Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged partisan

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

The Republicans least committed to democratic principles are those most worried about W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...st-worried-about-white-america

white supremacy anti-democratic authoritarian survey attitudes GOP politics culture

shared by Javier E on 02 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • There are certain elements that are central to the American democratic experiment. Rule of law. Equal opportunity. A government determined by free, open, democratic elections. These values are at times strained — or intentionally constrained — but they are precepts that are central to the way in which the country governs itself.
  • They are also ideas that Americans seem increasingly willing to abandon. That’s particularly true among one subset of the population: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who hold views centered on concern about the growing non-White minority.
  • Research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences articulates the link between what author Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University describes as “ethnic antagonism” and views that run contrary to core democratic principles.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Bartels’s research involved asking respondents whether they agreed with each of four statements:
  • “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it."
  • “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”
  • “Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done."
  • “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.”
  • Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed with the first statement, that it might be necessary to use force to save the “traditional American way of life.”
  • Now, Trump and Fox News remind them, implicitly or explicitly, on an almost-daily basis.
  • Respondents were significantly more likely to say they agreed with the other two statements than that they disagreed.
  • Bartels was interested in determining what factors overlapped with support for those statements. A number of basic demographic factors — education, amount of interest in politics, region — didn’t yield any significant differences.
  • Positions like thinking that Black Americans or immigrants get more than their share of government resources or seeing discrimination against Whites as a problem matching discrimination against Blacks were categorized as contributing to a respondent’s “ethnic antagonism” value. And the higher that value registered, the more likely respondents were to agree with the anti-democratic statements.
  • Bartels described anti-democratic sentiment in the Republican Party as “grounded” in this sort of skepticism about or hostility to non-White Americans.
  • “Even in analyses including elaborate measures of partisan attitudes, views of President Trump, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, and political cynicism," he wrote, “ethnic antagonism stands out remarkably clearly as the most powerful factor associated with willingness to resort to force in pursuit of political ends and support for ‘patriotic Americans’ taking the law into their own hands and ‘strong leaders’ bending rules.”
  • “One of the most politically salient features of the contemporary United States is the looming demographic transition from a majority-White to a ‘majority-minority’ country,”
  • Several years ago, reminding White Americans of that prospect significantly altered their political attitudes.
  • Nearly three-quarters agreed that election results should be treated with skepticism, given the amount of “handouts” people receive
  • “It’s impossible to say whether or how those sentiments might translate into anti-democratic behavior,” he wrote to The Post, “but they certainly provide a troubling reservoir of potential public support for ugly behavior by extremists and would-be authoritarians.”
Javier E

Opinion | What Will You Do if Trump Doesn't Leave? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-election-2020.html

election fraud trump authoritarian crisis results 2020

shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • “Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency,” he wrote, “man faces the ever-present possibility of a swift relapse not merely to animalism, but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice.”
  • If Trump claims a victory that is not rightly his, a few marches in the streets will not be an adequate response. There may have to be a sustained campaign of civic action, as in Hong Kong and Belarus, to rally the majority that wants to preserve democracy, that isolates those who would undo it.
  • Two themes would have to feature in such civic action. The first is ardent patriotism. The country survives such a crisis only if most people’s love of nation overwhelms the partisan fury that will threaten to envelop us.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The second is the preservation of constitutional order. Through epic acts of self-discipline, the nonviolent civil rights marchers in the 1960s forced their foes to reveal that if there were to be any violence and anarchy, it would come from the foes. That’s how the movement captured the moral high ground and won the mind of the nation.
  • The process of mobilizing for an accurate election outcome, before it is too late, would be a struggle to preserve the order of our civic structure against the myriad foes who talk blithely about tearing down systems, disorder and disruption. It may be how we rediscover our nation again.
  • It’s time to start thinking about what you would do.
Javier E

Michael Sandel: 'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit' ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...t-against-the-tyranny-of-merit

meritocracy merit individualism inequality resentment working class culture crisis politics economics

