This is Christmas Week--but it is bound to be quite a busy week as the January 6 Committee is slated to issue out its' referrals, Government Funding Continues, the war in Ukraine rages on, Iran's Revolution continues, Europe continues its' challenges as China relaxes Covid Rules and is slated to deal with a surge in COVID Cases and as Kevin McCarthy's path to the Speakership is in peril as we present a snapshot of the week that was:
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The Scorched-Earth Legal Strategy Corporations Are Using to Silence Their CriticsSasha ChavkinEnergy and extractive industry giants are targeting environmentalists with racketeering charges.
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Biden Moves Ahead on Trump Plan to Build Israel Embassy on Stolen Palestinian LandAlice SperiObjections from the land’s rightful owners — including U.S. citizens — are going unacknowledged by the administration. |
As I wrote last night, it looks like this is going to be one heck of a week. Tomorrow afternoon at 1:00, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold its last public hearing. It is expected to vote on whether to refer former president Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal charges. Then, on Wednesday, it is scheduled to release its report, which is said to be around 1000 pages.
These looming events appear to be causing Trump concern. On Truth Social yesterday, he gave his opinion of the whole proceeding: “They say that the Unselect Committee of Democrats, Misfits, and Thugs, without any representation from Republicans in good standing, is getting ready to recommend Criminal Charges to the highly partisan, political, and Corrupt ‘Justice’ Department for the ‘PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICLY’ speech I made on January 6th. This speech and my actions were mild & loving, especially when compared to Democrats wild spewing of HATE. Why didn’t they investigate massive Election Fraud or send in the Troops? SCAM!” (The quotation is produced here as it appeared.)
Today he continued to post similar statements.
Meanwhile, Andrew Solender and Alayna Treene of Axios reported today that the Republicans are planning to issue their own 100-page report, focusing on what they say are security failures, claiming that the January 6th committee has “never dealt with the serious issues.” The committee report is expected to discuss security failures.
One of the authors of this Republican “shadow” report is Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), himself implicated in the attempt to overturn the election. Another is Representative Jim Banks (R-IN), whom Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) called out in October 2021 for falsely representing himself as the ranking member of the actual January 6th committee.
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) warned the January 6th committee to preserve all its materials. Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) seemed unimpressed. Not only does the committee have to preserve all its materials by law, but it intends to make its material available to the public. “He’s the public. If he wants access to it, all he has to do is go online and he’ll have it,” he told Solender.
But that is not all that’s going on this week.
Congress continues to hammer out a big funding bill to keep the government funded through the end of next September. This is entangled in the Republican Party’s internal chaos. The far-right members of the House caucus don’t want a deal before they take control of the House, expecting that they can exert pressure on the administration to do as they wish by refusing to fund the government. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans recognize the mess that would create and have worked to get a deal finalized. Still, a few Senate Republicans are now backing the House extremists, apparently unwilling to open themselves to the charge of cooperating with Democrats.
Until last Thursday it appeared that one of the things that would make its way into the funding bill was a deal on immigration reform. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post was following the story closely and noted that by early December, Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) appeared to have hammered out a deal that offered to Democrats a path to citizenship for about 2 million “dreamers,” people who were brought to the U.S. by their parents without documentation and have never known any home but this one. It offered protections for migrant rights by providing up to $40 billion for processing those coming to the U.S. to seek asylum; the money will pay for more processing centers, more judges, and more asylum officers.
To Republicans it offered more resources for removing migrants who don’t qualify for asylum. It offered more funding for officers at the border. And it continued the Title 42 restrictions on migrants until the new processing centers were ready.
Title 42 is a law that permits the government to keep contagious diseases out of the country, and Trump put it in place in March 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, not least because it enabled him to stop considering migrants for asylum as required by U.S. and international law (Title 42 had only been used once before, in 1929, to keep ships from China and the Philippines, where there was a meningitis outbreak, from coming into U.S. ports). Extremist Republicans like using Title 42 as a way to stop immigration to this country, although technically it is an emergency rule.
