Republicans Are Losing with Women Voters

Outside of Republican Women's Clubs - where older women in particular want to bring back the 1950's and perhaps the Jim Crow laws too - women are increasingly fleeing from the GOP.  What had been a growing problem has become a crisis fueled by the always vile Donald Trump whose crudeness, vulgarity and incompetent response to the Covid-19 pandemic is rapidly alienating women voters. If the exodus away from the GOP continues, not only Trump but his enablers within the GOP may face a harsh reckoning come November. A piece at CNN looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights: 

The GOP's quest to win back women is not looking promising 100 days before Election Day, a point punctuated by yet another week of sexist missteps -- from a GOP congressman's decision to reportedly call Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a "f**king bitch" on the steps of the Capitol to President Donald Trump's tweet marshaling "The Suburban Housewives of America."

Though the United States is rightly focused on the coronavirus pandemic, last week's events in Washington underscored that two years after women powered the Democrats' 2018 push to flip the House of Representatives, Trump and some members of his Republican Party have not learned their lesson -- and still cannot seem to show that they will treat women as equals and respect the dignity of their work both at home and in the professional realm. As Trump ramped up his campaign to strike fear in the hearts of White suburban voters by arguing that they will not be safe in Joe Biden's America this week, he tweeted out an opinion column in the New York Post praising his efforts to get rid of an Obama-era fair housing regulation. . . . . the Thursday afternoon tweet that seemed straight out of the 1950s, Trump said "The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!"
 In another example of his failure to think about the consequences before he speaks, he wished Ghislaine Maxwell "well" during a Tuesday briefing on the coronavirus even though she faces charges for recruiting, grooming and ultimately sexually abusing minors who were as young as 14 as Jeffrey Epstein's alleged accomplice. Trump's tone-deaf tweet about suburban housewives was in keeping with his long record of using demeaning language to describe women and his attempt to win the 2018 midterms for his party by stoking a backlash to the #MeToo movement by calling it a "very scary time" for young men.

Trump has never figured out how to make up lost ground with female voters since 2016 and 2018. And he now stands to lose them by potentially historic margins in the November election.

The President was trailing Vice President Joe Biden by 25 points among women (35% to Biden's 60%) in the recent Washington Post-ABC News poll and by 28 points in the mid-July Quinnipiac poll that showed Biden leading Trump among female voters 59% to 31%. And as CNN's Harry Enten wrote this weekend, this is not an election where the economy -- which Trump has long believed to be his greatest strength — is driving the election. At this moment when the number of coronavirus cases in the US has surpassed 4.1 million and more than 146,000 Americans have died, polls have consistently shown that Americans, particularly women, are more concerned about Covid-19 than any other issue. Voters trust Biden more than Trump to handle the pandemic, and largely because of that, the former vice president has maintained a solid lead in the polls, both nationally and in many of the key battleground states that Trump needs to win reelection. [H]e also undercut his own message by continuing to argue that children must return to school in person -- and falsely claiming that children don't get sick or transmit the virus easily -- even though polls show a majority of parents with school-aged children do not feel safe sending them back for in-person instruction. . . . . Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said Sunday that Trump's claim that governors have everything they need is not accurate. The gendered language of the week, from Trump's tweet to Florida GOP Rep. Ted Yoho's verbal attack on Ocasio-Cortez -- an incident in which the Florida Republican reportedly called the New York Democrat "disgusting" and a "f**king bitch" within earshot of a reporter from The Hill newspaper -- was a reminder that Trump and many of his allies still don't understand how to talk to women, much less about them. In many interviews with female voters of all political persuasions over the past three years, one of the things many of them said they don't like about Trump is his coarse, sexist language and how he has changed the dialogue in America — convincing his followers and allies that they can say whatever comes to mind, no matter how hurtful or offensive it is. 

For Trump and Republican acolytes like Yoho, there are now too many self-inflicted mistakes to count. They are dragging their own party down with them -- and no one will be surprised if women once again rise up in November and deliver a victory to the Democrats.

New Poll: Majority of Americans Endorse Impeachment Inquiry

In the previous post, it was noted that Lindsey Graham called Donald Trump a “nutjob” and a loser,” as well as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” Moreover, he predicted that if the GOP nominated him, “we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”  That, of course, was before Graham and other Congressional Republicans sold their souls and became Trump apologists or worse. Now, a new poll suggests that the GOP's much deserved self-destruction may be closer at hand than boot licking Republicans want to admit.  Indeed, 58% of Americans support the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry and 49% believe Trump should be removed from office - and this is even before the hearings likely expose much more unsavory and improper actions by Trump.  Here are highlights from the Post about the poll findings which must have some in the GOP close to soiling their underwear:

A majority of Americans say they endorse the decision by House Democrats to begin an impeachment inquiry of President Trump, and nearly half of all adults also say the House should take the additional step and recommend that the president be removed from office, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.

The findings indicate that public opinion has shifted quickly against [Trump] the president and in favor of impeachment proceedings in recent weeks as information has been released about Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian government officials to undertake an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden, a potential 2020 campaign rival, and Biden’s son Hunter.

The recent revelations appear to have prompted many Americans to rethink their position.

The poll finds that, by a margin of 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans say the House was correct to undertake the inquiry. Among all adults, 49 percent say the House should take the more significant step to impeach [Trump] the president and call for his removal from office. Another 6 percent say they back the start of the inquiry but do not favor removing Trump from office, with the remainder undecided about the president’s ultimate fate. The results among registered voters are almost identical.

The findings highlight the partisan divisions that surround the Trump presidency and any impeachment inquiry, but also the degree to which there are defections among Republicans.