shared by Javier E on 07 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • But as an age of violently polarised, partisan and poisonous politics has taken hold, it is that early encounter with Reagan that has begun to play on his mind. “It taught me a lot about the importance of the ability to listen attentively,” he says, “which matters as much as the rigours of the argument. It taught me about mutual respect and inclusion in the public square.”
  • As American commentators warn of an “Armageddon” election in a divided country, how can a less resentful, less rancorous, more generous public life be revived?
  • The starting point, uncomfortably, turns out to be a bonfire of the vanities that sustained a generation of progressives.
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • The Tyranny of Merit is Sandel’s response to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump
  • By championing an “age of merit” as the solution to the challenges of globalisation, inequality and deindustrialisation, the Democratic party and its European equivalents, Sandel argues, hung the western working-class and its values out to dry – with disastrous consequences for the common good.
  • Sandel charts the rise of what he sees as a corrosive leftwing individualism: “The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality – and we heard this on both sides of the Atlantic – was that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their effort and talents will take them
  • It became an article of faith, a seemingly uncontroversial trope
  • We will make a truly level playing field, it was said by the centre-left, so that everyone has an equal chance. And if we do, and so far as we do, then those who rise by dint of effort, talent, hard work will deserve their place, will have earned it.”
  • The recommended way to “rise” has been to get a higher education. Or, as the Blair mantra had it: “Education, education, education.
  • For those willing to make the requisite effort, there was the promise that: “This country will always be a place where you can make it if you try.”
  • First, and most obvious, the fabled “level playing field” remains a chimera. Although he says more and more of his own Harvard students are now convinced that their success is a result of their own effort, two-thirds of them come from the top fifth of the income scale.
  • social mobility has been stalled for decades. “Americans born to poor parents tend to stay poor as adults.”
  • Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing. “The book tries to show that there is a dark side, a demoralising side to that,” he says. “The implication is that those who do not rise will have no one to blame but themselves.
  • Centre-left elites abandoned old class loyalties and took on a new role as moralising life-coaches, dedicated to helping working-class individuals shape up to a world in which they were on their own.
  • “On globalisation,” says Sandel, “these parties said the choice was no longer between left and right, but between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open meant free flow of capital, goods and people across borders.” Not only was this state of affairs seen as irreversible, it was also presented as laudable. “To object in any way to that was to be closed-minded, prejudiced and hostile to cosmopolitan identities.”
  • A relentless success ethic permeated the culture: “Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively.
  • As centre-left parties and their representatives became more and more middle-class, the focus on upward mobility intensified. “They became reliant on the professional classes as their constituency, and in the US as a source of campaign finance.
  • Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure
  • Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”
  • Does he empathise, then, with Trumpism?
  • my book conveys a sympathetic understanding of the people who voted for him. For all the thousands and thousands of lies Trump tells, the one authentic thing about him is his deep sense of insecurity and resentment against elites
  • Am I tough on the Democrats? Yes, because it was their uncritical embrace of market assumptions and meritocracy that prepared the way for Trump.
  • the Democratic party will not succeed unless it redefines its mission to be more attentive to legitimate grievances and resentment, to which progressive politics contributed during the era of globalisation.”
  • The only way out of the crisis, Sandel believes, is to dismantle the meritocratic assumptions that have morally rubber-stamped a society of winners and losers
  • “This is a moment to begin a debate about the dignity of work; about the rewards of work both in terms of pay but also in terms of esteem.
  • There must be a radical re-evaluation of how contributions to the common good are judged and rewarded.
  • The money to be earned in the City or on Wall Street, for example, is out of all proportion with the contribution of speculative finance to the real economy. A financial transactions tax would allow funds to be channelled more equably.
  • the word “honour” is as important as the question of pay. There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree.
  • “We need to rethink the role of universities as arbiters of opportunity,” he says, “which is something we have come to take for granted. Credentialism has become the last acceptable prejudice
  • Greater investment is important not only to support the ability of people without an advanced degree to make a living. The public recognition it conveys can help shift attitudes towards a better appreciation of the contribution to the common good made by people who haven’t been to university.”
  • A new respect and status for the non-credentialed, he says, should be accompanied by a belated humility on the part of the winners in the supposedly meritocratic race
  • To those who, like many of his Harvard students, believe that they are simply the deserving recipients of their own success, Sandel offers the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift
  • “Humility is a civic virtue essential to this moment,” he says, “because it’s a necessary antidote to the meritocratic hubris that has driven us apart.”
  • The Tyranny of Merit is the latest salvo in Sandel’s lifelong intellectual struggle against a creeping individualism that, since the Reagan and Thatcher era, has become pervasive in western democracies
  • “To regard oneself as self-made and self-sufficient. This picture of the self exerts a powerful attraction because it seems on the face of it to be empowering – we can make it on our own, we can make it if we try.
  • It’s a certain picture of freedom but it’s flawed. It leads to a competitive market meritocracy that deepens divides and corrodes solidarity.”
  • Sandel draws on a vocabulary that challenges liberal notions of autonomy in a way that has been unfashionable for decades. Words such as “dependency”, “indebtedness”, “mystery”, “humility” and “luck” recur in his book.
  • vulnerability and mutual recognition can become the basis of a renewed sense of belonging and community. It is a vision of society that is the very opposite of what came to be known as Thatcherism, with its emphasis on self-reliance as a principal virtue.
  • There are, he believes, optimistic sign
  • “The Black Lives Matter movement has given moral energy to progressive politics. It has become a multiracial, multigenerational movement and is opening up space for a public reckoning with injustice. It shows that the remedy for inequality is not simply to remove barriers to meritocratic achievement.”
  • “The moral of Henry Aaron’s story is not that we should love meritocracy but that we should despise a system of racial injustice that can only be escaped by hitting home runs.”
  • “Tawney argued that equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic ‘equality of condition’ that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture.
Javier E

Trump's GOP is Increasingly Racist and Authoritarian-and Here to Stay - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/authoritarian-and-here-to-stay

