Growing Partisan Divide on the Insurrection

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.  

 From Pew:

Since March, there has been a 22 percentage point drop in the share of Republicans who think it is very or somewhat important that federal law enforcement agencies find and prosecute those who broke into and rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 (from 79% to 57%).

Moreover, only about quarter of Republicans (27%) view the prosecution of the rioters as very important; six months ago, half said this was very important. Among Democrats and Democratic leaners, there have been only modest changes in opinions about finding and prosecuting the Jan. 6 rioters. Today, 95% say it is important, including 80% who see this as very important.

 

Not-So-Independent Redistricting Commissions

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

David Daley at NYT:

From Arizona in 2000 to California, Michigan, Colorado, Missouri, Utah and Virginia since then, voters took it upon themselves via ballot initiatives to put independent commissions in place for the 2021 redistricting cycle. The clear message: to keep politicians and partisan operatives as far away as possible from drawing districts and tilting state legislative and congressional maps in their party’s favor for the next decade.

Yet as a new cycle begins, the ballot-initiative efforts and independent commissions on redistricting appear to have been undermined by partisans. Operatives have managed to exploit loopholes and, in some states, shredded the very notion of fair maps before a single line has been drawn.

Those discouraging efforts to thwart the people’s will — combined with congressional inaction on the Freedom to Vote Act and the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision to close the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims — suggest there could be few brakes on gerrymandering run amok.

Red COVID

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

At NYT, David Leonhardt writes of the very strong negative correlation between Trump vote share and vaccination.

Vaccination has changed the situation. The vaccines are powerful enough to overwhelm other differences between blue and red areas.

Some left-leaning communities — like many suburbs of New York, San Francisco and Washington, as well as much of New England — have such high vaccination rates that even the unvaccinated are partly protected by the low number of cases. Conservative communities, on the other hand, have been walloped by the highly contagious Delta variant. (You can find data for hundreds of counties here.)

Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., Covid has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.

...

Why is this happening?

Some of the vaccination gap stems from the libertarian instincts of many Republicans. “They understand freedom as being left alone to make their own choices, and they resent being told what to do,” William Galston has written in The Wall Street Journal.

But philosophy is only a partial explanation. In much of the rest of the world, vaccine attitudes do not break down along right-left lines, and some conservative leaders have responded effectively to Covid. So have a few Republican governors in the U.S. “It didn’t have to be this way,” German Lopez of Vox has written.

What distinguishes the U.S. is a conservative party — the Republican Party — that has grown hostile to science and empirical evidence in recent decades. A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility. Trump took the conspiratorial thinking to a new level, but he did not create it.

MISCALCULATION BY GOP—As an epidemiologist, I think Republicans might be killing off their voter base faster than they think. The #COVID19 death rate since June 30 in counties where Trump got >90% of the vote are 9.5x higher than where he got <10%—pretty strong. HT @charles_gaba pic.twitter.com/e5IAE6qTv5

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) September 26, 2021

Constitutional Crisis

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.  

 Robert Kagan at WP:

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers.

The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.

"Decertify"

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. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.

 Jonathan Shorman at The Kansas City Star:

Despite a draft report of a Republican-led election review that found more votes in Arizona for President Joe Biden, former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens called on the state Friday to decertify its 2020 presidential election results.

The U.S. Senate candidate’s insistence that Arizona cancel the results of its free and fair election continues his promotion of the false notion that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

Greitens and other Missouri Republican candidates are courting hard-right primary voters and have all played some role in either perpetuating baseless claims of voter fraud or indulging those who believe Trump won the election. But Greitens has been the most aggressive, traveling to Arizona and securing the endorsement of a far-right Arizona state senator close to the review. .

...

Greitens, who resigned in 2018 amid scandals that included allegations of violent sexual abuse and blackmail, is running in the Senate Republican primary against Attorney General Eric Schmitt, Rep. Vicky Hartzler, Rep. Billy Long and St. Louis businessman Mark McCloskey.