But while the potential reform package drew support from conservative outlets like the Wall Street Journal editorial board, right-wing extremists opposed it, claiming that the pathway toward citizenship for dreamers would, as anti-immigrant Trump adviser Stephen Miller said, “turn the present tsunami of minor-smuggling into a biblical flood.”
As of last Thursday, the immigration deal was off the table. Republicans objected to it and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he would not let it be attached to the funding bill even if the negotiators could hammer out the last details.
So what does this have to do with next week? On Friday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Title 42 must end on December 21 unless the Supreme Court steps in.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under the Biden administration tried to end the rule last April, saying public health no longer warranted it. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the policy would end on May 23, permitting those who had been turned away under the policy to apply for asylum. “Let me be clear, Mayorkas said, “those unable to establish a legal basis to remain in the United States will be removed.” Nonetheless, Stephen Miller promptly said that ending Title 42 “will mean armageddon on the border. This is how nations end.”
More than 20 Republican-dominated states immediately sued the administration, insisting that Biden was trying to put in place “open border policies” rather than simply ending the pandemic-related policy. In May a Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana blocked the lifting of the rule. In November, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan vacated the rule, saying it was “arbitrary and capricious,” but gave the administration until mid-December to prepare for the change. Now a federal court has decided the rule must end this Wednesday.
What this change will look like is not clear. It does not magically create “open borders” as Republicans charge; it simply restores the law as it was before March 2020. This will have one immediate consequence: under ordinary immigration law, making an attempt to cross the border after being rejected bears a heavy penalty, which it does not under Title 42. The lack of that penalty under Title 42 meant migrants made repeated attempts, one of the factors that has so inflated the number of immigrant “encounters” in the past two years. So the change is likely to slow down repeated attempts to cross the border.
The Department of Homeland Security has released a six-point plan for managing what it expects will be an increase in the number of migrants. It will hire about 1000 additional Border Patrol processing coordinators and add another 2500 personnel—both contractors and government workers—to work in ten new “soft-sided” facilities, which will increase capacity by about a third. It will continue increasing transportation for migrants to places farther from the border, to avoid overcrowding.
But, Secretary Mayorkas says, our system is “fundamentally broken.” It is “outdated” at every level, and “in the absence of congressional action to reform the immigration and asylum systems, a significant increase in migrant encounters will strain our system even further. Addressing this challenge will take time and additional resources, and we need the partnership of Congress, state and local officials, NGOs, and communities to do so.”
And yet, for the Republicans there is an obvious political payoff to leaving the situation unaddressed.
Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) tweeted today: “With Title 42 ending, our nation is going to be overrun with illegals worse than at just about any other point in history. Remember, this is intentional and all part of Biden’s systematic destruction of America.” Republican extremists are already demanding that the incoming Republican House majority impeach Secretary Mayorkas.
In a week when a former Republican president seems likely to make history as the first president to be referred to the Justice Department for criminal charges, it seems likely we’ll hear a great deal indeed from Republicans about the end of Title 42.