More than 8 in 10 Democrats endorse the inquiry and nearly 8 in 10 favor a vote to recommend that Trump be removed from office. Among Republicans, roughly 7 in 10 do not support the inquiry but almost 3 in 10 do, and almost one-fifth of Republicans say they favor a vote recommending his removal. Among the critical voting bloc of independents, support for the impeachment inquiry hits 57 percent, with 49 percent saying the House should vote to remove Trump from office. . . . there has been movement toward an impeachment inquiry among all three groups, with support for the inquiry rising by 25 points among Democrats, 21 points among Republicans and 20 points among independents.

Two pieces of information triggered the impeachment inquiry and have sparked widespread public concern, according to latest survey . . . . The first was the rough transcript of a July 25 telephone call between Trump and newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump asked for “a favor” that included requests for the Ukrainians to look into what happened during the 2016 election and to investigate Biden and his son, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.
Asked about the contents of the telephone call, a clear majority of Americans say Trump’s request to investigate Biden and his son was inappropriate (62 percent to 32 percent who felt it was not).

When it comes to Trump’s overall conduct as president, Americans offer a harsh verdict. Asked whether the president upholds adequate standards for ethics in government, 60 percent of Americans say he does not, while 35 percent say he does.
At this early stage in the impeachment inquiry, whose timing is fraught as the country barrels toward an election year, the public is siding more with congressional Democrats than Republicans when it comes to their responses so far.

Majorities of Americans say Democrats in Congress are making a necessary stand against Trump’s actions (61 percent) and are acting to uphold their constitutional duties (53 percent). Similarly, a majority (55 percent) say Democrats are not overreacting by starting the impeachment inquiry.

The survey finds cracks within the Republican coalition on the question of support for the impeachment inquiry, with younger and more moderate Republicans offering greater support. . . . 40 percent of Republican-leaning adults ages 18-39 endorse the start of the impeachment inquiry, compared with 23 percent of those ages 40-64 and 13 percent of those age 65 and older.

On the question of the appropriateness of Trump’s request to Zelensky to investigate Biden and his son, 45 percent of moderate-to-liberal Republicans and Republicans under age 40 say it was not appropriate.

65 percent of women favoring the impeachment inquiry, compared with 51 percent of men.

A majority (61 percent) of white college graduates favor the inquiry, while whites without college degrees, a mainstay of Trump’s support, are split: 47 percent in favor and 48 percent in opposition.

One can only hoe that support for impeachment - and removal of Trump from office - continues to grow.  He is a cancer that must be removed from the White House at any cost. 

Trump Is Driving Out Republican Voters

A piece in the New York Times looks at an issue that I have long argued ought to be terrifying the Republican Party both nationally and here in Virginia: the GOP is driving away younger, non-rural voters at an alarming rate and putting the party's long term viability at risk. The GOP base is aging and literally dying off and in states like Virginia, the rural vote can no longer outweigh the collective vote of the urban voters, which is precisely why GOP operatives sought to create chaos in the Virginia Democrat Party with its orchestrated attacks on Ralph Northam, Justin Fairfax and, to a lesser extent Mark Herring (a piece in the Washington Post suggests the GOP strategy is not working with the Democrat donor class).  The majority of voters increasingly do not want what the GOP is selling.  And Donald Trump is exacerbating the problem, especially with younger voters who over time will replace the GOP's steadily dying base.  Personally, the death of the GOP and everything it has come to stand for cannot come soon enough, but one would think alarm bells would be going off somewhere with the GOP leadership.  Here are article highlights:

Ever since Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, much of the media attention has been on how Democrats need to reconsider their strategy for winning voters in future elections, particularly Obama-to-Trump voters. But the results of the 2018 midterm elections suggest that Republicans have some soul-searching to do as well.

They lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections and suffered battering losses in the House in 2018. Republican strategists must grapple with how to keep their party viable nationally, and our data suggests that Trumpism may continue to hurt them in the future.

It has flown under the radar a bit, masked perhaps by the switch of millions of Barack Obama’s voters into Mr. Trump’s column, but in 2016 Mr. Trump did not receive support from a large segment of voters who pulled the lever for Mitt Romney in 2012. In fact, our data shows that 5 percent of Romney 2012 voters stayed home in 2016, while another 5 percent voted for Mrs. Clinton. These voters tended to be female, nonwhite, younger and more highly educated — the very voters Republicans feared would be alienated by a Trump victory when he was seeking the party’s nomination.

Most strikingly, one-third of 2012 Romney voters who were under 40 in 2016 did not vote for Mr. Trump, but rather stayed home, voted for Mrs. Clinton or voted for a third-party candidate. Among the under-40 Romney voters who supported Mr. Trump in 2016, 16 percent appear to have defected from the party to vote for a Democratic House candidate in 2018. Of course, we don’t know how they will vote in 2020, but what this means is that in the past two elections Republicans may have lost more than 40 percent of Romney voters born after 1976.

Republican House candidates performed worse among 18- to 39-year-olds than they have in decades. The voters Mr. Trump and his party lost in 2016 and 2018 represent the future of American politics.

Defectors were disproportionately women; 63 percent of Romney-to-Clinton voters were female compared with 46 percent of Romney-to-Trump voters. Romney-to-nonvoters were 54 percent female.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, Mr. Trump shed a large share of 2012 Romney voters of color — precisely the type of voters that Republicans have been struggling to attract for some time.

Trump also lost support from Romney-supporting college-educated voters. While only one in four Romney-to-Trump voters had a college degree, 39 percent of Romney-to-Clinton voters did, and 31 percent of Romney-to-nonvoters were college-educated.