trump gop analysis 2020 election trumpism

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • he inflicted on us a presidency which was ignorant, cruel, reckless, lawless, divisive, and disloyal.
  • Mendacity and bigotry became the mode of communication between America’s president and his party’s base.
  • Not only did he worsen a deadly pandemic—by immersing an angry and alienated minority in his alternate reality, he is sickening our future.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • He rose from a political party bent on thwarting demographic change by subverting the democratic process; a party whose base was addicted to white identity politics, steeped in religious fundamentalism, and suffused with authoritarian cravings—a party which, infected by Trumpism, now spreads the multiple malignancies metastasized by Trump’s personal and political pathologies.
  • Since the civil rights revolution triggered an influx of resentful Southern whites, the GOP has catered to white grievance and anxiety.
  • Trump’s transformative contribution has been to make racial antagonism overt—a badge of pride that bonds him to his followers in opposition to a pluralist democracy that threatens their imperiled social and political hegemony.
  • Take the poll released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) measuring the attitudes of “Fox News Republicans”—the 40 percent of party adherents who trust Fox as their primary source of TV news. The survey found that 91 percent oppose the Black Lives Matter movement; 90 percent believe that police killings of blacks are “isolated incidents”; and 58 think that whites are victimized by racial discrimination, compared to 36 percent who think blacks are.
  • He comprehends his audience all too well
  • Their animus toward immigration is equally strong. Substantial majorities believe that immigrants consume a disproportionate amount of governmental services, increase crime in local communities, and threaten our cultural and ethnic character.
  • In 2016, Vox reports, Trump carried whites by 54 to 39 percent; in 2020, by 57 to 42 percent (per the raw exit polls)
  • Another key subgroup of the GOP base, white evangelicals, harbors similar attitudes. The poll found that the majority adamantly disbelieve that the legacy of racial discrimination makes it difficult for African Americans to succeed
  • The head of the PRRI, Robert P. Jones, concludes that Trump arouses white Christians “not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy” based on evoking “powerful fears about the loss of White Christian dominance.”
  • That sense of racial and cultural besiegement pervades the 73 percent of Fox News Republicans who, the survey found, believe that white Christians suffer from “a lot” of societal discrimination—more than double the number who say that blacks do
  • Tucker Carlson serves as a cautionary tale. When Carlson dismissed, as gently as possible, the crackpot allegations of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell about a sweeping conspiracy using rogue voting machines, he was savaged across the right-wing echo chamber as a spineless quisling. Lesson learned.
  • fear of displacement helps explain the profound emotional connection between Trump and Republican voters. Their loyalty is not to the political philosophy traditionally embraced by the GOP, but a visceral sense of racial, religious, and cultural identity—and the need to preserve it—which is instinctively authoritarian and anti-democratic.
  • Bartels surveyed respondents regarding four statements which, taken together, read like a blueprint for Trump: The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it. A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands. Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done. It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.
  • Support for Trump’s wall is nearly unanimous (96 percent); two-thirds (66 percent) favor barring refugees from entering the United States; and a majority (53 percent) support separating children from their parents when a family enters the country without permission.
  • This lies at the heart of Trump’s appeal: his shared sense of victimization by an insidious elite; his unvarnished denunciation of white America’s supposed enemies; and his promise to keep them at bay—if necessary, by force. For many in the Republican base, he fulfills a psychic longing for an American strongman.
  • In the New York Times, Katherine Stewart describes the growth of “a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world.”
  • “Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders.”
  • As Republican strategists well appreciate, a party whose appeal is confined to conservative whites is, over the demographic long term, doomed to defeat. The GOP’s design is to postpone as long as possible their electoral day of reckoning.
  • In launching his naked attempt to disenfranchise the majority of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin through assertions of fraud unprecedented in their speciousness and scope, Trump took the GOP’s distaste for free and fair elections to its logical conclusion: the abrogation of American democracy at the highest level.
  • Trump justified his anti-democratic sociopathy by proliferating a plethora of groundless and preposterous falsehoods calculated to delegitimize our electoral processes. He claimed that millions of phony mail-in ballots had been cast for Biden; that voting machines had been re-engineered to exclude millions more cast for him; and that Republican election observers had been excluded from many polling places by a host of local officials bent on serving a labyrinthine conspiracy to purloin the White House.
  • Never once did he or his lawyers cite a shred of evidence supporting any material impropriety. Rather his purpose was to convince the Republican base that they were being cheated of their leader by the insidious “other.” Numerous polls confirm that it’s working; typical is a Politico/Morning Consult survey showing that 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the election was fairly conducted.
  • As Trevor Potter, a Republican who formerly headed the Federal Election Commission, told the New York Times, Trump “is creating a road map to destabilization and chaos in future years. . . . What he’s saying, explicitly, is if a party doesn’t like the election result they have the right to change it by gaming the system.”
  • Reports Bump: “Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed with the first statement. . . . Nearly three-quarters agreed that election results should be treated with skepticism.” Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were also “significantly more likely to say they agreed with the other two statements than that they disagreed.”
  • Ultimately, this otherworldly obduracy stems from Trump’s manifest psychological illness: his imperishable narcissism; his ineradicable drive to be noticed; his relentless need to dominate; his comprehensive carelessness of all considerations save what pleases him in the moment. Television turned this moral pygmy into a mythic figure—and he cannot let go.
  • Republican elites want very much to turn the page on Donald Trump following his loss. But . . . they do not have any say in the matter, because their party now belongs to him. And the party belongs to Donald Trump because he has delivered to Republican voters exactly what they want.
  • a notable phenomenon of Trump’s presidency is the degree to which financially embattled working-class whites imagined, contrary to observable reality, that their economic situation had improved—or soon would. There are few better examples of how politics mirrors psychology more than lived experience.
  • This fidelity is why some Republican gurus remain committed to Trump’s strategy of maximizing support among middle-class and blue-collar whites. After all, they argue, despite Trump’s defeat the GOP did better than expected in senatorial and congressional races. Why risk tinkering with his formula?
  • Finally, economic populism is antithetical to the donor classes who, in truth, did better under Trump than did anyone else. They got their tax cuts and their judges—the GOP’s pipeline for judicial nominees, the Federalist Society, is dedicated to advancing pro-corporate jurisprudence. This is not the prescription for worker-friendly policies.
  • For the foreseeable future, Trumpism will define the GOP. The path to regeneration runs not through reform but, one fears, must proceed from self-destruction. The wait time will be painful for the party, and fateful for the country.
delgadool

Most Republicans Say They Doubt the Election. How Many Really Mean It? - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-voters-election-doubts.html

election

shared by delgadool on 30 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • surveys have consistently found that about 70 percent to 80 percent of Republicans don’t buy the results. They don’t agree that Joe Biden won fair and square. They say the election was rigged. And they say enough fraud occurred to tip the outcome.
  • Research has shown that the answers that partisans (on the left as well as on the right) give to political questions often reflect not what they know as fact, but what they wish were true.
  • She suggested, however, that these results be taken with something between alarm and skepticism.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Those results, which mirror past elections, suggest many Republicans knew Mr. Biden would become president. But they don’t tell us much about whether Republicans believe he won fairly.
  • 87 percent of Republicans accurately said that news media decision desks had declared Mr. Biden the winner of the election. That rules out the possibility that many Republicans simply aren’t aware of that fact.
  • Democratic faith in the 2016 election jumped 22 percentage points. It jumped 11 points for the 2000 election.
Javier E

Opinion | The destructive myth about divided government - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html

bipartisan government myth

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • voters must understand that as long as Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is the Senate majority leader and the base of the Republican Party is dominated by the far right — including “Stop the Steal” Trumpists — a divided government is not a recipe for compromise. Instead, it’s a ticket to obstruction and the very sort of partisan brawling that moderate voters can’t stand.
  • The belief that divided government guarantees moderate outcomes might once have been true when there was a solid moderate bloc in the Republican Party. But it should now be clear that it’s a destructive myth.
  • Since Barack Obama’s presidency, the GOP’s leadership has been committed to preventing a Democratic president from governing successfully — even when that president is willing and eager to compromise.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • in 2009, during the steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, that all but three Republican senators (two of whom are now gone) refused to support a desperately needed stimulus package. And to get their support to reach the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, Obama had to cut spending well below what the economy needed. In the House, all the yes votes came from Democrats.
  • Both McConnell and then-House Republican leader John Boehner, he writes, realized that if “they fought a rearguard action, if they generated controversy and threw sand in the gears, they at least had a chance to energize their base and slow me and the Democrats down at a time when the country was sure to be impatient.”
  • they can assure moderate voters that radicalism won’t be on the table since progressives would have to negotiate with middle-of-the-roaders such as Manchin, Warner and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to get anything passed. But unlike McConnell, all three members of this moderate trio want to get things done — and want the new president to succeed.
rerobinson03