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Notes:
@RonFilipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/
https://www.axios.com/2022/12/
https://www.axios.com/2022/12/
https://www.cdc.gov/media/
https://www.texastribune.org/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/
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@lotsofuss
A brief recent history of the Electoral CollegeAt some point, either the Democrats or Republicans are going to win a true blowout in the Electoral College (and popular vote). But in an era defined by competitive elections, good luck guessing when that next will occur. The United States has now had 9 presidential elections in a row (beginning in 1988) where neither side has won by a double-digit margin in the popular vote. That is the longest streak in the history of the current 2-party system (Democrats vs. Republicans, which dates back to just before the Civil War). While some elections in that timeframe -- 1988, 1996, and 2008 -- were still decisive victories for one side or the other, there have been some true nail-biters, with 2000 as the closest in terms of the Electoral College vote and the winning margin in the decisive state (just 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast in Florida). Republicans won a pair of presidential elections (2000 and 2016) despite not winning the popular vote -- 2 other such “misfires” happened in the late 1800s (1876 and 1888), the last time period where there have been many relatively close presidential elections in a row. Since 2000, the popular vote margin has been less than 5 points in 5 of the 6 elections, with only 2008 as an exception. This does not quite match the 6 elections between 1876-1896, when every election had a margin of under 5 points, but it’s close. These 2 eras really stand out for competitiveness, because they account for so many of the close presidential elections since 1856. There have been 42 presidential elections since then, and 16 of them have been decided by less than 5 points in the popular vote. Of those, 11 of them came in either the 1876-1896 or 2000-2020 time period (the 5 others: 1916, 1948, 1960, 1968, and 1976). The current alignment of the Electoral College has arguably been in effect since 2000, in that there were several changes going from the 1996 to 2000 elections that have endured even as the respective party coalitions have evolved in subsequent elections. Let’s take a quick visual tour through the Electoral College from 1996 to 2020 to see how things have changed. (Our source for all results is Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.) Map 1: 1996 Electoral College results Bill Clinton’s second victory produced both a popular vote (8.5 points) and Electoral College (220) margin bigger than any we have seen in either category since. Clinton won a half-dozen states that have not voted Democratic in any of the presidential elections since, all in what one could consider as either Southern or as Border states: Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Despite his loss, Republican Bob Dole carried Colorado and Virginia, 2 states that have now become solid parts of the Democratic federal coalition. In the 1990s, some of the trends we have become accustomed to were taking hold. In 1992, Clinton only got a majority of the vote in his native Arkansas (excluding the District of Columbia) -- by 1996, he got a higher share in 6 other states. Several of those other states were in the Northeast, which, along with the West Coast, has been solidly blue in the 21st century. Much of the Great Plains and northern Interior West states were and are red. Indiana was Dole’s only victory in the states that touch the Great Lakes; the Hoosier State remains the most Republican of those states today. Map 2: 2000 Electoral College results George W. Bush swept the South in 2000 and won a narrow Electoral College victory. Gore’s showing in Florida, despite his agonizingly narrow loss there, was stronger than any Democrat since: Florida voted very close to the national popular vote in 2000 but has since voted at least a couple of points to the right of the national vote. Despite Bush’s win, the Democrats retained much of the Great Lakes turf as well as the whole West Coast and nearly all of the Northeast. New Hampshire voted for Bush, the last time a Republican would win a state northeast of New Jersey. After a brief dalliance with Democrats in 1996, Arizona reverted back to being Republican -- at the time, 1996 was the only time the Grand Canyon State had voted Democratic for president since 1948. Map 3: 2004 Electoral College results Bush’s second victory was substantially similar to his first victory, although there were a few changes. Bush, a Texan, flipped New Mexico, while Democratic nominee John Kerry, from Massachusetts, also flipped a neighboring state, New Hampshire. Iowa, one of the closest states of 2000, became the third state to change hands in 2004, narrowly flipping to Bush. This was the last time the now-lapsed bellwether state of Ohio was truly decisive in the election. Kerry actually did very slightly