Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

Prediction Model That Nailed 2018: Trump Will Lose

Like many, I view Donald Trump as a foul and abhorrent individual and worry that the nation could not survive if he were to be re-elected in 2020.  According to a researcher at nearby Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, that widespread sense of dread and loathing may be what is key in seeing Trump defeated in 2010. Apathetic Democrat voters who stayed home in 2016 - as well as Never Trump Republicans who threw away their votes on third party candidates - elected Trump.  According to this researcher who correctly predicted the Democrat gains in the House of Representatives in 2018 believes no such apathy will be witnessed in 2020.  I hope and pray that she is correct and the long national nightmare ends in January, 2021.  Here are highlights from The Hill:

The prediction model that accurately predicted Democratic gains in the House four months before the 2018 midterm elections says President Trump will lose his reelection bid.

The latest "Negative Partisanship" model by Rachel Bitecofer, the assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, released Monday, predicts Trump will lose the Electoral College with the Democratic candidate earning 278 votes.

The model predicts Trump will earn 197 electoral votes. That leaves 63 votes a toss-up – still not enough to overcome the Democrat's lead.  Bitecofer highlighted Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as states the incumbent will have difficulty winning this time around.

"The complacent electorate of 2016, who were convinced Trump would never be president, has been replaced with the terrified electorate of 2020, who are convinced he’s the Terminator and can’t be stopped," she said. "Under my model, that distinction is not only important, it is everything."  She also pointed to his low approval rating among independents as an impediment to a second term.

Bitecofer's model predicted a 42 seat House Democratic pickup in 2018, and the Democrats won 40. Many other models did not predict such a large victory.

She acknowledged the Democratic candidate has not been chosen yet, but argued it is not incredibly important who the nominee is.

"Does the Democrat’s nominee matter? Sure, to an extent. If the ticket has a woman, a person of color or a Latino, or a female who is also a person of color, Democratic Party turnout will surge more in really important places," Bitecofer wrote. "If the nominee is Biden he’d be well-advised to consider Democratic voter turnout his number one consideration when drawing his running mate to avoid the critical mistake made by Hillary Clinton in 2016."

"But the Democrats are not complacent like they were in 2016 and I doubt there is any amount of polling or favorable forecasts that will make them so. That fear will play a crucial role in their 2020 victory. We will not see a divided Democratic Party in 2020," she wrote.

More Monday Male Beauty

Has the Republican Party Rejected Democracy?

As the Democrat presidential veer to the left, the Republican Party has veered far right and, as a column in the New York Times, suggests looks to a form of authoritarian rule to maintain its power.  Indeed, in today's GOP, the goal is to thwart the will of the majority of voters and restrict the voting of anyone outside of its increasing racist and religiously extreme white base. The GOP tools to accomplish this?  Voter ID laws, gerrymandering, using legislative rules to block bills that otherwise have popular support - think Mitch McConnell - and outright intimidation. Frighteningly, while today's GOP bears no resemblance to the party I and my family once belonged to and actively supported, far too many Americans refuse to open their eyes to what the GOP has become.  Those who do, seemingly embrace minority rule and the shredding of American institutions.  Here are some column highlights:

A number of observers, myself included, have written pieces in recent years arguing that the Republican Party is no longer simply trying to compete with and defeat the Democratic Party on a level playing field. Today, rather than simply playing the game, the Republicans are simultaneously trying to rig the game’s rules so that they never lose.

The aggressive gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court just declared to be a matter beyond its purview; the voter suppression schemes; the dubious proposals that haven’t gone anywhere — yet — like trying to award presidential electoral votes by congressional district rather than by state, a scheme that Republicans in five states considered after the 2012 election and that is still discussed: These are not ideas aimed at invigorating democracy. They are hatched and executed for the express purpose of essentially fixing elections.

The idea that one party has become so radically different from the other, despite mountains of evidence, is a tough sell.  It’s a hard sell to make for one very simple reason: It doesn’t have a name, this thing the Republicans are trying to do. It’s not true democracy that they want. But it’s also a bit much to call them outright authoritarians. And there’s nothing in between.

Or is there?

A couple of weekends ago, I tripped across a 2010 book called “Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War,” by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way. If you pay close attention to such things, you will recognize Mr. Levitsky’s name — he was a co-author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of last year’s book “How Democracies Die,” which sparked much discussion. “Competitive Authoritarianism” deserves to do the same.

