (A patch of Fox TV and film talent is up in arms, some threatening to leave for another studio.) There is never a time when House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) says, “You know, my church and my conscience don’t allow me to participate in such evil,” or when anyone in the White House has the decency to quit rather than lie and help perpetuate the policy.

There surely is never a moment [Trump] the president stops lying, . . . . He is, unbelievably, getting worse, and there is no one in the administration willing to resist.

There are plenty of signs that the public has finally had enough of Trump’s lying and the GOP’s inhumanity. A massive protest is planned for June 30 near the White House and in 132 cities across the country. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a blistering attack on Trump’s policies.  At least eight governors(including two Republicans) are now recalling National Guard troops assigned to help with the border crackdown.

There is far more that can be done — from voters calling and showing up at lawmakers’ offices and appearances, to cutting off donations flowing to GOP candidates and PACs.

[T]he Republican Party has disgraced itself and lost the moral authority to govern. Anyone and everyone with an “R” after his or her name who did not condemn the policy and take meaningful action to eliminate it will be attacked for this disgraceful chapter. Really, should they be reelected for anything — ever?

This from a former Republican.  Schmidt and Rubin have belatedly reached a point I reached many years ago. Yes, Trump is an outright evil, but I remain insistent that the evil began to overtake the GOP with the rise of the evangelical Christians - the most selfish, hate-filled, cruel people one can encounter - began their takeover of the GOP base. Moderate Republicans of old and the so-called country club Republicans never countenanced such evil.  That began with with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and has now metastasized in the form of Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr., and, of course Trump, who made a pact with the devil with them.  

Kansas Republicans Vote to Expand Medicaid Under Obamacare

Even as Republican efforts in the House of Representatives to repeal Obamacare were crashing and burning, Kansas Republicans were taking steps to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.  Why? Because it is backed by the hospital industry and the business community and because it will aid many of Kansas' poorer citizens.  This is a sharp turn around from the Kansas GOP's agenda that cut taxes and cut funding to public education and other critical programs only to leave the state a financial basket case, proving that a "pure" GOP economic plan is the road to disaster. A piece in Mother Jones looks at this ironic approach by Kansas Republicans that is moving forward in spite of the threatened veto by nutcase GOP Gov. Sam Brownback, an architect of the state's economic and budgetary disaster.  Here are excerpts:

On the same day the House was supposed to pass a bill dismantling Medicaid, Kansas Republicans took a big step toward expanding the program in their state.

In a voice vote Thursday morning, a committee in the Kansas Senate approved legislation that would enable the state to take advantage of an Obamacare provision offering Medicaid health insurance coverage to a wider group of poor people. The federal government would provide the vast majority of the funding.

Many deep-red states like Kansas have rejected Medicaid expansion based largely on their ideological objections to Obamacare. But as I reported earlier this week, a new bloc of moderate Republicans in the state—backed by the health care industry and business community—have teamed up with Democrats to push Medicaid expansion. They point out that the state has given up, to date, nearly $2 billion in federal funds that could have helped both improve the health of the state's low-income communities while also boosting its economy.

The Kansas House overwhelming passed Medicaid expansion earlier this year. The full state Senate is expected to vote on the issue Monday, according to KCUR. But they would likely need to cobble together a veto-proof majority, since Gov. Sam Brownback (R) has vocally opposed to adopting the program.

More coverage on this development is here at Mother Jones:

According to a study by the nonpartisan Kansas Health Institute, about 152,000 people would join KanCare, the state's Medicaid program, if Kansas adopted the ACA expansion. Roughly 80,000 of those people currently lack health insurance coverage, while 71,000 would ditch their current coverage to jump onto Medicaid.

Now, Eplee has joined a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats that is trying to make that happen. They want their state to accept everything Obamacare has to offer before their brethren at the national level can tear it apart—and they've got the state business and medical communities on their side. Voters agree, too, with 82 percent supporting Medicaid expansion in a poll sponsored by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.