...

As recently as Sept. 15, Greitens posted a slickly-produced video featuring him and Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican who has intensely promoted the review and has endorsed Greitens.

"It is clear that in Arizona they must decertify the election" -- Trump one day after the Arizona "audit" affirmed Biden's victory pic.twitter.com/oHtMJhc7U1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 26, 2021

Trump Trumpets Report That Shows He's a Bigger Loser

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. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.

Jack Healy, Michael Wines and Nick Corasaniti at NYT:

After months of delays and blistering criticism, a review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, ordered up and financed by Republicans, has failed to show that former President Donald J. Trump was cheated of victory, according to draft versions of the report.

In fact, the draft report from the company Cyber Ninjas found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.

The full review is set to be released on Friday, but draft versions circulating through Arizona political circles were obtained by The New York Times from a Republican and a Democrat.

Late on Thursday night, Maricopa County, whose Republican leaders have derided the review, got a jump on the official release by tweeting out its conclusions.

“(TFG) brought attention to the Arizona electoral audit in a statement released Thursday night, apparently unaware of the reports that their findings confirm he is a bigger loser to current President Joe Biden than previously thought.”https://t.co/IAQngqL0fT

— Changfucius (@AsianResister) September 24, 2021

Recall and Midterm

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social issues.  It also discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall.  Newsom won.

Nathaniel Rakich and Geoffrey Skelley at FiveThirtyEight:

But here’s the thing about the 2022 midterms: Republicans don’t need a significant shift in the electoral environment to flip the House, considering that Democrats hold only a 222-to-213 seat edge there.6 For one thing, the GOP will control the redistricting process for more districts than Democrats, so new map lines alone could provide Republicans with enough of an edge before we even consider the electoral environment. Newsom’s 26-point win also contains some potentially ominous signs for Democrats. Take Orange County, the ancestral home of the state’s GOP that is now a key swing suburban county. In 2020, Biden won Orange County by 9 points, while opposition to the recall leads by about 3 points there. And if we dig into two key, swingy House seats that Republicans flipped in 2020, we see that “yes” on recall leads relatively narrowly in the Orange County portions of California’s 39th Congressional District (by less than 1 point) and 48th Congressional District (by more than 4 points).7 By comparison, Biden performed about 5 to 6 points better in both districts in 2020, carrying the Orange County part of the 39th District by about 5 points and the 48th District (entirely in Orange) by about 1.5 points. These small shifts don’t mean Democrats can’t flip those seats back in 2022 — the lines will change to an unknown extent in redistricting, for one thing — but at the very least, it doesn’t suggest that turf is getting friendlier to them.

Nonetheless, Orange County’s result might also demonstrate Democrats can still hold onto their edge in the suburbs. Even though “yes” on recall performed better than Trump, this contest marked yet another election where the Republican candidate or the Republican-backed ballot position still lost the huge suburban county — a sign that it probably won’t return solidly to the GOP fold anytime soon. Conversely, although the recall vote failed by 26 points in heavily Hispanic Imperial County, which is located along the U.S.-Mexico border, such a result still suggests Republicans might be able to hold onto the improvements they made among Hispanic voters in 2020. That’s because that result, while positive for Newsom, is similar to Biden’s 24-point edge in 2020, which is a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s nearly 42-point lead there in 2016.

The Plot Against America, in Six Parts

Our new 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. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.  And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.

From CNN:

John Eastman, a conservative lawyer working with then-President Donald Trump's legal team, outlined in a two-page memo a scheme to try to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to subvert the Constitution and throw out the 2020 election results on January 6. The memo was obtained by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, the authors of "Peril," and which was subsequently obtained by CNN.

PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL January 6 scenario

7 states have transmitted dual slates of electors to the President of the Senate. The 12th Amendment merely provides that “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” There is very solid legal authority, and historical precedent, for the view that the President of the Senate does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes (as Adams and Jefferson did while Vice President, regarding their own election as President), and all the Members of Congress can do is watch.

