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Whether shrewd or misguided, cynical or sincere — or outright cruel and divisive — these gambits were each part of an effort to expand the Republican coalition as far as it could go without abandoning Reaganite conservatism itself.

It was the work of a self-assured political movement, confident that it could secure a position as the nation’s de facto governing party.

There is no such ambition, or confidence, in today’s Republican Party.

Republicans have made it their mission to restrict the vote as much as possible.

Conservative grass-roots and political action groups are joining the crusade, according to reporting by my newsroom colleague Jeremy Peters, galvanized into action by the former president, who blames nonexistent fraud and illegal voting for his defeat.

“So here’s the good news: There is action taking place to go back and correct what was uncovered in this last election.”

“It kind of feels like an all-hands-on-deck moment for the conservative movement, when the movement writ large realizes the sanctity of our elections is paramount and voter distrust is at an all-time high,”

H.R. 1’s only objective is to ensure that Democrats can never again lose another election, that they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century,”

Some of this is undoubtedly cynical, a brazen attempt to capitalize on the conspiratorial rhetoric of the former president. But some of it is sincere, a genuine belief that the Republican Party will cease to exist if it cannot secure “election integrity.”

If Republicans could break themselves of Trump and look at last November with clear eyes, they would see that their fears of demographic eclipse are overblown and that they can compete — even thrive — in the kinds of high-turnout elections envisioned by voting rights activists.

Indeed, the great irony of the Republican Party’s drive to restrict the vote in the name of Trump is that it burdens the exact voters he brought to the polls.

Under Trump, the Republican Party swapped some of the most likely voters — white college-educated moderates — for some of the least likely — blue-collar men.

In other words, by killing measures that make voting more open to everyone, Republicans might make their fears of terminal decline a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Fifty Republican national-security experts signed an open letter declaring Trump a danger to the republic; several staffers quit the Republican National Committee rather than work to elect Trump. Allegiances have been sundered, and professional trajectories thrown into confusion.

Several Republicans I know, finding the campaign intolerable, have rediscovered old hobbies.

Although he was originally drawn to the party for its emphasis on economic freedom and self-reliance, he now believes that a substantial portion of Republicans were never motivated by those ideas. Rather than a conservative party that happens to incorporate cultural grievances, today’s GOP is, in his view, a vehicle for the racial resentment, nationalism, and nostalgia of older white voters.

Trump is the “logical end point” of the GOP’s long history of racialized politics.

Republican Party is an illiberal anti-democratic nativist global outlier, with positions more extreme than France’s National Rally, and in line with the Germany’s AfD, Hungary’s Fidesz, Turkey’s AKP and Poland’s PiS, according to the widely respected V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute.

The GOP has been sliding into authoritarianism over two decades, using increasingly demonizing rhetoric against its opponents.

Historically, democracy dies.

Three-quarters of Americans disapprove of the January 6 mob’s actions, and Trump’s seemingly immovable approval floor dropped by about more than six points. In the days after, only 13 percent of Americans considered themselves “Trump Supporters” while another 16 percent considered themselves “Traditional Republicans.” If “Trump Supporters” were their own party, they’d be about as popular as Germany’s far-right AfD, which polled at about 15 percent for 2019, though their support more recently dropped off to 11 percent.

. For decades, majorities of Americans have told pollsters they want more parties to choose from, and registered their dissatisfaction with the two-party system by increasingly identifying as independents.

But as the two parties began sorting more clearly along liberal-conservative lines as “culture war” issues starting in the 1970s, and as American politics nationalized around these cultural issues, and, starting in the 1990s, as the long-time Democratic control of the House ended, every election became a high-stakes all-or-nothing fight for control of federal power.

The only way to elevate the moderate Republicans is for Congress to use its constitutional authority (Article I, Section IV) to change how we vote, and create electoral opportunities for a center-right to rise again.

This election, many Republicans won’t withhold their support from an openly cruel, sexist bigot. And there is a lesson in their failure. It suggests the best way forward. If the groups that Trump targets, especially the sizable ones, like women and Latinos, turn out in large enough numbers to vote against him, handing a crushing loss to the corrupting billionaire; if other folks who usually vote Republican join in that protest, to signal that this behavior is a dealbreaker; then the GOP will likely never nominate a man like this for high office ever again.

