Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged Midterm

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

No, radical policies won't drive election-winning turnout - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b721-9f4cdc90bc1c_story.html

radical policies turnout election campaign history politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • No myth is stronger in progressive circles than the magical, wonderworking powers of voter turnout. It’s become a sort of pixie dust that you sprinkle over your strenuously progressive positions to ward off any suggestion that they might turn off voters.
  • Sanders’s explanation of why this is not a problem is simple, and he has repeated it endlessly. When a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board asked him whether “a candidate as far to the left as you” would “alienate swing voters and moderates and independents,” the senator replied: “The only way that you beat Trump is by having an unprecedented campaign, an unprecedentedly large voter turnout.”
  • Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, adds: “Bernie Sanders has very unique appeal amongst [the younger] generation and can inspire, I think, a bunch of them to vote in percentages that they have never voted before.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • This has remarkably little empirical support. Take the 2018 midterm elections, in which the Democrats took back the House (a net 40-seat gain), carried the House popular vote by almost nine points and flipped seven Republican-held governorships. Turnout in that election was outstanding, topping 49 percent — the highest midterm turnout since 1914 and up 13 points over the previous midterm, in 2014 — and the demographic composition of the electorate came remarkably close to that of a presidential election year
  • Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of the Democrats’ improved performance came not from fresh turnout of left-of-center voters, who typically skip midterms, but rather from people who cast votes in both elections — yet switched from Republican in 2016 to Democratic in 2018
  • the 2018 results do not support Sanders’s theories — not the central importance of high turnout, nor the supposed non-importance of changing mainstream voters’ minds, nor the most effective issues to run on.
  • Democrats in 2018, especially the successful ones, did not run on particularly radical programs but rather on opposition to Trump himself, and to unpopular GOP actions on economic policy and health care (tax cuts for the rich and efforts to repeal Obamacare’s protections, for example)
  • 89 percent of the Democrats’ improved performance came from persuasion — from vote-switchers — not turnout. In its analysis, Catalist notes, “If turnout was the only factor, then Democrats would not have seen nearly the gains that they ended up seeing … a big piece of Democratic victory was due to 2016 Trump voters turning around and voting for Democrats in 2018.”
  • an analysis using data from the States of Change project, sponsored by, among others, the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress, indicates that, even if black turnout in the 2016 election had matched that of 2012 (it dropped from 62 to 57 percent), Clinton would have still lost. On the other hand, if she had managed to reduce her losses among white noncollege voters by a mere one-quarter, she’d be president today. That’s an issue of persuasion, not turnout.
  • States of Change data does not suggest that youth turnout, which Sanders promises to increase so significantly, was a particular Democratic problem in 2016. In fact, young voters (ages 18 to 29) increased their turnout more than any other age group in that election, from 42 percent in 2012 to 44 percent in 2016. They also increased — if only slightly — their margin of support for the Democratic candidate
  • In 2016, the age cohort that really killed Democrats was voters ages 45 to 64, who had split evenly in 2012 but leaned Republican by six percentage points four years later.
  • after scrutinizing the data, it’s a mistake to assume that Democrats would benefit disproportionately from high turnout. Trump is particularly strong among white noncollege voters, who dominate the pool of nonvoters in many areas of the country, including in key Rust Belt states. If the 2020 election indeed has historically high turnout, as many analysts expect, that spike could include many of these white noncollege voters in addition to Democratic-leaning constituencies such as nonwhites and young voters. The result could be an increase in Democrats’ popular-vote total — and another loss in the electoral college.
  • This analysis shreds an implicit assumption of Sanders and other members of the turnout-will-solve-everything crowd: that if they polarize the election by highlighting progressive issues, “their” nonvoters will show up at the polls, but none of the nonvoters from the other side will
  • Stanford political scientists Andrew Hall and Daniel Thompson, for example, studied House races between 2006 and 2014 and found that highly ideological candidates who beat moderates for a party nomination indeed increased turnout in their own party in the general election — but they increased the opposition turnout even more. (The difference was between three and eight percentage points.) Apparently, their extreme political stances did more to turn out the other side to vote against them than to turn out their own side to vote for them.
fischerry

Principal Dates and Time Line of the French Revolution - 0 views

www.marxists.org/...timeline.htm

french revolution history dates

shared by fischerry on 12 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Principal Dates and Time Line of the French Revolution
  • fischerry on 12 Dec 16
     
    These may be good events to add to charts for Midterm. Though many events are probably irrelevant for the Midterm.
malonema1

Zuckerberg: Someone trying to disrupt midterms - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...2018-midterm-elections

US politics culture

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talks to CNN Senior Tech Correspondent Laurie Segall about what Facebook is doing to prevent meddling in the 2018 midterm
anonymous

New flak for Hillary Clinton as she cautiously wades into the midterms | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ously-wades-into-midterms.html