What defines competitive authoritarian states? They are “civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents.” Sound like anyone you know?

But today, incredibly, the phrase has begun to bring to mind the United States of America. I literally gasped as I read certain passages, notably the part about the important role of a strong party in winning elections and in controlling legislatures. “Legislative control is critical in competitive authoritarian regimes,” the authors write. They list four reasons. You can bet Mitch McConnell knows every one of them, and probably a couple more. For one, there’s President Trump. Think of his efforts to do things like politicize the institutions of the executive branch, to try to turn the Department of Justice into his personal law firm. Think of his threat in 2016 that he would honor the results of the election “if I win,” and his recent musings about staying beyond two terms. Think of his commerce secretary’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census, which would benefit the Republicans electorally. These are all manifestations of competitive authoritarianism. Second — and maybe even more so — there’s the Republican Party. The gerrymandering enabled them to maintain their House majority during the Obama years even as Democratic House candidates were winning more votes. But there’s much more. “Recent Republican behavior — from the 2016 stolen Supreme Court seat to the legislative shenanigans that followed gubernatorial defeats in North Carolina and Wisconsin to voter suppression efforts across numerous states — suggests a party whose commitment to democratic politics has weakened,” Mr. Levitsky said.
 “The fact that the Republican Party has grown increasingly authoritarian poses a greater threat to American democracy than Donald Trump.”

Monday Morning Male Beauty

Democratic Candidates Veer Left, Ignoring Winning 2018 Strategy

Having been involved in both the GOP and the Democrat parties over the last three decades, I often think that at various times, each party has shown itself to be its own worse enemy.  Now, in the lead up to the 2020 presidential and federal elections, Democrat candidates seem to be quickly becoming a potential threat to defeating Donald Trump and holding the House of Representatives and gaining control of the U.S. Senate.  As a prior post noted, some are jumping on board the reparations bandwagon which I perceive to be an absolute loser in the 2020 general election.  Similarly, many of the would be presidential nominees are lurching leftward seemingly oblivious to the realities that (i) one most be able to win the general election, not just the primary, and (ii) voters - and especially GOP attack ads - will not allow far left statements and positions to go forgotten come the 2020 general election.  What plays with the so-called liberal elites doesn't play well in key states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at what drives me to distraction as candidates pander to extreme elements of the Democrat base with no thought to what will happen once the winner of the primary contest is selected.  Here are highlights:

With a full embrace of liberal positions on hot-button issues from immigration to health care, taxes and abortion, the Democratic presidential field has effectively abandoned the strategy that propelled the party to a landslide victory in the 2018 midterms, when Democrats flipped 43 GOP House seats and won 31 districts that Trump carried in 2016. The sharp shift to the left, laid bare over the course of two nights last week on the Miami debate stage, has scrambled the country’s political dynamics headed into a 2020 campaign in which Democrats hope the 2018 results, combined with Trump’s relatively low approval ratings, would put them in a strong position to retake the White House.

Last year’s midterm strategy focused on what party leaders viewed as a sensibly moderate message designed to attract centrist voters. In that campaign, Democratic congressional candidates denounced GOP tax increases for the middle class in Trump’s 2017 tax cut and blasted Republican plans to take away federal protections for preexisting conditions in private insurance.

But many of the leading Democratic presidential candidates are running on a Medicare-for-all plan that would replace private insurance entirely for most Americans and raise middle class taxes to pay for it. Several of the candidates support plans to not just increase background checks for guns but buy back guns already in circulation. They are also elevating social issues Trump has embraced politically in the past like police misconduct, transgender rights and immigration.

“These are not mainstream proposals. Think about it. They are way to the left of Barack Obama,” said Jim McLaughlin, a pollster working on Trump’s reelection campaign. “They are talking about middle class and small business tax increases, no restrictions on abortion. How do you think these things are going over in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio?”

Democratic strategists from the 2018 campaign agree there is a danger.

“We should not be deploying strategies right now that make the national battlefield smaller,” said Dan Sena, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. His research on the electorate after Trump’s 2016 win concluded it was a mistake to get into a simple base turnout fight against Trump, who has proved remarkably successful at motivating non-college educated white voters to go to the polls.

