stevenkesslar

Michigan voters file federal lawsuit seeking to toss 1.2M ballots Rudy Giuliani claims 650,000 votes were counted unlawfully in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh Those headlines speak for themselves. It is just surreal. Call me stupid. But as much as I feel Trump has proven he is racist, deplorable, go through the whole list of negative adjectives, this is going way past where I thought he'd go. If only because I really didn't think he was willing to hurt America this much. Or, more important, destroy his own reputation further. Both in the history books, and right now. I have to assume he has some calculation in his mind that somehow this helps him in some way. Even if it is with a post-White House career. But it really makes no sense. Some partisan part of me is just hoping he does more of this. The message could not be more clear. This is supposed to be the least racist guy in America. And now what they are saying is that the votes of Blacks in Detroit are not legal, and should just be thrown out. The votes of White progressives in Philly or Pittsburgh are not legal, and should be thrown out. It's the most outrageous claim I've ever heard in my lifetime in the US. That hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes are unlawful. And yet there is still not any proof. I have to imagine that every headline like this just loses Trump and the Republicans more future votes. I guess losing by over 5 million votes wasn't enough. It goes without saying, but I'll say it. I'm assuming Trump will win by about 75,000 votes in North Carolina. That's about half of Biden's winning margin in Michigan and maybe double Biden's final winning margin in Pennsylvania right now. I'm quite sure Democratic lawyers could whip up a nice shit list of similarly baseless claims about White voters in North Carolina. I don't have a clue why Democrats would WANT to do that, since it would alienate Whites in North Carolina. Why would Democrats do that? I also assume that right-of-center suburban Republicans who are just groaning right now could forget all this in 4 years and switch back to voting for a John Kasich. IF the Republicans nominated someone like him in 2024. I get the idea that maybe this is a play so that Trump or Trump, Jr. or Ivanka or maybe a Trumpy Nikki Haley/Ivanka Trump ticket are the Trump Party nominees in 2024. It just seems to me like even if this helps you get 70 % of the shrinking Republican Party on your side, that's a losing proposition. Both in 2020, and moreso in 2024. Again, some partisan part of me is saying, go ahead Trumpians. Burn the bitch down if you must. If the goal is to drive out any remaining Kasich Republicans and consolidate control of the Republican Party for the Trumps, that's a winning ticket for Democrats. If you didn't get that in 2020, we can do it again in 2022 and 2024. Please. Go ahead. Make my decade. This is where I'll keep repeating the excellent question Ron Brownstein is asking. Do Republicans not think that Millennials have memories? Do Republicans not think Blacks have memories? If the exit polls are right, 60 % of Latinos in Michigan and Wisconsin and 70 % in Pennsylvania voted for Biden. In the specific urban areas where Trump is saying the votes should be tossed out, it was probably more like 3 in 4 Hispanics, I'd guess. Do you think those Latinos will forget this? So what Republicans are teaching entire generations and races of Americans is that if we don't win, you don't count. Your vote doesn't count. Whatever small gains the Republicans made - and all the exit polls suggest they were small - with Blacks and Latinos, this wipes it out. Telling them their vote does not count, because they somehow cheated, just wipes away any pretense of caring about them. Or their votes. Outside of the ones that are committed Trumpians, I can't see how this could possibly help with alienated suburban centrists, as well. It will just alienate more of them. I've posted endless dorky data over on Daddy's. But I am going to do a brief summary here. I actually hope this stuff is debated. Because the facts underscore how totally ignorant Trump is. And that he is willing to tear down democratic norms based on completely baseless bullshit. The data I will refer is not polling guesses. This is based on actual vote totals in 2016 and 2020, based on current vote totals - which I think include like 99 % of all votes cast. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, statewide voter turnout is up about 10 % from 2016 statewide. In Michigan, it's close to 15 %. For the most part, the urban parts of those states closely reflect the state trend. In Milwaukee County, turnout is up 10 % - same percentage as all Wisconsin. In Wayne County (Detroit) - turnout is up 15 %, just like in all of Michigan. in both counties I just mentioned, Biden managed to boost Clinton's winning margin as well. So, for example, Clinton's win of 65.48 % in 2016 became Biden's win of 69.1 % in Milwaukee County. Blacks and Berniecrat Whites and to a lesser degree Latinos (since they are not a huge population group there) ran up big vote totals for Biden in all three states. So what happened in the urban areas Trump wants to focus on basically reflects very closely what happened in the entire state. Turnout was up, across the board. Second important point. If you are decent at math, you will understand that Trump could have won all three states if he pulled off exactly the same thing in the predominantly White parts of the state he won in 2016. But he did the opposite. He lost vote share in predominantly White suburbs, as well as in some predominantly White working class areas like Erie County, Pennsylvania (88 % White). So here's a specific example. Biden's winning vote share in Wayne County. Michigan was 322,925 votes, compared to Hillary's 290,451 winning vote margin in 2016. Meanwhile, Biden cut Trump's winning vote share in Macomb County, Michigan from 48,348 votes in 2016 to 38,974 votes in 2020 - even though turnout in Macomb County was up about 22 %, higher than the statewide increase. Overall, Biden turned Hillary's roughly 10,000 vote loss into his roughly 150,000 vote win in Michigan. So do the math. If we're talking about fraud in Michigan, you really have to go after how White voters (often in Republican areas) fraudulently tipped the vote to Biden. That's where he ran up most of those 150,000 votes. Trump needs to be talking about, and proving, White voter fraud. Even if Biden implausibly had gotten 30,000 FEWER votes in Wayne County, he STILL would have won Michigan. Because of White voters. Trump can't say that. In a state Biden won by 150,000 votes, the only mathematically tenable position he can take is literally to say just take all those Black votes in Detroit away. They just don't count. How racist is that? Thank you. I thought so, too. If there is some logic in Trump exposing himself to be the racist, erratic, ignorant, democracy-hating monster he has always been, I don't see it. Third important point. There were outliers. I just mentioned one. Turnout in Macomb County was up 22 %, which beat Michigan's 15 % overall increase. In Dane County (Madison), White Berniecrats drove turnout up 17 %, much higher than the 10 % statewide increase. So if we are looking for outliers were there were unusual vote totals, those places could make more sense. Or you could just decide that educated voters in Dane and Macomb County were highly motivated to vote. As I said above, Milwaukee and Detroit conformed almost exactly to the overall statewide increase in turnout. Here's an outlier I can't figure out, other to say it is what it is. In Philadelphia County, turnout was only up 1 %, compared to 10 % in Pennsylvania as a hole. And for reasons social scientists or activists will have to figure out, Trump's winning vote share in Philadelphia actually INCREASED. Since it undercuts any theory of fraud in Philadelphia, I'll spell out the details as of yesterday. Clinton got 584,025 votes in Philadelphia County in 2016, which went DOWN to 573,785 for Biden in 2020. Meanwhile, votes for Trump went from 108,748 in 2016 to 128, 123 in 2020. Net impact: Clinton's winning 2016 vote share of 475,277 in Philadelphia County was shaved to Biden's 445,662 vote share. So if everything else in the state stayed exactly the same as 2016, Trump would have won Pennsylvania by 30,000 votes more than he did in 2016 - BECAUSE OF PHILADELPHIA. If there was farud in Philadelphia, which I don't believe there was, the vote totals suggest it helped Trump. Why did Biden win? In Bucks County (suburbs), he boosted Hillary's victory of 2,699 votes in 2016 to his victory of 16,395 in 2020. In Alleghany County (Pittsburgh), Clinton's winning margin of 108,317 votes in 2016 climbed to a 146,706 winning margin for Biden. For whatever reason, in Pennsylvania Biden's win was irrefutably grounded in White voters in suburbs and working class areas like Erie County. He actually had to make ground he lost in Philadelphia County. (This may have something to do with slow vote counting. But the vote seems likes it's mostly counted. And turnout and votes for Biden in every other blue part of Pennsylvania - like Pittsburgh - did increase a lot.) I have no explanation for why Philadelphia sticks out like a sore thumb, compared to all the other big cities in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. But it does. It actually looks like somehow Trump cheated to reduce the number of votes Biden got. Basing an argument about fraud on the actual vote totals in Philadelphia makes this more a comedy than a tragedy. It's absurd. Trump has no proof. And it makes no fucking sense. Other than to prove Trump is an ignorant monster who feels winning is more important than democracy. Ron Brownstein often comes back to the same question. Do you think Millennials have no memories? Do you think Gen Z has no memories? Do you think Blacks have no memories? Those groups in particular turned out in droves to fire Trump. So if the message back is that your vote just doesn't count, I am with Brownstein. They are teaching entire generations and races to view them as deplorable for the rest of their lives. Republicans just paid a huge price for letting Trump degrade, corrupt, and pollute their party. The verdict is out. But I think the price they just paid may look like a small down payment of the full cost from the vantage point of history.