US politics hilary trump

shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The New York Times said yesterday that she "faces distrust on the left, where she is seen as an avatar of the Democratic establishment, and raw enmity on the right."
  • First, it's ridiculous that the former secretary of State is being criticized for not automatically backing the woman in New York's gubernatorial primary, even though Nixon is a long shot with zero political experience. Cuomo supported Clinton's presidential bid and ran HUD in her husband's administration, so of course she's backing him. Is there some rule that female politicians have to endorse every single woman who jumps into a race, unqualified or not?
  • In that address, Clinton took shots at Trump, though not by name, and said of the election in a slightly self-deprecating tone: "No, I'm not over it. I still think about the 2016 election. I still regret the mistakes I made."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Times piece says that Hillary Clinton is cautiously trying to reengage in the midterms, but that her husband has been "all but invisible" and "largely sidelined amid new scrutiny of his past misconduct with women." The #Me-Too era has caused even some liberal commentators to retroactively denounce Bill Clinton. Plus, insiders fear that he could go "wildly off message" in campaign settings.
  • Hillary Clinton has a right to speak out, of course, but she has so much baggage that much of her own party is wary of her. And the media, which always had testy relations with her, seem wedded to covering her as a figure from the past.
kaylynfreeman

Stimulus Bill as a Political Weapon? Democrats Are Counting on It. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mocrats-stimulus-midterms.html

US Politics

shared by kaylynfreeman on 15 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — Triumphant over the signing of their far-reaching $1.9 trillion stimulus package, Democrats are now starting to angle for a major political payoff that would defy history: Picking up House and Senate seats in the 2022 midterm elections, even though the party in power usually loses in the midterms.
  • Republicans need to gain only one seat in the Senate and just five in the House in 2022 to take back control, a likely result in a normal midterm election, but perhaps a trickier one if voters credit their rivals for a strong American rebound.
  • They lost 63 House seats, and the majority, and were unable to fulfill President Barack Obama’s goals on issues ranging from gun control to immigration.
Javier E

What Do These Midterms Mean? « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...what-do-these-midterms-mean

politics Obama election history crisis narrative economics foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • these midterms mean nothing? That can’t be right either. They seem to me to be reflecting at the very least a sour and dyspeptic mood in the country at large, a well of deepening discontent and concern, and a national funk that remains very potent as a narrative, even if it has become, in my view, close to circular and more than a little hysterical.
  • what is the reason for this mood – and why has Obama taken the biggest dive because of it?
  • Even though the economic signals in the US are stronger than anywhere else in the developed world, even as unemployment has fallen, and as energy independence has come closer than anyone recently expected, the underlying structure of the economy remains punishing for the middle class. This, in some ways, can be just as dispiriting as lower levels of growth – because it appears that even when we have a recovery, it will not make things any better for most people.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • This shoe falling in the public psyche – a sense that we are in a deep structural impasse for the middle class, rather than a temporary recessionary hit – means a profound disillusionment with the future. And the fact that neither party seems to have a workable answer to this problem intensifies the sense of drift.
  • The emergence of ISIS has dimmed that hope as well. It does two things at once: it calls into question whether our departure from Iraq can be sustained, and it presents the threat of Jihadist terror as once again real and imminent. So ISIS is a reminder of the worst of 9/11 and the worst of Iraq.
  • The last great triumph of the US – the end of the Cold War, the liberation of Central Europe, the emergence of a democratic Russia – is now revealed as something more complicated. If Americans thought that the days were long gone that they had to worry about Russian military power, they’ve been disabused of that fact this past year.
  • the other recent success: getting out of Iraq and defeating al Qaeda. For many of us, this was one of Obama’s greatest achievements: to cauterize the catastrophe of the Iraq War, to decimate al Qaeda’s forces in Af-Pak, and to enable us to move forward toward a more normal world.
  • Events overseas have had another, deeply depressing effect.
  • So the core narrative of the Obama presidency – rescuing us from a second Great Depression and extricating us from a doomed strategy in response to Jihadism – has been eclipsed by events. And that’s why Obama has lost the thread. He has lost the clear story-line that defined his presidency.
  • You can argue, and I would, that Obama is not really responsible for the events behind this narrative-collapse.
  • But most Americans are not going to parse these trends and events and come to some nuanced view. They see the economy as still punishing, Jihadist terror just as frightening, and they are increasingly unable to avoid the fact that we lost – repeat, lost – the Iraq War. They’re also aware that the US, after Iraq, simply has historically low leverage and power in the world at large, as the near-uselessness of our massive military in shaping the world as we would like has been exposed in the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan. Now throw in a big bucket of Ebola, and what on earth is there to be cheerful about?
  • And who else do you hold responsible if not the president?
  • They want to create a Carter-like narrative that can bring down the Democrats and turn the Obama presidency into an asterisk. But the difference between now and the late 1970s is that Obama is not a Carter and the GOP have no Reagan, or, more importantly, no persuasive critique of Obama that is supplemented by a viable alternative policy agenda that isn’t just a warmed-over version of the 1980s.
  • The future as yet seems to contain no new or rallying figure to chart a different course. Ever-greater gridlock seems the likeliest result of the mid-terms; polarization continues to deepen geographically and on-line
  • the Democrats have only an exhausted, conventional dynasty to offer in 2016; and the Republicans either have dangerous demagogues, like Christie or Cruz, or lightweights, like Walker or Rubio or Paul, or, even another fricking Bush.
  • it is not too late for Obama to lead the way, to construct a new narrative that is as honest and as realist as it is, beneath it all, optimistic. It’s a hard task – but since his likeliest successors are failing to do so, he has as good a shot as any. In these circumstances, treating the last two years of a presidency as irrelevant could not be more wrong. They could, with the right policies and the right message, be the most relevant of them all.
Javier E

Racial Divisions Exist Among Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583267