Opinion | How Betsy DeVos Has Influenced Education Policy's Future - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...betsy-devos-education.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 01 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • hough Ms. DeVos has been mostly stymied, both by Trumpism’s policy indifference and progressive opposition, her legacy will still be far-reaching and long-lasting. This is not a result of what she made, but of what she broke:
  • Yet Ms. DeVos has also elevated the education policy agenda of the far right, giving voice and legitimacy to a campaign to fundamentally dismantle public education. That campaign, pursued for the past few decades only in deep-red
  • states, and often perceived as belonging to the libertarian fringe, has become the de facto agenda of the Republican Party.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • More than three decades ago, conventional Republicans and centrist Democrats signed on to an unwritten treaty. Conservatives agreed to mute their push for private school vouchers, their preference for religious schools and their desire to slash spending on public school systems. In return, Democrats effectively gave up the push for school integration and embraced policies that reined in teachers unions.
  • Curiously, the only time during her tenure that she prominently supported standardized testing was during the pandemic — a move seemingly intended to make public schools, which would obviously struggle to manage the task, look bad.
  • $5 billion annual tax credit for private school tuition, Ms. DeVos and her allies have made tremendous inroads at the state level.
  • And this past summer, the Supreme Court in Espinoza v. Montana declared that states could not bar religious schools from participating in state programs that provide scholarships to students attending private schools, clearing the way for further private expansion.
  • To capitalize on voter dissatisfaction with education policies in the coming years, Democrats can no longer lean on maligning Ms. DeVos.
  • And while Mr. Biden’s expansive (and expensive) education plans will confront the harsh reality of partisan division in Congress, he is guaranteed a powerful megaphone — one that he’ll share, not just with the next secretary of education, but with a former high-school teacher and current community-college professor, Jill Biden.
Javier E

Opinion | The Deep State Is on a Roll - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-fauci-deep-state.html

deep state bureaucracy US

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • “Deep state” isn’t the right term — its overtone is too clandestine, its undertone too nefarious — but let’s go with it, co-opt it, turn a put-down into a point of honor, the way gay rights activists did with “queer” and anti-Trump feminists did with “nasty woman.”
  • Let’s define it ourselves, not as a swampy society of self-preserving bureaucrats in Washington but as a steadfast, tradition-minded legion of public officials and civil servants all over the country, in every branch of government.
  • These officials and servants are distinguished by a professionalism that survives and edges out their partisan bearings, by an understanding that the codes of conduct and rules of engagement become more important, not less, when passions run hot. They’re incorrigible that way. Invaluable, too.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “Thank God for the deep state,” John McLaughlin, a former deputy and acting director of the C.I.A.
  • Anthony Fauci is the steely superhero of my deep state, and he’s flanked and fortified by all the government health officials who also pushed back against the quackery of Scott Atlas, the Trump-flattering pandemic adviser who resigned on Monday.
Javier E

Yes, 'elites' support covid restrictions. So do working-class Americans. - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...trictions-working-class-divide

class response pandemic demographics

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Peggy Noonan made a similar argument in May, during the pandemic’s first wave. She wrote: “There is a class divide between those who are hard-line on lockdowns and those who are pushing back. We see the professionals on one side … and regular people on the other.”
  • The Washington Post recently noted: “In the middle of a pandemic in which Democrats have been more willing to push stay-at-home orders and other mitigation measures, Republicans have accused them of seeing the world through the eyes of a privileged class of workers able to conduct their work from home.”
  • Surveys — whether conducted recently or earlier in the pandemic — don’t show the class divide that some pundits believe is self-evident. Compared with previous Republican candidates, Trump did well among working-class voters and poorly among middle-class voters, prompting attempts to identify issues that might explain this pattern
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • some observers are imagining class differences where they do not exist, or exaggerating small differences.
  • , two recent surveys sponsored by Fox News contain a good measure of general attitudes about the issue: “Which of the following do you think should be the federal government’s priority: limiting the spread of coronavirus, even if it hurts the economy, or restarting the economy, even if it increases the risk to public health?
  • The first survey was conducted Oct. 3-6, when the recent surge in cases was beginning; the second was conducted Oct. 27-29, when it was well advanced.
  • In the first survey, 36 percent of White voters with a college degree — and 37 percent of Whites without one — thought that restarting the economy should be the priority. In the second survey, 43 percent of White college graduates — and 38 percent without a degree — took that position.
  • the class differences in both surveys were within the margin of error — they could easily be due to chance — so the safest conclusion is that there is no compelling evidence of a class-based divergence of opinion.
  • an NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll conducted Aug. 3-11 did. It asked about seven kinds of restrictions: keeping students out of school; closing workplaces; preventing large groups from attending religious, social and sporting events; ending organized youth sports; banning indoor dining at restaurants; banning outdoor dining; and mandating mask use nationally
  • Support among all groups for restrictions ranged from 17 percent (the proportion who thought outside dining was a bad idea) to 74 percent (in favor of a mask mandate)
  • On six of the seven questions — all except allowing outside dining — people with a college degree were more likely to favor restrictions, but the differences were very small: 42 percent of people without a college degree thought it was a good idea for students to return to school, for example, compared with 37 percent of people with a degree.
  • several other demographic characteristics were more closely correlated with attitudes about restrictions than was class
  • Women were significantly more likely than men to support restrictions, as were people from urban areas.
  • Forty-nine percent of non-Hispanic Whites but only 21 percent of African Americans thought that it was a good idea to have restaurants open for indoor dining
  • Democrats support restrictions more than Republicans do, and Black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic. But it’s not simply a partisan issue: Even among Democrats, Black support for the restrictions stood out.
  • contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is not a consistent class difference in views on coronavirus-related restrictions.
cartergramiak

Opinion | Republicans Can't Handle the Truth - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republicans-election-lost.html

history US politics gop

shared by cartergramiak on 08 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump’s continuing attempts to overturn an election he lost decisively more than a month ago is, like so much of what he’s done in office, shocking but not surprising.
  • According to a survey by The Washington Post, only 27 Republican members of Congress are willing to say that Joe Biden won. Despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud, two-thirds of self-identified Republicans said in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that the election was rigged.
  • Most obviously, Republican refusal to accept the election results follows months of refusal to acknowledge the dangers of the coronavirus, even as Covid-19 has become the nation’s leading cause of death, and even as a startling number of people in Trump’s orbit have been infected.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • As far as I can tell, however, no prominent Republican was willing to admit that the party’s apocalyptic warnings had been proved false, let alone talk about why they were wrong. Nor, of course, did Republicans make any effort to come up with a better health plan. (It has been almost 11 years since Obamacare was signed into law, and we’re still waiting.) Instead, party leaders simply pretended that the promised catastrophe had, in fact, materialized.
  • The thing is, Republican rejection of reality didn’t start in 2020, or even with the Trump era. Climate change denial — including claims that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by an international cabal of scientists — has been a badge of partisan identity for many years. Crazy conspiracy theories about the Clintons were mainstream on the right through much of the 1990s.Gift Subscriptions to The Times, Cooking and Games. Starting at $25.And one half-forgotten episode in particular seems to me to have foreshadowed much of what we’re seeing right now: Republican reactions to the mostly successful introduction of Obamacare.
  • And the G.O.P.’s previous history of dealing with inconvenient reality gives us a pretty good idea about when the party will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — namely, never.
Javier E