"I'm out here in the rural area practicing [medicine], and I see it every day," Eplee says. "When I gave my testimony [in favor of Medicaid expansion], I gave examples of the working poor and their inability to get health insurance and to get the help they need. It puts them in very dire, precarious financial situations of being made medically bankrupt by one illness or one disease. It just takes one event, and then they're wiped out financially."

When the Kansas House collected testimony on the issue earlier this year, more than 160 organizations and individuals supported expansion. Just four offered testimony that opposed the idea—mostly national conservative organizations.

Koesten was part of a group of moderate Republicans that last year reclaimed control of the state legislature from the far right of the party. Five years earlier, Republican Gov. Sam Brownback had waged an electoral war to purge the party of legislators who opposed his ambitious tax cuts, ushering in a conservative takeover executed with the help of the Koch brothers' organization Americans for Prosperity. But after Brownback's policies left an enormous hole in the state budget, the moderates roared back in the 2016 elections. Moderate Republicans primaried sitting conservatives, and Democrats knocked off others. Out of 165 total lawmakers in the state Senate and House, there are 49 new members this year.

The consequences became clear late last month, when the state House voted 81-44 in favor of Medicaid expansion. "There was just enough change in the primary and the general election that tweaked the control over to the moderate side, where this was unstoppable at this point in time," explains Robert St. Peter, president and CEO of the Kansas Health Institute.

The hospitals have good reason to be upset about the money the state is leaving on the table. Many hospitals, especially in rural parts of the state, are under increasing financial strain from treating uninsured patients. In 2015, Mercy Hospital in Independence, Kansas, closed. Independence has just 9,500 residents, but the closure attracted media coverage from around the state. . . . an industry advisory group, found that out of 107 rural hospitals in Kansas, 31 are considered "vulnerable" and at risk of closure. The report didn't name the hospitals in trouble, leaving each community worried that its hospital could be next.

Kansas is one of the last places one would expect to see Republicans regaining a grasp on objective reality and actually pushing policies that help poorer citizens.  It is the exact opposite of Paul Ryan's reverse Robin Hood agenda. 

Hillary Clinton Launches "Alt-Right" Attack on Trump

While the self-prostitution of the Republican Party to right wing extremist groups has been going on for years, much of the activity went on under the radar to those who are not political junkies.  The GOP establishment always tried to at least put a little bit of limp stick on its dog whistle racism and empowerment of Christian Dominionist.  With the rise of Donald Trump, all pretense of civility and decency was thrown out the window and ugly elements of right wing society were openly welcomed or at least not spurned as Trump sought to win the vote of every angry white voter, every white supremacist, and every Christofascist extremest.  Now, Hillary Clinton has released an ad that ties Donald Trump to all of these horrible, scary people that can be found here.   A piece in New York Magazine looks at Clinton's move and why it is a calculated risk, but likely a smart idea.  Here are highlights:

From the very beginning of the 2016 general election, it has been obvious that Hillary Clinton’s campaign would go after Donald Trump with a claw hammer. He presented too ripe a target to ignore even momentarily, and given Republican misgivings about him it made obvious sense to exploit Trump’s weaknesses in order to both detach potential supporters and to frighten the Democratic base into showing up to vote. Beyond that, it seemed logical in a contest between two relatively unpopular pols to do everything possible to ensure that media coverage revolved around the other candidate.

But while a negative (or if you wish, “comparative”) campaign was a no-brainer, HRC’s campaign still had to decide on its scope and focus. They could simply underline Trump’s out-there rhetoric and unpopular issue positions again and again. They could instead make him out as a conventional Republican with a conventional Republican’s weaknesses — as a sort of rough-hewn and profane version of Mitt Romney. They could execute a combo platter of the above strategies.

Or they could Go Big and attack Donald Trump the way shocked elites in both parties tend to think of him: as the representative of a new and scary departure in conservative politics that replaced the usual litany of limited-government priorities with ethno-nationalism and a violent reaction to cultural change. 

With the new ad Clinton unveiled yesterday and her speech in Reno, Nevada, today, it’s clear that for the moment at least her campaign is indeed Going Big.

