Sunday, August 14, 2016
Latest Poll: Young Voters Flee Donald
A new USA TODAY/Rock the Vote Poll has bad news for Donald Trump and over the longer term, the GOP as a whole: voters under 35 are fleeing the GOP. In terms of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump faces a 36 point deficit compared to Hillary Clinton. 2016 may be the third straight election where younger voters have avoided the GOP candidates. Here are highlights from USA Today:
Democratic presidential nomineeHillary Clinton is consolidating the support of the Millennials who fueledBernie Sanders ' challenge during the primaries, a new USA TODAY/Rock the Vote Poll finds, as RepublicanDonald Trump heads toward the worst showing among younger voters in modern American history.The survey shows Clinton trouncing Trump 56%-20% among those under 35, though she has failed so far to generate the levels of enthusiasm Sanders did — and the high turn-out that can signal — among Millennials.
"I get worried about the bigoted element of our country, and that they will stick with Trump regardless of his stupidity," says Elizabeth Krueger, 31, an actress in New York City who was among those surveyed. She supports Clinton. "She is not going to be a perfect president, but who would be?"
The findings have implications for politics long past the November election. If the trend continues, the Democratic Party will have scored double-digit victories among younger voters in three consecutive elections, the first time that has happened since such data became readily available in 1952. That could shape the political affiliations of the largest generation in American history for years to follow.
In the new survey, half of those under 35 say they identify with or lean toward the Democrats; just 20% identify with or lean toward the Republicans. Seventeen percent are independents, and another 12% either identify with another party or don't know.
Trump's weakness among younger voters is unprecedented, lower even than the 32% of the vote that theGallup Organization calculatesRichard Nixon received among 18-to-29-year-old voters in 1972, an era of youthful protests against the Vietnam War.
RNC Considers Cutting Cash to Trump
Perhaps further disheartened by Donald Trump's rants that "he will not change" and that "he is who he is," the Republican National Committee is reportedly said to be considering cutting off cash support to Trump's campaign and shifting funding to down ticket races threatened by a Trump catastrophe on November 8th. Along with the possible funding cut, an effort may be under way to set Trump up to take the blame for a GOP disaster. On the later issue, Trump has certainly inflicted more than enough wounds to himself to give the meme traction. A piece in Politico looks at the doom and gloom at the RNC despite efforts to put on a positive public face. Here are excerpts:
Publicly, Republican Party officials continue to stand by Donald Trump. Privately, at the highest levels, party leaders have started talking about cutting off support to Trump in October and redirecting cash to save endangered congressional majorities.
Since the Cleveland convention, top party officials have been quietly making the case to political journalists, donors and GOP operatives that the Republican National Committee has done more to help Trump than it did to support its 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, and that therefore Trump has only himself and his campaign to blame for his precipitous slide in the polls, according to people who have spoken with Republican leadership.
In the words of one person in the room, the message was that the RNC has “all these staffers out there working and knocking on doors, with a data system they believe rivals what Obama build in 2012 — so it’s not their fault.”
Spicer emphasized that RNC chairman Reince Priebus has been working aggressively to coach Trump into being a more disciplined candidate, calling the nominee “five or six times a day,” according to another person present at last week’s closed-door meeting.
According to sources close to Priebus, the chairman has warned that if Trump does not better heed this persistent advice to avoid dustups driven by his rhetoric, the RNC might not be able to help him as much — suggesting that money and ground resources might be diverted.
“Early voting in Ohio starts in a few weeks, there’s a 45-day window for absentee voters, so mid-September would probably be the latest the RNC could redeploy assets and have any real impact,” said an RNC member privately. “The only thing you could change in mid-October would be to shift some TV ads, maybe try to prop up Senate candidates in tough races like [Rob] Portman, [Marco] Rubio and [Pat] Toomey.”
One high-level Republican strategist added: “The party committee has this same job every cycle, to employ limited resources to maximum effect at the ballot box. ... And that means not pouring precious resources into dysfunctional, noncooperative, losing campaigns.”
Within the Trump campaign, there has been suspicion for months that the RNC already has not been as supportive of its nominee as it could — and should — be, according to operatives in and around the campaign. . . . . Other Trump allies in and around the campaign fear that the RNC could use Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s widening lead in polls to justify pulling the plug on Trump before he has a chance to even the race. . . . . one fundraiser with knowledge of the party’s high-dollar fundraising efforts said earlier this summer that the message to leery donors was “people can give to the RNC and not to him.”
[T]he RNC’s frustration is at a boiling point after a week of deepening division between the organization’s political and communications staffs and their counterparts on the Trump campaign.
Beyond the candidate’s continued rhetorical carelessness on the stump, his campaign has confounded GOP officials with a travel schedule — more events have been announced in Colorado and Virginia, two swing states that appear to be out of reach, and even deep blue Connecticut — that many believe is a poor use of the candidate’s time.
“He has shown no interest in doing the tough demographic work that’s necessary in campaigns,” one RNC member said. . . . “The senior staff gets it,” that RNC member said, “but the true believers outnumber them.”