better there than he did in the national popular vote, one of the relatively few times Democrats have run better in Ohio than they did nationally. Had Kerry won Ohio, he would have won the election even if nothing else had changed. But Bush won Ohio by 2.1 points as part of a 2.5-point national popular vote victory -- the most recent time a Republican won the popular vote. Map 4: 2008 Electoral College results Barack Obama won a victory similar in size to Clinton’s 1996 win -- the then-Illinois senator won the popular vote by 7.3 points and the Electoral College by 192. He failed to win back any of those half-dozen southern-ish states mentioned in the 1996 section as having voted for Clinton -- in fact, he performed worse in several of them than Kerry had 4 years earlier. Obama barely lost Missouri, which formally shed its old bellwether status in this election and has sped to the right since. But Obama won a handful of states that didn’t vote for Clinton in 1996: Colorado and Virginia, which have since solidified as Democratic-leaning states, and Indiana and North Carolina, which Democrats have failed to carry since. Map 5: 2012 Electoral College results Obama fell off some in 2012, winning by just 4 points in the popular vote and shedding Indiana, North Carolina, and the single Electoral College vote he had won in Nebraska’s 2nd District (there is more on the 2 states that award some of their votes by congressional district, Maine and Nebraska, below). Otherwise, the results were identical to 2008. Map 6: 2016 Electoral College results In his victory, Donald Trump became the only Republican in the 21st century to carry 3 key Great Lakes states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He also pushed a couple of heartland states, Iowa and Ohio, from swing state to leaning Republican status. That said, a handful of non-Midwestern states that had voted once or twice for Bush but also twice for Obama remained blue: Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Virginia. Map 7: 2020 Electoral College results Joe Biden defeated Trump by winning back the Great Lakes battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He also flipped a couple of typically Republican Sun Belt states, Arizona and Georgia, that had not voted for Obama in either election and had each only voted for Clinton once apiece. As we look ahead to 2024, remember that we have gone through another reapportionment cycle following the 2020 census. So the electoral vote allotments have changed slightly. California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia all lost a single electoral vote; Texas gained 2, and Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon added a single vote apiece. Had this allocation been in place in 2020, the Electoral College would have been 303-235, for a slightly smaller Biden edge. That new allocation is shown in Map 8; Maps 9 and 10 also include the new Electoral College vote tallies. Map 8: 2020 Electoral College results under new apportionment How the states have changedIn aggregate, here’s how all of the states have voted in the 6 elections since 2020, a period in which both parties have won the presidency 3 times (Republicans in 2000, 2004, and 2016, and Democrats in 2008, 2012, and 2020). Map 9: Electoral College voting record since 2000 Interestingly, and despite the 3-3 split over the past 6 elections, only a single state has split 3-3 in that same time period: Iowa. But the state’s rightward turn suggests that it likely will not be a true battleground in 2024. The same is true of the only 4/6 Republican states on this map: Florida and Ohio, both of which have also taken a turn right in the Trump era. At the same time, many of the 5/6 states (both Democratic and Republican) appear likely to be the top battlegrounds in 2024. Seven states were decided by less than 3 points in 2020: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all of which have voted Democratic in all but 1 of the presidential elections since 2000; Nevada, which has voted Democratic in 4 of those 6 elections; and Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, all of which have voted Republican in 5 of these 6 elections. Indiana is decidedly the least competitive of either party’s 5/6 states -- aside from 2008, when Obama’s Midwestern appeal and a huge campaign resource advantage likely helped him carry it, it has not been a top target. Similarly, while New Mexico was hotly contested in the early 2000s, recent Democrats have won there relatively comfortably. One other way of looking at this is to see how the states have trended over the past 6 elections relative to the nation. Map 10 compares the change in what we call the “presidential deviation” from the 2000 election to the 2020 election. There is a longer explanation in this past Crystal Ball story if you want a fuller description, but here’s how it works in a nutshell: What we did was take the 2-party Democratic vote in a given state and compared it to the national 2-party Democratic vote in both 2000 and 2020. To illustrate how this works, let’s use Virginia as an example. In 2000, Gore won 50.3% of the national 2-party vote, while he received 45.9% of the 2-party vote in Virginia. We subtract 45.9% from 50.3% to get -4.4%, and we round to -4 to simplify things. So Virginia was R +4 in 2000: Bush’s share of the 2-party vote was about 4 points better in Virginia than it was nationally (and Gore’s was about 4 points worse). In 2020, Biden won 52.3% of the national 2-party vote, and he got 55.2% of the vote in Virginia. 