The ad does not begin with much subtlety, as noted on Politico:

“The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in,” a robed man identified as the Imperial Wizard of the Rebel Brigade Knights of the Ku Klux Klan says at the top of the video, followed by images of a Confederate flag fluttering in the wind, Trump waving after a speech, and a man performing a Hitler salute at what appears to be a Trump rally.

But then the ad seeks to do two fairly complicated things very briefly: explain the ethno-nationalist background of Trump campaign chairman and Breitbart News exec Stephen Bannon; and introduce the concept of “alt-right” as the broader movement backing Trump.

Clinton’s subsequent speech in Reno followed the same tack with significantly more detail. She spent considerable time presenting what you might call Trump’s racist prehistory, before his presidential candidacy, concluding with his support for the “racist conspiracy theory” of birtherism.

Her key argument was that Trump had, time and time again, resisted opportunities to repudiate racism and racists, and was only now ineffectively trying to change his tune. Her best sound-bite was suggesting that Trump’s slogan could well be: “Make America Hate Again.” And she concluded with a very direct challenge to Republicans to reject the “takeover,” citing Bob Dole’s call for racists to leave the GOP and George W. Bush’s defense of American Muslims.

All in all, it was a pretty compelling pitch that aggregated a lot of negative material on Trump’s unsavory comments and associations; the ad made more sense once you listened to her explanations. But this tack is not without risks.

For one thing Clinton and her campaign will need to devote far more resources to the kind of explanations she gave in Reno before it will begin to “stick” with voters who aren’t already hip to the ins and outs of white nationalism and Trump’s association with it. There are opportunity costs associated with that investment as well: It won’t leave as much time as she once had to focus on his dubious personal business record, his irresponsible tax plan, his climate-change denialism, and his incoherent foreign policy views.

[T]he great virtue of what Clinton is doing now is that it brings the widespread elite horror at Trump in both major parties down to earth and into the mainstream of the campaign. In the chattering classes it’s been an open and incessantly discussed question as to whether Trump represents the sudden advent of of an alien strain of crypto-fascism, or merely a crude version of old-school American right-wing populism.

For Republican elites, it hasn’t just been a matter of deciding whether to support or not support Trump as their leader; some conservative thinkers and opinion leaders view the mogul as an existential threat to everything they believe in. Bringing this mostly negative furor about Trump to actual voters instead of shouting about it over their heads isn’t the easiest choice, but could be the best choice.

What will be most interesting is whether these tactics shake the (mostly) stubborn loyalty of Republican voters to their nominee, and even turn a significant number of them to a one-time vote for a Democrat.

But either way, Clinton certainly knows that going after Trump in so visceral a manner will be wildly popular with Democratic activists starved for a presidential candidate willing to give as good as she gets in partisan warfare. And when it comes to “energizing the base” and perhaps deterring progressives from a vote for Jill Stein, you cannot get much more galvanizing than a warning that indifference or apostasy could elect a racist monster to the cheers of Nazis, Klansmen, and Vladimir Putin. From that perspective, Clinton’s new tack may well be a carefully calculated risk.

Hillary Attacks Trump's "New Normal" of Hate

For much of the Republican Party base open racism and contempt for other citizens and Donald Trump's uttering a new liar roughly every minute is now the new normal.  Outside the fetid swamp of Fox News and alt-right websites, most Americans (even some Republicans) live in a much more rational world and Hillary Clinton is on a new outreach effort to woe them.  One of the worse effects of Trump's campaign is that, win or lose, he has lowered what passes as acceptable political discourse - at least among far too many Republican - to the level of a cesspool.  A piece in Politico looks at Clinton's efforts to court the sane Republicans who still shockingly cling to a party that has morphed into something truly hideous.  Here are excerpts:

For months, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have aimed their pitches at distinct sets of voters, each candidate operating under the belief that a November win will be determined singularly by base turnout. That changes Thursday.

Clinton lands in Reno with a message targeted squarely on center-right Republican voters: Trump’s attempted pivot toward moderation, she will suggest, is a head-fake and the GOP nominee remains too extreme for you.
 Clinton may not cast her move to zero in on Republicans so explicitly when she takes the stage here to rail against Trump’s position within the “alt-right” — a movement her team has branded as “disturbing” and supportive of a “dystopian” worldview. But coming after a two-week stretch in which Trump has made overtures to minority voters while suggesting he may alter his campaign-defining immigration plan, Clinton’s intended audience includes the Republican-leaning women and educated white populations with whom her opponent is polling poorly.