The Electoral Count Act, which is likely unconstitutional, provides:

If more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State shall have been received by the President of the Senate, those votes, and those only, shall be counted which shall have been regularly given by the electors who are shown by the determination mentioned in section 5 of this title to have been appointed, if the determination in said section provided for shall have been made, or by such successors or substitutes, in case of a vacancy in the board of electors so ascertained, as have been appointed to fill such vacancy in the mode provided by the laws of the State; but in case there shall arise the question which of two or more of such State authorities determining what electors have been appointed, as mentioned in section 5 of this title, is the lawful tribunal of such State, the votes regularly given of those electors, and those only, of such State shall be counted whose title as electors the two Houses, acting separately, shall concurrently decide is supported by the decision of such State so authorized by its law; and in such case of more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State, if there shall have been no such determination of the question in the State aforesaid, then those votes, and those only, shall be counted which the two Houses shall concurrently decide were cast by lawful electors appointed in accordance with the laws of the State, unless the two Houses, acting separately, shall concurrently decide such votes not to be the lawful votes of the legally appointed electors of such State. But if the two Houses shall disagree in respect of the counting of such votes, then, and in that case, the votes of the electors whose appointment shall have been certified by the executive of the State, under the seal thereof, shall be counted.

This is the piece that we believe is unconstitutional. It allows the two houses, “acting separately,” to decide the question, whereas the 12th Amendment provides only for a joint session. And if there is disagreement, under the Act the slate certified by the “executive” of the state is to be counted, regardless of the evidence that exists regarding the election, and regardless of whether there was ever fair review of what happened in the election, by judges and/or state legislatures. So here’s the scenario we propose:

1. VP Pence, presiding over the joint session (or Senate Pro Tempore Grassley, if Pence recuses himself), begins to open and count the ballots, starting with Alabama (without conceding that the procedure, specified by the Electoral Count Act, of going through the States alphabetically is required).

2. When he gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States. This would be the first break with the procedure set out in the Act.

Philip Rotner at The Bulwark:

The problem with this is that it wasn’t true: Pence didn’t have multiple slates of electors from Arizona, unless Eastman is referring to something Pence might have received over the transom or stumbled upon on Twitter. But random flotsam doesn’t count. The Twelfth Amendment is quite clear on this: The Vice President shall open “the certificates” signed and certified by the states, not just anything he might chance to pick up off the street. Arizona, like every other state, had “signed” and “certified” a single slate of electors, reflecting the results of the state’s election.

Back to the coup: 

3. At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of “electors appointed” – the language of the 12th Amendment -- is 454. This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe (here). A “majority of the electors appointed” would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.

4. Howls, of course, from the Democrats, who now claim, contrary to Tribe’s prior position, that 270 is required. So Pence says, fine. Pursuant to the 12th Amendment, no candidate has achieved the necessary majority. That sends the matter to the House, where the “the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote . . . .” Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well.

Ned Foley at ElectionLawBlog:

Had Pence done any of what Eastman’s memo suggested, the plot would not have prevailed because the House of Representatives under Speaker Pelosi’s leadership would have caused the Twelfth Amendment’s joint session to come to a halt incomplete.... With a stalled and incomplete count because of a standoff between Pence and Pelosi, the Twentieth Amendment becomes the relevant constitutional provision (not discussed in Eastman’s two-page memo, but the relevant part of the analysis in my Loyola Law Review article and the Atlantic essay). From the House and Pelosi’s perspective, because the counting of electoral votes remains incomplete, if that condition continues all the way through until noon on January 20, then Pelosi is in a position to assume the role of Acting President (and entitled immediately to receive the nuclear football, with its launch codes). 

The coup, continued: 

5. One last piece. Assuming the Electoral Count Act process is followed and, upon getting the objections to the Arizona slates, the two houses break into their separate chambers, we should not allow the Electoral Count Act constraint on debate to control. That would mean that a prior legislature was determining the rules of the present one — a constitutional no-no (as Tribe has forcefully argued). So someone – Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, etc. – should demand normal rules (which includes the filibuster). That creates a stalemate that would give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors, if they had not already done so.