Those are the stakes in November, the rare election where the larger the margin of the GOP loss, the better the chance it will have to be reborn into something viable and constructive. It certainly cannot succeed with conservative women in swing states calling its delegation scum and even a faction of elected Republicans cheering her on.

Who fits the stereotype of the rich and powerful described in this research? Mitt Romney. Empathy: “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Compassion: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Sympathy for the disadvantaged: My wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” Willingness to lie in negotiations: “I was a severely conservative Republican governor.”

48 percent described the Democratic Party as “weak,” compared to 28 percent who described the Republican Party that way. Conversely, 50 percent said the Republican Party is “cold hearted,” compared to 30 percent who said that was true of the Democrats.

This is the war that is raging throughout America. It is between conservatives, who emphasize personal responsibility and achievement, against liberals, who say the government must take from the wealthy and give to the poor. So it will be interesting this week to see if President Obama can rally the country to support his vision of a strong social compact. He has compassion on his side. Few Americans want to see their fellow citizens suffer. But the president does have that fiscal responsibility issue haunting him because the country remains in dire trouble.

For power holders, the world is viewed through an instrumental lens, and approach is directed toward those individuals who populate the useful parts of the landscape. Our results suggest that power not only channels its possessor’s energy toward goal completion but also targets and attempts to harness the energy of useful others. Thus, power appears to be a great facilitator of goal pursuit through a combination of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. The nature of the power holder’s goals and interpersonal relationships ultimately determine how power is harnessed and what is accomplished in the end.

Republicans recognize the political usefulness of objectification, capitalizing on “compassion fatigue,” or the exhaustion of empathy, among large swathes of the electorate who are already stressed by the economic collapse of 2008, high levels of unemployment, an epidemic of foreclosures, stagnant wages and a hyper-competitive business arena.

. Republican debates provided further evidence of compassion fatigue when audiences cheered the record-setting use of the death penalty in Texas and applauded the prospect of a gravely ill pauper who, unable to pay medical fees, was allowed to die.Even Rick Santorum, who has been described by the National Review as holding “unstinting devotion to human dignity” and as fluent in “the struggles of the working class,” wants to slash aid to the poor. At a Feb. 21 gathering of 500 voters in Maricopa County, Ariz., Santorum brought the audience to its feet as he declared:We need to take everything from food stamps to Medicaid to the housing programs to education and training programs, we need to cut them, cap them, freeze them, send them to the states, say that there has to be a time limit and a work requirement, and be able to give them the flexibility to do those programs here at the state level.

President Obama has a substantial advantage this year because he does not have a primary challenger, which frees him from the need to emphasize his advocacy for the disempowered — increasing benefits or raising wages for the poor. This allows him to pick and chose the issues he wants to address.At the same time, compassion fatigue may make it easier for the Republican nominee to overcome the liabilities stemming from his own primary rhetoric, to reach beyond the core of the party to white centrist voters less openly drawn to hard-edged conservatism. With their capacity for empathy frayed by a pervasive sense of diminishing opportunity and encroaching shortfall, will these voters once again become dependable Republicans in 2012?

But it’s only a short-term measure, mainly designed to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic and its immediate aftermath.

everyone says that turning those longer-term plans into law will be much harder than passing the ARP.

But what if everyone is wrong?

Just about every analyst I follow asserted, almost until the last moment, that $1.9 trillion was an opening bid for the rescue plan and that the eventual bill would be substantially smaller

Instead, Democrats — who, by standard media convention, are always supposed to be in “disarray” — held together and did virtually everything they had promised. How did that happen?

Much of the post-stimulus commentary emphasizes the lessons Democrats learned from the Obama years, when softening policies in an attempt to win bipartisan support achieved nothing but a weaker-than-needed economic recovery

only part of the story

Republicans have lost their knack for demonizing progressive policies.

There’s certainly plenty of demonization out there: Vast numbers of Republican voters believe that Biden is president thanks only to invisible vote fraud, and some even buy the story that it was masterminded by a global conspiracy of pedophiles.

unsuccessful in convincing voters that they’ll be hurt by Biden’s spending and taxing plans.

Part of the answer, surely, is that this time around Republican politicians and pundits have been remarkably low energy in criticizing Biden’s policies.