Her goal is to make sure they don’t buy into his new rhetoric and begin drifting toward Trump as the 2016 campaign enters the home stretch.

“Trump’s newly installed brain trust of Steve Bannon, Roger Ailes and Roger Stone completes Donald Trump’s disturbing takeover of the Republican party. We intend to call out this ‘alt-right’ shift and the divisive and dystopian vision of America they put forth because it tells voters everything they need to know about Donald Trump himself,” said Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. “Republicans up and down the ticket are going to have to choose whether they want to be complicit in this lurch toward extremism or stand with the voters who can’t stomach it."

It’s been a rough week for Clinton. The FBI found 15,000 more previously undisclosed Clinton emails, Trump called for a special prosecutor to look into the Clinton Foundation, and Republicans have increasingly accused the Democrat of hiding from the press as she chooses to raise tens of millions of dollars on a fundraising spree that has taken her from Massachusetts and California before returning for more cash collecting gatherings in New York this weekend.
 So on Thursday, her campaign will try to reclaim the week. “They want to pin Trump to the Right and not allow him to pivot," said David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama’s campaign, noting that it’s a message pitched to the Republican and independent voters Trump is also trying to secure. “And, given her exposure this week, I am sure they are eager to go back on offense."

The case Clinton is expected to prosecute will center around Trump’s close ties to a movement that’s out of step with rank-and-file Republicans due to its divisiveness and reliance on white nationalism. Fully expecting scads of moderate Republicans to fall in line behind him before Election Day, Clinton’s team is looking to poison his attempt at normalcy. . . . "Anything you can say about Donald Trump, the majority of the country that doesn’t like him is willing to believe."

[W]orking with Bannon and new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, [Trump] has appeared to try and soften his image for the middle class white voters and Republican women that most GOP nominees can rely on. 

To Democrats, this kind of shift is disingenuous at best, and Clinton’s speech is expected to highlight the kind of controversial nationalism Bannon — now officially Trump’s campaign CEO — is known for.

That will go one step further than even Clinton’s usual anti-Trump diatribe: a stinging recitation of his questioning of Obama’s birthplace, his insults about Mexicans, his questioning of whether an American judge of Mexican heritage could be impartial, and his hesitant disavowal of former KKK leader David Duke. "Putting politics aside, I think it’s a very important point to make in the moral dialogue of the campaign. You can’t let this stuff be normalized, I wish more Republicans would speak out. I think it’s incredibly detrimental to civic society and it’s an attempt, under the guise of not being politically correct, to normalize hate speech,” said Stevens, one Republican who’s remained vigilant in his opposition to Trump no matter how many campaign shake-ups the nominee attempts. Most GOP voters, he insisted roughly 24 hours before Clinton was set to make a similar case, should recognize that the “alt-right” does not represent them.  “They’re a bunch of racists. It’s a rebranding of something as old as time."

Things Hillary Must Cannot Do If She Wants to Win In November

As I watch Donald Trumps surge and Republicans who I once believed had some minimal level of sanity and decency swear fealty, I wonder if this is how thinking, moral Germans felt in the late 1920's and early 1930's as Hitler rose to power.  Did they too wonder how their countrymen - and neighbors - became so fueled by hate and resentment that they were willing to put a narcissistic egomaniac who had no background to lead the nation into office? I continue to believe that we are living in a very dangerous time and that America could become an unrecognizable horror story if Trump and his forces are not stopped.  That said, a piece in Politico looks at four things that Hillary Clinton needs to avoid doing if she is going to defeat Trump in November.  Here are article excerpts:

If Clinton pushes away some of her potential supporters; fails to energize others to vote; and fires up Trump’s base by pandering to her own—well, she just might be able to make the numbers work out for him. If he does pull off the election of the century, Trump’s path to 270 Electoral College votes will begin with 164 practically in the bank, from 21 solid-red states generally considered sure things for the Republican nominee. And here’s how Clinton could push more than enough additional states onto Trump’s side of the ledger—Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan—one mistake at a time.