Why So Many Men Stuck With Trump In 2020 | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...y-men-stuck-with-trump-in-2020

politics culture sexism masculinity support

shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • the COVID-19 pandemic may have played a large role in exacerbating gender divisions in the electorate. This split wasn’t enough for Trump to win this time, of course, but his attitude toward the coronavirus crisis may actually have been a bonus for some men, which could present a real challenge for Biden moving forward.
  • Overall, most Americans consistently disapproved of the way Trump handled the pandemic, but the AEI poll found one notable exception — men who identify as “completely masculine.”1
  • a majority (52 percent) of men who identified as completely masculine on the survey agreed that the Trump administration has a strategy on COVID-19
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • When broken out by how masculine or feminine they identified themselves, completely masculine men were the only group where the majority (60 percent) said they had voted for Trump.
  • research conducted before the election found that these men, or men who fall into a similar category, were less likely to wear masks in the first place or take other precautions to stop the spread of COVID-19, including social distancing.
  • this conclusion lines up with a broader tendency among men to take fewer health precautions period — like wearing seat belts or going to the doctor regularly. Cassino said that traditional stereotypes around masculinity encourage men to shake off vulnerability, such as hiding a fear of illness and instead projecting strength
  • . “Reaffirming that you are traditionally masculine is itself a political statement today — a way to push back on changes to the way society is organized,” he said.
  • this reflects the extent to which Americans’ views about gender roles have become intertwined with their partisan identity,
  • “COVID-19 makes men focus more on their masculine identity than they otherwise would have, because they feel this pressure to say and demonstrate, ‘Yeah, this big scary medical crisis is happening, but it’s not going to affect me,’” Cassino said.
  • Republican men who identified as completely masculine were somewhat more likely than less-masculine Republican men to approve of the way Trump has handled the pandemic, although the difference wasn’t necessarily all that huge (79 percent compared with 69 percent).
  • One possible explanation is that the threat of business closures or other restrictions on the economy may have been alarming especially to men who identify as completely masculine. “Because employment and working is so central to American masculinity, job loss is seen as a threat to masculinity,”
  • by actively seizing on the spread of COVID-19 as an opportunity to emphasize his own brand of hypermasculinity and portray his opponent as weak and ineffective, Trump may have crafted a tailor-made pitch for men whose own sense of masculinity was threatened by the pandemic.
lmunch

The Pandemic Has Hindered Many of the Best Ideas for Reducing Violence - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...crime-pandemic-cities.html

politics us culture pandemic crime

shared by lmunch on 06 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Reported crime of nearly every kind has declined this year amid the pandemic. The exception to that has been stark and puzzling: Shootings and homicides are up in cities around the country, perplexing experts who normally expect these patterns to trend together.
  • The president and others have blamed protests and unrest, the changing tactics of police, and even the partisan politics of mayors.
  • And programs devised to reduce gun violence — and that have proved effective in studies — have been upended by the pandemic. Summer jobs programs were cut this year. Violence intervention workers were barred from hospitals. Group behavioral therapy programs meant to be intimate and in-person have moved, often haltingly, online.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Some version of that fear — students with no school to attend, long summer days with no summer jobs, young people with nowhere to go — may be part of what is happening this year on a wider scale.
  • The behavior of the police has certainly changed. Early in the spring, officers pulled back on their interactions amid social distancing. Later in the spring and summer they faced mass protests — and may have reacted to those protests with slowdowns. But Mr. Abrams said the effect of any policing changes wouldn’t be limited to homicides and shootings.
  • “When confidence in the police wanes and drops sufficiently, then one gets a rise in so-called street justice, in people taking matters into their own hands to settle disputes,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “That contributes to a rise in violence.”
  • Separately, there’s evidence that the presence of nonprofits in a community has helped lower violent crime. There’s evidence that hospitals can play a role in reducing violence, when gunshot victims are identified in trauma centers for follow-up interventions. There are randomized control trials showing that summer youth employment programs reduce violent crime among participants, even well after the programs have ended.
  • “The first thing to go last March when the stay-at-home order was issued here in Chicago for these young people was the stability of school,”
martinelligi