In the short term, the new Democratic messaging is aimed less at suburban swing voters in key states like Wisconsin and Michigan than at liberal donors clustered in coastal cities and nonwhite voters in the party’s base, who tend to be more liberal and hold significant sway over the nominating fight.

Last year’s midterm strategy focused on what party leaders viewed as a sensibly moderate message designed to attract centrist voters. In that campaign, Democratic congressional candidates denounced GOP tax increases for the middle class in Trump’s 2017 tax cut and blasted Republican plans to take away federal protections for preexisting conditions in private insurance.

But it is not clear how dramatically the candidates plan to pivot if they do win the nomination, and whether they will be successful. Many reject the argument that more liberal policies will alienate needed voters. They point to Trump’s inability to use immigration fears of migrant caravans to stop a Democratic wave in 2018.

Warren and Sanders, in particular, have cast Trump as a symptom of broader rot in the American political system, not the root cause. The larger problem can only be fixed, they argue, with dramatic policy changes that shift resources from the wealthy, including new taxes on Wall Street, corporate profits or the richest Americans. They contend that message will ultimately resonate with many of the same working-class white voters who supported Trump in 2016.

[S]ome veterans of Obama’s 2012 reelection also chimed in with concern, not just for the coming election but for the prospect of governing, even if Democrats recapture the Senate and hold the House.

“I wonder if we’re solving a problem that is not there and spending the vast majority of our political capital on it,” said Obama’s former campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt, who is unaffiliated in the 2020 race. “Expanding upon and improving Obamacare accomplishes the vast majority of goals that Democrats are looking for.”

Polling shows that single payer health care remains a confounding idea for many Americans. Recent Kaiser Family Foundation polls have found that 56 percent of the nation favors the Medicare-for-all, compared to 74 percent of Americans who support expanded Medicare as an option for younger Americans in addition to private insurance.
When the same people were told that a Medicare-for-all plan would raise taxes and eliminate private health insurance, support fell to 37 percent.

Rick Tyler, a conservative Republican strategist who has become a vocal critic of Trump, said he believes Democrats are playing right into Trump’s hands.

“They are not talking to the blue collar workers that I understand that vote in Pennsylvania and Michigan,” Tyler said. “Are they seriously capable of choosing a nominee who is going to beat Donald Trump? Right now, I have my doubts.”

More Sunday Male Beauty

Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Portrait of a Liar

The Trump/Pence regime is full of liars, the worse, of course, being Trump himself.  Following closely behind him is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a case study of why anyone honest and decent should not want to wear the "Christian" label if it puts them in the same category as Sanders. About the only thing that can be said in Sanders' defense is that she was raised in a household where lying, con-artistry, and hucksterism were the norm and embodied in the person of her father, Mike Huckabee, a man devoid of any moral compass save self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment often achieved by preying on the ignorant and gullible (i.e., evangelical Christians). Now, Huckabee Sanders is leaving her role as press secretary to the worse, most dishonest occupant of the White House in history and rumors are afloat that she will run for governor of Arkansas - her election would show that state as a place to be avoided - no doubt trying to lie her way into office.  A piece in Politico reminds us of Huckabee Sanders moral bankruptcy.  Here are excerpts:

If Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ departure as White House press secretary meant she would be leaving public life, I’d be toasting her goodbye this week. Unfortunately, since it probably represents only a brief pause in her now well-established history of sliming people, a firm marker should be laid down about her right now.

Sanders reportedly is considering following in her father’s footsteps and running for governor in her home state of Arkansas, where Mike Huckabee served from 1996-2007. With high built-in name ID and the benefit of riding President Donald Trump’s coattails in a ruby red state, she is already talked about as the favorite in the race, which isn’t until 2022. This says far more about the sorry state of our political system than it does about any merits she has as a potential candidate. The barrage of lies she told from the White House podium would disqualify her from any industry but politics.

[A] lot of politicians lie. Sanders, however, has participated in mean-spirited, personal and cruel lies that have hurt people.

Back in the spring of 2016, in the height of the GOP presidential primary, the National Enquirer, a rag we now know took tremendous efforts to support Trump, published my likeness on its front page and insinuated that I had had an affair with my former boss and Trump’s then-campaign rival, Senator Ted Cruz. It was 100 percent false without a shred of evidence supporting the allegation. Still, Trump supporters furiously fanned the falsehood online. I was abruptly confronted by a Trump supporter about the story on CNN, where I work as a contributor, and was forced to respond live on air.