55.2%-52.3% is 2.9, which rounds to 3, or D +3, meaning that Biden did 3 points better in Virginia than he did nationally. So from 2000 to 2020, Virginia went from R +4 to D +3 -- a net Democratic shift of 7 points relative to the nation. That puts it among the most blue-trending states from 2000 to 2020. The shifts in all 50 states are shown in Map 10. Map 10: Shift in presidential deviation, 2000 compared to 2020 Notice that the western half of the country has largely moved left relative to the nation over the course of the last 2 decades, while much of the Northeast, Midwest, and Border state areas have shifted right. That doesn’t mean, obviously, that New York is gettable for Republicans or Utah is gettable for Democrats, for instance, despite the relative trends in each state. But it does help show the direction of some of the key states, like Arizona and Georgia, shifting from clearly Republican to swing states, as well as Republicans becoming relatively stronger in the key states of the Midwest. Maine’s lean has been unchanged in Map 10, but its internal movements have had Electoral College implications -- along with Nebraska, it splits its electoral votes, awarding some by congressional district. For the first 4 elections in this timeframe, both Maine districts voted Democratic for president. But its rural 2nd District has voted Republican since 2016, giving the GOP an extra electoral vote. In Nebraska, Democrats have benefitted from the split allocation in a couple of recent elections, as the Omaha-based NE-2 voted for Obama in 2008 and Biden in 2020. The trend in each state over the past 2 decades shown in Map 10 adds a little bit of context to the overall voting records displayed in Map 9. Of the closest states in 2020, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin of the Great Lakes region have all gotten redder relative to the nation over the past 20 years despite voting Democratic in 5 of the past 6 elections. Meanwhile, the most electorally competitive states in the South and West -- Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina -- have all gotten bluer, even as Nevada is the only state among them to vote more often for Democratic presidential candidates in the past 2 decades. How these states vote -- and trend -- in 2024 will help determine both the next election and the ones that follow. | |
| The End of a Golden Age? Why elections are increasingly difficult to predict | |
By David Peyton Guest Columnist, Sabato's Crystal Ball | |
KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE-- American elections are becoming harder to predict. -- Part of this is likely because of the immense changes and disruptions we are seeing not only in the United States, but in the world as a whole. -- If the underlying social phenomena are less stable, then predictions become unavoidably chancier. The difficulties of forecasting in an unstable worldReaders of the Crystal Ball have become accustomed to predictions of an extremely high level of accuracy. There were years one wondered whether the Center for Politics team could ever do any better. Predictions in 2022 have not matched previous performances. Numerous sources have discussed the difficulties in polling. A recent phone call for Center supporters included the exceedingly unwelcome news that some universities have abandoned their neutral polling efforts for fear of negative consequences from delivering what some officeholders would consider unacceptable news. But deeper, underlying reasons indicate that what one might call a Golden Age of political predictions has ended, not to be recovered any time soon. Scientists must have phenomena with some underlying level of stability so as to make accurate predictions. Lunar eclipses may provide the ultimate example. Given only so many elections -- compare that paucity of evidence with the massive amounts of evidence available in economics or linguistics, for example -- political scientists must dig deep into limited data sets. The Crystal Ball has excelled in this regard. Incumbent presidents running for reelection? The primary pattern is reelection; the secondary, defeat by a challenger; and very rarely, reelection by a narrower margin. The Crystal Ball correctly noted the correspondence of Presidents Obama and Wilson in this rare latter phenomenon. But what happens when American politics loses the stability that makes accurate prediction possible? Indeed, the entire world? -- The world’s climate used to be more predictable. Now, human-induced climate change has produced volatility that will last for the lifetime of any reader -- and inevitably yielding some accompanying political instability around the world as a corollary. -- The