American idea race diversity identity survey politics

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Contra Barack Obama, there is a white America and a black America. There are also varying versions of Latino and Hispanic Americas across different regions of the country. There are robust, enduring differences in belief across races and communities about just what America’s identity should be and how politics are experienced, and they in turn create the political reality of the countr
  • these differences might be structural, informed by the basic fact of human geography, a geography itself built on the fact of American apartheid.
  • The PRRI/Atlantic poll, a random survey of slightly more than 1,000 people taken in December, reveals major differences among racial groups on some of the basic questions about what makes America America, and what makes Americans so
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Other polls also show black voters increasingly concerned about racism. White voters might be moving in the other direction, and philosophically seem to be deprioritizing the importance of diversity in favor of an embrace of capitalism, nationalism, and individual liberty
  • The majority of black and Hispanic people do think that speaking English is at least a somewhat important component of Americanness, but almost a tenth of both groups think it’s not important at al
  • black and Hispanic respondents are much more likely than whites to say that belief in God is a very important component of a specific American identity.
  • Seventy-six percent of white people and 74 percent of Hispanics think that civil liberties such as freedom of speech are very important pieces of American identity, while only 61 percent of black respondents feel so
  • More than half of black respondents think that a belief in capitalism isn’t a very important part of that identity, while good majorities of both white and Hispanic people think that it’s either somewhat important or very important
  • Forty-five percent of Hispanic respondents said that racial, ethnic, and religious diversity make the country much stronger, compared with 32 percent of whites
  • white respondents are most likely to say that diversity makes the country weaker, or to be ambivalent about the idea of diversity altogether.
  • the small but influential sliver of black conservatives who identify as Republican appears to be diminishing, as the increasing influence of Trumpism and the alt-right of the modern GOP have made the Republican Party more and more openly hostile to black voters.
  • Latino voters have increasingly made opposing the GOP agenda a top political priority in the age of President Donald Trump
  • 40 percent of Hispanic respondents think that a potential citizenship question would be used for checking individuals’ immigration status as opposed to counting the population. Black respondents, on the other hand, are the least likely to buy the stated rationale for the question, and only 17 percent believe that it will be used for the sole purpose of counting the population
  • The profiles of the Republican and Democratic parties have shifted accordingl
  • In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats elected one of the most racially diverse incoming classes of legislators since Reconstruction, and a diverse field of potential presidential contenders revolves around a multifaceted policy debate that’s heavily influenced by progressive ideas
  • Republicans have had to shape their party around explicit appeals to white voters and their anxieties, and have had to build an electoral strategy that can promote low overall turnout and stoke white grievances
  • In short, Democrats have cultivated an image as the party of racial and cultural pluralism, while Republicans have rejected pluralism as a viable strategy.
  • Majorities of both white and Hispanic respondents also favor the minimum-wage increase, but not at the numbers or with the fervor of black people
  • black and Hispanic respondents are also much more likely to strongly favor stricter gun-control laws than whites
  • black respondents are the most likely racial group to support providing pathways to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States.
  • Six percent of black people and 7 percent of Hispanic people reported that they or someone else in their household did not have the proper voter identification the last time they went to vote, a small proportion but one much higher than the 1 percent of white respondents who said they’d had similar problems.
  • Nineteen percent of black people and 14 percent of Hispanic people said they’d had to wait in long lines, as opposed to 9 percent of whites
  • they come after a 2018 midterm election in which claims of voter suppression and major civil-rights lawsuits came to define elections in places such as Georgia, Kansas, and North Dakota.
  • A strong majority of white respondents—59 percent—think that speaking English is a very important part of being American.
  • These numbers track with the Census Bureau’s recent approximation that more than 600,000 households would fail to complete the census because of the question
  • these results from PRRI and The Atlantic shed new light on fundamental questions
  • They illustrate that the so-called demographic destiny of America is one that would look radically different should the country become majority nonwhite sometime in the next 20 or 30 years. The data indicate that white, black, and Hispanic voters have markedly divergent ideas on what exactly makes the American identity, and they also indicate that these differences are enforced and entrenched via spatial and social segregation
  • the data also cast some doubt on the political prospects of that demographic destiny. They show that black and Hispanic voters are more likely to be carved out of the political process, and that those efforts are perhaps aided by the existing regime of segregation
  • they show that the competing visions of America, as separated by race and region, are indeed competing, and that they are the chessboard upon which all politics is played.
malonema1

Democrats widen their lead in House midterm elections - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...ts-after-gop-tax-cut-bump.html

US crisis

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Democrats now hold an estimated 9 percentage point advantage in recent polls that measure whether voters support a generic Republican or generic Democrat, according to FiveThirtyEight, a website dedicated statistical analysis. Republicans cut that deficit to as low as 5 percentage points in early February. show chapters
  • Of course, much can change in the roughly eight months before the congressional elections. In addition, Republicans still have a favorable path to holding or adding to their 51 seats in the Senate, as several Democrats run for re-election in states Trump won in 2016. show chapters
malonema1

Dems working to flip GOP California seats - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...2018-midterm-elections

US politics culture

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • emocrats in California are targeting competitive Republican House seats they want to flip in the midterm elections. CNN's Miguel Marquez reports.
malonema1

New alarm among Republicans that Democrats could win big this year - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.html