Step 1: Take Hispanic enthusiasm for granted

It’s been a matter of faith in Democratic circles: Trump’s grotesque demonization of Latin-American immigrants will boost Hispanic turnout and Clinton’s share of their vote. As a result, you’re already hearing a lot less about Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, once the odds-on favorite to become Clinton’s vice presidential running mate. Castro was supposed to be part of a big Democratic push for Hispanic votes this year. Now, the thinking seems to be, those votes will take care of themselves.

A new Fox Latino poll shows Clinton leading Trump by an impressive-sounding 39 points: 62 to 23. But there’s a problem: That 39-point spread is actually less than the 44 by which Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012.

Yes, their numbers are growing. But Hispanics simply don’t like Clinton nearly as much as they like Obama: Her favorable/unfavorable is a net +15 in that Fox Latino poll, while Obama’s is +46. Colorado, where the fast-growing Hispanic population gave 75 percent of its vote to Obama in 2008, is a similar story to Florida. So is Nevada, where all of the major analysts still rate the Senate race between Republican Joe Heck and Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto a tossup—suggesting that they aren’t yet foreseeing a torrent of Democratic-voting Hispanics rush the polls in November.

Oh, and did we mention that Hispanic voters are disproportionately young—a staggering 44 percent of eligible Hispanic voters this year are millennials, compared with 27 percent of non-Hispanic whites, according to Pew—and that Sanders has been pulling large numbers of them away from Clinton, just as much as others their age.

Step 2: Alienate the young

Millennials, being both more numerous and less cynical than their Generation X predecessors, once seemed likely to usher in a substantial advantage for Democrats among young voters. Except then they stopped turning out. In 2012, the number of 18-to-29-year-old voters dropped by 1.8 million from the previous presidential election year. “It seems likely that the observed young-adult voting surge of 2004–2008 was temporary,” a U.S. Census study concluded, “and not representative of a permanent shift towards greater young-adult engagement in presidential elections.”

In 2016, this is likely to affect Clinton’s performance in several college-heavy states that have had relatively high turnout—and high Democratic voting rates—among those age groups. That includes swing states such as Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Virginia.

To see how much young-voter turnout matters, look at North Carolina. In 2008, Obama had a net advantage there among 18-to-29-year-olds of 368,000 votes—and eked out a 14,000-vote victory overall. In 2012, with dampened enthusiasm, Obama’s advantage in that age group dropped by 120,000, and Romney coasted to a 92,000-vote win. What’s more, those young voters are especially likely to be swayed to third-party alternatives, which—see below—could become more enticing this time around.

Step 3: Let establishment Republicans find another place to go

The key to a Clinton landslide is turning red voters blue. And once it became clear that conservatives didn’t have the guts to put forward a #NeverTrump protest candidate, “Republicans for Hillary” was beginning to have a bit of a ring to it. But there’s another possibility: A plausible moderate-right candidate could emerge as a genuine alternative. 

Take, for example, former Massachusetts Republican Governor Bill Weld, whose history with Clinton goes back decades. Weld is exactly the type of GOP moderate Clinton has reportedly been wooing as Trump edged closer to the nomination. He endorsed Obama in 2008. He compares Trump’s rhetoric to Nazism. And there are plenty of Republicans like him this year, particularly in the Northeast. Not too many years ago, you could imagine considerable appeal for Clinton among Weld-ian Republicans. But thanks to her primary run, a combination of issues—Sanders pushing her left on economic issues, her unsatisfactory answers on the email scandal—has made that a tougher sell.

Step 4: Fumble on trade

As soon as the votes were tallied in 2012, Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO and Mary Kay Henry of SEIU were claiming unions had delivered Obama’s victory. They argued, with justification, that Ohio, Wisconsin and Nevada got into the blue column because of a massive turnout effort from labor. But earlier this year, both Trumka and Henry expressed concerns that Trump could flip that script.