6. The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. Let the other side challenge his actions in court, where Tribe (who in 2001 conceded the President of the Senate might be in charge of counting the votes) and others who would press a lawsuit would have their past position -- that these are non-justiciable political questions – thrown back at them, to get the lawsuit dismissed. The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.

Pushing the Big Lie Downballot

Our new 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. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. Now they are trying to take over state and local parties, where they can influence nominations and challenge election results.

 Jill Colvin at AP:

Before winning Donald Trump’s coveted endorsement in his race to become Arizona’s top election official, Mark Finchem received several calls from people close to the former president making clear they approved of the work he was doing to challenge the results of the 2020 election.

“They said I had been noticed,” said Finchem, a state representative who was outside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and has been a key proponent of a widely panned partisan ballot review in Arizona. In subsequent conversations, he said, Trump praised his work and expressed hope he would continue.

As Trump considers another presidential run in 2024, he has taken similar interest in important but relatively obscure races in other critical battlegrounds, throwing his support behind candidates who have not only perpetuated the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, but in some cases also actively tried to overturn the results. The moves reflect Trump’s desire to exert influence on all levels of the Republican Party and install allies into critical roles in the states that may be more amenable to helping him subvert future election results.

Evangelicalism Is a Political Movement Now

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

David French:

On Wednesday, the Pew Research Center released the results of a study indicating that the percentage of white adults identifying as Evangelical or born-again grew between 2016 and 2020, and that growth was concentrated amongst Trump supporters.

...

But setting aside the instances of individual conversions, what seems to be happening at scale isn’t so much the growth of white Evangelicalism as a religious movement, but rather the near-culmination of the decades-long transformation of white Evangelicalism from a mainly religious movement into a Republican political cause.

Why do I say the transformation is political and not religious? A key metric here is church attendance. An increasing number of self-described Evangelicals go to church rarely or not at all. The numbers are remarkable. Here is Ryan Burge with the data:

Even more evidence here that "evangelical" is not a religious term anymore.

Among self-identified evangelicals in 2008:
16.1% reported never or seldom attending.
58.6% reported weekly or more attendance.

2020:
26.7% never or seldom (+10 pts)
49.9% weekly or more (-11 pts) pic.twitter.com/xukBAX77ue

— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) April 8, 2021

Stuart Rothenberg spotted this trend years ago:

Why Evangelicals Stick with Donald Trump and Roy Moore: In most cases, white evangelicals get their religion from their politics, not their politics from their religion (@StuPolitics) https://t.co/VebKcL16GP

— Opinion Today (@OpinionToday) November 28, 2017

Winners: Newsom and None of the Above

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social issues.  It also discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall.  Newsom won.

Ben Christopher at CalMatters:

Of the nearly 10.6 million ballots counted as of Sept. 17, nearly 4.7 million, or 44%, did not include a choice for the replacement candidate. That’s compared to the 2.8 million votes, or 26%, that went for the flesh-and-blood frontrunner Larry Elder. If “nobody” were a candidate, he or she would be crushing the competition.

...

The two-question structure of California’s recall ballot was the subject of endless confusion among voters. Now it’s providing new ways to be perplexed by — or perhaps to purposefully misinterpret — the election results.

Elder has already touted his 47% showing among voters who picked a replacement candidate as evidence of his strength as a possible 2022 candidate and to suggest that polls understated his popularity. In a tweet today, he juxtaposed the reported election night results to an Emerson College poll that put the candidate at a mere 23%.

In fact, the number Elder highlighted was his share of the vote only among ballots marked with a replacement candidate. Missing from his calculation: The 4 million-plus ballots without a selected candidate at all.

A historical note: In the successful 2003 recall of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, only about 756,000 of 9 million voters, or 8%, left question two blank.

Gonzalez to Retire at 36

 Our new 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. 

