The Sopranos: Gaetz and Stone

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.  

Jon Swaine and Dalton Bennett at WP:

As Roger Stone prepared to stand trial in 2019, complaining he was under pressure from federal prosecutors to incriminate Donald Trump, a close ally of the president repeatedly assured Stone that “the boss” would likely grant him clemency if he were convicted, a recording shows.

At an event at a Trump property that October, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) predicted that Stone would be found guilty at his trial in Washington the following month but would not “do a day” in prison. Gaetz was apparently unaware they were being recorded by documentary filmmakers following Stone, who special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had charged with obstruction of a congressional investigation.

“The boss still has a very favorable view of you,” said Gaetz, stressing that the president had “said it directly.” He also said, “I don’t think the big guy can let you go down for this.”

 

Gaetz also spoke with Stone about redacted parts of the Mueller report that DOJ showed House Judiciary members in a secure room under a confidentiality agreement: “There was a lot on you in the full redact that came out in the skinny redact.”https://t.co/GcePQC3vcg

— Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) July 30, 2022

Season 3, episode 13 of The Sopranos: 

Paulie: How is Carmine? 

Johnny Sack: He asks about you. 

Paulie: Give him my love. 

Johnny: I will, he'll like hearing that.

Mixed Midterm Signals

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.   There are some favorable signs for Democrats in the 2022 midterms.

Bad signal for Dems. Ben Winck and Madison Hoff at Business Insider:

Data out Friday shows sky-high prices starting to chip away at households' safety nets. Real disposable personal income per capita — the cash each American can spend after taxes and inflation — slid through June to $45,356 from $45,505, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced. That's the lowest since March 2020, when the immediate hit from the coronavirus pandemic powered widespread job loss. It's also below the highs seen just before the crisis began, signaling households are worse off financially than at the end of the last economic cycle. 

But Nate Silver writes: "Democrats are now essentially tied with Republicans in our generic ballot polling average, after having trailed by 2 to 3 percentage points over most of the late spring and early summer."

How come?. Spencer Bokat-Lindell at NYT:

As The Times’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, explains, recent news is actually helping Democrats in some ways: This summer, the Supreme Court has handed the right significant victories on abortion, climate policy, religious rights and gun laws, galvanizing voters who lean Democratic on those issues and shifting the national political discourse away from the Republican Party’s preferred turf of immigration, crime and school curriculums. Recent mass shootings have also played a role in this shift.

In the past several years, the Republican Party has made inroads with less affluent, less educated voters while shedding support among higher-income, higher-educated voters. As a result, the electoral playing field has become less tilted toward Republicans, according to Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who focuses on redistricting and demographic trends. While “the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are disadvantaged in redistricting because of their inefficient over-concentration in cities,” he told Thomas B. Edsall, a contributing writer for Times Opinion, “the Trump era seems to have changed the country’s political geography in ways that are beneficial to Democrats.”

Republicans are also reconfiguring their relationship with Donald Trump, whose grip on the party isn’t as strong as it once was, particularly as the fallout from the House Jan. 6 investigation compounds. According to the Times/Siena College poll, nearly half of Republican primary voters would prefer someone other than Trump for president in 2024. As Jake Lahut reports for Insider, that fault line has created potential pitfalls for Trump-backed Senate candidates, like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia, who have won their primaries but have struggled to break away in general election matchups against their Democratic opponents.

The odds: According to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, Republicans have roughly the same chance of reclaiming a Senate majority as Democrats do of retaining theirs. In the House, though, Republicans are still heavily favored. Why? House candidates are both more numerous and more anonymous than Senate candidates, Silver explains, so voters’ feelings about the national political environment tend to be determinative.

As The Times’s David Leonhardt wrote this month, “If Democrats keep the Senate without the House, they still would not be able to pass legislation without Republican support.” But, he added: “Senate control nonetheless matters. It would allow President Biden to appoint judges, Cabinet secretaries and other top officials without any Republican support, because only the Senate needs to confirm nominees.”

Democratic Party Demographic Profile

 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.

Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

Surveys have found little change in the number of Democrats in the adult public. Roughly one in three Americans identify as Democratic today (and about one in four are Republican)—numbers that have been fairly constant since the mid-1990s.[iii]

But the stable size of Democratic Party membership among the public belies large changes in its composition. Over the past 20 years, while the balance of Democrats and Republicans among the public has remained much the same, the Democratic Party’s demographic profile has undergone a remarkable transformation. Today, the party is more racially and ethnically diverse, includes a larger share of college-educated adults, and has more people who self-identify as liberal. It also includes far fewer religious people.

...

A record number of Americans are graduating from college. In 2021, the number of Americans 25 and older who hold a bachelor’s degree rose to 38 percent from 30 percent only a decade earlier.[xv]

Today, college-educated Americans are overrepresented in the Democratic Party (Figure 6). Nearly half (48 percent) of Democrats over age 24 have a degree from a four-year college or university, and nearly one in four (23 percent) have a postgraduate degree.[xvi] In 1998, only 23 percent of Democrats had a college or postgraduate degree.[xvii]

The Republican Party has not experienced similar growth among those with a college education. In 2021, fewer than one in three (31 percent) Republicans had a college education, nearly identical to the number (30 percent) who had a degree in 1998.

House Dems Who Oppose the Akin Ploy

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

In the 2012 Missouri  Senate race, incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ran ads during the GOP primary campaign saying that Todd Akin was "too conservative."  The idea of the "attack ad" was to drive GOP voters to Akin, her weakest potential foe.  It worked.  Other campaigns have tried variations of the "pick your opponent" ploy.

Sarah Ferris and Ally Mutnick at Politico:

A growing number of House Democrats are seething at their own campaign arm for meddling in a GOP primary to promote a pro-Trump election conspiracy theorist — after months of warning that such candidates were a threat to democracy.

In public statements, private chats and complaints taken directly to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic members are aghast that the committee is spending nearly half a million dollars to air ads boosting Donald Trump-endorsed John Gibbs over Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), who voted to impeach Trump last year.

While Meijer is one of the few GOP lawmakers who voted to hold Trump accountable for his own false claims about the 2020 race, his blue-leaning seat is also a top Democratic target district this fall — and Gibbs is seen as an easier opponent to beat in November. The primary next Tuesday will kick off a three-month sprint to the general election.

“No race is worth compromising your values in that way,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who sits on the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and Trump’s election-subverting schemes that preceded it.

Democrats, like Murphy, fear the strategy could easily backfire, if a candidate like Gibbs were to win the general election amid a GOP wave — and the party also risks undercutting its own core message about the dangers of MAGA Republicans taking power. It could be harder for Democrats to claim that certain GOP candidates are an existential threat to the country if they are also using party money to push them closer to winning office.

Some members’ frustrations are particularly acute now, after months of simmering tensions with Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) over other issues during his tenure as chair of the DCCC.

The Akin Ploy in Michigan

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

In the 2012 Missouri  Senate race, incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ran ads during the GOP primary campaign saying that Todd Akin was "too conservative."  The idea of the "attack ad" was to drive GOP voters to Akin, her weakest potential foe.  It worked.  Other campaigns have tried variations of the "pick your opponent" ploy.  Even in California.

 Lachlan Markay at Axios:

National Democrats are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to boost a far-right, Trump-endorsed conspiracy theorist in one of the most closely watched House races in the country — further endangering one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Trump.

Driving the news: A new TV ad from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee portrays Republican John Gibbs as the true pro-Trump conservative in his effort to unseat Republican Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) — aligning with Gibbs' own campaign messaging. 

• Trump endorsed Gibbs' challenge after Meijer voted to impeach the former president over his role in fomenting the Jan. 6 Capitol siege.
•  Meijer, a freshman, had been in Congress just days when he took that potentially career-ending vote.
• Now Democrats, who see Gibbs as the more beatable general election opponent, are fueling the Trump-backed effort to oust one of his few remaining GOP critics in next week's primary.

A DCCC spokesperson told Axios it plans to spend $425,000 to air the ad in the Grand Rapids market beginning Tuesday.

There are two dangers with the Akin ploy.

• When far-right candidates lose the primary, moderate winners come out stronger for the general election, as in Colorado this year.
• And the more conservative candidate could actually win the general election -- as Democrats learned in 1966 with Ronald Reagan.