Where are the bloodcurdling warnings about runaway inflation and currency debasement, not to mention death panels?

the most important reason Trump failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act was that Republicans have largely forgotten how to govern.

They couldn’t do the hard thinking required to settle on a plausible line of attack

while Democrats were pushing through tax credits that will cut child poverty nearly in half and subsidies that will make health insurance more affordable, Republicans were focused on cancel culture and Dr. Seuss.

Bear in mind that both infrastructure spending and raising taxes on the rich are very popular.

Republicans will have to come up with something beyond boilerplate denunciations of socialists killing jobs. Will they? Probably not.

Democrats know what they want to achieve and are willing to put in the work to make it happen — while Republicans don’t and aren’t.

The wiser response to the impending Republican electoral defeat is to learn from Trump's insights—separate them from Trump’s volatile personality and noxious attitudes—and use them to develop better, more workable, and more broadly acceptable policies for a 21st-century center-right.

The democratic world today is roiled by a tide of nationalist populism.

Mr. Trump publicly made a similar request of China. His chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said publicly on Thursday that the administration threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine if it did not help “find” the D.N.C. servers.

These attempts to enlist foreign interference in American electoral democracy are an assault not only on our system of government but also on the integrity of the Republican Party.

Yet Republicans will not be able to postpone a reckoning with Trumpism for much longer. The investigation by House Democrats appears likely to result in a vote for impeachment, despite efforts by the White House to obstruct the inquiry. That will force Senate Republicans to choose.

Will they commit themselves and their party wholly to Mr. Trump, embracing even his most anti-democratic actions, or will they take the first step toward separating themselves from him and restoring confidence in the rule of law?

That’s why all elected officials take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. By protecting Donald Trump at all costs from all consequences, the Republicans risk violating that sacred oath.

It is a dance Republican candidates often do when they hedge their answers about whether evolution should be taught in schools. It is what makes the fight over global warming such a liability for their party, and what led last year to a widely criticized response to the Ebola scare.

the national debate is forcing the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential hopefuls to confront questions about whether it is in the public’s interest to allow parents to decide for themselves.

The debate does not break entirely along right-left lines. The movement to forgo vaccinations has been popular in more liberal and affluent communities where some parents are worried that vaccines cause autism or other disorders among children.

Howard Dean, a presidential candidate in 2004 and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said there are three groups of people who object to required vaccines: “One is people who are very much scared about their kids getting autism, which is an idea that has been completely discredited. Two, is entitled people who don’t want to put any poison in their kids and view this as poison, which is ignorance more than anything else. And three, people who are antigovernment in any way.”

The issue has more political potency among conservative voters who are highly skeptical of anything required by the government.

for Republicans like Mr. Paul who appeal to the kind of libertarian conservatives who are influential in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, which hold the first two contests in the battle for the nomination, there is an appeal in framing the issue as one of individual liberty.Asked about immunizations again later on Monday, Mr. Paul was even more insistent, saying it was a question of “freedom.” He grew irritated with a CNBC host who pressed him and snapped: “The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.”

It’s true there are “extremists on both sides,” but as this Wonk Blog post showed, the percentage of non-centrist Republicans skyrocketed from under 10 percent in the Ford years (less than Democrats) to almost 90 percent today, while the Democratic percentage has stayed basically flat [chart].

What’s more, in the last session (2013-2014), the data shows that 147 House Republicans — more than half the caucus — were more ideologically extreme than the most extreme Democrat in the House. There is simply no comparison between the two partie

But it’s a fact that “balanced” journalism has to ignore. To admit that the political world isn’t balanced would shake their whole belief system to its core. And yet, the shaking seems to have begun

The GOP’s strategic logic is simple and straightforward: If the media is going to split the difference between what Democrats and Republicans say, then if Republicans simply double their demands, suddenly the media, embracing the “sensible center,” will now articulate the old GOP position as the “sensible center,” the “common sense” place to be

Their stubborn adherence to a false balance narrative has, ironically, become an integral part of the GOP’s relentless rightward push. By talking about “government dysfunction” instead of “Republican obstruction,” the media actively helps the most extreme anti-government Republicans thwart any efforts at competent governance and it helps promote their “government is horrible” worldview

There was once a penalty for becoming too politically extreme: one’s actions would be characterized as unrealistic, destructive, heedless of past experience, etc. Sometimes this was justified, sometimes not (as with the Civil Rights movement). But right or wrong, this media practice inhibited radical movements in either direction.