Understanding The 2020 Electorate: AP VoteCast Survey CNN Exit Polls There ya go. The first link is to the AP VoteCast, the second to the CNN exit polls. We all know now to take polls with a gain of salt. Which is partly why I included two different ones. That said, I think the results are in the ballpark. We know Blacks overwhelmingly supported Biden. Whether it's 90 % (AP) or 87 % (CNN) makes a difference. A close election could turn on that. But it does tell you about 9 out of 10 Blacks supported Biden. The cool thing about the CNN polls is that you can toggle through various state exit polls from swing states, as well. On education, there are no surprises. Both AP and CNN show Trump overwhelmingly won the White non-college vote. Biden won the White college vote. How that shakes out in various states helped determine the outcome. The Blue Wall states are important because Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (plus Ohio, which is now solid red) have a treasure trove of White non college voters. Georgia had just enough college Whites to add to non-Whites to produce a razor thin Biden win. AP started their data base in 2018. But with CNN you can compare 2020 to the state-level CNN polls from 2016. It indicates that both non college White men and women shifted back to Democrats a bit in 2020. We've heard a lot about suburban women and working class White women fed up with Trump. The state polls suggest that the shift among White suburban and working class men may have been just as important in getting Biden enough votes to win the electoral college as well as a 5 million + popular vote lead. AP says Trump won White non college men 64/34, and White non college women 60/39. Trump also won White college men 52/46, but Biden won White college women 59/39. Net it out, and Trump won White America. Biden offset it with Black, Latino, Asian, etc. voters. I'll wait to hear from the experts. But I'm pretty sure in Michigan Biden would have won if if he won ZERO more White votes, based on the increased turnout from Blacks in Detroit alone. The fact that he won back a lot of suburban Whites and at least a sliver of non college Whites helped him rack up a pretty decent win that fell a bit short of 4 %. In Wisconsin White Berniecrats in Madison and Blacks in Milwaukee produced enough votes to turn a 20,000 loss in 2016 into a 20,000 vote win in 2020. But small gains among Whites in the suburbs helped offset higher Trump margins in the core red meat rural areas. In Pennsylvania I am almost certain that Biden absolutely needed to win more White suburban voters and a sliver of White working class voters to win. Which he did. That's one of my go-to charts that I post a lot, because I think it explains so many things. It's already clear that Biden reversed the trend from Clinton's R + 39 wipeout with non college Whites in 2016. I'm pretty sure that Biden did not quite get back to Obama's R +25 outcome in 2012. My guess, or at least hope, is that we'll look back at 2020 as the peak of Trumpism - much like McCarthyism had a peak. Trump had The White House. He spent $1 billion or so (not his money) and four years building an army to legitimately overwhelm the field in one election on one day. If true, Trump volunteers were knocking on 1 million doors a week while Biden volunteers knocked on zero doors. So they put a lot of effort into this. And they failed. And at the end of the day Trump lost at least a sliver of his White non college base. And his racist and mean antics alienated a treasure trove of suburban college Whites that delivered Arizona and Georgia to Biden. Bill Clinton is the only Democrat to split the non-college White vote 50/50 - two times in a row. And there's a rumor I heard that Barack Obama was actually Black. Some people even describe Bill Clinton as "America's first Black President". (Don't tell Trump.) My point is I think you are right to not jump to conclusions about racism. What we still don't know is how many of these non-college Whites are driven by these "cultural" drivers (racism, sexism, Gays, feeling like America is being lost). Versus how many feel the Democrats betrayed them and their communities by either helping to give their jobs to robots or Chinese, or at least acquiescing to it on behalf of their corporate and Wall Street donors. Trump obviously played on that in 2016. My guess, or at least my hope, is that with Trump gone or at least reduced to Trump TV there will be an opportunity to move some of those Whites back to the Democrats. But that will depend on Biden persuading them that he got the message, Democrats got the message, and we are now doing specific and clear things to make it right. That is a huge fight yet to be fought, I think.

Chris Cuomo has been clearly showing that even though he chose journalism rather than law and politics, he has the political instincts of his brother and father. He's been saying what I have been thinking, which suggests that what I'm thinking is a sensible enough hope. Everything goes through COVID. It gets you to health care. It gets you to schools. It get you to jobs. It gets you to wages (income inequality). In theory, it could even get you to taxes: whose income taxes go up to pay for this? Who is getting the benefit of this crisis (Answer: Amazon). That last part is a huge stretch. Biden was right to claim a mandate for urgent action and cooperation. Mitch knows this. He's already being the Republican in the room saying we have to have another COVID relief package. Reagan comes to mind. Yes, he had a bigger mandate. But he also had a much bigger obstacle. Despite heavy losses in 1980, Democrats had a 243 to 192 majority in the US House. Yet Reagan mostly got what he wanted. He went to the grassroots in some of those House districts. And of course he was way better at compromising than Trump was. Biden won the union vote nationwide 56 to 40. 15 % of voters in Wisconsin are union, and they voted for Biden 58/39. It would be a stretch to say that Biden won a mandate to try to restore union manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin. But I think he did. In 2016 Trump won the one third of Georgians that make under $50,000 a year by one point, 48 to 47. In 2020, Biden won that group - lots of whom are White - by a 14 point margin, 56/42. Rich Mitch has to worry about that, just like Tip O'Neill had to worry about his much larger majority in 1981. If Republicans are seen to be against cooperation to help the union factory workers of Wisconsin or the have nots of Georgia, they'll potentially have problems in Senate races in 2022. Biden is wired to understand this in a way Obama wasn't. Speaking of having enough. We now know that Kentucky and Montana and Iowa are lost causes, at least for a while. McGrath was a lost cause from Day One. The size of Bullock's loss was a bit of a surprise. As was the size of Ernst's victory. It confirms the idea that it's the geography, stupid. Where White men roam free and proud in places with lots of cows, small towns, and contentment, running a popular and centrist Governor like Bullock is a waste of time almost. This sounds cruel. But if people in Montana or Kentucky truly embrace the idea that lockdowns are a threat to liberty, and the only people who wear masks are Marxists, we know where this goes. Fauci is saying it could go to 250,000 infections a day. Seniors will die on stretchers in hospitals in Montana and Kentucky, if they even get to the hospital. Because there is no room in the ICU. I said this will sound cruel. I think of it as those people being cruel to themselves, and their neighbors. They have every right to see it differently. But if that happens, which is nowhere near the worst case scenario, it helps Biden when he says we need to cooperate and act now.

Sorry, sis. But on this one I have to completely disagree. It won't just fade away. But don't ask me. Smarter people than me have debated this for a long time. I've posted a short version of this already on Daddy's but this slightly longer version is worth posting here. That's the flip side of what Douglass was talking about. There is a time for conflict. And there is a time for reconciliation. "Reconciliation" is the word that needs to be in the mind and heart of every American right now. This is already starting. One of the many images that brought me to tears this weekend was the spontaneous celebration near The White House in DC, in what I believe is now called Black Lives Matter plaza. That was where we came close on one day this summer to looking like an authoritarian state, with the armed forces attacking peaceful US citizens who were described and treated by some as enemies of the people, as opposed to "the people". This weekend it was so clear that so many people want reconciliation, and healing. It's up to all of us now whether that can actually happen. This is my new mantra. Biden flipped the suburbs. Trump won them 49/45 over Hillary in 2016. Biden won them 51/48. Trump won rural areas. But Biden cut Trump's win from 61/34 in 2016 to 54/45 in 2020. So when he says he's the President of rural America, he's talking about places where maybe half the people actually voted for him. They want help on COVID. They want help on jobs. They want help on health care. They want a more civil debate. So Biden being Biden, we really do have an opportunity for reconciliation and healing I believe. It's sad that John Lewis was not here to see this. But his spirit is with us.

Read my snarky message to him over there. I meant what I said. I think we should thank him and encourage him to continue, loudly, on the path he is on. I won't repeat everything I said. But I will repeat the key Saul Alinsky idea: The action is in the reaction. Here's the way I'm going to view it. The problem Biden had is that Trump is the kind of guy who can actually get 70 million + Americans to vote for him, as we just saw. So the Democrats needed someone who could get 75 million people to vote for Biden. The beauty of Biden is he realized only one candidate could get 75 million people to vote for Biden. And that candidate is Donald J. Trump. To state it slightly differently, everything Trump did to agitate and divide and conquer to get 70 million votes helped Biden get 75 million votes. Augustus exemplifies the kind of rabid Trumpist thinking (sometimes it is not even thinking, really) that helped get 75 million people to vote for Biden. So he helped elect Biden, I think. We also know Biden will make plenty of mistakes and gaffes that will cause people to question his leadership. So I think it's helpful to have Trump himself, or fans like Augustus, popping up to remind us that while Biden might not be perfect, he is such a better alternative.