Sheriffs

Our 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.  

Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti at NYT:

An influential network of conservative activists fixated on the idea that former President Donald J. Trump won the 2020 election is working to recruit county sheriffs to investigate elections based on the false notion that voter fraud is widespread.

The push, which two right-wing sheriffs’ groups have already endorsed, seeks to lend law enforcement credibility to the false claims and has alarmed voting rights advocates. They warn that it could cause chaos in future elections and further weaken trust in an American voting system already battered by attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies.

One of the conservative sheriffs’ groups, Protect America Now, lists about 70 members, and the other, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, does not list its membership but says it conducted trainings on various issues for about 300 of the nation’s roughly 3,000 sheriffs in recent years. It is unclear how many sheriffs will ultimately wade into election matters. Many aligned with the groups are from small, rural counties.

But at least three sheriffs involved in the effort — in Michigan, Kansas and Wisconsin — have already been carrying out their own investigations, clashing with election officials who warn that they are overstepping their authority and meddling in an area where they have little expertise.

“I’m absolutely sick of it,” said Pam Palmer, the clerk of Barry County, Mich., where the sheriff has carried out an investigation into the 2020 results for more than a year. “We didn’t do anything wrong, but they’ve cast a cloud over our entire county that makes people disbelieve in the accuracy of our ability to run an election.”

In recent years, sheriffs have usually taken a limited role in investigations of election crimes, which are typically handled by state agencies with input from local election officials. Republican-led state legislatures, at the same time, have pushed to impose harsher criminal penalties for voting infractions, passing 20 such laws in at least 14 states since the 2020 election.

Last fall, Adam Rawnsley reported at The Daily Beast:

The MAGA think tank at the vanguard of pro-Trump public intellectuals is recruiting sheriffs with ties to the far right and a dubious devotion to the “rule of law” to be academic “fellows” as part of a new program launched by the conservative institute this week.

The Claremont Institute, a far-right research group that’s home to a number of former Trump administration officials, announced a new crop of eight “sheriffs fellows” selected from across the country on the basis of their “character, aptitude, accomplishments, zeal, and community reputation” to visit Claremont’s California campus and study a syllabus of standard conservative political catechism.

The coursework, Claremont says, is fairly anodyne—lectures on Locke, the Federalist Papers, and English legal history—but the Institute’s choice of students is far more radical. Of the eight fellows announced this week, six have some affiliation with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an organization labeled as an anti-government extremist group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center for its endorsement of the idea that sheriffs can pick and choose which laws to enforce based on their own personal beliefs about what the Constitution allows.

In that spirit, members of Claremont’s first crop of sheriff fellows have vowed not to enforce pandemic restrictions, vaccine mandates, gun laws, and basically any laws they disagree with. For far-right groups like the Claremont Institute, those efforts to sidestep the rule of law and the will of democratically elected governments are a feature, not a bug.

 

A Weekend in Crazytown (aka Turning Point)

 Our 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. See, for instance, the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit. 

Trump repeats the myth that NATO charges dues, says he told allies that he would not defend them if they were delinquent on the nonexistent dues.

"That's right, I will not come to your defense" -- Trump claims that he once told NATO countries he wouldn't come to their defense if they were attacked by Russia pic.twitter.com/4cZAnR3EvQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2022

Matt Gaetz shows how to win suburban women.

Gaetz: "Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb." pic.twitter.com/0qqvun3Pf8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2022

MTG does MTG:

Marjorie Taylor Greene takes the stage at the Turning Point USA event and immediately gets the crowd booing the idea they should care about Ukraine pic.twitter.com/hALbBMccT6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2022

The Tea Party Road to Trump

 Our 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. 

Charles Homans at NYT Magazine:

The echoes from the earliest days of the Tea Party are instructive. The movement’s advent in early 2009 quickly piqued the interest of Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist who has studied grass-roots organizing for decades, and Vanessa Williamson, her graduate student. In its profusion of local groups, its library public-room conclaves, the Tea Party harked back to a kind of civic activism that had gone largely dormant in American politics. Skocpol and Williamson began attending Tea Party meetings in several states and interviewing dozens of participants. 