For quite some time now, however, conservative Republicans have realized that by moving right and attacking the media for any criticism, they can turn the media into a tacit ally, forcing them to treat preposterous claims as serious ideas, or even proven facts

Norm’s response underscores the reality of asymmetric polarization, which the mainstream media and most good government groups have avoided discussing — at great costs to the country

Thus, when they were planning to force a government shutdown, a key part of their strategy was spinning the media with a preposterous argument that it was the Democrats who were shutting down the government, even though, as the New York Times reported, the shutdown plan traced back to a meeting early in President Obama’s second term, led by former Attorney General Edwin R. Meese.

What’s more, once the media plays along, it’s a trick that can be used over and over again. One can keep moving farther and farther right indefinitely, pulling the “objective” media along for the ride, every step of the way. (Conservatives even developed an operational model to describe the process, known as the “Overton Window,” explained by a conservative activist here.)

The basis for all this is a cultural illusion that the “nonpartisan” media is somehow objective, philosophically in tune with science.

historically, this is far from true. Up until the late 19th century, American journalism was quite partisan, serving substantial “niche” audiences, sustained by subscriptions.

hen advertising exploded as a revenue source in the early 20th century, a new journalistic model emerged, trying to appeal across parties, while taking care not to anger large advertisers. The broader story is well told by Paul Starr in “The Creation of the Media

Jeremy Iggers incorporates this history into his account of how journalism ethics confuses the purposes of journalism in “Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest.”

Such is the basis for the media’s claims of “objectivity.” Starr’s history explains the forces leading to why this happened.

the blogosphere’s origins were not just Usenet, email lists and the like, they were also the underground press tracing back to IF Stone’s Weekly and George Seldes’ In Fact; the black press, both commercial and movement-based; political journals of the left and right; and so on

These underappreciated traditions provide largely untapped examples of how to do quality political journalism outside of the artificial construct in which false balance is rooted. They point the way forward for us, beyond our current state of asymmetrical dysfunction.

these patterns match recent political events. In international negotiations, the United States has been less interested in taking steps to slow global warming than many other rich countries. President Obama and a majority of Democrats favored a bill that would have raised the cost of emitting carbon, and such a bill passed the House of Representatives in 2009. Strong opposition from Republicans in the Senate, as well as some Democrats from coal-producing states, defeated the bill there.

I don't know how you bring these people together.

It's a fundamental belief in whether or not you want to continue the American experiment.

He thinks the big divide is between authoritarians and those who believe in democracy.

"This isn't their Republican Party anymore," the president's son said. "This is Donald Trump's Republican Party."

You have a segment of American society that does not accept the election outcome and is going to continue to speak up, is going to continue to agitate. And that's going to make this a very unstable period for months and perhaps even years."

That means a long, unstable period not just for the Republican Party, but for the American political system as a whole.

Annie says it wasn't that long ago that she could talk politics with her mom without things getting heated. But when the pandemic started, she says their conversations were peppered with conspiracies.

And what I found were stories, mostly from family members of people who have gotten wrapped up in political conspiracy theories like QAnon. And many are adult children who say they can't really have a civil conversation with their parents anymore and that it wasn't always this way.

It kind of seems normal at first. And then all of a sudden, something will just be out of the blue that just seems so far from anything that could be true.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: She's spending 16 to 18 hours a day consuming this. CORNISH: And the result of all this is a detachment from the facts.

Q's stories range from false notions about COVID to a cabal running the U.S. government to the claim there's a secret world of satanic pedophiles. But what's relevant here is that this culminates in a belief that President Trump is a kind of savior figure, which leads to the next phase for these families - a breakdown.

Because these belief systems are not about the information within them, but about the identity and the emotions that are appealed to through them, the only thing that can actually combat them effectively are loving, trusting, emotional connections.

Do not mock. Do not use snark. All of the, you know, Twitter posts where people make fun of the crazy QAnon supporters, all that does is further reinforce their sense that they are disrespected and maligned.

No. 2 - using scientific evidence, argumentation, etc., that comes through the very institutions that they have been told not to trust, that is going to backfire because now they think that you are the dupe because you trust these institutions, etc.