Coronavirus in the U.S: How Did the Pandemic Get So Bad? | Time - 0 views

time.com/...onavirus-united-states-failure

pandemic crisis

shared by martinelligi on 07 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • If, early in the spring, the U.S. had mobilized its ample resources and expertise in a coherent national effort to prepare for the virus, things might have turned out differently. If, in midsummer, the country had doubled down on the measures (masks, social-distancing rules, restricted indoor activities and public gatherings) that seemed to be working, instead of prematurely declaring victory, things might have turned out differently. The tragedy is that if science and common sense solutions were united in a national, coordinated response, the U.S. could have avoided many thousands of more deaths this summer.
  • . More than 13 million Americans remain unemployed as of August, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data published Sept. 4.
  • t this point, we can start to see why the U.S. foundered: a failure of leadership at many levels and across parties; a distrust of scientists, the media and expertise in general; and deeply ingrained cultural attitudes about individuality and how we value human lives have all combined to result in a horrifically inadequate pandemic response
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Common-sense solutions like face masks were undercut or ignored. Research shows that wearing a facial covering significantly reduces the spread of COVID-19, and a pre-existing culture of mask wearing in East Asia is often cited as one reason countries in that region were able to control their outbreaks. In the U.S., Trump did not wear a mask in public until July 11, more than three months after the CDC recommended facial coverings, transforming what ought to have been a scientific issue into a partisan one.
  • Testing is key to a pandemic response—the more data officials have about an outbreak, the better equipped they are to respond. Rather than call for more testing, Trump has instead suggested that maybe the U.S. should be testing less. He has repeatedly, and incorrectly, blamed increases in new cases on more testing. “If we didn’t do testing, we’d have no cases,” the President said in June, later suggesting he was being sarcastic.
  • Seven months after the coronavirus was found on American soil, we’re still suffering hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand, deaths every day. An American Nurses Association survey from late July and early August found that of 21,000 U.S. nurses polled, 42% reported either widespread or intermittent shortages in personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks, gloves and medical gowns.
  • Among the world’s wealthy nations, only the U.S. has an outbreak that continues to spin out of control. Of the 10 worst-hit countries, the U.S. has the seventh-highest number of deaths per 100,000 population; the other nine countries in the top 10 have an average per capita GDP of $10,195, compared to $65,281 for the U.S. Some countries, like New Zealand, have even come close to eradicating COVID-19 entirely.
  • The coronavirus has laid bare the inequalities of American public health. Black Americans are nearly three times as likely as white Americans to get COVID-19, nearly five times as likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes, being Black in the U.S. is a marker of risk for underlying conditions that make COVID-19 more dangerous, “including socioeconomic status, access to health care and increased exposure to the virus due to occupation (e.g., frontline, essential and critical infrastructure workers).” In other words, COVID-19 is more dangerous for Black Americans because of generations of systemic racism and discrimination. The same is true to a lesser extent for Native American and Latino communities, according to CDC data.
  • Americans today tend to value the individual over the collective. A 2011 Pew survey found that 58% of Americans said “freedom to pursue life’s goals without interference from the state” is more important than the state guaranteeing “nobody is in need.” It’s easy to view that trait as a root cause of the country’s struggles with COVID-19; a pandemic requires people to make temporary sacrifices for the benefit of the group, whether it’s wearing a mask or skipping a visit to their local bar.
  • ut at least some Americans still refuse to take such a simple step as wearing a mask. Why? Because we’re also in the midst of an epistemic crisis. Republicans and Democrats today don’t just disagree on issues; they disagree on the basic truths that structure their respective realities.
  • There’s another disturbing undercurrent to Americans’ attitude toward the pandemic thus far: a seeming willingness to accept mass death. As a nation we may have become dull to horrors that come our way as news, from gun violence to the seemingly never-ending incidents of police brutality to the water crises in Flint, Mich., and elsewhere. Americans seem to have already been inured to the idea that other Americans will die regularly, when they do not need to.
  • Our leaders need to listen to experts and let policy be driven by science. And for the time being, all of us need to accept that there are certain things we cannot, or should not, do, like go to the movies or host an indoor wedding.
  • The U.S. is no longer the epicenter of the global pandemic; that unfortunate torch has been passed to countries like India, Argentina and Brazil. And in the coming months there might yet be a vaccine, or more likely a cadre of vaccines, that finally halts the march of COVID-19 through the country.
xaviermcelderry

The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-us.html

Covid Trump election

shared by xaviermcelderry on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Over the past month, about 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the virus.
  • That’s more than five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined.
  • ... the outbreaks still pale in comparison to those in the United States. Florida, with a population less than half of Spain, has reported nearly 300,000 cases in the same period.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • When it comes to the virus, the United States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it is often compared but instead far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South Africa, or those with large migrant populations, like Bahrain and Oman.
  • The second major theme is one that public health experts often find uncomfortable to discuss because many try to steer clear of partisan politics. But many agree that the poor results in the United States stem in substantial measure from the performance of the Trump administration.
  • President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation.
carolinehayter

Eric Holder accuses Republicans of using courts to facilitate 'cheating' - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

politics US trump policy pandemic gop election

shared by carolinehayter on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Former US Attorney General Eric Holder accused Republicans of using court challenges to facilitate "cheating" in the 2020 election and attempting to "suppress the vote all through the process."
  • "There's a lot of cheating that Republicans are trying to do here and they're trying to get the courts to facilitate that cheating,"
  • Republicans are "trying to change the rules at the end of the day. They tried to suppress the vote all through the process."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Holder cited a GOP legal challenge to drive-through voting sites in a Texas county and an order from the Texas Republican governor limiting ballot drop boxes.
  • He also pointed to Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's proclamation to limit mail-in ballot drop box locations to one site per county as "cheating."
  • In the final days before the presidential election, state Republicans and Democrats in battleground states have been battling in the courts, bringing some cases to the US Supreme Court, seeking last minute approval to change election rules amid the coronavirus pandemic, especially regarding whether mail-in votes can arrive after Election Day and still be counted.
  • It is seeing that the Republican Party wants to limit the number of people who want to vote. Democrats are trying to get as many people to vote and have as many votes counted as is possible,"
  • "I think we want to make sure that we get our ballots in and our votes in so we don't leave it to the court to make any decisions here," he said.
  • The order, first issued in October, significantly affects the Democratic stronghold of Harris County, the state's most populous county.
  • "That is cheating. I defy Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, to explain a good logical reason why you would have one drop box in Harris County -- 4 million people, bigger than I think the state of Rhode Island -- why you would limit it to one drop box. You only try to gain partisan advantage. All the other reasons that they put forward are simply nonsense,"
  • "They're trying to steal this election," he added.
  • The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Abbott's order, saying it "provides Texas voters more ways to vote in the November 3 election than does the Election Code" and that it doesn't "disenfranchise anyone."
anonymous

2016 Nonvoters, a Key Prize for Biden and Trump, Turn Out in Droves - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-trump-biden-early-voting.html

politics trump

shared by anonymous on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • In Pennsylvania and other battlegrounds, both parties are succeeding in coaxing infrequent voters off the sidelines. The all-important question is who does it better.
  • I’m petrified of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi getting power and doing all this stuff that’s going to totally destroy the economy,”
  • secret weapon,
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Mr. Walsh called polls showing the president trailing “a joke,” adding, “He will do nothing but gain in the areas he won last time.”
  • About one in four of the 1.3 million registered Democrats who have voted did not vote in 2016.
  • But that is partly because Mr. Trump has made mail-in ballots toxic to many of his supporters through his frequent (and unfounded) claims that mail voting is ripe for fraud.
  • Although it is impossible to know how a person voted, the voter file unlocks a trove of information, including a voter’s age, race, sex and history of past voting. In states without partisan registration, the firm models voters’ likely party preference based on other information.
  • The Biden campaign said that Mr. Trump’s share of voters has not grown even if he is turning out new supporters.
  • showed Mr. Biden with a seven-point lead over Mr. Trump. Pennsylvania’s districts were redrawn two years ago; Mr. Trump lost the equivalent of the new Seventh District to Mrs. Clinton by one percentage point.
  • Ms. Sanchez had to work last week during the final debate, but she plans to catch up with a recording. Depending on what she sees, she said, she will make up her mind about whether to cast a ballot or not.
clairemann