After four years spent working toward winning back the White House, the RNC’s shift toward an endgame it didn’t envision — essentially deciding when to concede the White House to focus on saving the Senate and saving face — is a sign of resignation setting in.
My question to the RNC is this: why are you at all surprised that you find yourselves at this point? You have always known that Trump is an undisciplined, lose canon. All of this should have been seen coming long before the Republican National Convention.
The Mainstreaming of Gay Culture
While Republicans and their Christofascists overlords continue unrelenting attacks on LGBT people, especially through disingenuous "religious freedom" laws that seek to grant Christian extremists special rights and licenses to discriminate, in the wider society LGBT acceptance is increasing markedly. At home, in Hampton Roads, Virginia, Pride Fest is now the second largest festival on the Norfolk waterfront and once conservative private clubs are accepting LGBT members. The downside in the minds of some is the decline of a separate gay culture and the demise of many LGBT clubs as younger gays now go to mainstream clubs with their straight friends. It all leaves me with mixed emotions. A piece in Huffington Post looks at the phenomenon. Check it out.
What is Donald Trump Hiding?
First Donald Trump refused to release copies of his tax returns in contradiction of a tradition that now goes back decades. His excuse that he is being audited is, to be blunt, utter bull shit. Hence, the question is, what doesn't he want the American people to know? Now, Trump is also refusing to identify his bundlers - those who go out and gather up the really big donations. Hillary Clinton has released the names of her bundlers, so again the question is, what is Trump hiding? An editorial in the Washington Post looks at Trump's disturbing secrecy. Here are excerpts:
Voters could get some answers if Mr. Trump would release, as have Hillary Clinton and most recent candidates before her, the names of his bundlers. These are the people who solicit large numbers of often medium-size checks and hand them over to campaigns. Though they do not necessarily give huge amounts of their own cash, bundlers rake in big sums for their candidates — and therefore pose a similar threat to the integrity of the political process. Even so, the law requires campaigns to disclose bundlers only when they are registered lobbyists. It is left to the campaigns to voluntarily provide more information.
Ms. Clinton has done so, releasing the names of some 500 bundlers. Mr. Trump, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher recently noted, has not. Nor would the campaign discuss with Politico, or with us, its intentions with regard to this rudiment of transparency.
Such contempt for voters is not surprising. Mr. Trump also is thumbing his nose at the long tradition of major-party presidential nominees releasing their tax returns. He promised to do so. Ms. Clinton has released decades of hers, including her 2015 return, which she disclosed Friday . Yet Mr. Trump continues to keep his “beautiful” tax documents under wraps.
Why the secrecy? With respect to bundlers, Mr. Truump might not want to draw attention to the special interests now backing him, and some of his bundlers might (understandably) be embarrassed to be outed. With respect to his tax returns, the candidate may not want to reveal that his business is not as successful as he claims, that he is stingy with charity or that he has compromising business relationships in Russia or elsewhere overseas.
Mr. Trump’s refusal to meet essential standards of transparency expresses contempt for the democratic process and erodes crucial norms. If voters reject him in November — and his secrecy provides yet another reason they should — we hope future presidential candidates will conclude that these traditions are not so easily discarded.
I always say that, if one has nothing to hide, then you don't act like you are hiding something. The only conclusion is that the names of Trump's bundlers and his tax returns would show Americans something damaging.
White Nationalism: The Gravitational Center of the GOP
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| GOP supporters |
A piece in Vox includes an interview with Avik
Roy, a Republican, health care wonk and editor at Forbes, who has worked for three Republican presidential hopefuls. The focus is on how the Republican Party has finally shown the world its true gravitational center: white nationalism. The piece traces the descent of the GOP into a openly white racist party from the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964, through Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to the rise of Donald Trump. The one failing, in my view, is that it fails to factor in the role of white Christian denominations, especially the Southern Baptist Convention, in driving the GOP toward the embrace of racism and its current hostility to anyone that isn't a conservative white Christian. From my own years of experience as an activist in the GOP, the rise of the Christofascists is inseparable from the GOP's increased embrace of white supremacy. Here are article highlights:
“Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 was a historical disaster for the conservative movement,” Roy tells me, “because for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.”
Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He himself was not especially racist — he believed it was wrong, on free market grounds, for the federal government to force private businesses to desegregate. But this “principled” stance identified the GOP with the pro-segregation camp in everyone’s eyes, while the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson became the champions of anti-racism.
This had a double effect, Roy says. First, it forced black voters out of the GOP. Second, it invited in white racists who had previously been Democrats. Even though many Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in Congress, the post-Goldwater party became the party of aggrieved whites.
“The fact is, today, the Republican coalition has inherited the people who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the Southern Democrats who are now Republicans,” Roy says. “Conservatives and Republicans have not come to terms with that problem.”
The available evidence compiled by historians and political scientists suggests that 1964 really was a pivotal political moment, in exactly the way Roy describes.