Now that the drama at the top of the ticket has ended, I've been sifting through what happened down the ticket. We now all have the memo that 2020 was definitely not an embrace of progressive ideals. I think the best way to read this election is that it was a repudiation of Trump and Trumpism, at least as a way of running America. But it was hardly an endorsement of progressivism, like The Green New Deal. That explains why Republicans lost the Presidency, but gained House seats. I think Biden was wise to claim a mandate yesterday. And to define the mandate as a call to unity, cooperation, and action - as opposed to any left-of-center policy. As far as I can tell, some of these new Republican House members are women of color, who probably think a lot like Mia Love - the Black Republican Trump basically verbally humiliated after she lost in 2018, because she did not "give me love", in Trump's gross words. One of the 2018 Democrats that may lose is Ben McAdams of Utah, who barely beat Love in 2018. He's now losing by a fraction to Burgess Meredith, a Black man. But it's still too close to call. It's a perfect symbol of how moderates in both parties are winning or losing very close elections in what are, and will remain, swing districts split right down the middle. Just like America is right now. Democrats have now lost a net of 4 House seats that have been called. If every Democrat losing by a fraction right now goes on to lose their election, it looks like slightly more than one third of the 41 seats Democrats gained in 2018 will have been lost. Joe Scarborough has already called this a "repudiation" of the Democratic Party. I think he needs some sleep. We just won the Presidency by maybe 5 million votes. Trump is the one who got his sorry ass repudiated, I think. If I forget about firing Trump and just focus on the US House, I'm going to look at this as 3 steps forward in 2018, one step back in 2020. That in itself is not bad news. Just from eyeballing it, every one of the seats we may lose in 2020 was a Republican stronghold we picked up in 2018. 4 are in California, all of which have Democrats I've sent money to and followed. These are hardly radical House members. Several of them are moderates who are former Republicans. Like Harley Rouda, who right now is losing by about one point to an Asian American Republican woman. Both him and his opponent are centrists. I noted that the four Democratic women who worked in intelligence/CIA jobs and won in "Trump" House seats in 2018 and wrote the controversial op/ed calling for his impeachment all won re-election. There was a very long and very good article written earlier this year about Elissa Slotkin, one of those female House members. She just won her race 51/47. That is about as good as you can probably expect in what used to be a solidly red seat in Michigan. I mention the article because it went through in great detail all the policy and relationship work she had been doing to bind herself to her district and its voters. So it clearly worked. If the question is whether Democrats can survive in these largely suburban swing districts that used to be solid red, the answer is way more "yes" than "no". No surprise, it ain't easy. You win by a few points, or even a few fractions of a point. If two of the three Democratic House members who won in Orange County in 2018 by a fraction of a point end up losing by a fraction of a point in 2020, that's disappointing. But it is hardly a shock. or a repudiation. Again, I'd look at this as three steps forward (41 new seats in 2018) and one step back (maybe lose one third of them, at worst, in 2020). One of the House moderates has now, in effect, attacked AOC by saying that Democrats should never use words like "socialism" or "defund the police" again. I'm glad Pelosi publicly pushed back against that. If Biden wins in Arizona and Georgia, some big part of that victory is Blacks and young progressive voters. The same is actually true in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. So if we're going to trash Blacks and Berniecrats, we are essentially saying we really wanted Trump to win, instead. I understand how AOC is now the woman Republicans like to use to make Democrats look crazy or radical. They did the same thing to Pelosi herself in 2010. That's politics. We should not let Republicans decide who gets to be in the Democratic coalition. On the face of it, the election results do suggest that if Bernie or Elizabeth had been the nominee, they might have lost. I could make a good argument that either one of them might have done better than Biden at running on a platform that would have motivated the blue base. But there's not much evidence that happened in the 2020 primaries. There's more evidence that Biden won in part because of a message about ending the craziness, and trying cooperation and unity and compromise instead. Especially after yesterday I feel like the principal victory in 2020, a horrible year, is that we won the grand prize and have ended the madness. Trump and Trumpism took its very best shot, and got 70 million votes. But it still failed - by millions and millions of votes - as a way to run America. That's a huge victory in my eyes. People all over America and all over the world seem to feel that way, as we all saw yesterday. When I was binging on Allan Lichtman earlier this year I watched several clips of past debates he has had on TV, usually with other Democrats, who argued he was wrong that we need to impeach Trump. They made what he called the typical and wrong argument that Clinton "won" the impeachment debate. Lichtman argued it was true that in 1998 Republicans lost a few House seats. But in 2000 they won the Presidency, which is the grand prize in US politics. And he cited poll data showing that concerns about Clinton sleaze and moral leadership gave W. an edge over Gore. This is the way Pelosi has already said we should view 2020. She's said we lost some battles, but we won the war. I agree with her. That's the way I will look at this. AOC is a good target, even within the Democratic Party. As a progressive, I of course wish that we had just made sweeping gains, and took over the Senate. But I get why we didn't. I also get that if we tell young voters and Blacks who like the language about "defunding the police" or "democratic socialism" to just go fuck themselves, we can forget about winning those Georgia Senate seats. If Democrats don't want to be a coalition, let's just not waste the time and money and give those two Senate seats to the Republicans. Of the examples I've read about so far of what happened down ticket, Pennsylvania is a good one to frame how to think about this, I think. While Philadelphia was celebrating putting Biden over the top, the news down ticket was not good for Democrats. Efforts to take over the state legislature did not go well. That was in part because of the red wave that swept over the Trump parts of the state. So this is from an article about the failures of Pennsylvania Democrats that I find a telling anecdote about the politics of Trumpism in 2020: So I think it's good to have a debate about the impact of AOC or Rep. Omar or Blacks or Muslims or progressives or whatever. And I realize that Republicans can say even Joe Biden is a socialist, and he just wants to ban cows and hamburgers. That's the kind of crazy shit Trump will say. But this is even more crazy. There is of course a legitimate debate about how far you go in closing down business in order to stop a deadly virus that is now back to killing about 1,000 Americans a day. But this is not radical stuff. The polls are clear that most people put dealing with coronavirus above the economy. Biden clearly gets this. I'm sure he scored points with America when he said to heal the economy we first have to deal with and contain the virus. What's remarkable is that we even have to have this debate. This is not about banning cows or hamburgers. This is about a pragmatic Democratic Governor taking steps to try to save American lives. But we know that Trump did pretty well, especially in Trump America, making it sound like masks are a threat to liberty itself. Laura Ingraham has been talking about "lockdowns versus liberty". As if Joe Biden's goal is to destroy liberty and capitalism, as opposed to keep Grandma and Grandpa from dying. Any by the way, Biden lost the senior vote in the end - even though he may have done better with seniors than Clinton in some of these swing states. He won on the backs of Blacks, Latinos, and young progressive voters of every race. That's where he ran up huge majorities, as we just saw vote by vote and day by day. All of this makes me feel better about the fact that we picked Biden, that he won, and that he is adopting a political strategy he debuted last night. He is clearly going to focus on unity and compromise. In some imaginary US, if Sanders were nominated and if he won and got 55 Democratic Senators, maybe we could do it a different way. But that has nothing to do with the reality we now face. We will be lucky to have 50 Democratic Senators. Ron Brownstein was on TV last night saying OF COURSE Rich Mitch will try to block almost anything Biden tries to do. I agree with Ron. We should just assume that. What Biden has going for him, and is clearly going to use, is that we have multiple crises. And that Americans just gave him a mandate to try to get people to cooperate on dealing with this huge set of messes that we all share. That gets him to health care, to income, and even to income inequality. It gets him to the fact that people at the bottom, including Blacks and Latinos, are hurting the most. So he has plenty of ways to put pressure on Republicans to vote for progressive things that deal with the immediate health and economic problems of most Americans. It may not be a mandate for The Green New Deal. But for me it's a whole let better than the craziness and non-leadership of Trump. I'm quite sure Rich Mitch's strategy will be to blame Biden for everything that happens as of January 2021. Just like he blamed Obama for everything bad he inherited in January 2009. I'm sure Rich Mitch will try to use that to prevent Biden from winning a Senate majority in the 2022 midterms, when Republicans have to defend seats in blue states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as opposed to purple states like Arizona or Georgia or North Carolina. I'm actually confident that Biden can prevail this time. In part because we now know Mitch is likely to try to do the same thing again. And in part because Mitch will be trying to beat Biden at a game Mitch himself knows Biden is very good at - in a way that Obama simply wasn't. In my mind, this explains why Mitch himself is now saying we need a coronavirus relied deal. Rich Mitch won't make it easy for Biden to paint him as the reason things Americans want and need are not getting done. The burden will be on Biden to lead by trying to unify and compromise. He clearly gets that. Somehow Biden is going to have to do this in a way that gets progressives and Blacks and Latinos to support him, but doesn't alienate those unreliable suburban swing voters who were not exactly sold on Democrats in the election that just happened. There's many good reasons to think that Biden will fail to do it. But this week definitely created a clear direction that Biden obviously sees - he actually called it a "vision" - and that I think could work. I've had a personal epiphany about Susan Collins. Two of the milestones of my own emotional turmoil about Trumpism involve Collins. In 2017 I spontaneously went nuts defending Collins in a restaurant with two former Republican friends, one of whom attacked her as a "RINO" for having just voted - along with Murkowski and McCain - to not kill Obamacare. Then in 2018 I went rabid when she did her thing defending Justice Rapist. I will always view that as one of the worst and most dishonest moments of Collins (aka Senator Susan Coverup). Had anyone but Trump been President, they would have replaced Kavanaugh with a better person - like Barrett. I have to imagine that Collins survived an election she should have lost because enough voters in Maine cut her some slack because she was having to deal with an asshole like Trump. And they helped solve the real problem by voting Trump out, even as they cut Collins some slack. So I can get my mind around and respect what voters in Maine just did. My point is that this does create an opportunity for Biden. There are at least a handful of moderates in both parties - Tester and Manchin on the D side, Collins and Murkowski on the R side, who actually have won elections that can be taken to be a mandate for bipartisanship. They are Democrats who survived elections in red states, or Republicans who survived elections in blue states. So if this came down to something like SCOTUS throwing out Obamacare, or an inability to agree on a relief package that would prevent states from having to fire cops and teachers and public health nurses, Biden may have room to outmaneuver Rich Mitch. I've now gotten the memo that this is not like 1992 or 2008. Those were the only two elections in my adult lifetime when Democratic Presidents got to do what they wanted because they had the House and Senate. Both times it ended badly for Democrats, even though Clinton and Obama - not to mention Obamacare - survived and had successful Presidencies. Even if we win both Georgia run-offs and have 50 seats, this is going to be an unrelenting uphill climb for Biden. I do think that, like Reagan in 1981, one of his weapons is he could have Americans (including voters in swing states and swing districts that have Republican Senators, like Pennsylvania) on his side. I'm going to hope this is like 1960 and JFK - which is hardly what Joe Biden is, superficially. That election swept in new ideas and a new direction. But it took years, and LBJ, to both define the real agenda, and then enact it. The agenda itself - Medicare, The Great Society, civil rights - was very powerful. And it has mostly stuck. We actually are at a similar place today. Nobody really knows what The Green New Deal is. Whatever it is, it is nowhere near becoming law. And yet all these polls show that maybe as many as 2 in 3 voters support some kind of law that addresses climate change, which they see as a real and serious problem. I think most progressives and most Blacks get where we are at. They understand that if we want to have a majority to actually enact some version of a Green New Deal, or John Lewis's new Voting Rights Act, we're going to have to build a majority. This week made me feel a lot better, not a lot worse, about having Joe Biden lead that effort for the next four years.