Jonathan Martin at NYT:

Calling former President Donald J. Trump “a cancer for the country,” Representative Anthony Gonzalez, Republican of Ohio, said in an interview on Thursday that he would not run for re-election in 2022, ceding his seat after just two terms in Congress rather than compete against a Trump-backed primary opponent.

Mr. Gonzalez is the first, but perhaps not the last, of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to retire rather than face ferocious primaries next year in a party still in thrall to the former president.
...

Mr. Gonzalez said that quality-of-life issues had been paramount in his decision. He recounted an “eye-opening” moment this year: when he and his family were greeted at the Cleveland airport by two uniformed police officers, part of extra security precautions taken after the impeachment vote.

“That’s one of those moments where you say, ‘Is this really what I want for my family when they travel, to have my wife and kids escorted through the airport?’” he said.

Mr. Gonzalez, who turns 37 on Saturday, was the sort of Republican recruit the party once prized. A Cuban American who starred as an Ohio State wide receiver, he was selected in the first round of the N.F.L. draft and then earned an M.B.A. at Stanford after his football career was cut short by injuries. He claimed his Northeast Ohio seat in his first bid for political office.

Mr. Gonzalez, a conservative, largely supported the former president’s agenda. Yet he started breaking with Mr. Trump and House Republican leaders when they sought to block the certification of last year’s presidential vote, and he was horrified by Jan. 6 and its implications.

Still, he insisted he could have prevailed in what he acknowledged would have been a “brutally hard primary” against Max Miller, a former Trump White House aide who was endorsed by the former president in February.

Yet as Mr. Gonzalez sat on a couch in his House office, most of his colleagues still at home for the prolonged summer recess, he acknowledged that he could not bear the prospect of winning if it meant returning to a Trump-dominated House Republican caucus.

Recall Reverb

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social issues.  It also discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall.  Newsom won.

 Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic:

The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations showed that a clear majority of voters backed Newsom’s approach to combatting the pandemic. More than three-fifths of voters said his policies for fighting the virus were about right or even not strict enough, and he won roughly 85 percent of them. Almost exactly the same share of voters said getting the vaccine was a public-health responsibility (as opposed to a personal choice) and Newsom likewise won nearly 85 percent of them. More than seven in 10 voters backed his mask mandate for public schools. The recall ran up huge margins among those who said his policies were too strict and that getting the vaccine was a personal choice, as well as those who opposed the mask mandate, but in each case they constituted only about one-third or less of voters (just one-fourth in the case of masks).

Those results suggest that both in California and nationally, Republicans who have centered their messaging on defending the “rights” and “choices” of the unvaccinated are playing to the short side of public opinion—and potentially alienating many among the roughly three-fourths of American adults who have gotten the shot. (A flurry of national polls released this week have found narrow majorities backing vaccine mandates for large employers, teachers, and health-care workers, and a bigger majority supporting mask mandates in schools—both of which almost all Republicans are opposing.) Although the exit poll did not ask voters about their vaccination status, two of the best-respected late California polls each showed Newsom winning about two-thirds of those who have received the shot (as did Newsom’s internal polling).

Nationalizing the Recall Vote

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social issues.  It also discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall.  Newsom won.

Jonathan Martin at NYT:

California basks in its clairvoyance. “The future happens here first,” says Gov. Gavin Newsom, calling his state “America’s coming attraction.”

By emphatically turning back the effort to recall him from office, however, Mr. Newsom made clear that California’s cherished role presaging the politics of tomorrow was not as significant as another, larger factor in Tuesday’s results: the tribal politics of today.

The first-term Democratic governor will remain in office because, in a deeply liberal state, he effectively nationalized the recall effort as a Republican plot, making a flame-throwing radio host the Trump-like face of the opposition to polarize the electorate along red and blue lines.

Mr. Newsom found success not because of what makes California different but because of how it’s like everywhere else: He dominated in California’s heavily populated Democratic cities, the key to victory in a state where his party outnumbers Republicans by five million voters.