Crucially, the Trump campaign alienated a lot of younger-to-middle-aged voters who had turned out for Mr. Romney in 2012. Four percent of Romney-to-Trump voters were under 30 years old in 2016. In contrast, 18 percent of Romney-to-Clinton voters were under 30, as were 21 percent of Romney-to-nonvoters. Each of these patterns should raise red flags for Republicans, even more so after 18- to 29-year-olds went from supporting Mrs. Clinton by a 25-point margin in 2016 to supporting House Democrats by a 44-point margin in 2018. . . .

But it is the graying of the Republican coalition that is arguably the biggest threat to the party’s prospects. It is true that on average, older people are more reliable voters than younger people. But the partisan identities and voting behaviors that people adopt early in the life cycle tend to stick, becoming routines that people carry on for the remainder of their lives.

Can Republicans solve their demographic problem? A look at issue preferences indicates wooing back defectors will be difficult. On crucial issues facing the country, Romney-to-Clinton voters, Romney-to-nonvoters and Americans over all hold positions that are relatively far from Romney-to-Trump voters.

Trump may have won the White House with a thin margin built on winning over just enough Obama voters in the right places. But this victory may ultimately have come at the expense of the Republican Party’s long-term electoral prospects. To win some of the Romney coalition back, Republicans would need to moderate their stances on some key issues, like immigration and trade, and, of course, exactly the opposite is happening.

Again, let's hope the exodus of GOP voters accelerates!

Is Trump Driving Women Away From the GOP for Good?

Both of my daughters grew up working on Republican campaigns, doing literature drops, working the polls with me, and going to "victory parties" on election nights.  One happily related to me that she voted a straight GOP ticket the first time she was old enough to vote.  What are they doing now?  Using social media to encourage people to register to vote and voting Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections.  What happened?  Two things, in my view: (i) the take over of the GOP base by Christofascists - and now white supremacists - and (ii) the election of Donald Trump and the mainstreaming of misogyny within the GOP.   Polls suggest that they are unique and some pundits are now wondering if the GOP has lost the majority of women long term.  A piece in Politico Magazine suggests that what my daughters - both Millennials - have experienced is not unique even among much older one time Republican women.   Here are article highlights: 

President Donald Trump has historically low favorability among women, with the Pew Research Center now reporting that 63 percent of women disapprove of how he is doing his job—compared with 30 percent who approve. That might not be surprising, given the range of things that Trump has said and done that might be seen as offensive to women. There’s the famous “Access Hollywood” tape that gave rise to thousands of pussy hats, the 22 women who have publicly accused him of sexual harassment and assault, and the hush money his personal lawyer has admitted to paying to cover up marital indiscretions. There is Trump’s tendency to insult women, from Carly Fiorina to Megyn Kelly to Mika Brzezinski. Most recently, there was his rally in Mississippi, during which the president mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations . . . . 

Trump’s election and performance in office have clearly pushed independent and Democratic women into action, resulting in record numbers of women running for office, and surges of women involved in local political organizing for the first time. But what about Republican women? Is it possible that Trump—and the Republican politicians who enable him—are not just alienating left-leaning women, but are permanently damaging the GOP’s female ranks, driving some splintering portion of women away for good?
 Republican women still overwhelmingly support the president—84 percent of them, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll this week. But that statistic overlooks a broader trend: Fewer and fewer American women identify as Republicans, and that slow migration is speeding up under Trump. . . . . According to pollsters on both sides of the aisle, that doesn’t bode well for the Republican Party either in this fall’s midterms—which are likely to bring a record gap between how men and women vote—or for the party’s long-term future.
 Only more recently did women start actively leaving the GOP. For two decades now, they have been leaking away from the Republican Party, very slowly becoming independents, while independents have been drifting toward the Democrats. In 1994, according to Pew, 42 percent of women identified as or leaned Republican, as did 52 percent of men. By 2017, only 37 percent of women and 48 percent of men still did. In 1994, 48 percent of women and 39 percent of men identified as or leaned toward the Democrats. By 2017, those numbers were 56 percent of women and 44 percent of men.
 Trump’s election put this gender shift “on steroids,” Greenberg says. According to Pew, the share of American women voters who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party has dropped 3 percentage points since 2015—from 40 percent to 37 percent—after having been essentially unchanged from 2010 through 2014. By 2017, just 25 percent of American women fully identified as Republicans. That means that when, say, 84 percent of Republican women say they approve of Trump and his actions, or 69 percent of Republican women say they support Kavanaugh, or 64 percent say they, like Trump, don’t find Ford very “credible,” those percentages represent a small and shrinking slice of American women.
 [W]omen have voted in higher numbers and at higher rates than men for decades. In 2016, according to Dittmar, 9.9 million more women than men voted, and about 63 percent of eligible females voted, compared with 59 percent of eligible males. If more women than men vote in November, women’s shift toward the Democrats is likely to be over-represented on Election Day—especially in an election like this one, in which women are highly mobilized and motivated. The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walters recently noted: “The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that [white college-educated women] support a Democrat for Congress by 22 points—58 percent to 36 percent.
 “Once you give up that party label, you’re less inclined to easily take it back,” says University of Virginia political scientist Jennifer Lawless. Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee staffer, notes that the Republican loss of college-educated white women “is not balanced out by a huge spike among white men—on net, that’s a real problem for the Republicans.” Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, of all people, put it more starkly this summer: “The Republican college-educated woman is done. They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”
 In recent weeks, I sought out women who had crossed over from Republican to Democrat, to understand what motivated their shift and how permanent they think it will be. . . . . Some had voted straight-ticket Republican all their lives; others had crossed the line occasionally but remained proud Republicans until Trump. . . . Each woman’s experiences and motivations were different, but some clear themes emerged about their disillusionment with the Republican Party.