world economy likewise used to be more predictable, even with big swings in commodity markets, especially oil. Now, cryptocurrency has produced an unpredictability never before observed, going beyond previous wild swings. A firm is now supposedly worth $32 billion, but next week nothing? Who ever heard of anything like that before? -- The rise of social media has likewise proved destabilizing. Error travels several times faster than truth or fact. Social media have enabled neo-Soviet and other forms of disinformation and has enabled fringe hate groups. Facebook has announced mass layoffs, as has Elon Musk as the new owner of Twitter, and some users have been abandoning Twitter for a new open-source platform called Mastodon. -- The rise of authoritarian or strongman rule also makes world politics less predictable. Elected leaders face at least some constraints of moving against public opinion. Unconstrainted in that way, strongmen are harder to read. What will Putin do next? Or Xi? Or any other autocrat, even given a presumption that using his power to keep his power is primal? Venezuela and Turkey, for example, used to be more predictable than today. When that level of predictability will return, no one can say. -- Global public health has increasingly intruded into politics in recent years, with several episodes of virus spread and virus scares. Covid brought the world to a halt like nothing since the “Spanish” flu a century ago. No one could have predicted the timing or origin of the latest damaging virus, although the outlines of the different kinds of national responses may have been dimly visible. For a public health matter to have become a politicized partisan matter in the U.S. was something new. All one can say safely is that some other global pandemic will occur sometime in the future. -- The world already had 100 million refugees or displaced people before the staggering flood in Pakistan -- the size of Virginia -- displaced 30 million more. Where are these people going to go? Few are going home any time soon. The continuing “crisis” at the southern U.S. border painfully reflects the global reality. Sober forecasts about the inevitable effects of global warming project migration of people away from hotter and less habitable equatorial regions to cooler places. That’s even more refugees. Against rising global unpredictability, some features of American politics do remain stable (lamentably, some of the worst ones): -- The chaotic presidential primary system -- indeed, the nonstop campaigning -- seems immovable. (Center Director Sabato proposed a much preferable regional primary system, sequencing chosen by lot, in his book A More Perfect Constitution, but there is no visible progress toward that end.) -- The Electoral College shows the value of Peter Drucker’s insight, in the 1960s, that all decisions become obsolete over time. To employ the old ship of state metaphor, this ship now has a permanent list to starboard, a built-in favoritism to Republicans, as demonstrated twice in this century. But there is no known way to amend the Constitution in such partisan circumstances. States can apportion their votes rather than give them all to the state winner, but only Maine and Nebraska do. The little-noticed proposed interstate compact, by which all participating states would give all their votes to the national popular vote winner, offers a workaround. Yet only 15 states plus D.C. have ratified it, and at 195 electoral votes it remains short of the 270 needed for it to come into force. Moreover, ratification in today’s world takes Democratic control of both houses and the governorship, and it would be subjected to legal challenge. -- Partisan gerrymandering, which dates back to Massachusetts 200 years ago, seems essentially as entrenched as ever -- notwithstanding a new, neutral process in Virginia for this cycle -- and the Supreme Court now refuses to adopt any remedy. Wisconsin Republicans, for example, appear to have been able to convert even a minority of votes for state legislative candidates into a permanent legislative majority. Alternate approaches such as proportional representation from statewide slates of candidates, or multimember districts, get next to no attention. At least certain state Supreme Courts -- notably Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and New York -- have provided some boundaries to gerrymandering, although even this is now in question. -- Huge private donations to finance TV ads and social media continue unabated. Indeed, Ken Bensinger and Alyce McFadden recently reported in the New York Times that fully $1.4 billion has been spent on just 4 races in Georgia starting in January 2020. Most major democracies feature public financing of campaigns, but even the limited form employed in the U.S. -- the federal income tax checkoff, which actually worked for several cycles -- has been overwhelmed by private money starting in 2008. -- The demographic sorting of Americans into Democratic- or Republican-dominated areas also appears quite stable. Of major city areas, essentially all of them are blue to some