More F.S. Oliver: Nothing in politics is sadder than: the man of sterling character whose genius is so antipathetic to the particular emergency in which he finds himself as to stupefy his thoughts and paralyze his actions. He drifts to disaster, grappling blindfolded which are beyond his comprehension, failing without really fighting.

Bad choices over the past decade by Republican political leaders opened the way to Donald Trump, yes.  For a decade, Republican voters have signaled they wanted to protect Medicare, cut immigration, fight fewer wars, and nominate no more Bushes. Their party leaders interpreted those signals as demands to cut Medicare, increase immigration, put boots on the ground in Syria, and nominate another Bush.

Their task ahead, in the Biblical phrase, is to pluck the brands from the fire—rescue as much of their party as can be rescued—while simultaneously minimizing the damage to party and country by the nominee their rank-and-file has imposed on them. They need to maneuver so that Trump’s defeat is as solitary as possible, and so that he cannot shift the blame for the failure he has earned onto the heads of others

Trump’s taught Republican politicians that they’ve neglected the interests and values of their core supporters. He’s demonstrated that much of their party ideology is obsolete, and that their language no longer moves their voters. He’s proven that their party is less culturally conservative than they believed, less hostile to social insurance than they imagined, and more worried about the economic and social costs of mass migration than they realized. Those are valuable lessons that need to be absorbed and pondered.

He’s also demonstrated that he himself is a dangerous person

To save themselves and their country, Republican politicians will have to rediscover the politician’s arts of deftness, flexibility, and self-preservation—while stealthily hastening Trump toward the defeat that almost certainly awaits him in November.

That’s a big job and a hard job, all the harder because they cannot acknowledge what they are doing. They will seem to help Trump win, while actually working to ensure he fail

What Walter Lippman said of presidents is really true of all politicians: They are not “working through noble institutions to dear ends … but trying to grind out a few crude results from a decadent political machine.”

The harms they stop are more important than the good they cannot achieve. What they’re called upon to do is to practice statesmanship without fine phrases; to protect the republic without receiving any credit for it

Unfortunately, then, the nonpartisan press is essentially stuck, at least until Donald Trump is out of office. While there is no longer a “he said, she said” campaign, the fact that Trump is not only the president but the head of the Republican Party makes his statements informal positions of the Republican Party. For the press to attack those statements as lies is to place themselves in opposition to the Republican Party, making them de facto Democratic partisans. Because Trump is an entertainer rather than a policymaker, it is difficult for the press to even interview him as a normal political figure since he does not respond to facts in conventional ways. Each time he lies, any media outlet that aspires to objectivity must decide whether to point it out – which would make it indistinguishable from the Democratic-aligned press – or to allow the lie to go unremarked, thereby remaining complicit in the lie, tacitly aiding the Republican Party. Neither is likely to inform anyone in any meaningful way, which renders the model of the neutral press nearly inoperable.

That lack of confidence in the government is a sentiment Republicans are trying to tether to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party.

While anger and economic unease have subsided, polls suggest that people are anxious. A recent survey by The Associated Press found that 53 percent of Americans believe the risk of another terrorist attack inside the country is extremely high or very high. In a new Pew poll, 41 percent said they had “not too much confidence” or “no confidence at all” that the government could prevent a major Ebola outbreak in the United States.

Republicans said the hyperbole highlighted the perception that the president, with his no-drama air, often plays down the seriousness of the problems facing the country.

Meanwhile, a 2014 study by The National Bureau of Economic Research found that the likelihood of voting Republican increased by 0.9 points among viewers who watched "four additional minutes per week."

research that shows the Fox Effect caused congressmen in both parties to "increase their support for Republican policies."

during the Clinton years, members of Congress became "less supportive of President Clinton in districts where Fox News begins broadcasting than similar representatives in similar districts where Fox News was not broadcast."

These days, the misinformation peddled by Fox may actually lull conservative viewers and voters into a false sense of security.

"wishful thinking" may have hurt Republicans' efforts to take the White House in 2012. "It may be that some Republican Fox viewers became complacent and didn’t work as hard as they might if they had been more aware of how badly Romney was doing in the final days of the campaign," he wrote.

But over the past decade, I can recall conversations with some of these individuals in which they refused to accept that there was any problem within the Republican Party, attributing such criticism to media bias.