“Gavin may have been on a high wire, but he was wearing a big, blue safety harness,” said Mike Murphy, a California-based Republican strategist.

The recall does offer at least one lesson to Democrats in Washington ahead of next year’s midterm elections: The party’s pre-existing blue- and purple-state strategy of portraying Republicans as Trump-loving extremists can still prove effective with the former president out of office, at least when the strategy is executed with unrelenting discipline, an avalanche of money and an opponent who plays to type.

Pre-Emptive Allegations of Fraud

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social issues.  It also discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall.  At this point, a Newsom defeat would be a huge upset.

 Nick Corasaniti at NYT:

As a wave of recent polling indicated that Mr. Newsom was likely to brush off his Republican challengers, the baseless allegations accelerated. Larry Elder, a leading Republican candidate, said he was “concerned” about election fraud. The Fox News commentators Tomi Lahren and Tucker Carlson suggested that wrongdoing was the only way Mr. Newsom could win. And former President Donald J. Trump predicted that it would be “a rigged election.”

This swift embrace of false allegations of cheating in the California recall reflects a growing instinct on the right to argue that any lost election, or any ongoing race that might result in defeat, must be marred by fraud. The relentless falsehoods spread by Mr. Trump and his allies about the 2020 election have only fueled such fears.

More Good Signs for Newsom

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social issues.  It also discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall.  At this point, a Newsom defeat would be a huge upset.

52.48% of returned ballots in California right now are from registered Democrats.

This is HIGHER than 52.36% at an equivalent point of the 2020 election cycle.

The CA recall electorate is shaping up to be pretty similar to the 2020 presidential election electorate.

— Ryan Matsumoto (@ryanmatsumoto1) September 12, 2021

The bottom line: a strong Republican turnout advantage is *not* materializing if we look at returned ballots data and compare it to 2020.

Without this, the recall needs to win over a HUGE percentage of Biden voters to pass - the polls do NOT suggest this is happening either.

— Ryan Matsumoto (@ryanmatsumoto1) September 12, 2021

Newsom's Sprint

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social issues.  It also discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall. 

Phi Willon at LAT:

Momentum has turned strongly against the effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom with just days to go before voting ends, a change that comes after a deluge of political ads and support from leading Democrats who have slammed the effort as a Republican power grab.

According to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll cosponsored by the Los Angeles Times released Friday, 60.1% of likely voters surveyed oppose recalling Newsom compared with 38.5% in favor of ousting the governor. Fewer than 2% of likely voters remained undecided or declined to answer, suggesting the issue is largely settled in the minds of California voters.

The findings, which were gathered by pollsters between Aug. 30 and Sept. 6, align with results from a batch of recent independent polls, all of which showed a decisive advantage for Newsom as the Sept. 14 recall election approaches.

Shane Goldmacher at NYT:

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s bid to fend off a recall in California has been bolstered by an infusion of tens of millions of dollars from big donors in recent months that delivered him an enormous financial advantage over his Republican rivals in the race’s final stretch.

There had been moments over the summer when Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, had appeared vulnerable in public polls, as California’s unique recall rules seemed to provide an opening to conservatives in one of the most reliably Democratic states in the nation. But Mr. Newsom raised more than $70 million this year into an account to battle the recall, much of it in July and August, allowing him and his allies to dominate the television airwaves and out-advertise his opponents online.

California has no limits on donations to recall committees, and Mr. Newsom has taken full advantage of those loose rules. His contributions have included an early $3 million from Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix; $500,000 from the liberal philanthropist George Soros; and $500,000 from the Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg. Dr. Priscilla Chan, a philanthropist and the wife of the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, contributed $750,000, and the real estate magnate George Marcus gave $1 million.

Nationalizing the Recall

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social issues.  It also discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall. 