Could a Joe Biden Presidency Help Saudi Political Prisoners? | Time - 0 views

time.com/...joe-biden-saudi-arabia

US trump election policy gop politics

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabian legal scholar Abdullah Alaoudh has become adept at spotting state-backed harassment.
  • “take advantage of what they called the chaos in the U.S. and kill me on the streets,” Alhaoudh tells TIME
  • Although the message ended with a predictable sign-off, “your end is very close, traitor,” Alaoudh was more struck by what he took to be a reference to protests and unrest in the months leading up to the U.S. elections.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • For dissidents living outside the Kingdom, the American election has personal as well as political implications. On one side is an incumbent who has boasted he “saved [Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s] ass”
  • On the other is Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who last year said he would make Saudi Arabia a “pariah,” singled out the kingdom for “murdering children” in Yemen, and said there’s “very little social redeeming value in the present Saudi leadership.”
  • Saudi Arabia was the destination for Trump’s first trip overseas in May 2017, a visit that set the tone for the strong alliance that has persisted ever since.
  • “but what I’m sure of is that a Biden Administration would not be as compliant and affectionate with Saudi Arabia as Trump has been.”
  • Al-Odah is one of hundreds detained or imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for activism of criticism of the government. He was arrested only hours after he tweeted a message to his 14 million followers calling on Saudi Arabia to end its blockade of the tiny Gulf Emirate of Qatar, Alaoudh says.
  • Court documents list al-Odah’s charges as including spreading corruption by calling for a constitutional monarchy, stirring public discord, alleged membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, and “mocking the government’s achievements.”
  • For some, like Alaoudh, those words offer a glimmer of hope that relatives detained in the kingdom might have improved prospects of release should Biden win in November
  • the historic ties between the U.S. and the Al Saud that date back to 1943, or business interests in the region is unclear, says Stephen McInerney, Executive Director at the non-partisan Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED). What is clear, he says, is that “Trump and his family—and in particular Jared Kushner—have close personal ties to Mohammed Bin Salman.”
  • But subsequent behind-the-scenes meetings between Trump’s special advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s and King Salman’s son Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS) proved at least as significant as the President’s headline announcements.
  • ranging from 450,000 to “a million,” (the actual total is between 20,000 to 40,000, according to May report by the Center for International Policy.)
  • That closeness has translated into a reluctance to confront Saudi Arabia over its human rights abuses.
  • “at times there has been real bipartisan frustration or even outrage with him.”
  • Trump publicly mulled the possibility he was killed by a “rogue actor” — in line with what would become the Saudi narrative as outrage grew.
  • “I have no doubt that Donald Trump did protect and save whatever part of MBS’s body,”
  • Callamard says she would expect a Biden administration, “at a minimum, not to undermine the U.S.’s own democratic processes,” as Trump did in vetoing bipartisan bills pertaining to the Khashoggi murder and the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia that were used in the Yemen war.
  • President Biden to not “justify violations by others or suggest that the U.S. doesn’t care about violations because of its economic interests.”
  • “end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.” The statement adds that Biden will “defend the right of activists, political dissidents, and journalists around the world to speak their minds freely without fear of persecution and violence.”
  • “I think there would be some international debate between those who want a very assertive change in the U.S.–Saudi relationship and those who would be more cautious,” says McInerney. “The more cautious approach would be in line with historical precedent.”
  • Saudi authorities tortured and sexually abused al Hathloul while she was in prison, her family says. On Oct 27, Hathloul began a new hunger strike in protest at authorities’ refusal to grant her a family visit in two months.
  • The only thing that allows them to ignore all the international pressure is that the White House has not talked about it, and has not given a clear message to the Saudis telling them that they don’t agree with this,” Hathloul says.
  • If Trump is re-elected, then experts see little chance of him changing tack—in fact, says Callamard, it would pose “a real test” for the resilience of the democratic institutions committed to upholding the rules-based order.
  • “Just the fact that we are filing the lawsuit here in Washington D.C. is a sign that we still have faith that there are other ways to pressure the Saudi government,”
clairemann

Yes, Texas Could Go Blue This Year | Time - 0 views

time.com/...texas-blue-biden-trump

US politics election trump gop Texas

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The outcome of the 2020 Presidential election is more uncertain than any in modern history—and nowhere is that uncertainty on better display than in Texas, a state that could very well go Democratic for the first time since 1976.
  • “If I were to guess, I would say 10-15% who vote in a Republican primary aren’t true Republicans,” Ryan says, adding that the percentage might be a notch higher for Democratic primaries, particularly in more partisan areas where the primary is functionally the general election.
  • (to quote Frank Drake, the founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that’s “a wonderful way to organize our ignorance).
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The polls in Texas are all over the place, ranging from a 7-point margin for U.S. President Donald Trump, who won the state by 9 percentage points in 2016, to a four-point Biden victory.
  • Turnout in Texas this year will greatly surpass any previous cycle. In 2016, just shy of 9 million Texans cast a vote for president, amounting to 51.4% of the voting-eligible population, according to the United States Election Project.
  • Many more voters are expected to turn out on Nov. 3. A recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found that 75% of respondents consider it safe to vote in person on Election Day, though there’s a rift along party lines: 57% of Democrats said they felt safe compared to 91% of Republicans, suggesting Trump voters are more likely than Biden voters to vote in person.
  • “significantly different electorate than in 2016,” says Joshua Blank, research director at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Nationwide, the conventional wisdom that higher turnout benefits Democrats does not hold up when one considers President Trump’s core base
  • As of Wednesday, early voters with a history of voting in a Republican primary outpaced those who voted in Democratic primaries by 6 points, though the largest percentage voted in neither.
  • More to the point, those on the ballot for state races, Blank says, form an organic field operation across the state, armed with their own volunteers and knowledge of their districts that a statewide or national campaign could never generate from scratch.
  • “They’re only afraid of extremely high turnout.” Meanwhile, he says that Democrats have long held that Texas “is not a Republican state. It is a non-voting state.”
  • This is a particularly common misconception regarding eligible Hispanic voters, plenty of whom, polling by Blank’s organization and others suggests, are generally supportive of the Republican Party.
  • There is a strong possibility that Democrats will retake the Texas House of Representatives this year, which Republicans have controlled—along with the Texas Senate and governorship—since 2003.
  • the Texas Democratic Party has widened the front in terms of slating better candidates. For more than a decade, Blank says, the Party was “catch as catch can” in terms of finding viable candidates for district races, a process that restarted every cycle, with many seats going uncontested
  • “If you’re a candidate who loses narrowly but runs again, it gives you a lot more parity with the Republican incumbent,” Blank says.
  • Arguably the more relevant question is: how many Texans who otherwise would not have voted are excited about local candidates, and are thus more likely to vote and perhaps boost Biden?
  • both shifted Texas from leaning or tilting Republican to a genuine toss up, while the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato places it in “Leans Republican,” just one category to the right.
  • Whether that’s enough to make a difference is, of course, ultimately unknowable before the election. When I asked Sabato why he was keeping Texas in the “Leans Republican” category, he said that “I’ve been hearing every four years that Texas is going Democratic, and it never happens.”
  • Austin Q. Sarker-Young on 31 Oct 20
     
