Problematic GOP Senate Candidates

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. Several Republican Senate candidates are having problems. 

Republican (Former Congressman Mike Rogers) hoping to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate suffered a setback to his campaign this week after facing allegations that he lives in Florida.
https://t.co/gHgZi0jF5C

— Karol Cummins (@karolcummins) April 10, 2024

In Montana, GOP recruit Tim Sheehy is having trouble explaining what he had claimed was a war wound.

Sheehy apologized and asked for leniency after alleged 2015 gun incident https://t.co/hEahHtNnho

— Liz Goodwin (@lizcgoodwin) April 17, 2024

Former baseball star Steve Garvey, who is running against Adam Schiff for Senate, has owed millions in back taxes since the 1980s

Garvey has had more than 40 tax liens, federal and state, totaling nearly $4 million

He’s still trying to pay off the debthttps://t.co/wVkKgtvfGf pic.twitter.com/i5Sfc6OwJO

— Christopher Cadelago (@ccadelago) April 17, 2024

In June 2022, Kari Lake praised the 1864 anti-abortion law as “great legislation already on the books” and said politicians should do the right thing despite polling and protests.

Lake: “Arizona will not be a state where abortions are happening.“ pic.twitter.com/usYACHCPUL

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) April 10, 2024

Arizona Senate hopeful Kari Lake (R) suggested that supporters “maybe strap on a Glock” after saying the “next six months is going to be intense” ahead of the 2024 election. https://t.co/hLDrY2Ng8R

— The Hill (@thehill) April 17, 2024

Protection Money

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

Thomas Edsall at NYT:

Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton of sociology and international affairs, summed up in an email the Trump-driven changes in the politics of raising money: “Most business leaders unfamiliar with autocratic government believe that when they support someone running for office, that person will owe them something if elected, tax cuts, deregulation, whatever the business leaders want.”

But, Scheppele continued, “autocrats turn the tables. Once elected, autocrats use the power of the state to squeeze business.

In these circumstances, she added, political leaders “can threaten businesses with tax audits, more regulation, even criminal charges, unless they give in to the autocrats’ demands.”

Project 2025, Scheppele wrote,

is a blueprint for autocracy. In fact, it’s a direct copy of the plan that Viktor Orban used to take over the Hungarian government in 2010. If it is carried out, Project 2025 will concentrate huge power in the hands of the president, giving him the power to control the whole federal government at his whim. If business leaders think that this will benefit them and that giving up the rule of law is good for business, they will quickly learn that they are wrong. But it will be too late.

...

Perhaps most important, Project 2025 asserts that “President Trump’s Schedule F proposal regarding accountability in hiring must be reinstituted.”

Schedule F, which Trump sought to initiate by executive order in 2020, would turn the top 50,000 or so civil servants, who are currently protected from arbitrary firing or demotion, into political appointees under the control of his administration. Trump lost the White House before Schedule F could be applied, and Biden withdrew the executive order creating it.

For corporate America, application of Schedule F would radically escalate uncertainty. Federal officials making decisions ranging from penalties for failed occupational safety violations to initiation of antitrust proceedings, from I.R.S. rulings to the application of sanitary regulations in nursing homes would presumably have to prioritize loyalty to Trump to keep their jobs.

Fear of the consequences of Schedule F is the strongest weapon of intimidation in Trump’s fund-raising armament. A significant campaign contribution might well serve as a useful shield.

“One practical consequence of undermining the civil service is a rise in cronyism,” Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings, wrote by email in response to my inquiry. “Usually we think of that in terms of the winners, the insiders getting special deals, but it is equally true that cronyism creates losers, the business elites that do not get favors or face punishment for their lack of loyalty to the ruling party.”

The End of Election Modeling

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the politics of economic policy.

At Marketplace, Kimberly Adams says that the economy  is becoming less predictive of political attitudes and behavior.

As a result, according to Alan Abramowitz, a professor emeritus of political science at Emory University, “these sorts of forecasting models that incorporate measures of economic conditions are just not working very well anymore.”

Abramowitz said another reason forecasting is harder these days is that, although models can be quite good at predicting the popular vote, that’s not how presidents are elected in the United States.

“What ultimately matters, of course, is the electoral vote,” Abramowitz said, referring to the Electoral College, “and the electoral vote hinges on the outcomes in a handful of closely contested states. Well, that’s very difficult to predict.”

For the first time in his decadeslong career, Abramowitz said he won’t even bother trying to put together a forecasting model this year.

“I know that enterprise continues, people will continue to do this,” he said. “I am so skeptical about the value of this particular enterprise right now … I’d rather leave it to others to try to figure out how to do this. And I think a lot of us who’ve been in this game for a long time probably feel about the same way.”

Views of the economy used to shape political choices.  Increasingly, it is the other way around. 

Kathy Frankovic at YouGov:

In 2000, a change in presidential administration from Democratic to Republican shifted the way partisanship affects economic views – even without a real change in economic measures. Economic assessments shifted in the opposite direction when Biden succeeded Trump as president. At the beginning of the Trump administration, Republicans and Democrats differed on how they saw the economy moving, with Republicans far more likely than Democrats to say the economy was getting better and Democrats far more likely to say it was getting worse. That difference was even larger in the weeks before the 2020 election. A month after Joe Biden’s victory — which was a month before his inauguration — Democrats remained negative on the direction of the economy, while Republicans were moving in that direction. The responses in the week before and the week after the inauguration show large movements in both parties. By the time Biden took office, Republicans viewed economic trends more negatively and Democrats saw them more positively.