US politics

shared by malonema1 on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A raft of retirements, difficulty recruiting candidates and President Trump’s continuing pattern of throwing his party off message have prompted new alarm among Republicans that they could be facing a Democratic electoral wave in November.
  • But the trends have continued, and perhaps worsened, since that briefing, with two more prominent Republican House members announcing plans to retire from vulnerable seats and a would-be recruit begging off a Senate challenge to Democrat Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota despite pressure from Trump to run.
  • In the Camp David presentation, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) described scenarios to the president ranging from a bloodbath where Republicans lost the House “and lost it big,” in the words of one official, to an outcome in which they keep control while losing some seats. McCarthy outlined trends over recent decades for parties in power and spotlighted vulnerable Republican seats where Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Eight years ago, before the 2010 midterms swept the GOP to power, he had drafted a similar presentation with the opposite message for his party. Republicans hold the advantage of a historically favorable electoral map, with more House seats than ever benefiting from Republican-friendly redistricting and a Senate landscape that puts 26 Democratic seats in play, including 10 states that Trump won in 2016, and only eight Republican seats.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • At least 29 House seats held by Republicans will be open in November following announced retirements, a greater number for the majority party than in each of the past three midterm elections when control of Congress flipped.
  • Who knows what 2018 will be like? Nobody called 2016, right?” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the second-ranking Republican in that chamber. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to get elected and that Chuck Schumer was going to be the majority leader. And none of that turned out to be true.”
  • In private conversations, Trump has told advisers that he doesn’t think the 2018 election has to be as bad as others are predicting. He has referenced the 2002 midterms, when George W. Bush and Republicans fared better after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, these people said.
  • Trump continually reminds advisers that he remains popular in a number of states, including West Virginia, Montana and North Dakota, according to aides. But slow fundraising and anemic candidate recruitment have caused tensions between the White House and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, White House advisers said. Still, two people with direct knowledge of that relationship said it has improved considerably in recent months. One person said “there is an active effort to professionalize the operation,” and “coordination has improved.”
  • White House officials said they expect a full plunge in upcoming weeks into a special House race in Pennsylvania, with trips from Trump, Vice President Pence and Cabinet members. The race has taken on a larger-than-life role in the White House because officials want to stem the tide of the losses they suffered last year in Virginia and Alabama.
  • But maintaining that message can be a challenge, as the president showed this week when his vulgar comments about some developing countries sparked international outrage. Dave Hansen, a political adviser to Love, the Utah congresswoman, said such conflicts are unavoidable during the Trump presidency. “It’s certainly not like running with Ronald Reagan, that’s for sure,” Hansen said. “What a candidate has to do in a situation like this is, you can’t be all in for the guy. Basically, you support him when you think he’s right and oppose him when you think he’s wrong.”
Javier E

The Quiet Significance of NeverTrump - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/iet-significance-of-nevertrump

gop politics

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • No one seems to trust their senses anymore. They’ve forgotten the very basics of campaigns.
  • Starting with this obvious point: Trump needs Republicans to win. Not just his MAGA-hat-wearing, self-avowed deplorables. He needs all of them. He needs GOP suit-and-tie Chamber of Commerce types, the suburban yoga moms, and the buttoned-up Sunday school teachers alike. Even those camped out in the farthest nooks and crannies of the most gerrymandered districts in the swingiest of swing states. Why? Because he’s never even entertained the concept of reaching out to Democratic and Independent voters.
  • The 2018 midterm elections showed us two important things: Trump’s historic disapproval rating is real and Democratic turnout in 2020 is going to be off the charts.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Remember, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a total of just under 80,000 votes in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump got a shade under 63 million votes in 2016, which means that if he loses one tenth of one percent of those people, his margin is gone.
  • Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign manager Jeff Roe told Republicans that the only way to survive the midterms was by staying on board with Trump. “[Y]ou are in the same boat as Mr. Trump, whether you like it or not,” he wrote. “If enough people jump ship, generic party identification will suffer, and everyone will sink. . . . The lesson for Republicans: Stay in the boat and keep rowing.”
  • While not many Republicans identify as “NeverTrump,” an important bloc vote like they are.
  • Despite Trump’s inevitable Senate acquittal, the fact that he’s the first impeached president in history to face re-election is likely to have some negative impact on the race
  • Democrats will run ads from sea to shining sea accusing the president of cheating to win elections. And, what a lucky label for them to hang on Trump, since “cheater” applies neatly to pretty much every aspect of his personal and professional life
  • 10 percent of Republicans think he should be removed from office. If 10 percent of Republicans are unhappy enough to rip him out of the Oval Office today, how many more would be content to send him packing in November?
  • In all these states there seems to be an analogous cohort of voters who probably don’t care about hashtags, but who are, functionally, Never Trump in their outlook. It would be an exaggeration to call them a silent majority. It’s better to understand them as the silent majority-makers.
aidenborst