The movement arrived at a moment of crisis for the Republican Party. Its elites, and many of their foreign and domestic policies, had been battered by the unpopularity of the George W. Bush administration; voters had broadly turned against the party at the national level, and even its own base seemed demoralized. The Tea Party, arising in the first days of Obama’s presidency, offered the promise of reinvigoration, and almost immediately an array of well-funded conservative and libertarian organizations — Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks — backed by major donors and staffed by Beltway Republican lifers jumped on its bandwagon. With their own priorities in mind, they tried to cast it as a people’s uprising on behalf of well-established conservative fiscal objectives: austerity in budgeting, the rollback of entitlement programs and the reduction of taxes.

But in their 2012 book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” Skocpol and Williamson argued that most of these views were not what drove the grass-roots activists. These activists represented the Tea Party’s novel contribution to politics — what distinguished it from the professional, top-down organizing that had dominated liberal and conservative activism for half a century, and its real source of political strength. They were overwhelmingly white baby boomers and retirees who were relatively well educated, disproportionately evangelical and only occasionally direct casualties of the financial crisis that had, in the popular understanding of the Tea Party, prompted the movement. Though they made common cause with the political professionals’ tax-cutting agenda, their concerns were otherwise less economic than social and cultural.

“As a general rule, the participants in the Tea Party seemed like sweet grandmotherly and grandfatherly types who had watched an awful lot of Fox News,” Williamson, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. Their specific preoccupations varied, but they boiled down to a profound pessimism about the future of the country, a sense that it was imperiled by the left, the young and the nonwhite. Local organizers and activists were often quick to distance themselves from the most baldly racist derisions of Obama. Far more common, and openly sanctioned, were anti-immigrant sentiments and Islamophobia, which informed not only the conspiracy theories about Obama but also the panic about the supposed threat of Shariah law being imposed across the country and the plans to construct an Islamic cultural center near ground zero in Manhattan.

Two particular themes of the Tea Party’s politics struck Williamson at the time and loomed larger to her after the 2020 election. One was the conspiracism that characterized the views of many grass-roots Tea Partyers, despite the best efforts of the more mainstream-oriented leaders. It drew from a wide range of sources: vintage ones like the John Birch Society and Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign — alumni of both often turned up in Tea Party meetings — and newer strains like Alex Jones’s Infowars media empire and the wild-eyed quest for Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate. Where those sources met was in a narrative of dispossession in which true Americans were losing their country to actors from outside the proper bounds of public life. This was the other big theme: “the idea,” Williamson told me, “that a substantial part of the American public were not legitimate actors in American politics.”

This idea reached its purest expression in the conspiracy theories about Obama, whose presidency was so unsquarable with what the Tea Partyers believed to be the true nature of America that to some it seemed, ipso facto, to represent a crime. Even those who in interviews did not espouse conspiracy theories like the birth-certificate claim confided to Skocpol and Williamson an uneasiness about the new president that went beyond normal partisanship. “I think that he’s actually not what he seems to be,” one Virginia Tea Partyer told them. Several interviewees told them that Obama planned to give amnesty to illegal immigrants in order to secure 10 million extra votes for his re-election — enough to allow him to “continue to ignore the interests of real Americans,” Skocpol and Williamson wrote.

The J6 Hearing

  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.   We now know that Trump fired up the mob against Pence after learning about the violence at the Capitol.  Was he trying to get them to kill Pence, or did he just not care one way or the other?  There was danger all around. And last night's hearing showed that he did nothing to stop the violence.

‘There were calls to say goodbye to family members’ — A White House security official revealed in interviews with the Jan 6 committee that members of VP Mike Pence's security detail feared for their lives as rioters took over the Capitol pic.twitter.com/7ikTTe0tRi

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) July 22, 2022

We asked a security professional who had been working in the White House complex on January 6th what was meant by the comment that the Secret Service agents did not "sound good right now."

The professional discusses what they heard from listening to the incoming radio traffic: pic.twitter.com/lDn8sNMaYR

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) July 22, 2022

The Select Committee obtained never-before-seen footage of the President recording an address to the nation on January 7th.