Trump claimed he had nothing to do with the story, but he said the tabloid had been right to expose other affairs and suggested Cruz was an evangelical hypocrite. . . . A cacophony of pro-Trump forces had come together to gaslight me and feast on the media explosion.

As so often happens when a woman is unfairly attacked, the burden fell on me to clear my name. It was an absolutely infuriating position to be in, but I was not about to be driven from the public space over something that had never happened. Trump supporters wanted nothing more than to force me, a committed NeverTrumper, off the air.  So, I went back on television to defend myself . . .

That afternoon, Sanders happened to be scheduled for an interview with Tapper as well and was asked about fake news her campaign was pushing. Sanders, a wife, a mother, a conservative, a [faux] Christian and a political staffer—just like I am—twisted the knife. . . . She also claimed to have no knowledge of what Scavino had done. Then, she chalked up the entire thing to the scummy business of politics at large and slammed Cruz’s team as “one of the dirtiest and nastiest campaigns out there.”

Sanders has outright lied throughout her time as press secretary. She had the jaw-dropping audacity to lie about FBI agents in spring 2017, when she stood in front of the national press corps and offered an absurd pretense for the firing of Director James Comey, saying that “countless” agents had “lost confidence in their director” over his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Under oath, she later admitted she had made up the statement “in the heat of the moment,” and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators concluded her statement “was not founded on anything.”

These are just two examples in a long line of Sanders’ casual smears against perceived opponents. Let’s not forget how she tweeted a video that analysts said had been doctored to suggest that CNN correspondent Jim Acosta had inappropriately grappled with a White House intern over a microphone during a live briefing. Or how Sanders adopted Trump’s talking point that the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct or assault are lying. Or how often she deflected legitimate questions by suggesting that those who posed them had nefarious motives.

Sanders never rose to the level of professionalism exhibited by diligent, respectful people who previously held her position. She became an echo of internet trolls.

Many Republicans will say Sanders performed about as well as anyone could under a difficult boss who demands total loyalty and under the most challenging of circumstances. I do not accept that. She is a woman in control of herself, and she willingly opted to make disrespect for others the defining characteristic of her tenure as White House press secretary. That’s all on her. She wasn’t conscripted into service for Trump; she enthusiastically volunteered.

It’s obvious Sanders is not a bit sorry for her disgraceful work. . . . there is no reason to believe Sanders would change her ways if elected governor. Arkansas, you’ve been warned.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Reparations: A Wrong Answer and Sure Road to Democrat Party Defeat

In addition to Bernie Sanders' - in my view, insane - talk about socialism, one other issue being pressed by far left Democrats could help re-elect Donald Trump and, of course, in the process achieve the exact opposite of what these ultra-liberals want.  That issue is reparations for slavery which will (i) push many working class whites firmly into Trump's waiting arms, and (ii) ignores the fact that far more whites than blacks are living in poverty.  In a perfect world, it would be nice to have a magic wand and be able to erase slavery and Jim Crow from America's history, yet the push for reparations will likely only exacerbate racial division, especially among poorer whites who would rightly or wrongly likely view reparations as "those people" getting special rights at their own expense.  Indeed, Trump's 2016 calls to stir up racial division would likely be greatly intensified in 2020.  A piece in The Atlantic by a black authors argues that reparations is not the way to remedy the situation and that the battle against poverty needs to be a collective fight.  Here are article highlights:

Juneteenth—the annual celebration of when enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom—brought two hearings this year on Capitol Hill. The first was widely covered. The House Judiciary Committee looked at H.R. 40, a proposal to create a commission to study reparations for slavery and subsequent discrimination. Witnesses debated the utility and justice of pursuing financial reparations to right some of the wrongs that, past and present, have kept black people economically disadvantaged in the United States.

At the same time, the House Budget Committee held a hearing on poverty in America, which drew a fraction of the media coverage. In that hearing, the economic disadvantages facing African Americans were only part of the story—because less than one-quarter of Americans living in poverty are black.