Trump's clash with GOP over using his name in fundraising ignites midterm worries - CNN... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics US Trump crisis Culture gop

shared by aidenborst on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump's push to route his supporters' money through his own political apparatus, rather than traditional Republican campaign committees, has ignited fears among GOP donors and operatives that the former president could hamstring the party's efforts to win House and Senate majorities in next year's midterm elections.
  • Letters in recent days from Trump's lawyers to the Republican National Committee and the party's House and Senate campaign arms have warned against using Trump's name to raise money.
  • "No more money for RINOS," Trump said in a Monday evening statement. "They do nothing but hurt the Republican Party and our great voting base--they will never lead us to Greatness. Send your donation to Save America PAC at DonaldJTrump.com. We will bring it all back stronger than ever before!"
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • "I fully support the Republican Party and important GOP Committees, but I do not support RINOs and fools, and it is not their right to use my likeness or image to raise funds," Trump said in the statement.
  • "If you control the money, you control the party," Republican donor Dan Eberhart told CNN on Tuesday. "Trump has effectively stunted the RNC, NRCC and NRSC this cycle because they are going to have to spend an awful lot of time worrying about friendly fire from the MAGA crowd."
  • The RNC's chief counsel, J. Justin Reimer, told Trump's lawyers the RNC has "every right to refer to public figures" in its political speech and will "continue to do so."
  • "The MAGA endorsement is going to loom large this cycle for everyone. When Trump puts his finger on the scales, it may prove decisive in a lot of races," said Eberhart, who said he is considering a Senate run in Arizona. "There is going to be a lot of consternation when Trump backs a different candidate than the NRSC and the NRCC in primary races. Serious people are going to get burned."
  • Trump's lawyers also sent the same cease-and-desist request to the NRCC and the NRSC. A spokesman from the NRCC declined to comment and a spokeswoman from the NRSC did not respond to a request for comment.
  • "The desire is to have it both ways, where you get the former president's voters, not his baggage," said a GOP campaign strategist who requested anonymity to speak candidly about Republican incentives.
  • As a consequence, Trump's clash with party leaders "will have very little -- if any effect -- on major donors," she told CNN in an interview Tuesday.
  • "They are less concerned about a former president's agenda, or frankly, making him feel good," she added.
  • After losing the election last November, Trump amassed millions of dollars for his own political action committee as he promoted falsehoods about election fraud -- instead of plowing funds into twin US Senate races in Georgia. In the end, the Republicans lost the runoffs in early January, along with their majority in the chamber.
  • "He's all about himself. He's not about building or supporting the party."
yehbru

Covid relief bill: Biden's stimulus package is huge, ambitious and about to pass - CNNP... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US Politics Biden Trump Covid Pandemic Senate Congress House Stimulus Bill

shared by yehbru on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden plans to use the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill expected to pass Congress on Wednesday as a platform for a generational transformation of the economy to benefit the least well-off Americans and alleviate poverty.
  • according to a CNN poll released Tuesday, the relief bill is broadly popular, and Biden's approval rating tilts positive around 50 days after he took the oath of office.
  • Some economists, meanwhile, fear that it could trigger an inflationary spike in an economy that already appears to be in recovery and could overheat if there is a swift exit from the pandemic.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Early successes are crucial for presidents, since they must harness their power when it is at its apex early in their terms. Political muscle is built for later legislative fights by enacting priorities and uniting party factions behind a common cause. Presidents who struggle to get early priorities passed are not necessarily doomed. But they risk creating an impression of disarray that can hurt them in their first midterm elections, as was the case with President Bill Clinton's collapsed effort to overhaul American health care.
  • And progressives who were dismayed by the removal of a hike in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour elected to bank their gains, staying behind the effort and vowing to fight another day.
  • The President judged the $600 billion cost of an alternative package offered by 10 GOP senators as insufficient for the scale of the crisis. In votes so far in the House and the Senate, the bill has not attracted a single Republican supporter as Biden's opponents stake out early positions for the midterm elections on the basis of a pro-Trump base of activists who are keen to deny the new President an early victory.
  • Various polls show that more than 60% of the public supports it, which means some Republican and independent voters are on board.
  • With its tax credits for children and low-income workers, an extension of health insurance subsidies and nutrition and rental assistance, the American Rescue Plan is intended to do far more than simply stimulate the economy.
  • "It's a real tragedy when you look at that package. We know that the result of that package is going to be middle-class tax increases," the Wyoming Republican said.
  • The bill is sure to be a fulcrum of the Democratic midterm election campaign next year.
  • But if the current pace of vaccinations is maintained and the end game of the pandemic is not derailed by a wave of sickness and death caused by Covid-19 variants, Biden can expect a much faster and more robust economic rebound.
  • The bill is almost the inverse of Trump's sole major legislative triumph outside of a conservative refashioning of the judiciary: a massive tax cut that cost $1.5 trillion and was targeted mostly at corporations and more well-off Americans.
  • His initial $1.9 trillion request, not far off half the entire US annual federal budget, is playing into Republican claims that his administration will be rooted in out-of-control socialism.
  • The partisan nature of the votes on Biden's recovery package also has some Democrats pondering whether to seek to abolish filibuster rules that mean most major legislation needs a 60-vote majority to pass. The $1.9 trillion behemoth was advanced using a process known as reconciliation, which applies only to budget issues and can be used only sparingly.
  • But it seems equally certain that Democratic priorities like voting rights will die in a 50-50 Senate.
Javier E