First is their dislike of Trump himself, whom these women see as offensive, impulsive and dangerous to America’s standing in the world. “He is just the most amoral person,” said Jennifer Pate, a recently married 31-year-old devoted churchgoer in San Antonio, raised in that city by what she called “very conservative” parents in a church where women still can’t be pastors. “He is everything—I don’t have kids yet—everything I don’t want my kids to grow up to be.

“His honesty is in question,” said Julie Vann, a 68-year-old in Beavercreek, Ohio. She points to Trump’s company’s multiple bankruptcy filings. “That was just his way of doing business,” she says. “And that’s the same way he thinks now. He doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he wins.”
 Another born-and-raised Republican, Kansas teacher Janea Lawrence, 54, is dismayed because she believes Trump handed out Cabinet positions to unqualified “friends or people who could buy their way in”—because of wealth or, she assumes, campaign donations. She finds that approach shockingly counter to what she calls her Midwestern ethos of working hard and doing right.
 Cate Kanellis Zalmat of Plano, Texas, a 61-year-old grocery store manager and grandmother, has been a Republican since she first voted for Ronald Reagan. “I haven’t felt as angry about politics in my life as Trump makes me,” she told me—angry, among other things, at Trump’s instability, at what she sees as the GOP’s pandering to the religious right, at what she described as Republicans’ anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bias.
 That brings us to another reason these women are disillusioned: Under Trump, they say, many Republicans are peddling intolerance and exclusion. “It’s become normal to be a racist and a bigot, and those are not normal things,” said Jennifer Hackel Thrift, 43, a corporate headhunter in Austin, Texas. She had never voted for a Democrat until 2016—and now compares Fox News to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
 Karen Winslow, 66, a former Navy nurse who now lives in Austin as well, worked furiously at her consulting business after her first husband died so that her three daughters would be able to get excellent educations and travel widely. Now she is appalled at how Trump slanders Latinos—a group that includes two of her sons-in-law—and how the party treats women. In Charlotte, North Carolina, 58-year-old CPA Beth Monaghan said that in 2016, when her state senator, Dan Bishop, helped sponsor HB2, the North Carolina “bathroom bill,” she took it as an attack on the entire LGBTQ spectrum and was furious that the government was “telling my son he’s less-than because he’s gay.” Trump alone didn’t push these women to shed their Republican labels; other GOP politicians’ unquestioning support for Trump did that. Several told me they were angry that an all-Republican government has become the party of fiscal waste, deficits, trade wars and rebates for the wealthy. Zalmat said she is angrier at the “spineless Republicans in the Congress” for “enabling [Trump’s] crazy” than she is at [Trump] the president himself.
 Sentiments like those are telling, says UVA’s Lawless. “If the Republicans had stood up to [Trump], not necessarily on substance, but in terms of style and rhetoric,” she says, the reactions among voters might be, “I’m still a Republican, but I’m not supporting Donald Trump.” Instead, she continues, “because the Republicans have been complicit in a lot of what Trump has done,” many women no longer feel they can consider themselves Republican. And that’s a big step out the door.
 Whether or not their mothers drift away from the Republicans for good, in other words, young women might be signing up for the other team. “If millennials vote three times for the same party, they hold that identification their whole lives,” Lake says. “So, this is a very, very critical erosion. The Republicans could pay the price for decades.”

Personally, I am hoping for a massive Democrat turnout next month.  Similarly, I hope educated women - which almost by definition excludes evangelical women - turn out in force to punish the GOP.  Women, racial minorities, LGBT individuals, and  and Millennils have the most to lose if the GOP doesn't experience a bloodbath at the polls. I will be waiting with baited breath to see the outcomie of the November 6, 2018 vote. 

Nobody Likes Trump Except White Evangelicals

Trump with lunatic base.

The twin pillars of Donald Trump's base of support are evangelical Christians and white supremacists (personally, I believe there is a large overlap between the two groups).  For "friends" who continue support Trump and who have lost the fig leaf of "supporting fiscal conservatism" in the wake of the GOP/Trump tax bill, I suggest that they take a good look in the mirror and face the truth as to which of these two groups they fall into.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at continued evangelical support for Trump, perhaps the most morally bankrupt individual to ever occupy the White House. For me, the takeaway is that evangelicals are just as morally bankrupt as Trump.  Here are article excerpts:

The Public Religion Research Institute, which regularly does valuable polling and analysis on issues where politics and religion intersect, has a new poll out this week. They’ve also supplied some analysis breaking out white Evangelical respondents to their poll (about 17 percent of the sample), showing that support for Donald Trump among the paler born-again folk is at “an all-time high”:

White evangelical support for Donald Trump has steadily increased over time. Notably, Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals never reached 50 percent during the 2016 primary season. By the early fall of 2016, however, his favorability among white evangelicals had jumped to 61 percent. By the inauguration it increased to 68 percent, and shortly after the inauguration in February 2017 it jumped again to 74 percent. Over the course of 2017, there were minor fluctuations, but Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals never dipped below 65 percent during this time.

Trump’s favorability ratio among white evangelicals now, says PRRI, is 75-22, as compared to 42-54 among the American population generally. And his popularity is just insanely high among men (81 percent) and the non-college-educated (78 percent) within the white Evangelical universe.