The line that resonated most for me: "Slavery is an abomination ........ but neither I or any man have any immediate solution to the problem." How's that for understatement? Different century, but we're dealing with much of the same shit today. I suspect that clip was a highly white-washed portrayal of some of those men. We know about Jefferson and owning slaves. I don't feel he was a particularly good guy. I am now completely rabid about getting rid of the slavery electoral college. There's lots of scholars, especially Black ones, that can make a great argument that the electoral college is all about the ownership and blood of slaves. And there are plenty of "originalist" sources to go to to connect the dots and show the intent of "the Founding fathers" was to build institutions, like the electoral college, that were designed to support slavery. It is the last of our immediate problems, I know. And I also know we don't have the power to do anything about it right now. Talk about STILL not having an immediate solution to the problem. But it infuriates me that Biden will win this election by up to 5 million votes. And yet we have to go through this process of discussing whether the election was stolen from President Toxic. In no other country that even pretends to be a democracy would this be happening. To the extent that we're going to have noise, I'd rather have noise about how the electoral college is an institution built to support the ownership of Blacks as property. As opposed to how people feel about whether poll watchers should be six feet away from ballot counters in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Again, in no other democracy where someone just won by 5 million votes could this be happening. It makes me feel even worse about the kind of people who actually support this nonsense. There was an interesting discussion on CNN this week between Rep. Clyburn and Don Lemon. As always, Lemon was not exactly being a detached journalist. In fact, he was in tears, talking about how hearing Biden tell Blacks "You had my back, so I will have yours" made him cry as he heard it. He is not the only Black that said that on TV. The emotion and redemption in some of these moments and symbols this week was very deep and powerful. That was clear. Lemon was basically bitching as a Black man about how slow and difficult progress is. And how frustrating it is to even try to be objective interviewing people who are racists who unabashedly support Trump's racist nonsense. Clyburn got into this riff about his relationship with John Lewis and Elijah Cummings. How they became fast friends when they met and formed SNCC in the 60's. How close his religious and geographic roots with Cummings were. The love and dignity of these men, two of whom are now dead, was palpable as Clyburn went on in his riff with Lemon. But his basic point was what we would all guess. Be patient. Stay focused. Keep your eyes on the prize. Clyburn just gave an epic - one might say Biblical - example of how that works in real time with what he did with Biden in 2020. It has changed America for the good. I was in tears yesterday, too. I didn't know much about Clyburn until 2020. I am now in awe of the man. I feel America, and especially Democrats, are gifted with his wise and moral leadership. That's a way to rewrite the scene portrayed in what you posted, Adam. We still don't have any immediate solutions. I would argue we just escaped a brush with the degradation or even death of democracy. That might be going too far, since having maybe up to 150 million people vote in what was essentially a free election isn't exactly a bad example of democracy. But it was very messy, like that discussion about slavery in the clip you posted. One thing I feel good about is the discussion we just had wasn't one limited to or led by solely White men who own property, which in some cases is Black men. The key players in this debate on my side were people like Biden, Clyburn, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer. That's progress. The moral grounding of what just happened was in fact based on the words and ideals of men like Jim Clyburn, John Lewis, Elijah Cummings. So I'll take this as proof that MLK was right. We just saw the arc of the moral universe bend. 2020 is messy and sad. But if we listen to the words of men like Clyburn, Lewis, and Cummings, America will do well. That is truly a gift from God.

Why did so many Latinos vote for Donald Trump? I'm posting that article because the guy's main point is that White people (like me) who try to describe "the Latino vote" are going to get it wrong. I agree with him. That's why in what I said above, I clung to very specific polling data from actual states Biden won. The polling data contradicts some of what even this guy says. He states pundits will "ignore the fact that Trump also seems to have drawn significant numbers of votes from Mexican Americans in Arizona and Texas." What the exit polling data from CNN showed is that Biden did a whole let better among Latino men in Arizona in 2020 than Clinton did in 2016. As the author notes, the theory that Latino men like Trump because they see him as a "caudillo" is questionable. Latino men, primarily Mexican American, in Arizona didn't seem to groove too much on Trump's authoritarianism. In 2020, they seem to have decisively rejected it. Mostly what I liked about this article is it's a plea for outreach, base building, and understanding. That's a great statement. As a White liberal, I don't regret the outreach Biden did to Blacks, the ads clearly targeted to Black men, the selection of Harris as VP in a clear act of showing he "got it" to Black women. But there was no similar effort made to Latinos, as far as I can tell. Meanwhile, I'll keep saying that the efforts Bernie made in the primary seemed to provide one effective model of how to expand Latino participation. I mostly feel Democrats have a ton of work and outreach to do. This is stuff the mainstream media just is not good at covering. It is mostly quiet and tedious work. But my guess is that there were Latino progressives in Arizona and Nevada doing lots of work to register and motivate Latino voters, and that had an impact. We know the Trumpians, including lots of Cuban American Trumpians, ruled the air waves of South Florida. And Democrats' response was too little, too late. We now see the results. We should not be surprised. We should learn. A few other points in the article I'll reiterate. A lot of Blacks and Hispanics are just conservative. The history is not the same. Being anti-immigrant and even throwing Latino kids in cages is NOT the same as a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and systemic racism targeted at Blacks for all of US history. So I don't think it's realistic for Democrats to think that all Latinos or all Blacks are going to be Democrats. And I see Latinos as White people, much like I see Polish American people or Italian Americans as White people. Those ethnic groups suffered from anti-immigrant discrimination in the past, too. The author quotes Reagan in the article. But he didn't quote Reagan's best line about Hispanics: "They are Republicans, but they just don't know it yet." Speaking as a Democrat, I don't think Reagan is wrong. If Democrats aren't organizing and listening, we will lose more and more of the Latino vote. It also should be said that it is good for democracy, not to mention Blacks and Latinos, if both major US political parties are competing for their vote. So as a Democrat I don't feel bad about the fact that as the Trump ship goes down, the GOP picked up some House seats that will be filled by candidates that are mostly women, including Latina and (maybe in Orange County) Asian American women. The Republicans SHOULD feel good about that. And I applaud them for it. I was hoping South Carolina would be the first US state ever to have two Black Senators, one a Democrat and one a Republican. If we want healing and we want unity, that's exactly what the future of America should look like. Mostly I am delighted the Trump ship is going down. Thanks for that wonderful video. @Suckrates. Everything that has happened this week suggests that Trump and Trumpism will in fact rule the Republican Party during his post-Presidency. If I were a Republican, I'd feel more than a little worried about that. 75 million Americans, a majority, did just repudiate Trump and Trumpism. In that sense, Biden does have a mandate - even if it is NOT for liberalism. To me the brightest lights shining in the Republican Party are people like Sen. Scott, and some of these newly elected Republican House members (not, of course, the Q Anon whack job). If the Republican Party has a future as a majority, it is leaders like that that will build it. It's a different discussion for later, but if Republicans think or hope that blocking Biden for four years and reviving Trumpism in 2024 will be easy, they are being as delusional as Trump. Young voters voted 2 to 1 against Trump in 2020, and they turned out in droves. When McConnell pisses over everything most Americans in their 20's believe in, he will assure that the Republican Party in America will be viewed as worthwhile horse shit for the rest of our lives. Sorry, but let me repeat that. The Republican Party in America will be viewed as worthless horse shit for the rest of our lives, if McConnell pisses over all the young Americans who just voted 2 to 1 Democrat and helped turn states like Arizona and Georgia blue or purple. I'm glad you did well with some Cuban Americans and conservative Mexican Americans, Republicans. But if you are going to spend 2021 and 2022 saying "FUCK YOU" to progressive young America, don't be confused that there will be consequences in 2024 - just like there were in 2020. Again, there will be more of THEM and less