Yet Republican intellectuals have long denied this, fabricating a revisionist history in which Republicans were and always have been the party of civil rights. In 2012, National Review ran a lengthy cover story arguing that the standard history recounted by Roy was “popular but indefensible.”
This revisionism, according to Roy, points to a much bigger conservative delusion: They cannot admit that their party’s voters are motivated far more by white identity politics than by conservative ideals.
[T]hey deny the party’s racist history, that its post-1964 success was a direct result of attracting whites disillusioned by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights. And they deny that to this day, Republican voters are driven more by white resentment than by a principled commitment to the free market and individual liberty.
This, Roy believes, is where the conservative intellectual class went astray. By refusing to admit the truth about their own party, they were powerless to stop the forces that led to Donald Trump’s rise. They told themselves, over and over again, that Goldwater’s victory was a triumph.
But in reality, it created the conditions under which Trump could thrive. Trump’s politics of aggrieved white nationalism — labeling black people criminals, Latinos rapists, and Muslims terrorists — succeeded because the party’s voting base was made up of the people who once opposed civil rights.
This soul-searching led Roy to an uncomfortable conclusion: The Republican Party, and the conservative movement that propped it up, is doomed.
Both are too wedded to the politics of white nationalism to change how they act, but that just isn’t a winning formula in a nation that’s increasingly black and brown. Either the Republican Party will eat itself or a new party will rise and overtake its voting share.
For the entire history of modern conservatism, its ideals have been wedded to and marred by white supremacism. That’s Roy’s own diagnosis, and I think it’s correct. As a result, we have literally no experience in America of a politically viable conservative movement unmoored from white supremacy.
The fact is that limited government conservatism is not especially appealing to nonwhite Americans, whereas liberalism and social democracy are. The only ones for whom conservatism is a natural fit are Roy’s “cranky old white people” — and they’re dying off.
Facing the truth - and objective reality - is the last thing that the Christofascists and white supremacists who now control the GOP base want to face or admit.
Trump's Mormon Problem
The last time that a Democrat presidential candidate carried Utah was in 1964. Now,however, it appears that Hillary Clinton could repeat that feat, not so much because of Mormon's embracing her as for their rejection of Donald Trump. Unlike hypocrisy filled evangelical Christians flocking to Trump, many Mormons are repelled by Trump's many marriages, his vulgarity and hate mongering towards woman, Hispanics and Muslims. A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at trump's alienation of much of the Mormon population. Here are some highlights:
In the last couple of presidential elections, Mormons have given the GOP around 80 percent of their support. Utah, where Mormons make up about 60 percent of the population, has not backed a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964. With that history, a 2009 Gallup poll named Utah the “most Republican state.” In other western states like Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming, LDS citizens provide a reliable base for the Republican Party there.Yet despite Mormon loyalty to the GOP, they have largely refused to lend their support to Trump.
Back in March, I wrote about Trump’s trouncing in the Utah caucus. Coming in third place with a paltry 14 percent of the vote, Trump faced a devastating loss to Ted Cruz who captured nearly 70 percent of Utah Republicans. Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins explained Mormons’ rejection of Trump at the time owed to objections over his unsavory personal life and temperament but also to opposition to his proposals to ban Muslims from entering the country and his harsh anti-immigration rhetoric. Jana Reiss, a popular Mormon blogger, added that many Mormons recoiled from Trump’s demeaning treatment of women and his flippant statements about religious faith.
While Trump’s numbers are dropping almost everywhere—a recent poll indicated Clinton has grabbed a four percent lead in Georgia, for example—the Utah numbers invite further investigation.
In Slate, historian Max Perry Mueller provided critical insight last week contextualizing Trump’s poor standing among Mormons within the LDS Church’s long history as victims of religious persecution and its more recent emergence as a global faith. Having once faced extermination orders, Mormons, Mueller argues, take umbrage with Trump’s proposed ban to bar Muslims from entering the United States, something they rightly see as an affront to religious liberty.
As members of a global church that has found increasing strength in Central and South America, Mormons have also recoiled at Trump’s harsh statements about Mexicans.
[I]n light of the support white evangelicals have given Trump, Mormons’ rejection of The Donald seems especially meaningful. Leaders of the #NeverTrump movement have worked hard since last summer to convince evangelicals they cannot support Trump, yet Trump continued to gainevangelical support throughout 2016. While the #NeverTrump crowd has remained voluble, they have also stayed markedly silent regarding Mormons’ opposition to Trump, a response indicative of longer historical patterns.
Amidst the social and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals often admiringly looked at Mormon families as a conservative bulwark against the nation’s sexual permissiveness and rising divorce rates. Yet, also fretful that Mormonism might grab evangelical converts,evangelical publications instead presented Mormon families as a front to cover up the faith’s polygamous past. Mormon virtue threatened evangelical teachings about its vice.
That virtue shines in Mormons’ refusal to back Donald Trump. Although they have long called themselves a “peculiar people” because of their separateness from the world and its ways, Mormons might consider adopting a new nickname after November. If they do reject Trump this fall, Mormons would be right to call themselves a “principled people” instead.
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