degree. Conversely, rural areas almost all tend to be red, which the exception of some rural areas that contain a lot of nonwhite voters. Suburbs/exurbs today form the only generally competitive areas. There is the old adage that political parties serve their countries well when they manage to cut across other social divisions: urban/rural, old/young, rich/poor, religious/irreligious. In their respective curious ways, each party has both wealthy and poor adherents. Otherwise, the parties tend to reinforce social divisions. On the other side of the ledger are factors weighing against predictability: -- The parties themselves, as in other countries, normally provide bedrock predictors of interest aggregation and articulation, and policies conducted in office. Yet 2015-16 witnessed the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by an outsider that establishment leaders did not want -- yet to which almost all have acquiesced. The great drama of the 2024 Republican primaries, and the lead-in, will be the extent to which the hostile takeover continues in effect. -- “Soft on Communism” used to be that the most withering accusation that a Republican candidate could wield against a Democrat. Today? Many Republicans are talking about cutting back or ending support to Ukraine against a neo-Soviet (and also neo-Tsarist) invasion. Such an about-face was inconceivable before 2016, when candidate Donald Trump openly invited Russian hacking of Democratic servers -- carried out only hours later. Only 4 years before, candidate Mitt Romney, when questioned, had called Russia the biggest threat to national security, surprising some people who thought he would or should have said China instead. But it was a solid traditional Republican answer. -- Some key traditional prevailing voting patterns are losing their force. An incoming president carrying senators and congressional candidates along with him on his coattails? Not much in 2020. Midterm blowback? Not much in 2022. What pattern if any will emerge in 2024? No one can say at this point. -- Random disturbances have always presented a huge problem in forecasting. But with increased general social volatility, this factor is rising. Two years ago, Center supporters were given a state-of-the-art inside look at Wisconsin. The Kenosha disaster followed shortly thereafter. Who could have predicted that? Or what consequences it would have? -- Mass murders by gunfire -- a matter of recent pain at UVA -- are both stochastic in their local manifestation, as at UVA, and grimly predictable in their totality across the U.S. The deaths in Charlottesville were followed only days later by worse events in Colorado Springs and Chesapeake. Perhaps the bleakest aspect of U.S. politics has been the predictable prevalence of death by gunfire -- unlike any other developed country -- and the lack of political will by officeholders to overcome the militant minority opposing any effective measures. Finally in 2022 Congress passed a law most charitably called much too little, much too late. Whether any further action will be taken may be called very doubtful, but then a year ago no one could safely have ventured the proposition that Congress would do anything in 2022. -- Election time in the U.S. this year, in a way no one could have foreseen, brought together developments trending toward stability. Brazilian voters, albeit by a slim majority, decided to replace a largely irrational president with a largely rational one. The FTX cryptocurrency crash amounted to a huge punishment for reckless speculation and self-dealing. Troubles at Facebook may hold hope that the worst excesses of social media will not continue unabated indefinitely. Election deniers lost key races for Secretary of State positions across the country. But even with some signs of damage control or self-correction, it still appears beyond the capability of even the most acute political analysts to deliver the same level of predictive performance as previously. They are simply operating in a less predictable world. As the Economist’s Tom Standage has recently wrote, “Unpredictability is the new normal. There is no getting away from it.” Still, one may remain confident that the Center for Politics will continue to produce the best available analysis and predictions for any interested citizen to access at no charge. |
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By Marc Cooper
December 14, 2022
The walls might, indeed, be closing in on Donald Trump as the DOJ accelerates its probe of both the Mar-a-Lago case and the January 6 conspiracy to keep Trump in power.
It now seems a near certainty that Trump will be tagged for indictment sooner rather than later.
Adding to the dilemma of the extremist right, the Republican campaign for congress last month was a giant belly flop.
And apart from whack job Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidates did not claim they were cheated. Even Herschel Walker gave a rather gracious concession speech. They stayed away from any version of STOP THE STEAL.
So can we now celebrate the fact that The Big Lie is in decline and on its way to extinction?