of you in 2024. You might want to think that one through very carefully. I think my main takeaway from this election is already formed. The smart wizards of elections like Axelrod or Carville or Rove would probably agree that a good ground game can earn you 2 to 3 points in any election. So I'm going to just assume that some of these close 51/49 races Democrats lost might have been won if we had a more aggressive ground game, like the Republicans did. That said, we had a deadly pandemic in 2020. If being safer cost us a few House seats, I'm personally okay with that. The real takeaway is we have to do tons of outreach and organizing to Blacks, Latinos, and Whites who make less than $50,000 a year, and especially I think young voters. The very good news from 2020 is that all those groups can be registered to vote, and will vote, and will vote Democratic, if we organize and govern in a way that reflects their interests and priorities. Let me just say one other thing about young voters. More than any other group, they broke hard for Democrats. That's not quite true, in that Blacks seem to have broken up to 90 % Democratic in at least some states. But there are actually more young people than there are Blacks. And of course many of those young people are Black or Latino. And they tend to be the Berniecrats and Warrenites. So I just flat out disagree with the moderates who are trashing AOC and saying that talk about "socialism" cost the Democrats a few House seats in South Florida. That may be true. But if Democrats want Donald Trump, Jr to win in 2024, the smartest thing they could do now is tell young voters who supported Sanders or Warren to go fuck themselves. Instead, I think Biden did a more than adequate job reaching out to them and forming a coalition that just put Donald Trump to bed. Props to Biden for being smart enough to do that. The person who is about to tell most young voters in America to go fuck themselves is Rich Mitch. Let him do it. Let Rich Mitch define the Republican Party as the one that is antithetical to the goals and beliefs of the vast majority of young Americans. See how well that works for you in 2024.

I'm on a roll talking about exit poll data and what it suggests about building a Democratic majority. So I'm just going to rock on. This builds on the post directly above. But also on a post where I talked about a Fox News Pennsylvania exit poll. The key thing to me about that PA poll is it showed that Biden won a majority of all Pennsylvania voters who made less than $100,000 a year. Trump won a majority of voters making over $100,000 a year. So I said that we Democrats just have to go back to being very good at calling bullshit when Trump or other Republicans claim to be the economic populists fighting for the little guy and gal, and the working class. "Working Class Joe" is not the worst politician in America at doing that. Which is why Rev. Sharpton today said he thinks Trump could never get his hooks into Biden being an "elitist", the way he did into Clinton. I agree with Rev. Al. As if to prove my point, I watched a five minute or so riff between Sean Hannity and two Black guys he just had on that claim to be the very future of the Trump Republican Party. If I believed what I heard, Democrats are basically the coastal elite party that speaks for Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The Trump party speaks for Blacks, Latinos, and the working class of all races. This whole rap makes me want to vomit. After 5 minutes I had to change the channel. If it had anything to do with reality, I suspect Trump would have won Georgia and Arizona in a landslide. For whatever reason, Blacks in Georgia and Latinos in Arizona don't seem to understand what Sean and his two Black friends do. Dare I say that Sean is an elitist, and he needs to explain the truth to Blacks and Latinos better than he does? I also have to get on my soapbox for a minute about Sean Hannity. He is a lying, factually incorrect piece of shit. My low water mark for him was his rant on the "Community Investment Act", which he said forced banks to "give" homes to uncreditworthy people - many of whom are Black, and which they defaulted on. In fact, it is called the Community Reinvestment Act - not that accuracy matters to Sean. This was in an interview during the subprime crisis with Michael Moore. I was impressed that Moore was informed enough to ask Hannity how a law passed by Proxmire and Democrats in 1977 resulted in people losing homes in 2007, when the interviewed occurred. (By coincidence, a 30 year mortgage made in 1977 would actually be paid off in 2007. So you'd have a lot of equity, not a foreclosure). My point is that it was very clear that other than having a right wing talking point, Sean Hannity is completely ignorant about what comes out of his mouth. In fact, what Clinton did in the 90's on Black and Latino and White first time homeownership turned out to be arguably the single most effective thing any President has ever done to promote both homeownership and wealth creation for Blacks, Latinos, and low-income Whites. As a low-income White community organizer, I actually bought my first cheap home in a largely minority neighborhood for $77,000 in 1997. By 2005, it was worth at least $100,000 or $125,000 or so. Today it is worth triple that, and I own it with no mortgage. So I know Blacks who bought homes in the Clinton years built wealth and came out smelling like a rose. Elizabeth Warren can explain in amazingly accurate detail how the Blacks (and Whites and Latinos) who got screwed were the ones who bought the bullshit sold by predatory lenders in the Bush years - especially 2003 to 2005, when the Republicans ran everything. Predatory lending had more to do with refinances than purchase mortgages. So you can't blame any of that on Clinton. It happened years after his Presidency ended. Predators essentially stole Black wealth Clinton helped create. Blacks who know what happened don't blame it on Clinton. My point is that Democrats have done things that work for Blacks and Latinos. And it all has to do with things like homeownership, capitalism, wealth creation, and the American way of building net worth. It is the Republicans that usually fuck these things up. And it has nothing, nothing, and nothing to do with socialism. In early 2017 I actually thought, as a developer, Trump might have gone back to some of the things Clinton did that worked for Blacks. Instead, he went for trickle down and tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires like him. So I give credit to Trump for inheriting an improving economy and not fucking it up until 2020. He inherited the lowest Black poverty ever from Obama in 2017, and brought it a bit lower until 2020. It is now worse than it was under Obama. That may explain why 9 in 10 Blacks seem to have voted against Trump, not for him. The Pennsylvania data suggest that people who make under $100,000 voted for Biden, because they probably viewed him as the better and true economist populist. The days when Sean Hannity can put two Black talking heads on Fox News with him and claim to be the very heart and soul of Black America need to end. Democrats have to get better at being the party that talks - and delivers - real economic populism. So I thought some of this exit poll data was interesting. In Georgia, in 2016, Trump actually won by a sliver (48 % Trump to 47 % Clinton) the vote of Georgians who made under $50,000 a year. That's of all races. So we know among Whites in Georgia who make under $50,000 a year Trump had to have cleaned up in 2016. In 2020, Biden actually won this group handily. Of the one third of Georgians who make less than $50,000 a year, Biden just won them 56 % to 41 %. Meanwhile, Trump won Georgians who make over $50,000 a year 50 % to 48 %. I have no illusions about the fact that many low-income Whites in Georgia live in rural areas or small towns and probably are now fully culturally attached to the Trump/MAGA identity. I'd also guess many of them, especially the older ones, are racist and homophobic as hell. But politics is a game of margins. So if we've gone from Clinton barely losing the real low-income/working class in Georgia to Trump in 2016 to Biden winning them in 2020 by a 15 point margin, that helps to explain how he just won Georgia. It also explains why Democrats better not let Sean Hannity define them as the "coastal elite". Even Sean's two Black friends had to refer to the Blacks who are Democratic as "the Black elite". (As if being Black and rich was a bad thing?????) So it's true that part of what has changed in Atlanta is that you have an affluent and largely left-of-center and Democratic Black elite. Good for my party! We have to build on that, not be ashamed of it. I take it as a good thing that a few Black fat cats on the extreme crawled up Joe Biden's ass about how he wants fat cats of ALL races (most of whom are White) to pay more in taxes. It probably helped Biden win Black votes. Democrats need to do more of this. We need to be the real economic populists, and call bullshit on Trumpists like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. Let's take a trip down memory lane to when and why this abortion of a failed and rejected Presidency began. I'll end by playing Bernie Sanders. Shame on the Democratic Party for forgetting our roots, and our base, and letting this happen. Allan Lichtman would agree with O'Reilly that Hillary had the fundamentals working against her in the 2016 Presidential cycle. Period. That is probably the way I'll view what happened in 2016 moving forward. Just like by 2020 Biden had the wind at his back, no matter what he said or did. But my point is that if the Democrats legislate and govern like the real economic populists, we might have a better time holding on to the base we need and that Trump stole.