Opinion | Two Cheers for the Biden Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-economy-midterms.html

biden economy policy crisis pandemic

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • It’s true that voters who cited inflation as their biggest concern tended to vote Republican — more than seven in 10, according to CNN’s exit poll. But if you think about it, that statistic raises problems of cause and effect. Did people concerned about inflation tend to vote Republican, or did people who were already going to vote Republican tend to identify inflation as their key issue? Probably some of both.
  • NBC News asked a somewhat different question: Which party do you trust more to handle inflation? Republicans were favored — but by only 52 percent to 44 percent, which strikes me as a surprisingly narrow margin, given the historical tendency of voters to blame the party holding the White House whenever bad things happen.
  • What were the political consequences of Bidenomics?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Given the election results, however, it seems that job growth may have been more of a positive for Democrats than the narrative suggested
  • If there had been no rescue plan and inflation were 6 percent instead of 8 percent, but gas and grocery prices had spiked anyway, would Democrats have been in a much stronger political position? Probably not. And if there were fewer jobs created by fiscal stimulus, Democrats might actually have done worse.
  • My point is that while the midterms showed that voters care about issues going beyond economics, they also suggested that harsh negative verdicts on Bidenomics were premature. Biden’s economy hasn’t been that bad, and it didn’t sink his party.
Javier E

The Midterms Message for Republicans - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672108

got 2022 crisis politics culture history

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • The historian Bernard Lewis once offered sage advice to any group that faces adverse circumstances: “The question, ‘Who did this to us?’ has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. The other question—‘What did we do wrong?’—has led naturally to a second question, ‘How do we put it right?’ In that question … lie[s] the best hope for the future.”
  • For the party of the president to do well in a midterm election is very rare: 2002, 1998, 1962, and 1934 are the exceptions over the past century or so. In all four of those exceptional years, the president’s party was buoyed by some affirmative factor: a rally around the flag after 9/11, the economic boom of the late 1990s, relief after the Cuban missile crisis, the beginnings of recovery from the Great Depression.
  • This year was one in which all the indicators seemed negative for the party of the president: right-track/wrong-track numbers, presidential approval ratings, and optimism about the future. Yet Biden’s party won and won and won again despite the negative indicators.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • it’s hard to miss the strong smell here of a thorough repudiation, up and down the ballot, of the post-Trump Republican Party, of the January 6 insurrectionists, and of a cultural agenda that seems to many Americans regressive and repressive.
Javier E

"Falsehood Flies, And Truth Comes Limping After It" - 0 views

morningshots.thebulwark.com/...-flies-and-truth-comes-limping

truth falsehood lies gop culture trump history swift politics

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • “I traced a throughline: from Sandy Hook to Pizzagate to QAnon to Charlottesville and the coronavirus myths to the election lie that brought violence to the Capitol on January 6th,” she told Vox earlier this year. “I started to understand how individuals, for reasons of ideology or social status, tribalism, or for profit, were willing to reject established truths, and how once they’d done that, it was incredibly difficult to persuade them otherwise.”
  • She describes the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, CT as “a foundational moment in the world of misinformation and disinformation that we now live in.”
  • the NYT’s Elizabeth Williamson about her book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, which was recently named one of the best books of 2022 by Publishers Weekly.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “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.
Javier E

A Blow Against the Malice Theory of American Politics - The Dispatch - 1 views

thedispatch.com/...ce-theory-of-american-politics

malice trump culture history US politics anger negative partisanship animosity

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Why were partisans so oblivious to the escalating tensions that were tearing America apart? Why were they so confident that the solution to American polarization was domination and not accommodation? 
  • The answer was clear. For decades, winners and losers alike spun virtually every American election as the sign of things to come, the harbinger of a permanent victory (or permanent defeat). You don’t even have to be that old to see the recent pattern. The thrill of Democratic victory in 1992 turned into the agony of defeat in 1994, then the thrill of victory again in 1996
  • Then Obama won in 2008. But for Republicans, that was an aberration—a fluke caused by the housing crash and an unpopular war. The real majority came to the polls in Tea Party 2010. But wait: Obama won again in 2012, and suddenly all the momentum was on the side of the “coalition of the ascendant.” Remember that phrase? It signaled permanent Republican doom—the alleged party of white people couldn’t possibly keep winning in a nation that was growing more diverse by the year, could it?
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Then came 2016. The overreading began once again. The old electoral college “blue wall” had become a “red wall,” and Trump had supposedly unlocked the key to lasting control. But, well, you know the rest.
  • Everyone keeps looking for the political Battle of Yorktown—that moment when your opponents lose once and for all and they march out slowly before you while the band plays “The World Turned Upside Down.”
  • Instead, in a closely-divided nation that’s characterized mainly by negative polarization and calcification, the better analogy is to trench warfare—grinding, bloody attrition, with gains often measured in yards rather than miles and true breakthroughs few and far between. 
  • Thus, the question after any given election isn’t so much, “Who is ascendant?” Rather, it’s “In which direction did the lines move?” 
  • often the more important cultural changes can be harder to discern
  • in this instance one of those more important changes was the blow to the malice theory of American politics. 
  • The malice theory is a core element of Trumpism, and it’s a natural temptation of negative polarization. Negative polarization (or negative partisanship), as I’ve written many times, is the term for politics that is fundamentally motivated by animosity for the other side more than affection to your own party’s leaders or ideas. 
  • Under the malice theory, the key to electoral victory is unlocking that anger. That means highlighting everything wrong with your opponents. That means hyping their alleged mortal threat to the Republic.
  • who should be kind to the “godless communist orcs” who are “trying to ruin this great country”? 
  • then persuasion is a waste of time. Defeating the enemy isn’t about persuading the enemy, but rather about mobilizing the righteous.
  • inspiring people is hard. Scaring them is easy—especially when the internet gives you constant access to the worst and weirdest voices on the other side. 
  • here’s where the malice theory collides with human nature. Most people aren’t content with simply thinking their opponents are terrible. They still want to see themselves as good. They want to see the world as “good versus evil,” not “lesser evil versus evil.” 
  • That’s why the argument that voters should always swallow deep moral objections to vote for the lesser evil are ultimately unsustainable
  • When confronted with relentless wrongdoing from your own partisans, one of two things happens—over time you’ll either redefine evil as good, or you’ll abandon evil for the good. 
  • The first response is core to much of the MAGA movement. It’s how someone goes from holding their nose and voting for Trump in 2016 to being the first bass boat in the boat parade in 2020. We all watched it happen.
  • The ultimate expression of this faction was represented by what’s been called the “Stop the Steal” slate of Republican candidates. These were the folks who were all-in, not just on Trump, but on some of the most transparently, incandescently absurd political conspiracies in modern American history. 
  • I don’t want to make the very mistake I identified at the start of this newsletter and overstate my case. Talk of a true MAGA “repudiation” is overblown
  • remember, the question isn’t whether anyone achieved ultimate victory or faced a final defeat. It’s in which direction the lines moved in our nation’s political trench warfare. And they most definitely moved back towards reason and our most basic moral norms. 
  • since politicians so often follow voters far more than they lead voters, it is ultimately up to us to demonstrate to them that the malice theory of American politics is truly a dead political end
  • The worst thing for American politics would be for the Trumpist narrative—that decency is for the weak—to prevai
  • If cruelty truly is the sole or best path to partisan victory, then the continued temptation to yield to our worst impulses would grow overwhelming. The temptation was already strong enough to distort and transform the political culture of the right simply based on Trump’s single, narrow win.
  • the opposite message seems to be true
  • Ever since Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the Trumpist GOP lost and kept losing. A movement that prioritized vicious political combat lost the House in the 2018 midterms, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, and has likely blown a virtually unlosable election in 2022, despite the fact that the country is struggling under the great weight of the worst crime and inflation in at least a generation.
  • It turns out that there’s some life left in decency yet. Even when times are hard, there are voters who are unwilling to call good evil and evil good
  • It turns out that it’s hard to escape the need to persuade and inspire, and that might be the best—and most important—consequence of a midterm election that gave neither party a mandate but reminded the Republicans that malice and lies can do far more political harm than good. 
fischerry