No way. In a record speed transition, Elon Musk has stepped in to be the new standard bearer of the aggrieved Republican masses. And it seems he is dead set, actually obsessed, with the notion that Twitter “censorship” mist have cost Trump the election.
Indeed, The Richest Man In The World is no longer satisfied helming Tesla and Space X.
He has now cast himself as the beloved leader of the millions of Trumplikins, the acolytes of MTG, the gun nuts, the extremist militias, several pockets of Know-Nothings, insurrectionists, election deniers, and every hoople-head from Maine to California.
This is the coalition he has assembled since taking over Twitter and frantically tweeting out crap that he knows the hooples want: That he is now voting Republican, that Dr.Fauci should be prosecuted, and that the greatest danger in the world is wokeness, which he vowed to destroy.
Ordinarily, one would just write this stuff off as the pointless musings of a bored billionaire.
Not this time around. Musk now directly owns and controls Twitter and he is using it hour by hour to whip up his new coalition
In this effort he is being supported by a few journalists like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss to whom he handed a load of Twitter files from past management and who have been frantically typing out five separate Twitter Files threads.
I don’t want to give these jerks more oxygen by going into deep detail, other than to say the Musk-Taibbi-Weiss team are twisting facts, committing massive omissions, and generally exaggerating the supposed sinister Old Twitter.
By having prevented the story on Hunter Biden’s laptop from going viral – for one day, in October 2020, by having suspended Trump’s account after he clearly incited the January 6 insurgents to violence, and by having shut down the accounts of thousands of neo-Nazis, health quacks undermining public health during the pandemic, and removing other nefarious accounts, the Musk crew claims this was partisan censorship and are now inching quickly toward the line that Trump would have won if not for “Democrat Twitter,” these folks are attempting to stand up a new Big Lie i.e. Trump’s defeat by 8 million votes can be laid at the feet of a biased Twitter.
The entire basis of Musk’s “revelations” is premised on bullshit. For the most comprehensive run down of how far off base, how far out of this world, Musk’s Twitter Files are, I recommend you open this link and read Micah Sifry’s painstaking and detailed analysis.
The ConnectorI will add one point that’s not in Micha’s run down. Musk and Company are basically saying that the platform was being used by Democrats to further their political ends. But that is exactly what Musk is doing now day and night. He seems to be much more interested in tweeting than ever before and he is openly proselytizing for the Alt-Right.
And make no mistake., Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss are strategic allies in this quest by Musk to stand up The Big Lie #2. I can’t believe there’s a debate if Taibbi is or is not a leftist journalist. Well, he might have been once but let me be clear: Matt Taibbi is now a thought leader for the Trump forces.
Bari Weiss was never smart enough to do very much except whine that the was suffering as a NYTimes opinion editor. Her Twitter Files thread is a hodge podge of myths, lies, distortions and extreme right wing political bias,
Perhaps Musk’s most powerful ally from the ranks of journalists in Glenn Greenwald – a much better known name than Taibbi and Weiss. No question that for the last couple of years Greenwald has been blazing the path for Musk and his pal Taibbi. Check out these tweets from the last couple of days:
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I am curious to know how these bizarre comments from Glenn Greenwald would compare to those of, say, Tucker Carlson, on the same subjects. Then again, Greenwald has been playing footsie on air with Tucker on a regular basis.
For those of you who did not open the link to Micah Sifry or for those who want a simple summary of what the Twitter Files are about, it’s this:
Twitter like Fox News or the New York Times and just about every other media outlet in this country are privately owned,
The First Amendment has nothing to do with private venues,
If want to start a site that leans conservative or liberal, or pro-communist or anti-China, it is my right to do so. Period.
I don’t buy the Musk-Taibbi claim that Twitter was a Democratic tool that “censored” conservatives. But for the sake of the argument, let’s say it was partisan liberal. If so, there is still no “censorship” but rather a series of editorial decisions.