This is a great summary of a few election trends by Dave Wasserman of Cook Political report: House Republicans Defy the Polls, Narrow Democrats' Majority 1. Democrats suffered a catastrophic erosion in Hispanic support (note: but mostly in the specific House districts they won in mostly red states). 2. It was a stellar night for Republican women. I got to that because I saw Wasserman being interviewed on a few different TV channels tonight. And he said some things that did not quite fit with the early analysis coming out of all the cable stations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox. What he writes above also contradicts what he was saying right before the election, as he states in the article. Like everyone, he got blindsided by both external and interrnal polls - including internal polls of both Democratic and Republican House candidates. For whatever reason, the Republican internal polls were mostly off, too. I think perhaps the polls could have been off because of "shy" Trump voters. That's the main theory going around. But I actually think the biggest factor was simply that everybody had to guess about turnout. And a lot of pollsters guessed wrong. Once again, for whatever reason, they underestimated Trump turnout. That said, Republican pollsters like Trafalgar actually overestimated Trump turnout, and said he would win several states (Michigan and Arizona by 3 points each) which he lost. So basically everybody guessed wrong. Which is perhaps understandable in an election that broke all past turnout records. Here's another thing I mentioned once already that could partly explain why the polls were off. In the Fox exit poll of Pennsylvania I cited above as well as this NYT exit poll, the group that decided in the week before the election broke heavy for Trump: 63 % for Trump to 30 % for Biden. One can only guess about why that is. This group was only 2 % of the electorate. But another 3 % decided in the last few days, and they voted 50 % for Trump and 45 % for Biden. The people who decided in September and October leaned to Biden. They were about 20 % of all voters. The 75 % who came into Fall 2020 knowing who they supported split dead even - 49 to 49 - between Trump and Biden. This is exactly the opposite of what I expected. I expected, or at least hoped, that the last week would be like 1980. Meaning the small group of remaining undecided people would break against Trump. They actually did the opposite. That would explain at least part of the reason why Trump did better than it seemed he would based on polls taken a week or two earlier. The shifting at the end clearly helped Trump based on exit polls. One explanation that strikes me is that Trump had a better ground game to get last minute deciders to vote, and to vote for Trump. And Biden did basically sit on his lead while Trump was running around having rallies everywhere like in 2016. That may have helped him. Certainly the ground game did. The main thing Dave Wasserman talked about that surprised me is that Biden did NOT do particularly well in the core cities compared to Clinton, like Milwaukee and Detroit. He said the real difference in the Blue Wall states came in the suburbs, which shifted heavily from Trump to Biden. Like I said already, that somewhat contradicts some of the narrative about why Biden was able to win the three Blue Wall states, as well as Red Wall states like Arizona and Georgia. What a lot of people at least think happened, including a lot of Blacks and Latinos interviewed, is that turnout for Biden among Blacks and Latinos spiked. But at least based on a little research, including the article above, it appears Wasserman is largely correct. It may be that Biden's victory has less to do with changes in voting by Blacks and Latinos, and more to do with changes in voting among Whites. And I'll cite some data below that suggests it might actually be more White men than White women who shifted from 2016. That would be a surprise as well, since so much of what I read is about suburban White "wine Moms" who despise Trump. Another thing that prompted my curiosity is a riff that Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon got into about the overall national vote totals. Cuomo was arguing that this election was a "spanking" to Trump. Because while a lot of people (70 million) voted for him, maybe 4 to 5 million more people (getting close to 75 million) came out to fire Trump. So I buy Cuomo's idea that it is fair to say that this was a clear rejection of an incumbent, by a margin of millions of votes. The pushback against this, which is also true, is that at the same time there was a sort of red wave as well, in part due to Trump's well organized ground game. That red wave helps explains why Republicans did better than expected. In this context, somebody mentioned that we know this was a rejection of Trump because he actually underperformed, by millions of votes if I heard right, how Republican House candidates down-ticket did. If true, that would certainly help explain why some Republicans won House seats while Trump lost The Presidency. I've tried to find numbers that add up the total votes cast in this election for ALL Republican and Democratic House candidates in every district. I could not find them, since it's obviously a work in progress. The House is Wasserman's area of expertise, so he would know. And in the article above he does state this: Again, if I heard Cuomo on CNN right I think he suggested that Trump may have UNDERPERFORMED all Republican House candidates by something on the order of a few million votes. If anyone has seen data that backs that up, please post it. Once all the votes are counted, it will be easy to get a number of votes cast for all House Republican candidates, and compare that to all the votes cast for Trump. I checked in the key Senate races, and no big divergence shows up there. Trump actually got a little bit more votes than McSally, Tillis, and Ernst. He did slightly worse than Gardner. The one state where we know there was a big divergence was Maine, which Trump lost, but Collins won handily. With the Senate races, the most important big picture is that like in 2016 people who voted for Trump voted for a Republican Senator as well, by and large. Based on this information, my tentative takeaway is this may help explain some of the crosscurrents on Tuesday. It does seem like Republicans did a good job of fielding female House candidates, often women of color, that were a good fit for the districts they won in. As Wasserman states, that is certainly true in Miami-Dade and the Rio Grande border district in Texas. I'm not sure there is any evidence that Trump did much better with Latinos in MOST places - like in Arizona, for example. So as we heard a lot this week, everyone is learning that we can't generalize about "the Latino vote". Wasserman makes another point that probably helps to explain this election. In 2018, the only way that voters could send a message to Trump was by voting out a Republican House member. This year, they could support a Republican House member while voting against Trump. If it is true as Wasserman says that Trump underperformed many House Republican candidates, that would prove the point. If this happened, it only worked at the margin. Of the three Republican Orange County seats Democrats won in very close races in 2018, the two that are still razor close as of right now are ones in which White male Democrats are defending seats against Asian American Republican women who are good fitting candidates for their districts. Trump did lose in both districts in Orange County, just like he did in 2016. Again, these elections all ended up like 51/49 in both 2018 and so far in 2020. So this is not about massive swings. But at the margin it can mean the difference between winning and losing in several dozen swing districts. And if this is what happened in districts all over the country, it would explain why Republicans will pick up a handful of House seats even as Trump got fired. I also looked up exit polls for Arizona and Georgia - because they are the two parts of the Republican Red Wall that fell this week. Again, Wasserman is saying that in the Blue Wall states Biden's wins were based first and foremost on suburban Whites, not inner-city Blacks. I'll take Wasserman's word at that for now. But I figured I'd check how that compares to how things played out in Georgia and Arizona compared to 2016. And what I found seems to confirm Wasserman's point about shifts among WHITE voters - at least if you go by exit polls. Here's CNN exit polls for Georgia in 2016 and here for 2020. As I would have guessed, Biden did best among Blacks. CNN says that in 2020 30 % of all Georgia voters were Black, and they voted 87 % Biden and 11 % Trump. But that's actually pretty much the same as in 2016. In 2016, Blacks were also 30 % of all voters. And they voted 89 % for Clinton and 9 % for Trump. So Trump is not wrong in saying he got a small sliver more of Black votes. Although either way 1 in 10 is a really horrific judgment from Blacks, who mostly view Trump as a racist in every poll I've seen for years. So Blacks ARE NOT the explanation for why Biden won Georgia. He had to crush Trump among Blacks, which he did. But that was not enough to get either him or Clinton to victory. So the real difference was among Whites in Georgia. In 2016 Clinton lost the White vote, 21 % Clinton to 75 % Trump. In 2020 Biden lost the White vote, 29 % Biden to 70 % Trump. So we now know that cutting a 54 % loss among Whites to a 41 % loss was just enough to get Biden to about 50 % of the state vote, when you add overwhelming support among Blacks. Like I mentioned above, the way this played out by gender is also a surprise to me. Biden cut the losing gap among White women from a 44 % loss (70 to 26) by Clinton in 2016 to a 36 % loss (67 to 31) by Biden in 2020. But the shift among White men was bigger. They voted against Clinton in 2016 by a 64 % spread (80 to 16). Biden cut that massive gap to a 46 % spread (72 to 26) in 2020. I have to wonder whether part of the reason in Georgia is that White men just felt more comfortable voting for a man than a woman. It's impossible to say. There's also a few other demographic things about Biden's win in Georgia that are interesting and that relate to what Democrats need to do moving forward to build a majority, I think. Biden did better than Clinton among older voters, which is something we've been hearing about. Clinton lost all Georgia voters aged 65 + by 67 % to 31 %. Biden lost them, too, but by only 56 % to 43 % in 2020. that said, my guess is that the part of the White vote Democrats most need to focus on in places like Georgia is the young White vote. My guess is that a big chunk of the newly registered voters in Georgia who pushed Biden to victory were young Whites. The exit polls say that in 2016 voters aged 18 to 29 were 18 % of the entire Georgia electorate, and in 2020 they were 21 % of the electorate. So their participation expanded as a share of the total voting pie, even in a year with massive turnout. That said, in 2016 Clinton won the 19-24 year old vote by a 65 % to 29 % margin. By comparison, Biden won it, but by a slimmed down 56 % to 42 % margin. Either way, the youth vote helped both Biden and Clinton and are an obvious key ingredient to any future winning coalition in Georgia. But this is one area where perhaps a candidate - like Jon Ossoff - who is younger and more dynamic than Biden, or a woman, might actually be able to do better than Biden among young voters. We'll see how Ossoff does among young voters in Georgia in January. Or whether they even turn out for a special election. A very similar thing happened in Arizona. Latinos in Arizona, like Blacks in Georgia, turned out strong for both Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016. But the real difference in voting came from White voters. Again, here's a CNN exit poll for Arizona for 2016 and here's an Arizona exit poll for 2020. In 2016, Clinton won Latinos in Arizona by a 61 % to 31 % margin, when they were 15 % of all voters. In 2020, they were 19 % of all voters. And Biden won them by a 63 % to 36 % margin. So it's roughly in the same ballpark as Blacks in Arizona. Unlike Blacks in Georgia, Latinos in Arizona actually did grow as a share of the electorate, from 15 % to 19 %. So that helped Biden. Trump can argue he did just a fraction better with Latinos - cutting a 30 % losing margin to a 26 % losing margin. But the more Latinos vote in Arizona, the better it is for Democrats. Period. All that said, the shift among Latinos was not sufficient to explain moving from a Clinton loss to a Biden victory. Like in Georgia, the single most significant change in Arizona was Whites. In 2016 Clinton lost the White vote in Arizona 40 % Clinton to 54 % Trump. In 2020 Biden lost the White vote, but by only 47 % Biden to 51 % Trump. Like in Georgia, the most important shift was by men - not women. Which is a bit of surprise. The White female vote went from 44/51 for Clinton/Trump in 2016 to 47/52 Biden/Trump in 2020. So Biden cut Clinton's 7 point losing margin to a 5 point losing margin among Arizona White women. Among White men, it shifted from 36/56 Clinton/Trump in 2016 to 47/51 Biden/Trump in 2020. That's huge. Biden closed Clinton's 20 point deficit among Arizona White men to a 4 point deficit. That has to be the single biggest factor in explaining how he won. Whites are 74 % of all voters in Arizona, so a shift like that among White men in Arizona is massive. Something similar happened in Arizona with Latinos. Clinton won Latino men 51/44 in 2016. Biden won Latino men 59/39. Again, I have to wonder whether running a man against Trump had something to do with that. Biden actually did slightly worse among Latino women in Arizona. Clinton won Latino women 73/17 in 2016. Biden won them 66/32 in 2020. Again, Trump can argue he maybe did a smidgeon better among some Latinos. But that doesn't cut across the US. In most states, it seems clear that most Blacks and most Latinos view Trump and his policies as racist, racist, and racist. So we ought to be thinking hard about what kinds of candidates, policies, and organizing will win more and more Latino voters. While it did not happen in 2020, I still think what happened in Georgia and Arizona in 2020 CAN happen in Texas by 2024. We just have to be patient, and organize.

I tend to agree with your point about grassroots organizing, even though you didn't refer to it as organizing. You are offering a good and probably correct explanation for why Trump overperformed in Florida, in particular. It may be the case that Trumpism overperformed and what I'll call "Bidenism" underperformed in part because Trumpism had a better ground game. Meaning everything from registering new voters months ago, to a massive GOTV machine on Election Day. As a former community organizer, I will never say a bad thing about organizing real people to gain power. So if Trump did better than we thought because of many volunteers who organized, kudos to the army of Trump voters who made that happen. One thing we can all agree to is that Biden and Trump are now, factually, the #1 and #2 voter getters in any race for President in US history. That's good news for democracy. I'd also say half heartedly that some of the money I sent to people like Jaimie Harrison was a waste of money. But I mean that only in the sense that there is no evidence that running a $100 million ad campaign was enough to convince people whose heart is "red" that they should vote "blue". It did not work in South Carolina. That's no shocker. And I'd argue that's a good thing. I mostly feel positive about democracy, and American voters. That includes 2016, when a minority of Americans narrowly gave Trump and Trumpism a chance. I feel they just proved my faith in American voters is well placed. Because a majority of American voters just rejected Trump and Trumpism. The verdict is clear: you had your chance to actually make our lives better, as promised. And you failed. My point about huge amounts of money is that I'm actually glad that slick ads or stupid Facebook or Twitter messaging mostly doesn't convince people to believe things they just don't believe, or support people who don't really work in their interests. Poor Brad. Wasn't his $1 billion Death Star supposed to make Trump II inevitable? The flip side of that is that the money I sent to people like Abrams and Ossoff in 2017 was hardly a waste. It paid off big today in Joe Biden winning Georgia. It is not out of the question that Ossoff and Warnock can deliver two Senate seats in Georgia, just like Sinema and Kelly have now delivered two "blue" Senate seats in Arizona. My point is the same as yours. A lot of the money that went into Georgia in the past few years paid for getting I think something like 800,000 new Democrats registered. I'd bet money that between now and January, Abrams and Ossoff and Warnock will be turning over every rock in Georgia to see if there is some eligible Black or Latino or progressive White adult who is not yet registered. Again, whoever they vote for, that's just a very good thing for democracy, period. I'll gladly donate more money to support that. It may be that we Democrats would have won a few more Senate seats and held a few more House seats, and maybe won North Carolina for Biden, had the Democrats done a better ground game during a pandemic. Even if you could prove to me that was true, I still feel very good about the outcome. Biden never has been and certainly never will be a "ground game" kind of guy. I think at core, like Trump in 2016, his message mattered a lot more than money. Biden did turn out to be a pretty good choice for top of the ticket at a particular moment in time when healing and unity and ending divisive bullshit meant a lot to people. If we lost some votes because we were timid about going door to door in a pandemic, that is not an unreasonable or certainly an unhealthy decision. I strongly suspect that some of Trump's overperformance did have to do with a passionate ground game that Democrats did not match - in part because of a pandemic. One way you could read that, which is a stretch but not a wild stretch, is that Trumpians really were desperate to keep power. So they were not even going to let a pandemic stop them. I'm not going to judge whether a decision like that is right or wrong. Any more than I judged Black Lives Matter one way or the other for marching with masks on during a pandemic. Again, it all adds up to saying that democracy is alive and well. I have respect both for the Black marchers with masks, and for the White Trumpians going door to door to register people to vote. I do believe that Trump's loss in Georgia sends exactly the same message to Democrats. If we want to know how to win, look to Georgia. Today on TV almost every Democrat in America who has the mike is lavishing praise on Stacey Abrams, and everything she stands for. She deserves it. As a former community organizer, I adore her. What she did was not about slick 30 second ads. It was about building sustainable grassroots power person by person, face to face, church by church, door to door. That is the American way, which we should all be very proud of. Honestly. I'm not sad but I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I sent thousands and thousands of dollars to people like Kelly and Ossoff and Warnock and Greenfield and Cunningham and McBath. And I assume lots of that went to slick ads. As a former organizer, it seems like a cheap (although hardly inexpensive) and almost dirty way to try to win elections. Again, this election proved as much as any that people are not stupid. Democrats did well in Georgia because we registered Blacks and young people to actually vote their interests. Meanwhile, probably no amount of ads in South Carolina could convince conservative Whites to vote against The Divine Miss Graham. I can live with that. I can also live with the fact that no amount of ads could change the fact that Cal Cunnigham came up short on a major character test. I'm not going to argue he didn't deserve to lose after his sexting nonsense. He's not going to feel good ever again about the way he let the people he claimed to be fighting for down. (Have to say. Multiply Cal x 10 and you get the male scumminess of Trump, which Republicans and Christian evangelicals seems to be just fine with.) I knew it was a long shot that good guys like Bullock could win in increasingly Trumpian places like Montana. I sent them money anyway. You never know, and some of this is luck and fate. North Carolina (Cunnigham) and Maine (Collins) were our best shots, after Colorado and Arizona. Cunningham perhaps lost because of character. Just like Collins probably prevailed because Mainers still feel she has character. None of these decisions make me feel bad about the decisions voters made. Georgia actually gives us two more shots, one of which I did not really expect to have. Again, this is why I adore women like Stacey Abrams. She's had a lot of shit thrown at her. If she runs for Governor in 2022, she'll be called a socialist and every other name in the book. I'm sure she has flaws. But she has now demonstrated that she is tough, and she is going to fight like hell for what she believes in. Democrats should be investing more in leaders like her than in slick 30 second ads. Although, that said, Kelly and Sinema in Arizona both had huge TV budgets, some of which my small donations helped pay for. So that works, too. It's not either/or. I'll be interested if they ever do an analysis of the impact of The Lincoln Project. On the face of it, if their goal was to seed doubts about Trump and get one or two percent of Republicans to switch from Trump to Biden, there is probably plenty of evidence that it worked. And in a state like Georgia, if Biden wins by maybe 2000 votes, anyone can argue that their ads were the ones that made the difference. Certainly I would not complain if The Lincoln Project bragged that they helped bring Trump down in Georgia. That said, I did and do have very mixed feelings about The Lincoln Project. It's a one trick pony, which in itself is fine. It would be stupid to argue in the 21st century that TV ads don't make a difference in political campaigns. That said, those are mostly people who traffic in highly emotional 30 or 60 second ads that often just try to demean people. So Lindsey Graham got to be a maggot, which is further than even an outspoken Democrat like me would go. And if you use Graham as an example, there is no evidence it worked. Arguably, you could say it backfired. All those attacks on Graham just made him a victim, which he played to. And maybe it got people to come out and support him. That's possble, too. When I was sending money to Ossoff in 2017, a Republican client from Georgia was saying it was essentially a joke. This is Georgia. Ossoff can't win a House seat here, he said. Well, McBath won the seat in 2018 and just held it by a pretty strong margin. Biden just won the state, probably. Bordeaux looks like she is going to flip another Georgia House seat when the votes are all counted. I would not dismiss the possibility that Ossoff and Rev. Warnock will be the newly minted Democratic Senators of Georgia in 2021. Georgia has just given the Democrats a perfect example of how we need to fight and prevail over Trumpism. Slick 30 second ads may play a role. But it is going to take like what the Trumpians did with their ground game. And Stacey Abrams just proved it. Face to face. Person to person. Church to church. Door to door.