Slavery, and the systemic racism that has disadvantaged blacks in its aftermath, cannot be forgiven or forgotten. But reparations are not the answer. We cannot fix these injustices by emulating the my-race-first policies that birthed it. While the suffering of blacks hits close to home for me, it also pains me to see someone of another race or ethnicity degraded by the way our country forces poor people to live.

When blacks demand that our poverty be alleviated, it’s simply a matter of one race prioritizing its path to living well, when we should be fighting for everyone to live well. Prioritizing the economic needs of those who share my ethnicity, while so many others are suffering along with us, is morally wrong. The struggle against poverty needs to be a collective fight.

“We are tired of the racialization of poverty, the partisanism of poverty,” William Barber II, a Protestant minister who is a co-leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, told the members of the Budget Committee. More whites live in poverty than people of any other ethnic or racial group; a higher percentage of Native Americans live in poverty than members of any other ethnicity. Poverty isn’t a black problem, but an American problem, Barber told the committee, just as he had told the nine Democratic presidential candidates who spoke to the Moral Action Congress convened by the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., earlier that week.

[T]he prevailing system in the United States isn’t white supremacy, but rather, economic oligarchy. And too much of the discussion of racism adopts the language of oligarchy, offering economic ascension as an antidote.

While racial inequality is sometimes quantified in other ways—by the composition of the prison population, levels of education, or health—it is most often quantified by dollars, and how many one has. In 2018, the Equality of Opportunity Project released the results of a multiyear study of economic mobility. Most of its findings were about economic opportunity. People homed in on its statistics about black boys, who had much less of a chance of rising to a different economic tier than the one into which they were born, or of staying rich, than white boys. Less was said about Native Americans, who, the study’s statistics showed, were about as poor as blacks, or about Asian Americans, who had a better chance to rise economically than whites.

Reparations are often presented in terms that are meaningful within an oligarchic system: A long history of racist practices has created economic inequality between blacks and whites. Of this, there is no doubt. But this is not the racial wealth gap; it is merely a racial wealth gap. One goal of reparations is to close this gap. But that adopts the logic of oligarchy, instead of challenging it. More black people reaching higher wealth tiers, and then living in the cocoon those tiers provide? That’s not something I am willing to fight for.

Barber and Liz Theoharis, the other co-leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, presented a “moral budget” to the committee. It aimed to show that the alleviation of poverty and its degradations is not only a moral demand, but that these goals make good economic sense. . . . The principle behind the movement remains the same as it was in 1968. People of all races who oppose this system of inequality and suffering, and the demonization of the poor, must act as a single force.

[Martin Luther] King was focused on the oligarchic class—or “Bourbon class,” as he called it—and its promotion of a strategic form of divide and conquer, pitting poor blacks against poor whites. Howard University’s E. Franklin Frazier had written about this strategy in his popular book, Black Bourgeoisie, a decade earlier, in 1957. Other scholars before and since have pointed to the post-slavery origins of voter suppression in service of what the wealthy, white, land-owning class publicly called white supremacy. But they had a dual aim, ensuring that poor whites were not part of the supreme.

This is not to argue for an equivalence of historical suffering between whites and blacks, but to emphasize that white supremacy in the U.S. is a strategy, not a system. The system is an economic oligarchy, and racism is an extremely effective tactic for perpetuating it. And the debate over reparations confuses the system with just one of the tactics that sustains it.

Reparations would address the financial ramifications of the racism that stymies blacks from “winning,” and knocks those blacks who have won back down. But they would not right the wrong of a supremacist society that is designed to create a class of winners and a mass of losers, and to do so, in part, by isolating aspirants from those they leave behind.

I switched away from the H.R. 40 hearings to focus on the debate over the more encompassing wrong. The focus should be on transforming the oligarchy, not on lifting up any one segment of society.

Reparations are a sideshow. We are living in the now, in which millions of people of all races and ethnicities are forced into degradation, ill health, and despair in this rich nation. Overturning that system is a goal that is not out of reach for a people who had the intellectual, political, and social will to survive slavery and beat back Jim Crow.

The author is correct.  Reparations are a side show, but one that, if pushed, will only serve to defeat politicians seeking to right the wrongs of today's economic system.  Worse yet, it will maintain in office those who most promote hate and racial division.  Let's hope Democrats aren't foolish enough take the reparations bait.