Effects of the French Revolution - AP World History 2012-2013 - 0 views

apworldhistory2012-2013.weebly.com/-of-the-french-revolution.html

french revolution history effects

shared by fischerry on 12 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Effects of the French Revolution
  • fischerry on 12 Dec 16
     
    This cite gives an overview of the effects of the French Revolution, it might help to jog your memory for the midterm.
Javier E

Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-clintonismare-the-future.html

politics US parties coalition Democratic party gop clinton reagan

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The presidential election of 1968 was a milestone in partisan realignment — the breakup of the mid-20th-century Democrats and Republicans and the reshuffling of voter blocs among the two parties
  • In 2016, this half-century process of partisan realignment is all but complete. What we are seeing instead of partisan realignment is policy realignment — the adjustment of what each party stands for to its existing voter base.
  • For a while, the strength of the religious right allowed elite Republicans to trade tax cuts for the rich for support for banning abortion and gay marriage. But as religious conservatism declines, a kind of European-style national populism is rising, for which protectionism and immigration restriction are central issues, not peripheral concerns.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Although he benefited from the support of working-class whites who resented affirmative action, busing, mass immigration, sexual liberation and cultural liberalism, Reagan himself was animated by an optimistic individualism that had more in common with Chamber of Commerce boosterism than it did with the defensive and combative communitarianism of conservative populism.
  • in the midterm election of 1994, when the Republican party captured both houses of Congress, many centrist and conservative Democrats, particularly in the South and West, were replaced by Republicans. The Democrats who survived the slaughter were concentrated in New England and the West Coast, big cities and college towns, and majority black or majority Latino districts. The midterm elections of 2010 wiped out much of the remnant of centrist-to-conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats in the House.
  • Today’s Democratic base is, to simplify somewhat, an alliance of Northern, Midwestern and West Coast whites from the old Rockefeller Republican tradition with blacks and Latinos.
  • For their part, the Republicans of 2016 rely for their votes on the Southern white and Northern white working-class constituencies that were once the mainstays of the other party. With this partisan realignment over, the policy realignment has begun — the closing of the gap between the inherited program of a political party and the values and interests of its present-day voters.
  • In the Republican Party, the inherited program shared by much of the conservative movement and the party’s donors, with its emphasis on free trade and large-scale immigration, and cuts in entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, is a relic of the late 20th century, when the country-club wing of the party was much more important than the country-and-western wing.
  • We are accustomed to thinking of the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 as the beginning of a new era. But from the vantage point of 2016, both Reagan and Bill Clinton look more like transitional figures. During this period, the migration from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party of socially conservative, economically populist Democrats, like the supporters of the segregationist Democrat George Wallace’s independent presidential campaign in 1968, was not yet complete. Neither was the flow of moderate Rockefeller Republicans in the opposite direction.
  • Long before Mr. Trump threw his hat into the ring in 2015, the economic libertarians who are overrepresented in the donor class and Republican think tanks and magazines were losing to the populists. Opposition to illegal immigration went from being a fringe issue associated with Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s to a central test of whether one was a “true conservative” or a Republican in Name Only.
  • Mr. Trump exposed the gap between what orthodox conservative Republicans offer and what today’s dominant Republican voters actually want — middle-class entitlements plus crackdowns on illegal immigrants, Muslims, foreign trade rivals and free-riding allies
  • notwithstanding the enthusiasm of the young for Bernie Sanders, the major tension is not between Mr. Sanders and Hillary Clinton. It is between Hillary Clinton and the legacy of Bill Clinton.
  • the success of the Democrats in winning the popular vote for the presidency in every election since 1992 except 2004 has convinced most Democratic strategists that they don’t need socially conservative, economically liberal Reagan or Wallace Democrats any more. Many Democrats hope that the long-term growth of the Obama coalition, caused chiefly by the growth of the Latino share of the electorate, will create an all but inevitable Democratic majority in the executive branch
  • The Clintonian synthesis of pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism no longer needs to be diluted, as it was in the 1990s, by opportunistic appeals to working-class white voters.
  • on the social and racial issues that are important to today’s Democratic base, it is Mr. Sanders, not Mrs. Clinton, who has had to modify his message. At the beginning of his campaign, Mr. Sanders the democratic socialist focused in the manner of a single issue candidate almost exclusively on themes of class, inequality and political corruption. But because he is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, he has had to put greater emphasis on other issues, including racial disparity in policing and sentencing and the environment and immigration.
  • For all of these reasons, it is likely that the future of the Democrats will be Clintonism — Hillary Clintonism, that is, a slightly more progressive version of neoliberalism freed of the strategic concessions to white working-class voters associated with Bill Clintonism.
Javier E