Jeremy White and Carla Marinucci at Politico:

Vice President Kamala Harris cast California’s recall election as part of a national struggle for progressive policies while rallying voters in the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has long framed the recall as a clash between California’s forward-looking vision and resurgent Trumpism. Harris put the White House’s stamp on that argument as she returned to her political home turf for a campaign rally alongside Newsom and most of California’s statewide Democratic officials.

In a speech of contrasts, Harris assailed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for defending an abortion ban that doesn't create allowances for rape or incest by saying he would “eliminate all rapists” by aggressively prosecuting them. Harris said “that is not who we want in our leaders" and argued Newsom’s foes sought to reverse his policies on abortion rights, aid to undocumented immigrants and voting.

“It is because of his vision, it is because of the agenda, it is because of who he fights for,” Harris said. “California, let us send a message to the world that these are the things we stand for, these are the things we fight for, and we will not give up.”

That exhortation echoed Newsom’s campaign rhetoric. The Democratic governor predicted again Wednesday that a Republican governor would undermine California’s pandemic progress by unraveling vaccination mandates, and he warned that Republican frontrunner Larry Elder “celebrates what just happened to women in Texas and is celebrating the prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade.”

 

The Big Lie,  California ed.:

Trump, on Newsmax, claims the recall election in California is "probably rigged" (as if Democrats can't win elections there fair and square) pic.twitter.com/gPbSq0XHGN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 8, 2021

Trumpists Take Over the Precincts

Our new 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. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. Now they are trying to take over state and local parties, where they can influence nominatios and challenge election results.

 Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette Damon at ProPublica:

On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.

The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”

...

ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, people are coming out of the woodwork,” said J.C. Martin, the GOP chairman in Polk County, Florida, who has added 50 new committee members since January. Martin had wanted congressional Republicans to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and he welcomed this wave of like-minded newcomers. “The most recent time we saw this type of thing was the tea party, and this is way beyond it.”

Larry the Counterproductive

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social issues.  It also discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall. 

Carla Marinucci and colleagues at Politico:

THE BUZZ — GOD’S GIFT TO GAVIN? GOP gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder has become a campaign gift to Gavin Newsom — with some Republicans suggesting the talk show host has actually become “counterproductive” to the recall drive.

Elder last week set off a firestorm by uttering out loud the sentiment that every major GOP recall candidate had studiously avoided. Speaking of Sen. Dianne Feinstein on fellow conservative Mark Levin’s radio show, Elder claimed that “nobody’s seen [her] in weeks,” and suggested the 88-year-old senator is in “even worse mental condition than Joe Biden.”

“They’re afraid I'm going to replace her with a Republican — which I most certainly would do,” Elder said. “And that would be an earthquake in Washington, D.C."

Elder’s comments immediately became a fundraising focal point for Democrats — and prompted some on social media to suggest Elder had just sunk the recall movement. But Elder was right on this point: few statements can fire up the party’s base like the threat of Republicans flipping the U.S. Senate — and Newsom immediately jumped on it. incumbent opponent plenty of material. Take the case of Texas’ restrictive new abortion legislation: When anti-abortion activist Lila Rose tweeted that Elder promised a litany of actions to put the brakes on legal abortion in California, Elder, pressed by the Sac Bee’s Lara Korte this weekend, failed to refute that tweet and then had his security team block Korte from further follow-ups.

Over the weekend, Elder told conservative pundit Candace Owens that slave owners are “owed reparations” and said sex education has “no place“ in California schools. And CNN reported that Elder once admitted being accused twice of sexual harassment, saying that one of his accusers was too ugly to be credible.

THE FALLOUT: The stumbles have led recall campaign leader Orrin Heatlie, the former Yolo County sheriff's sergeant, to tell POLITICO this week that Elder’s entry has been “counterproductive” to the grassroots recall movement. “I rejected his candidacy from the get-go, because he’s so far outspoken on the extreme,’’ he said.

If Elder was deliberately trying to toss the recall back to Newsom, what would he do differently? 🤦‍♂️ https://t.co/GgUyS4g1dU

— Ron Nehring (@RonNehring) September 7, 2021