    Dear Claire, While I appreciate the optimism, I think the Democratic Party has cried victory too early this year, and claiming that Texas could go blue simply reinforces this. The Democratic Party seems to have gone a little too far on the offensive, much in the same way as they did in 2016, and this could have disastrous results for the cause of Joe Biden. As for your evidence, I do not trust Larry Sabato, since his prediction given right before election night in 2016 was WILDLY wrong (Clinton 322 - Trump 216). In that prediction, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/our-final-2016-picks/), he predicted that Wisconsin was a "Likely D" and said "Lean D" for the myriad swing states that we all know went for Trump that year. When it comes to Sabato's 2020 predictions, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/2020-president/), a great many of the states he marks as toss-up or lean Democrat went Republican in 2016. We also all remember the "Blue Wave" disappointment of 2018 that took the House but failed to take the Senate. Considering all this, I have reason to be quite skeptical of what pollsters say. And my opinion? I cannot have one yet. As of today, and probably even at the end of election day on November 3, the final winner of the election is unknowable.
lmunch

Opinion | Trump or No Trump, Religious Authoritarianism Is Here to Stay - The New York ... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...religion-authoritarianism.html

politics trump culture religion US

shared by lmunch on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The 2020 election is proof that religious authoritarianism is here to stay, and the early signs now indicate that the movement seems determined to reinterpret defeat at the top of the ticket as evidence of persecution and of its own righteousness. With or without Mr. Trump, they will remain committed to the illiberal politics that the president has so ably embodied.
  • As it did in 2016, the early analysis of the 2020 election results often circled around the racial, urban-rural, and income and education divides. But the religion divide tells an equally compelling story.
  • Christian nationalism: the idea that the United States is and ought to be a Christian nation governed under a reactionary understanding of Christian values.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • While many outsiders continue to think of Christian nationalism as a social movement that arises from the ground up, it in fact a political movement that operates mostly from the top down.
  • The conservative speaker and Falkirk Center fellow David Harris, Jr. put it this way:If you’re a believer, and you believe God appointed Donald J. Trump to run this country, to lead this country, and you believe as I do that he will be re-elected the President of the United States, then friends, you’ve got to guard your heart, you’ve got to guard your peace. Right now we are at war.
  • The conservative pastor Robert Jeffress, who gave a sermon before Mr. Trump’s inaugural ceremony in 2017, noted that a Biden win was “the most likely outcome.”
  • There are indications that the president in fact expanded his appeal among nonwhite evangelical and born-again Christians of color, particularly among Latinos. Mr. Biden, on the other hand, who made faith outreach a key feature of his campaign, appears to have done well among moderate and progressive voters of all faiths.
  • The power of the leadership is the function of at least three underlying structural realities in America’s political and economic life, and those realities are not going to change anytime soon.The first is the growing economic inequality
  • The second structural reality to consider is that Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere.
  • The third critical factor is a political system that gives disproportionate power to an immensely organized, engaged and loyal minority.
  • Recently, religious right leaders have shifted their focus more to a specious understanding of what they call “religious freedom” or “religious liberty,” but the underlying strategy is the same: make individuals see their partisan vote as the primary way to protect their cultural and religious identity.
  • The point of conspiratorial narratives and apocalyptic rhetoric is to lay the groundwork for a politics of total obstruction, in preparation for the return of a “legitimate” ruler.
anonymous

Trump fires top U.S. election cybersecurity official who defended vote | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ho-defended-vote-idUSKBN27Y011

uselection trump cisa

shared by anonymous on 18 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired top cybersecurity official Chris Krebs in a message on Twitter, accusing him without evidence of making a “highly inaccurate” statement affirming the Nov. 3 election was secure and rejecting claims of fraud.
  • Krebs’ work in protecting the election from hackers and combating disinformation about the vote won praise from lawmakers of both parties as well as state and election officials around the country.
  • Reuters reported last week that Krebs had told associates he expected to be fired.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Dozens of election security experts on Monday released a letter saying claims of major hacks were unsubstantiated and absurd on their face.
  • Krebs headed the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from its inception two years ago.He angered the White House over a website run by CISA dubbed “Rumor Control,” which debunks misinformation about the election, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
  • CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales is expected to take over
  • Wales has served in multiple positions within the DHS under the Trump administration and is not seen as a partisan figure, said a former colleague.
  • “Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow.”
  • White House officials had previously complained about CISA content that pushed back against false claims about the election, including that Democrats were behind a mass election fraud scheme. CISA officials declined to delete accurate information.
  • Among other things, one associate of Krebs said the White House was angry about a post rejecting a conspiracy theory that falsely claimed an intelligence agency supercomputer and program, purportedly named Hammer and Scorecard, could have flipped votes nationally. No such system exists, according to Krebs, election security experts and former U.S. officials.
  • “Chris Krebs should be commended for his service in protecting our elections, not fired for telling the truth.”
  • “His firing is very disappointing and appears to be an attempt to undermine the great work he and others at DHS/CISA have been doing.”
  • “The CISA and Director Krebs have worked diligently to safeguard our elections, provide vital support to state and local election officials, and inform the American people about what was true and what was not.”
  • Independent Senator Angus King said Trump was “firing Mr Krebs for simply doing his job.”
  • “Chris Krebs did a really good job — as state election officials all across the nation will tell you — and he obviously should not be fired,”
  • Senator Ben Sasse, who has been a Trump critic, was among the first Republicans to push back against the decision.
« First ‹ Previous 521 - 540 of 597 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page