I emailed the PRRI, and got the non-white-Evangelical numbers from the very same poll.  They’re pretty compelling. Among Americans who are not self-identified white Evangelicals, Trump’s favorability ratio is 36-60, with 41 percent expressing very unfavorable views of [Trump]the president. Among women who are not white Evangelicals, the ratio is 29-69, with about half — 49 percent — harboring a very unfavorable view of Trump. How about college-educated Americans who aren’t white Evangelicals? Trump’s at 32-65, with 47 percent holding a very unfavorable opinion of him. And outside the ranks of the white Evangelicals, even non-college-educated Americans have a dim view of the MAGA man, disliking him by a 39-58 margin (this obviously includes minority folks), though a mere 38 percent dislike him strongly.

There are two takeaways from this data, one obvious and one a bit less obvious. First of all, Trump is really, really dependent on the good opinion of white Evangelicals. . . . he owes them immensely. And you do have to wonder if there’s some tipping point . . . after which these fine church folk freak out and head south on [Trump]the president. There’s no evidence of that so far . . .

There’s another thing to consider as well. . . . Perhaps Trump’s most avid fans are living in their own bubble of white Evangelical culture, while disdain for the mogul is so common elsewhere that it’s the prevailing (if hardly unanimous) sentiment.

That’s a different way of looking at it, isn’t it? Trump-disparagers aren’t necessarily elite, aren’t necessarily secular, and aren’t necessarily minorities, either. What they most have in common is that by and large they do not identify with religious communities where the Bible is regarded as the literal, inerrant truth about all of its content; . . . 

Yes, there are anti-Trump people in white Evangelical circles and pro-Trump people elsewhere, but the patterns don’t follow the conservative meme of the Trumpian masses versus the anti-Trumpian classes, at all.

Non-white-Evangelical America is a pretty big part of this great big country, and it’s a place where Donald Trump is really unpopular. Get used to that idea.

Given Trump's reliance on evangelicals, it goes without saying that he - and the insidious Mike Pence - will do all in his power to make the lives of LGBT Americans a living Hell.  Meanwhile, Trump received less than a warm welcome in Key West, a city with a motto diametrically opposed to what Trump and his base stand for:

The Stormy Daniels Interview Should Scare Republicans

I, like I suspect many, I watched the 60 Minutes interview of Stormy Daniels last evening.  My take away?  Donald Trump is an adulterous pig.   In my view, a very unattractive adulterous pig.  Perhaps my favorite part of the interview was this:

Anderson Cooper: You were 27, he was 60. Were you physically attracted to him?

Stormy Daniels: No.

Anderson Cooper: Not at all?

Stormy Daniels: No.

I suspect that this exchange will most enrage Der Trumpenführer since it dismisses his delusional attractive image of himself.   

On a more serious note, what the Daniels interview may do is further alienate women voters - a demographic with whom Trump does poorly - by reminding them of Trump and the GOP's anti-women agenda.  With the 2018 mid terms a little more than seven months away, the last thing Republicans need is more alienation of women voters or, in the alternative, energized women voters out for retribution.  A piece in CNN looks at why Republicans should be worried.  Here are excerpts:

But one way that the Daniels story could have a very real political effect is in its ability to further energize the women's vote, especially that of white college-educated females. From the start of his presidency, Trump has had a gender problem. Hillary Clinton won 54% of the women's vote. The first mass protest against his presidency, the Women's March on January 21, 2017, drew hundreds of thousands of women from all over the country.
 The president has done nothing to allay the concerns that he is a sexist-in-chief who is dismissive of any policies that aim to achieve gender equity and who is prone to espousing the kind of "locker room talk," as he called it, that was on display in the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape that emerged during the election. While many Americans had been hopeful that Clinton's candidacy would signal a historic milestone in the fight for gender quality, the story turned out differently. The victory of Trump felt to many women like a huge step backward. In the period that has his followed his election, many women voters have only become more determined to reverse the damage that his victory caused. The #Metoo movement pushed the issue of sexual harassment to the front and center of our national conversation. Activists brought down numerous leading figures in key industries and have created immense pressure to transform the rules and norms of workplace behavior. The anger among women in the electorate could be decisive in the midterm elections. With a record-breaking number of female candidates running for office, many women are clearly determined to shake up Washington. If women voters who oppose President Trump turn out in large numbers, they can provide the key to electing a Democratic-controlled House and Senate. Ronald Brownstein has noted that 62% of college-educated women are planning to vote for Democrats in November. According to an NBC News/Wall Street poll, the president's favorability rating among college-educated white women has fallen from 32% to 27%. And the Republicans only receive positive marks from 23% of this pool. In the special elections in Virginia, Alabama, and Pennsylvania, the Republicans performed poorly with women voters. And [Trump's] the president's numbers have also fallen among blue-collar white women who were important to his victory last November. In RealClear Politics, David Brady and Brett Parker recently recounted how weak the enthusiasm is for his presidency among female voters, and the widening gender gap between the parties. Donald Trump has represented, both symbolically and in terms of the policy agenda, a reactionary presidency toward the feminist movement that has pushed the country toward greater gender equality. The daily tumult in the White House and Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation create woes for Trump. But the decisive factor that could put real institutional brakes on this [Trump] President may well turn out to be the women's vote.

Republicans Warn Trump of 2018 Bloodbath

As a previous post noted, Der  Trumpenführer has stated that he wants to spend much of 2018 on the campaign trail for congressional Republicans running for re-election.  If this happens, it will be a huge gift to Democrats, especially in states like Virginia where Trump and GOP policies have motivated grass roots Democrats to get out and vote in record numbers.  Trump, of course, blinded by his own perception of his own magnificence, seemingly doesn't grasp that his base in most states makes up 27-30% of the voting population is cannot propel Republicans to re-election.  A piece in Politico looks at the dire warnings Republicans are giving to Trump about what will hopefully be a historic bloodbath for the GOP.  Personally, I hope Democrats replicate Ralph Northam's "field game" as he calls it  to get out minority and younger voters in record numbers.  Both demographics hate Trump and dislike the GOP.  2018 is their opportunity for revenge, if you will.  We can make the GOP's feared bloodbath a reality.  Here are highlights from the Politico piece:

A few weeks before Alabama's special Senate election, President Donald Trump’s handpicked Republican National Committee leader, Ronna Romney McDaniel, delivered a two-page memo to White House chief of staff John Kelly outlining the party’s collapse with female voters.