One day after he incited an insurrection based on a lie, Trump still couldn’t say the election was over. pic.twitter.com/YjdpT02I6U

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) July 22, 2022

Garland on Investigating 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.   We now know that Trump fired up the mob against Pence after learning about the violence at the Capitol.  Was he trying to get them to kill Pence, or did he just not care one way or the other?  There was danger all around.

Attorney General Garland, July 20:

[T]here is a lot of speculation about what the Justice Department is doing, what it's not doing, what our theories are, theories aren't. And there will continue to be that speculation that's because  a central tenet of the way in which the Justice Department investigates a central tenet of the rule of law is that we do not do our investigations in public.

This is the most wide-ranging investigation and the most important investigation that the Justice Department has ever entered into. And we have done so because this represents this effort to upend a legitimate election transferring power from one administration to another, cuts at the fundamentala of American democracy. We have to get this right. And for people who are concerned, as I think every American should be, about protecting democracy, we have to do two things. We have to hold accountable every person who is criminally responsible for trying to overturn a legitimate election. And we must do it in a way filled with integrity and professionalism. The way the Justice Department conducts investigations. Both of these are necessary in order to achieve justice and to protect our democracy. 

...

 No person is above the law this country. I can't say any more clearly than that. There is nothing in the principles of prosecution or any other factors which prevent us from investigating anyone, anyone who is criminally responsible for four attempt to undo a democratic election. 

Drop Boxes

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses voting procedures:

Anthony Izaguirre and Christina A. Cassidy at AP:

The expanded use of drop boxes for mailed ballots during the 2020 election did not lead to any widespread problems, according to an Associated Press survey of state election officials across the U.S. that revealed no cases of fraud, vandalism or theft that could have affected the results.

The findings from both Republican- and Democratic-controlled states run contrary to claims made by former President Donald Trump and his allies who have intensely criticized their use and falsely claimed they were a target for fraud.

Drop boxes are considered by many election officials to be safe and secure, and have been used to varying degrees by states across the political spectrum. Yet conspiracy theories and efforts by Republicans to eliminate or restrict them since the 2020 election persist. This month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that drop boxes are not allowed under state law and can no longer be widely used.

...

In response to the legislation and conspiracy theories surrounding drop boxes, the AP sent a survey in May to the top elections office in each state seeking information about whether the boxes were tied to fraudulent votes or stolen ballots, or whether the boxes and the ballots they contained were damaged.

All but five states responded to the questions.

None of the election offices in states that allowed the use of drop boxes in 2020 reported any instances in which the boxes were connected to voter fraud or stolen ballots. Likewise, none reported incidents in which the boxes or ballots were damaged to the extent that election results would have been affected.

Lost, Not Stolen

 Our 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. 

LOST, NOT STOLEN: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election

• Senator John Danforth
• Benjamin Ginsberg
• The Honorable Thomas B. Griffith
• David Hoppe
• The Honorable J. Michael Luttig
• The Honorable Michael W. McConnell
• The Honorable Theodore B. Olson
• Senator Gordon H. Smith

We are political conservatives who have spent most of our adult lives working to support the Constitution and the conservative principles upon which it is based: limited government, liberty, equality of opportunity, freedom of religion, a strong national defense, and the rule of law. 

We have become deeply troubled by efforts to overturn or discredit the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. There is no principle of our Republic more fundamental than the right of the People to elect our leaders and for their votes to be counted accurately. Efforts to thwart the People’s choice are deeply undemocratic and unpatriotic. Claims that an election was stolen, or that the outcome resulted from fraud, are deadly serious and should be made only on the basis of real and powerful evidence. If the American people lose trust that our elections are free and fair, we will lose our democracy. As Jonathan Haidt observed, “We just don’t know what a democracy looks like when you drain all the trust out of the system.” Paul Kelly, “Very Good Chance” Democracy Is Doomed in America, Says Haidt, AUSTRALIAN (July 20, 2019). 

We therefore have undertaken an examination of every claim of fraud and miscount put forward by former President Trump and his advocates, and now put the results of those investigations before the American people, and especially before fellow conservatives who may be uncertain about what and whom to believe. Our conclusion is unequivocal: Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states. Biden’s victory is easily explained by a political landscape that was much different in 2020 than it was when President Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016. President Trump waged his campaign for re-election during a devastating worldwide pandemic that caused a severe downturn in the global economy. This, coupled with an electorate that included a small but statistically significant number willing to vote for other Republican candidates on the ballot but not for President Trump, are the reasons his campaign fell short, not a fraudulent election. 

Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. We do not claim that election administration is perfect. Election fraud is a real thing; there are prosecutions in almost every election year, and no doubt some election fraud goes undetected. Nor do we disparage attempts to reduce fraud. States should continue to do what they can do to eliminate opportunities for election fraud and to punish it when it occurs. But there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.

The Blue Bubble of White Educated Liberals

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.

Ruy Teixeira:

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Democrats’ emphasis on social and democracy issues, while catnip to some socially liberal, educated voters, leaves many working class and Hispanic voters cold. Their concerns are more mundane and economically-driven. This is despite the fact that many of these voters are in favor of moderate abortion rights and gun control and disapprove of the January 6th events. But these issues are just not salient for them in the way they are for the Democrats’ educated and most fervent supporters.

...

Strong progressives clearly live in a different world than Hispanic and working class voters. In strong progressive world, views on abortion, gun control and January 6th fit neatly into an overarching set of sociocultural beliefs that are highly salient to them and increasingly drive the Democratic party’s priorities and rhetoric. Hispanic and working class voters lack this overarching set of beliefs—in fact, don’t share many of them—and are much more concerned with the basics of their material lives. It should thus be no surprise that these voters are increasingly losing interest in the party of abortion, gun control and January 6th. As Josh Kraushaar notes:

• Democrats are becoming the party of upscale voters concerned more about issues like gun control and abortion rights.
• Republicans are quietly building a multiracial coalition of working-class voters, with inflation as an accelerant.

Exaggerated? Maybe. But consider this: between the 2012 and 2020 elections—which Democrats won by similar popular vote margins—Democrats’ advantage among nonwhite working class voters decreased by 19 margin points (Catalist data). Over the same period, Democrats’ performance among white college-educated voters improved by 16 margin points. So perhaps we’re just on trend

David French:

Hispanic Americans also tend to possess strong religious values. In October 2020 the New York Times’s Jennifer Medina published a prescient report highlighting Trump-supporting Hispanic Evangelicals. Called “Latino, Evangelical, and Politically Homeless,” it featured this insightful sentence: “Hispanic evangelicals identify as religious first and foremost.”

Yes. Absolutely. That’s exactly why a politics focused on mobilizing by race/ethnicity will not reach them, especially when identity politics is paired with hard-left cultural positions and hostility for traditional religion. Hispanic voters will find a religious connection with many, many white Republicans, and that religious connection can prove far more culturally and politically consequential than any effort to create a politics based on ethnic or racial identity.

The disproportionate secularization of white Democrats represents a danger for the Democratic Party, for the country, and for American religion. The danger for the Democrats is clear. America may be more secular than it’s been in generations, but it is still a quite religious country. It’s far more religious than any European nation. It’s far more religious than Canada or the rest of the anglosphere nations. And it’s going to remain extraordinarily religious for the foreseeable future.

A party that’s culturally disconnected from (or perhaps even scornful of) traditional religious faith is going to alienate itself from tens of millions of voters it could otherwise reach.

The Secret Service on January 6

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.   We now know that Trump fired up the mob against Pence after learning about the violence at the Capitol.  Was he trying to get them to kill Pence, or did he just not care one way or the other?  There was danger all around.

 Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:

The Secret Service’s account about how text messages from the day before and the day of the Capitol attack were erased has shifted several times, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security told the House January 6 select committee at a briefing on Friday.

At one point, the explanation from the Secret Service for the lost texts was because of software upgrades, the inspector general told the panel, while at another point, the explanation was because of device replacements.

The inspector general also said that though the secret service opted to have his office do a review of the agency’s response to the Capitol attack in lieu of conducting after-action reports, it then stonewalled the review by slow-walking production of materials.

Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept:

The Secret Service has emerged as a key player in the explosive congressional hearings on former President Donald Trump’s role in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent the 2020 election results from being certified. That day, then-Vice President Mike Pence was at the Capitol to certify the results. When rioters entered the building, the Secret Service tried to whisk Pence away from the scene.