“Our members are responding to Trump’s message,” Henry said in one interview. “Donald Trump is tapping into the very real and very understandable anger of working people,” Trumka said in a speech.

It’s not just that these workers are drawn to the raw emotion of Trump’s “you’ve been screwed” rhetoric. Polls show that union households tend to oppose free trade quite strongly. Sanders has made free trade a centerpiece of his primary campaign against Clinton. Trump, hoping to woo Sanders voters, frequently praises his position on that issue.

Union voters largely agree with Trump that trade deals—including those negotiated by Democratic Presidents Obama and Bill Clinton—have taken their jobs away. Hillary Clinton has yet to counter this attack in any meaningful way. Her history on trade has been careful and political, which has left her struggling to articulate a strong argument against Sanders, let alone Trump. The Final Tally

It’s not hard to see how quickly this could start costing her Electoral College votes in the Rust Belt, where Trump hopes to improve on past Republican performance. (And where, you may remember, Clinton had to apologize for threatening to put coal companies out of business.) In Ohio, for example, 22 percent of 2012 voters came from union households, and 60 percent of them voted for Obama. In Wisconsin, a similar share of the electorate voted 2-to-1 for Obama over Romney. In 2016, both states went for Sanders over Clinton in their primaries. In Pennsylvania, where Trump is planning a major effort, union households provided Obama more than half his net margin.

For what it’s worth, it’s also possible Clinton wins in a landslide, as an increasingly unstable Trump shrinks deeper and deeper into racism, xenophobia and conspiracy theories. But what’s clear is that Democrats can no longer count on a lopsided race that even a problematic candidate running a clumsy campaign can’t lose.

Again: It’s a long way to November, and Trump could always self-destruct. But he probably won’t, and 2016 is shaping up as a contest that a careful Clinton campaign can easily lose, state by state, even as she piles up the popular vote in California and other sure-win places. Demographics are not destiny. In fact, they can be a disaster waiting to happen.

Will the GOP Get the Message in Kansas?

Many of us are hoping that the GOP will get a much needed message in Kansas with the re-election defeat of Gov. Sam Brownback and Senator Pat Roberts (as well as other GOP elected officials).  Based on the Congressional GOP's economic agenda recently reviewed in a post on this blog, even if Kansas goes blue, one has to question whether or not the message will be received.  After all, part of being a Republican nowadays is to reject objective reality in every form and to blindly cling to ideology and one's Bible. A piece in The Daily Beast asks whether or not the GOP will get the message that its 30+ year old policies simply do not work.  Here are excerpts:

For many political observers, the question about Kansas these days is no longer, “What’s the matter?” so much as, “What the fuck?”

There was the unexpectedly close GOP Senate primary—three-term incumbent Pat Roberts wound up winning by 7 points—and the forced retirement of the Democratic Senate candidate; there’s the fact that Gov. Sam Brownback, whose average margin of victory in state-wide races is 23 points, is now fighting for his political life. Tom Frank made the state famous for illustrating how its citizens elected conservative candidates whose actual policies went against the voters’ economic self-interest; after one term of Brownback’s “Tea Party experiment,” Kansas voters seem to have enlightened their self-interest and want to undo the extremism that Brownback both promised and delivered. The question remains as to whether their Republican candidates will ever wise up to the same conclusion.

There’s no doubt that Brownback’s radically conservative economic policies failed. Schools closed, the deficit ballooned, highways crumbled, jobs disappeared—I imagine ruby slippers were hocked. That failure has the reddest state in the nation blushing blue.

Citing the state’s fiscal woes, moderate and not-so-moderate Republicans have flocked to Brownback’s opponent, Paul Davis, who trails by just 0.6 points. On the Senate front, independent candidate Greg Orman, who will likely caucus with the Democrats, is reaping the benefits of that Tea Party-weighted primary. “Traditional Republicans for Common Sense,” made up of 70 Republican moderates who served in the Kansas legislature, endorsed Orman and he is favored by independent voters by a margin of 30 points.

In the face of this, both Brownback and Roberts have chosen not to battle for the wide swath of Kansas voters who identify as moderate Republicans (47 percent, versus 38 percent “conservative Republicans”), but to move further to the right.