Why the Tea Party Isn't Going Anywhere - Theda Skocpol - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...282591

republicans tea party

shared by Javier E on 28 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Here is the key point: Even though there is no one center of Tea Party authority—indeed, in some ways because there is no one organized center—the entire gaggle of grassroots and elite organizations amounts to a pincer operation that wields money and primary votes to exert powerful pressure on Republican officeholders and candidates.
  • Tea Party influence does not depend on general popularity at all. Even as most Americans have figured out that they do not like the Tea Party or its methods, Tea Party clout has grown in Washington and state capitals. Most legislators and candidates are Nervous Nellies, so all Tea Party activists, sympathizers, and funders have had to do is recurrently demonstrate their ability to knock off seemingly unchallengeable Republicans (ranging from Charlie Crist in Florida to Bob Bennett of Utah to Indiana’s Richard Lugar). That grabs legislators’ attention and results in either enthusiastic support for, or acquiescence to, obstructive tactics
  • footholds gained are not easily lost. Once solid blocs of Tea Party supporters or compliant legislators are ensconced in office, outside figures like Dick Armey of FreedomWorks (in 2011) and Jim DeMint of Heritage Action (in 2013) appoint themselves de facto orchestrators, taking control away from elected GOP leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Americans may resent the Tea Party, but they are also losing ever more faith in the federal government—a big win for anti-government saboteurs. Popularity and “responsible governance” are not the goals of Tea Party forces, and such standards should not be used to judge the accomplishments of those who aim to undercut, block, and delay—even as Tea Party funders remain hopeful about holding their own or making further gains in another low-turnout midterm election in November 2014.
  • Anyone concerned about the damage Tea Party forces are inflicting on American politics needs to draw several hard-headed conclusions.
  • Democrats need to get over thinking that opinion polls and media columns add up to real political gains. Once the October 2013 shutdown ended in supposed total victory for President Obama and his party, many Democrats adopted a cocky swagger and started talking about ousting the House GOP in 2014. But a clear-eyed look shows that Tea Party obstruction remains powerful and has achieved victories that continue to stymie Democratic efforts to govern effectively—a necessary condition for Democrats to win enthusiastic, sustained voter support for the future, including in midterm elections
  • Also worth remembering is that “moderate Republicans” barely exist right now. Close to two-thirds of House Republicans voted against bipartisan efforts to reopen the federal government and prevent U.S. default on loan obligations, and Boehner has never repudiated such extortionist tactics
  • Cruz may very well enjoy unified and enthusiastic grassroots Tea Party support from the beginning of the primary election season. In the past, less extreme GOP candidates have always managed to garner the presidential nomination, but maybe not this time. And even if a less extreme candidate finally squeaks through, Cruz will set much of the agenda for Republicans heading into 2016.
  • at least three successive national election defeats will be necessary to even begin to break the determination and leverage of Tea Party adherents. Grassroots Tea Partiers see themselves in a last-ditch effort to save “their country,” and big-money ideologues are determined to undercut Democrats and sabotage active government
  • Our debates about federal budgets still revolve around degrees of imposed austerity. Government shutdowns and repeated partisan-induced “crises” have greatly undercut U.S. economic growth and cost up to a year’s worth of added jobs. Real national challenges—fighting global warming, improving education, redressing extreme economic inequalities, rebuilding and improving economic infrastructure—go unaddressed as extreme GOP obstructive capacities remain potent in Washington and many state capitals.
  • Unless non-Tea Party Republicans, independents, and Democrats learn both to defeat and to work around anti-government extremism—finding ways to do positive things for the majority of ordinary citizens along the way—Tea Party forces will still win in the end. They will triumph just by hanging on long enough to cause most Americans to give up in disgust on our blatantly manipulated democracy and our permanently hobbled government.
1 - 20 of 173 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page