The Way We Weren't

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.

In just a few years, a lot of people have forgotten how bad 2020 waws.

Lisa Lerer and Ruth Igielnik at NYT:

Views of Donald J. Trump’s presidency have become more positive since he left office, bolstering his case for election and posing a risk to President Biden’s strategy of casting his opponent as unfit for the presidency, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College.

While the memories of Mr. Trump’s tumultuous and chaotic administration have not significantly faded, many voters now have a rosier picture of his handling of the economy, immigration and maintaining law and order. Ahead of the 2020 election, only 39 percent of voters said that the country was better off after Mr. Trump took office. Now, looking back, nearly half say that he improved things during his time as president.

The poll’s findings underscore the way in which a segment of voters have changed their minds about the Trump era, recalling those years as a time of economic prosperity and strong national security. The shift in views about his administration comes even as Mr. Trump faces dozens of felony counts and will appear in a New York courtroom on Monday for jury selection in one of his four criminal trials.

 

The Two-Incumbent Election: Comparing Records

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.

The nomination phase is effectively over.

The voters are unhappy.

Seung Min Kim and Amelia Thomson-Deveaux at AP:

There’s a reason why President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are spending so much time attacking each other — people don’t think either man has much to brag about when it comes to his own record. Americans generally think that while they were in the White House, both did more harm than good on key issues.

But the two candidates have different weak spots. For Biden, it’s widespread unhappiness on two issues: the economy and immigration. Trump, meanwhile, faces an electorate where substantial shares think he harmed the country on a range of issues.

A new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that more than half of U.S. adults think Biden’s presidency has hurt the country on cost of living and immigration, while nearly half think Trump’s presidency hurt the country on voting rights and election security, relations with foreign countries, abortion laws and climate change.

Abortion Flip-Flops

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Abortion was a big issue in the 2022 midterm. It will be a big issue in 2024.

Evangelical leader Russell Moore nails Trump, says he and Republican leaders are, “pro-life with three exceptions- rape, incest, and declining poll numbers”. (Video: CNN) pic.twitter.com/kcZiGoZ6VZ

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) April 13, 2024

Em Steck, Andrew Kaczynski, Marco Chacón and Patrick Gallagher, CNN

Republican candidates in close races across the country who once fervently backed severe abortion restrictions are shifting how they talk about the issue.

On social media, in public comments and in talking points on their websites, candidates are shying away from past hard-line positions and softening their stances. In some cases, the changes have been overt, with candidates reversing course on supporting outright bans on abortion or even denying they ever opposed it.

But in others, the shift has been more subtle and nuanced, with candidates altering or deleting previous statements, or de-emphasizing stances that had been more central to their platform just a few years ago.

CNN’s KFile examined more than a dozen competitive races at various levels and found examples of Republicans shifting or downplaying their positions on abortion following the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned a nationwide right for women to have an abortion.

Since that decision, voters have affirmed abortion rights in every state that has put the issue on the ballot. The 2022 midterm elections also saw a number of anti-abortion Republicans lose, dissolving GOP hopes for a ‘red wave’ that year.

Ahead of this year’s election, some of those losing candidates are trying to rebrand themselves by moderating their positions on abortion. Others, including some incumbents, are avoiding the issue entirely as anti-abortion rhetoric and policies are seen as politically toxic.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, announced on Monday that abortion rights should be left to the states, effectively punting on Republican calls for a federal abortion ban in what appears to be an effort to neutralize the politically fraught issue for his party up and down the ticket in November. Trump himself has shifted on abortion repeatedly over the past 25 years.

 

FLIP-FLOP ALERT: Once a cheerleader for Arizona’s "great law" prohibiting abortion, Kari Lake now singing a different tune, labeling it a "personal and private issue." pic.twitter.com/TRxpTkjVFS

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) April 12, 2024

Montana and the Senate

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. 

Nate Moore at The Liberal Patriot:

Republicans are clear favorites to win the U.S. Senate in November. Practically guaranteed to flip Joe Manchin’s West Virginia seat, the GOP is turning west to Montana for their majority-making win. Despite a formidable Democratic incumbent in Jon Tester, Montana was a Trump +16 state four years ago and is the party’s best bet for that crucial 51st seat.

First, let’s look at the fundamentals. As recently as 2012, the Senate was littered with red-state Democrats. That year, Democrats won in Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, and West Virginia—all with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. Twelve years later, these electoral over performers are a dying breed. Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp, and Joe Donnelly all lost in 2018, despite a blue wave. Red-state hopefuls in 2016—like Evan Bayh and Jason Kander—came up short, dragged down by the top of the ticket.

In 2020, Senate Democrats poured hundreds of millions into South Carolina, Kansas, and Iowa—only for star recruits to run even with Biden. This ever-increasing alignment between presidential and down-ballot results highlights just how steep a climb Tester faces this cycle.

Tester’s 2012 plurality win, while impressive, is no sure sign that he will again triumph in a presidential year. The 2020 Montana Senate race offers more recent evidence: popular two-term Governor Steve Bullock lost to Republican Steve Daines by double digits. Bullock did outrun Biden, but not by nearly enough.

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#MTPol: "Jon Tester worked with Republicans, fighting to shut down the border...and he fought to stop President Biden from letting migrants stay in America."

Tester (D) is up with a new ad that distances himself from Biden. Tester has reserved $14.5M in ad spending for #MTSen. pic.twitter.com/tk0tMrZin9

— AdImpact Politics (@AdImpact_Pol) April 10, 2024