“I’m not getting in the car,” Pence reportedly told the Secret Service detail on January 6. “If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off.” Had Pence entered the vice presidential limo, he would have been taken to a secure location where he would have been unable to certify the presidential election results, plunging the U.S. into uncharted waters.

“People need to understand that if Pence had listened to the Secret Service and fled the Capitol, this could have turned out a whole lot worse,” a congressional official not authorized to speak publicly told The Intercept. “It could’ve been a successful coup, not just an attempted one.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the January 6 committee, called Pence’s terse refusal — “I’m not getting in the car” — the “six most chilling words of this entire thing I’ve seen so far.”

Abortion and the Midterm

 Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses how polarization has affected American life.  Abortion is a central issue in our national divide.

Arrest made in rape of 10-year-old #Ohio girl who was barred from getting an abortion in her home state. https://t.co/CEegNKXPgj Many had considered the child's story a "hoax." Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan has deleted his tweet calling it "another lie." https://t.co/3e8aKbO311

— Patt Morrison (@pattmlatimes) July 14, 2022

David Siders, Adam Wren, and Megan Messerly at Politico:

In the three weeks since the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe, Republicans poised for a winning midterm election have strained to keep public attention squarely on President Joe Biden’s weak job approval ratings and on inflation, fearful that abortion — a deeply felt issue that polls poorly for conservatives — could lift Democratic turnout and push moderates away from the GOP.

The case has become an instant flashpoint in the nation’s abortion wars, alarming Republicans as they try to use abortion to rally base voters without alienating the majority of Americans who say abortion should remain legal in at least some circumstances.

But the case of the pregnant 10-year-old has laid bare how uncontrollable GOP messaging around abortion may be. Not only were right-wing media outlets and Republican politicians who cast doubt on the story forced to backtrack once the facts of the case were confirmed, but the hits to Republicans appear likely to keep coming.

On Thursday, Jim Bopp, the National Right to Life Committee’s general counsel, inflamed the issue when he told POLITICO that the 10-year-old girl should have carried her pregnancy to term – a statement he later said resulted in him receiving death threats.

Despite what GOP leaders and strategists would prefer, the story is unlikely to fade quickly. Later this month, Indiana’s state legislature plans to convene a special session explicitly to pass new curbs on abortion, likely becoming the first state to do so in the wake of the Dobbs decision that reversed the national right to abortion enshrined by Roe in 1973.

College America, Non-College America, and Shifting Party Bases

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.

“The GOP is trading soccer moms for Walmart dads.” https://t.co/CgHv5h3YyU

— Bruce Mehlman (@bpmehlman) July 14, 2022

 Nate Cohn at NYT:

For the first time in a Times/Siena national survey, Democrats had a larger share of support among white college graduates than among nonwhite voters — a striking indication of the shifting balance of political energy in the Democratic coalition. As recently as the 2016 congressional elections, Democrats won more than 70 percent of nonwhite voters while losing among white college graduates.

What is your preference for the outcome of the 2022 congressional elections?

Which Party Different Groups of Voters Support

For the first time in a Times/Siena national survey, Democrats won a larger share of white college graduates than nonwhite voters.

Gender

	DEM.	REP.	OTHER/ UNDEC.
Female 52% of RVs	44%	34%	21%
Male 46%	38%	47%	15%

Race

	DEM.	REP.	OTHER/ UNDEC.
White 65% of RVs	37%	47%	17%
White, no coll. 39%	23%	54%	23%
White, coll. 26%	57%	36%	7%
Black 10%	78%	3%	19%
Hispanic 13%	41%	38%	21%
Other 8%	34%	39%	27%

Age

	DEM.	REP.	OTHER/ UNDEC.
Age 18 to 29 16% of RVs	46%	28%	26%
Age 30 to 44 22%	52%	31%	18%
Age 45 to 64 32%	35%	50%	15%
Age 65+ 24%	39%	45%	16%

Education

	DEM.	REP.	OTHER/ UNDEC.
College grad. 35% of RVs	56%	32%	12%
No four-yr. deg. 63%	33%	45%	22%

Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 849 registered voters from July 5-7. All figures are rounded. Some respondents did not provide demographic information.