We still see this denial, with the truly bizarre claim by some in the media that the rise of Trump is really all the fault of . . . Obama. The logic is varied.

Here is a much simpler explanation for Donald Trump: Republicans have fed the country ideas about decline, betrayal and treason. They have encouraged the forces of anti-intellectualism, obstructionism and populism. They have flirted with bigotry and racism. Trump merely chose to unashamedly embrace all of it, saying plainly what they were hinting at for years. In doing so, he hit a jackpot.

The problem is not that Republican leaders should have begun to condemn Trump last year. It is that they should have condemned the ideas and tactics that led to his rise when they began to flourish 20 years ago.

I discovered that thoughtful progressives and thoughtful conservatives each suffered from different, deep fears about our political future. Progressives feared minoritarian rule. Conservatives feared majoritarian domination. Ending the filibuster, perversely enough, makes both fears more real.

The Republican Party has won exactly one popular vote for president since 1988, George W. Bush’s narrow 2.4 percent edge over John Kerry in 2004. Yet it won three presidential elections in that span of time

Republicans not only have a present electoral college advantage over Democrats, they also have inherent advantages in both the House and the Senate.

Do away with the filibuster, and it’s entirely possible that the next Republican government could enjoy immense legislative power without a majority of the popular vote. In fact, they could lose voters by margins numbering in the millions, yet still exercise decisive control over the government.

The Democratic Party is seeking to pass laws that would introduce dramatic changes in American elections, transform free speech doctrine, and potentially limit religious liberty.

The GOP, for example, is currently in the grips of a Trumpist base that prioritizes angry opposition over compromise. The party largely lacks a positive agenda, so (with some notable exceptions) its priority is clear: No compromise, even when compromise might be prudent. Stop the Democrats. Some Republicans have gone further, descending into a fantasy world of dark conspiracies.

Yes, through decentralization, de-escalation, and strategic moderation.

That means most Americans live in jurisdictions where, for example, election rules, civil rights laws, gun laws, and a wide variety of economic and social policies are within their partisan control.

Gridlock in Washington does not have to mean gridlock in government,

Research demonstrates that a majority of Americans are exhausted by partisan politics. Motivated minorities drive most American polarization.

A combination of redistricting reform and voting reforms like ranked-choice voting can limit the powers of partisan extremists. Ranked-choice voting—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—most notably can reduce the chances of highly-partisan pluralities dominating political primaries.

The answer to polarization and gridlock is not partisan escalation. Ending the filibuster would only ramp up partisan acrimony and increase the level of fear and anxiety around American elections. There are better paths through American division. We should try those before we enable drastic measures like majoritarian dominance or minoritarian control.

“The struggle to defend objective truth against people who consciously choose to deny or distort it has become a fight to defend our society, and democracy itself.”

Jonathan Swift, it’s worth noting that he was not an optimist about “truth.”

By the time a lie is refuted, he wrote, “it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man, who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who has found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.'“

“Considering that natural disposition in many men to lie, and in multitudes to believe,” he wrote in 1710, “I have been perplexed what to do with that maxim so frequent in every body's mouth; that truth will at last prevail.

A recent Washington Post tally found that nearly 300 Republicans running for congressional and state offices are election deniers. That means, as a FiveThirtyEight analysis found, 60 percent of Americans will have at least one election denier on their ballot next week.

In a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll, 63 percent of Republicans say they worry “the election results could be manipulated.”

From the New York Times: When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.

The big mistake people have made is in assuming this could blow up only in an extensive struggle in 2024 and perhaps involving Donald Trump. What seems entirely unanticipated, yet is extremely predictable, is that smaller skirmishes could break out all over the country this year.

Democrats have got themselves in a situation where the head of their party holds the most popular position on guns and crime—and yet they’re getting crushed on the issue because they’ve let GOP campaign ads, the right wing media ecosystem, and assorted progressive big city prosecutors shape the narrative on the issue rather than doing so themselves.

In case you don’t speak fluent bureaucratese, “good discussion” means that the Republicans made it clear the report had to go. And “it was pulled” means the CRS obeyed. The Times quoted a person with knowledge of the deliberations as saying the decision on Sept. 28 to withdraw the report was “made against the advice of the research service’s economics division” and that the author, Thomas Hungerford, stood by its findings.