The warning, several people close to the chairwoman said, reflected deepening anxiety that a full-throated Trump endorsement of accused child molester Roy Moore in the special election — which the president was edging closer to at the time — would further damage the party’s standing with women. McDaniel’s memo, which detailed the president's poor approval numbers among women nationally and in several states, would go unheeded, as Trump eventually went all-in for the ultimately unsuccessful Republican candidate.

The backstage talks provide a window into how those closest to Trump are bracing for a possible bloodbath in the 2018 midterms, which could obliterate the Republican congressional majorities and paralyze the president’s legislative agenda. The potential for a Democratic wave has grown after Republican losses this fall in Virginia, New Jersey and Alabama, and as the president’s approval ratings have plummeted to the 30s. In recent weeks, some of the president’s advisers have taken it upon themselves to warn him directly about the fast-deteriorating political environment. Among GOP leaders, however, there is widespread concern heading into 2018. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said privately that both chambers could be lost in November. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has told donors that he fears a wave of swing district Republican lawmakers could retire rather than seek reelection.

During a conference meeting last week, House Republicans listened as the past five chairmen of the party’s campaign arm addressed the political environment. One endangered lawmaker said his main takeaway was that incumbents should spend little time worrying about Trump or the White House and focus only on controlling what they can.

As they raft a 2018 campaign plan, White House officials are cognizant that the president isn’t popular in some parts of the country. Trump is most likely to hit the trail in conservative states like Missouri or Montana with an eye toward mobilizing his core supporters. Discussions are underway, for example, about sending Trump and Pence to campaign in a southwestern Pennsylvania congressional district that the president won by nearly 20 percentage points that's holding a special election in March. While the president’s numbers are cratering in some swing states, he's expected to take on an expanded role on the fundraising circuit in 2018, which Republicans hope will allow them to swamp Democrats in campaign spending. Behind the scenes, though, the White House has been racing to find solutions to the electoral challenge. Following the Virginia gubernatorial race, the administration commissioned an after-action report to examine why the party under-performed among suburban voters. “There are 10 months to improve the fundamentals here, and the Senate map is, on paper, good. But maps don’t make majorities and I think there’s a realization that there’s at least a 50 percent chance one or both chambers could fall,” Jennings said. “In less than one year, this first term could be, for all intents and purposes, over if the Democrats take control of either chamber.” 

Chesterfield, Virginia - A Potential Bell-Weather of GOP Troubles

Kim Drew Wright is the founder of Liberal Women of Chesterfield County and Beyond, a grass-roots organization that helped deliver the Richmond suburbs to the Democratic candidate for governor for the first time since 1961.

Since the blue wave in November 7, 2017's Virginia elections, Virginia has received more political focus than at any time I can think of in recent memory.  Areas that were once reliably Republican - e.g., Virginia Beach, Chesterfield County and Loudoun County - flipped to the Democrat column.   Many, especially Republicans, try to lay all the blame at the feet of Der Trumpenführer, perhaps the most morally bankrupt individual to ever occupy the White House.  While Trump has indeed motivated women voters who find him repulsive and a down right horrible individual (I share this view), I would argue that the shift to Democrat involves much more.  Trumpism, which now defines the Republican Party, has finally caused many who were formerly marginally involved politically to belatedly open their eyes and realize that the Republican agenda is toxic for most Americans. Unless one is a Christifascists, a white supremacist, a vulture capitalist or very wealthy, the GOP has nothing to offer.  Indeed, it is probably harmful for you and your family.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Ed Gillespie's loss in Chesterfield County, Virginia, a former Republican bastion, and what it might foretell for the 2018 midterms.  Here are excerpts:

For the first time since 1961, Chesterfield County backed a Democrat for governor — and the driving forces in this Richmond suburb included women who defiantly trumpeted a political label their party has ducked for decades.

“Are we done?” Kim Drew Wright asked members of the organization that she and her allies christened the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County after President Trump’s election last year.  “Noooooo!” the women shouted back.

Until Gov.-elect Ralph Northam (D) won Chesterfield County three weeks ago, the stretch of suburban and rural communities southwest of Richmond had been considered reliably Republican.

Yet voters infuriated by Trump, many of them women and Hispanics who have migrated to the county in recent years, are redefining Chesterfield and alarming Virginia Republicans who have depended on the area to make up for the support the party lacks in urban areas.

The results in Chesterfield are also a potential harbinger of what looms beyond Virginia, in suburbs where anger toward Trump is motivating voters bent on defeating Republican candidates in next year’s midterm elections.

“That’s a huge red flag for Republicans and an opportunity for Democrats,” said Jesse Ferguson, a national Democratic strategist. “There’s opportunity in these traditionally conservative suburbs with college-educated white voters who are unwilling to back a Republican candidate. It’s a function of and proof that Trump has tainted the rest of the Republicans running for office.”

Chris LaCivita, a Richmond-based GOP strategist who works on national campaigns, said . . . . “Midterm and off-year elections are defined by whose base is more animated and engaged and right now it’s the Democrats,” he said. “You’re going to have to work harder than ever if you’re a Republican in this environment.”

[T]he growth in Republican turnout was overwhelmed by the ballooning number of Democratic voters. Northam received 16,000 more votes than Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) got in the county in 2013.