[O]ne has to wonder not just if the Republican leadership is shooting itself in the foot, but why it is. Is it misplaced, or at least short-sighted, cynicism, which might have them believe that their old white guy coalition (if you can call it that) will sustain them a few more cycles? (At least long enough to pass voting restrictions?) Or is it a form of psychosomatic blindness, a function of such deeply held, incorrect perceptions, that the party leaders literally cannot imagine the need to change their tactics, much less their policies?

In other words, are we dealing with cynics or zealots?  Obviously, one hopes for the former. Cynics respond to defeat, for one thing. Cynics and opportunists look at polls. Cynics are the lifeblood of representative democracy. Cynics will do anything to save their own skin, even change their minds.

Sadly, I suspect we are dealing with zealots who cannot grasp the reality that the nation is changing and pushing the same failed agenda is not the route to victory.   As for Brownback, he seems to think that attending every anti-gay rally is his ticket to reelection.

Will Chief Justice Roberts Become a Moderate?

Based on his ruling record to date, Chief Justice John Roberts is anything but a moderate.  But in the conspiracy theorist minds of the far right, especially the Christofascists elements of the right, there is a fear that over time Roberts might - gasp, worry about how history views him - go moderate.  If I were Roberts I would indeed worry that history might lump me with the justices that handed down the Dread Scott decision and other rulings now viewed with horror.  Scalia, the brain dead Thomas, and Alito have no such qualms.  Both perhaps Roberts might, and that has some extremists conservatives troubled.  A piece in Politico looks at their hand wringing. Here are excerpts:

Chief Justice John Roberts seems to be going wobbly again.

Conservatives, still smarting from what they view as an ideological betrayal by Roberts two years ago in the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Obamacare decision, have looked on suspiciously in recent weeks as the chief justice twice appeared to side with the court’s liberals and Justice Anthony Kennedy against the court’s conservatives.

When the high court issued orders last week blocking Wisconsin’s voter ID law and stopping enforcement of key parts of Texas’ new restrictions on abortion clinics, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito publicly dissented. Roberts was notably silent.

Taken together, Roberts’ actions seem to be contributing to a kind of buyer’s remorse that could result in even more pressure for ideologically pure nominees.

During his confirmation hearings, Roberts presented himself a strict interpreter of the Constitution and compared a judge’s role to that of an umpire calling balls and strikes. President George W. Bush was so confident in Roberts’ conservative bona fides that he appointed him directly to the post of chief justice.

“I think there are a lot of conservatives who feel like, instead of calling the balls and strikes, he’s kind of ducking when possible,” said Carrie Severino of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network. “There certainly seems like a more consistent pattern on the part of Scalia, Thomas and Alito of being really conservative to the core.”

Morris Davis, a liberal lawyer and former Guantánamo prosecutor, was more blunt in a tweet posted just after the Texas abortion order: “[Chief Justice] Roberts isn’t going to get invited to the tea party this year.”

The abortion and voter ID orders on which Roberts parted ways with his conservative colleagues came just days after the Supreme Court surprised many observers by punting on the issue of gay marriage, rejecting seven petitions asking the court to decide whether the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of same-sex couples to marry. Since only four justices were needed to take any one of the cases, some suspected that Roberts chose not to accept any of the petitions in order to steer the court away from the contentious social issue.

“It would be in character for Roberts to do this,” Chapman Law School Professor John Eastman said. “I find it hard to believe Thomas, Alito and Scalia wouldn’t vote to take it. … The only thing that makes sense is Roberts didn’t vote to grant certiorari and the other justices were happy to allow this thing to be decided by default.”

This assessment of Roberts troubles conservatives who want to see more ideological stringency and evokes the memory of GOP-appointed justices such as Sandra Day O’Connor and John Paul Stevens, who moved in a more liberal direction over their decades on the court.

If people are concerned that there’s a slow drift to the left, that’s a valid concern, because that’s usually how it happens,” Levey added. “It’s about 50-50 that a Republican judge or justice will remain anything like a Republican.”