The Liberal Women of Chesterfield County is an example of a new breed of Democratic activism in the Richmond suburbs. The group, which says it has admitted nearly 3,000 followers to its private Facebook page, has established 13 neighborhood chapters and canvassed more than 50,000 homes in a get-out-the-vote effort. On Election Day, the group worked with the local Democratic committee to staff all 75 of the county’s polling places, something that the local party on its own had previously been unable to accomplish.

Besides championing Northam and the statewide ticket, they pushed local residents running for the first time, including the first openly gay woman elected to the House of Delegates . . . “I wouldn’t have done this every day for the past year if I hadn’t gotten so angry about Trump,” said Wright, 46, a mother of three who observed politics from the sidelines before last year’s presidential election. “Once you wake up and see how important local elections are, it’s hard to go back to the shadows and stick your head in the sand. Now we have our eye on everybody, from dogcatcher on up.”

The group’s next target is Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), whose district includes Chesterfield and who earlier this year complained that “the women are in my grill no matter where I go” — a reference to the activists who protested against efforts by Brat and other House Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The last Democratic candidate to carry Chesterfield was former governor Albertis Harrison — 56 years ago. . . . . But the county evolved as its population mushroomed by nearly 25 percent between 2000 and 2016. While the number of whites in Chesterfield declined by 10 percent from 2000 to 2010, the percentage of blacks grew by 4 percent and Latinos more than doubled from 3 percent to more than 7 percent.  At the same time, Republicans’ victory margins steadily declined.
 “I don’t think this election was generally about demographics, but in Chesterfield it was,” said Quentin Kidd, director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. “In the next 10 years, it’s not going to be the Chesterfield where you slap an ‘R’ next to someone’s name and they win.” . . . “The challenge for Democrats is, ‘Can you transcend Trump?’ ” Kidd said. “A lot of this is driven by women voters, but can Democrats translate that to a more permanent voter? Or is that woman going back to voting Republican once Trump is gone?”

Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said the results suggest that voters’ rejection of “Trump’s brand of Republicanism” is potent in suburban areas that are “increasingly diverse and/or highly educated.”  “These results should scare them,” Skelley said of Republicans inside Chesterfield and beyond. 

By acking a presidential candidate who is utterly bankrupt morally and unfit for office and pushing policies harmful to the majority of voters, Republicans have set themselves up for disaster and I hope they reap the whirlwind in 2018 and beyond.  The GOP cannot be reformed from within given what its base has become, it has to die.   

Trump is Accelerating Virginia's Shift to a Blue State

click to enlarge image

The reverberations of Tuesday's election triumph for Democrats continue to shake Virginia and my well lead to further Republican defeats next year: Ralph Northam won roughly seven out of Virginia's eleven congressional districts and could put Republican incumbents on the firing line in the 2018 mid-term elections. Change has been coming to Virginia for years now, but one thing seems to be accelerating change and a rejection of the Republican Party: Donald Trump.  While popular in backwards, reactionary Southwest Virginia, parts of Southside and a few areas with lots of military personnel and retirees - although Virginia Beach went for Northam - Trump is increasingly toxic everywhere else, especially in the large population areas.  The map above shows locality drawn to reflect the number of registered voters.  The take away?  Southwest Virginia and other rural areas simply do not have the votes to elect Republicans statewide if Democrats run good candidates and smart campaigns.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the seismic changes taking place in Virginia.  Here are excerpts:

The sweeping gains won by Democrats in Tuesday’s elections complete Virginia’s transformation into the only blue state of the old Confederacy. Where the Harry Byrd machine once conspired to keep black students out of white schools, now a transgender delegate will take her seat alongside Latino women, a socialist and only the second African American elected statewide since Reconstruction.

The old edifices are falling faster than the state’s Confederate statues — but those are under scrutiny in Richmond these days, too. Even Virginia’s most politically powerful corporation — Dominion Energy — is being rattled: Some 14 of the newly elected Democrats have pledged to refuse contributions and challenge the priorities of a company that’s known as the state’s shadow government.

Change has been coming to the increasingly diverse state for years, but the evolution was turbocharged by the provocative influence of Donald Trump.  The president’s victory last fall and subsequent knife-twisting tweets inspired a surge of Democratic candidates to run for office and pushed many voters to the polls.

“This election, more than anything else, was a Trump-effect election,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. Democrat Ralph Northam won the governor’s race over Republican Ed Gillespie by a comfortable nine-point margin, but Farnsworth said the outcome could have been much tighter if not for highly motivated anti-Trump voters.

The sentiment turned up in voices across the state. In Fairfax Station, where Pam Rodriguez, 44, showed up in the chilly evening rain to vote for Northam partly because she is “not a fan of Trump . . . I loved the commercial where Northam called him a narcissistic maniac,” she said.

It was in eastern Henrico County outside Richmond, where a few days before the election Nick Hall was all set to vote for the Democrat for governor even though he wasn’t sure of his name. Hall just wanted to strike back at the party of Trump. “Trump is an idiot,” he said.

An especially striking aspect of that anti-Trump fervor was that most of those new candidates he inspired were women. Of the 15 Democrats who were on track to flip Republican seats in the House of Delegates, 11 were women.  All of the delegates they will replace are men.

Some Republicans saw Tuesday’s result as a tsunami that couldn’t have been avoided — thanks, of course, to Trump.  “I’m for 90 percent of what President Trump wants to do, but I’m against 90 percent of what comes out of his Twitter,” said former Republican delegate Dave Albo, who stepped down this year and on Tuesday saw his seat in Fairfax County go to a Democrat.  The president whipped Democrats into a frenzy, Albo said. “One of the rules of politics,” he said, “is pissed-off people show up.”

The results did, in fact, amplify the state’s divisions. Blue regions got bigger, as more suburbs flipped for Democrats — especially in the outer D.C. suburbs and around Richmond and Hampton Roads. But rural red areas went for Gillespie in great numbers, sometimes even more than for Trump last year.

Now, Democrats need to unite and take aim at winning congressional races next year and reelecting Tim Kaine to the U.S. Senate.  Trump will likely aid in that effort through his constant toxicity. 

Donald Trump: Are Women People?

The bizarre insanity that many of us always suspected linger just below the surface on Donald Trump's narcissistic personality is now on full display.  Trump has threatened to sue an unbowed New York Times, ranted that the release of the 2005 Entertainment Tonight" tape was a conspiracy hatched by Hillary Clinton and the news media, and even has claimed that one of the additional women who has accused him of sexual harassment must be lying since she is not attractive enough to meet his standards, saying "Take a look. You take a look. Look at her.” In his desperation to change the subject, he even said that "Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty." The man is in need of a serious mental health intervention.  Amazingly, as Politico notes, he sees himself as the biggest victim of all:

Entering the last month of a campaign that has always wielded the politics of grievance and victimization to devastating effect, the billionaire reality television star-turned-GOP nominee, facing a barrage of bad press and dimming electoral odds, currently sees himself as the biggest victim of all.

Trump has spent months attacking and delegitimizing the cornerstone institutions of American democracy: the voting process, the media, the political "establishment," even pollsters. But this is different.

While dismissing the women’s stories, Trump unabashedly focused on his own victimhood, emphasizing his personal and financial sacrifice, and informing his supporters that the attacks on him extend to them, too.

Trump’s angry assault on his attackers played out as a rejoinder to first lady Michelle Obama, who delivered a speech in New Hampshire that was simultaneously devastating and inspirational — and was, like Trump’s rally that followed, carried live on cable TV. Clinton’s most powerful campaign surrogate excoriated Trump over the myriad accusations of sexual assault and the videotape that shows him bragging about his ability to get away with that very behavior.

“I can’t believe I’m saying that a candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women,” she said. “Because let’s be very clear, strong men, strong men, men who are truly role models, don't need to put down women to make themselves feel powerful.”

As the First Lady correctly noted, in Donald Trump's world - and sadly among many of his low education white male voters - women aren't real people.  They are accessories for men and, if one believes in the Christofascists' claptrap, must be subordinate to their husbands.  A piece in Salon looks at the right's effort to dehumanize women and keep them them inferior.  Here are excerpts:

With the benefit of hours-old hindsight, it now seems inevitable that, with less than a month to go before the United States likely elects its first female president, the top trending topic on Twitter would be #repealthe19th. The hashtag was started by angry supporters of Republican candidate Donald Trump in response to a FiveThirtyEight analysis by Nate Silver showing that Trump would win in a landslide if women didn’t have the right to vote. That led to this demand, facetious or otherwise, that the United States end women’s suffrage.

For good reason, Trump’s rise has largely been attributed to the forces of white nationalism engaged in a backlash against the first black president and growing racial diversity. But the past couple of weeks have demonstrated that this election is also a referendum on the question: Are women people?

Shortly after Trump said this, the “grab them by the pussy” “Access Hollywood” video was released. In it, Trump confessed — bragged, really — to its NBC host Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it.

Unlike the confessions of the Central Park Five, Trump’s confession was not coerced. On the contrary, he comes across as a man who is dying to talk about how he can do whatever he wants to women.

Since then, there’s been an explosion of women coming forward with stories of being on the receiving end of exactly the behavior Trump was describing.
 And yet, Trump and his allies are dismissing his remarks as “locker-room talk” and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough is wanking on that he’s “skeptical about the timing of all of this.”

But it also goes back to Trump and his supporters treating women not as people but as objects to be owned and controlled by men.

If you look at women that way, the attitudes of Trump and his supporters make sense. Trump gets to grab all the pussy he wants because women’s bodies are objects put on this planet for his personal use.

Even the Republicans who are disavowing Trump do so in language that reinforces this notion that women are objects that men own, instead of people in their own right. Most Republican men who released statements condemning Trump invoked their wives and daughters, framing sexual violence as a property crime against male-controlled female bodies, rather than a crime against people with rights.

The thread that holds all this together is a disavowal of women’s right to autonomy and an assertion that our bodies and the decision-making power over them should belong to men. There’s an elaborate distribution scheme to handle which men get to control which female bodies: Virgins belong to their fathers, wives to their husbands, some women get categorized as “sluts” and can be manhandled at will. 

On Thursday, there were competing speeches on the subject of sexual harassment and assault. From Trump, of course, we got this incoherent rant where he denied all of it, and capped it all off by apparently claiming that one of his accusers is too ugly to grope, as MSNBC’s Katy Tur pointed out in a tweet.

In the last month of this election cycle, these contrasting speeches demonstrate how much this campaign has become about the question of whether women are people. In Trump’s view, the answer seems to be no. Instead, he paints women as objects who can be safely dismissed by saying they’re not hot enough to be bothered with.

First lady Michelle Obama, in contrast, speaks directly to women who are sick of this shit. Women are more than a bunch of boobs and butts to be rated on a scale and discarded if we don’t meet the standards of some jackass.

Women are people and, as Trump supporters have learned to their consternation, we have the right to vote. It’s a right, I suspect, will be exercised vigorously come November.

 I hope the author proves correct and that women get out in force and vote to send Trump - and his fellow Republicans - to a humiliating defeat on November 8th.  The man is disgusting and needs to be defeated by a landslide.