It's funny. I have less faith in Kamala than Joe, not more. And that's coming from a California liberal who was very excited when she won her Senate race in 2016. To clarify that, what is being talked about a lot on TV right now, especially among Blacks and women, is how exciting and empowering it will be to see a Black woman speaking to America, tonight perhaps, as Vice President elect. So I strongly agree with all that. She does not look, think, or vote like Mike Pence. This is a huge fucking deal, to quote Joe Biden. Democrats should feel very excited about that. I do. We now know that even if Warnock and Ossoff win we can forget about a bold progressive agenda, Labor Secretary Sanders, or Treasury Secretary Warren. We need them in the Senate. And Warren or Sanders would never be confirmed by Rich Mitch. This actually solves some internal political problems for Biden. I'm both progressive and pragmatist, I think. I get the fact that Democrats will now have to fight hard for relatively small victories, on things like jobs and the pandemic and voting rights and climate change. There will be more young voters in 2024. And they just crushed Trump. There is no reason to think they will convert to Trumpism in 2024. So Democrats did not really settle this internal battle between progressives and moderates in 2020. And we now have Kamala as a possible presumptive heir in 2024. I have mixed feelings about that. She kind of flopped in 2020. She didn't have much time in the Senate. But she isn't a Joe Biden, meaning someone who can clearly win elections outside California, or gets laws passed. We just don't know. Joe Scarborough said today that he is convinced now that Joe Biden is the only Democrat that could have won in 2020. I think that is worth thinking about, both in terms of present and future. I tend to disagree with Morning Joe and agree with Alan Lichtman. This was a referendum on Trump and Trumpism. Period. Trump lost the referendum. Period. In January, Biden will be President. Period. Lichtman's basic argument is that who the Democrats nominate doesn't matter so much, or even at all, if the conditions are right to remove the party in power. Here's how my bias plays out. I think Sanders might have made a negative difference, certainly in very close states like Georgia and Arizona. It's not logical to argue that making it easier to attach the label "socialist" to our candidate would have made it easier to win. Especially given that we now know the "socialism" label had traction in Florida, and probably with some moderate suburban women as well. I will go to the grave thinking my preferred candidate, Elizabeth Warren, would have won. You can argue she's too liberal, or even too female. But she would have thrown this shit right back at Trump. "I'm not a socialist. I was a Republican capitalist who saw how corporate greed crushed people by taking their homes, or taking their jobs to China. I'm the one who fought predatory Wall Street lenders, Donald. You're just the predator." I think you can make a good argument that Warren could have done a very good job inspiring the base without freaking out moderate women who grew up and look a lot like her. She would have had a logical and powerful argument that she is fighting for these women, and guys like Donald Trump simply are not. Regardless, none of that really matters now. Warren and Sanders won't be in play for 2024. And now Biden has the perfect reason to say we need their votes and their passion in the US Senate. And I'm not against the idea of Kamala being heir in 2024 or 2028. But I'm not convinced. While I know Independents in Iowa who kind of do view her as "The Dark One" who may have questionable and excessively liberal views, I view her the way progressives do. I'm not sure she's the one I'd want leading the ticket in 2024 or 2028. Being a pragmatist, I'm getting used to what the voters just did. It is clear now that there is zero mandate for moving directly from Trumpism to a full-on progressive agenda. There are not votes for that. Again, that's true even if Democrats have 50 Senators in January. It may have been true even if we had 51 or 52. Did we really think Joe Manchin was on board for the kind of Green New Deal AOC would support? The main lesson I am taking out of this is that if we build power, we will win. I sent a lot of money to people like Harrison and Warnock and Ossoff. What just happened suggests Stacey Abrams can be and should be elected Governor of Georgia in 2022. Some Latina Democrat should run in Arizona for Governor, because what happened suggests she could win. We again lost a chance to get ahead of the redistricting fight for an entire decade. But we won big in 2018, anyway. So if we figure out how to build a majority, Republicans simply can't stop us. We just proved that. Biden is winning over 50 % of the vote. They can not stop him from kicking Trump's sorry ass out of The White House. That itself feels like a huge victory. I think history just answered some questions. This was not 2008, or 1992. It was not a Democratic version of 1980. It was not 1932. Again, I think 1960 may be a pretty good year to think about. Kennedy won, but barely. It opened the door for things that had already been bubbling for years - like the civil rights movement - to gain a bully pulpit, legitimacy, and stature. It means we need to feel like we won, to feel proud, and to keep donating and voting and organizing. I'm not 100 % convinced Kamala is the right leader. That said, we now get to give her a test ride. And she will have a great chance to show America her leadership skills.

I wanted to add something I heard on Fox yesterday to reinforce this point. i was mostly watching Fox to hear their spin on President Toxic's alleged but completely unproven theories about election fraud. In some discussion, one of the Fox business reporters was asked to explain why the stock market is rallying so strongly this week. Her answer was that investors like the idea of gridlock. Biden, even if elected, likely won't be able to raise taxes on corporations or wealthy individuals. Or do anything about health care, she said. Which is to say that what Wall Street investors want is NOT what the vast majority of American voters want. To cite the Fox poll of Pennsylvania voters above, 72 % of voters in Pennsylvania favor "changing the system so that any American can buy into a government-run health care plan if they want to." It looks like Biden will win Pennsylvania about 51/49. So that tells us almost half of voters who JUST VOTED for President Toxic support what could be branded as a "socialist" health care system, in that it is "government-run." This is what Wall Street is apparently breathing a sigh of relief about. They don't have to worry about this for now, they hope. This particular poll doesn't ask about tax policy. But there are mountains of polls from 2020 that show overwhelming support - including often among a majority of Republicans - for things like wealth taxes on the ultra-rich, or higher income taxes on corporations like Amazon or mega-rich individuals like Jeff Bezos. Again, Wall Street investors are happy to not have to deal with that, they are at least hoping. Wall Street is not Main Street, or America. I've been watching more Fox than usual this week. So Sean Hannity or any of these people will preach with a straight face as if it's really true that Democrats are the party of Wall Street, and the Republicans are the party of Blacks or Latinos. They are so full of shit that it is pouring out of their mouths. The history of this is very clear, and it has been for as long as there have been Democrats, I think. There is always going to be a segment of "Democrats" that don't like gun control, don't like Gay marriage, don't like all kinds of "cultural" or social issues or racial issues a majority of Democrats support. The district Colin Peterson just lost in Minnesota is a great example of that. On social issues, Peterson essentially talked and voted like a Republican, even though he was a Democrat. So now having a real Republican in that seat makes almost no difference on social issues. And that does in fact represent the views of people in that mostly rural district. But Peterson survived despite Trump and Trumpism because he worked the themes of economic populism. One of the very good pieces of news is that most of the toxicity of race is now gone, at least within the Democratic Party. Most Democrats, and a big chunk of Republicans, mostly agree with the goals of Black Lives Matter. We want to keep making progress on rooting out systemic racism, which we believe is a real thing. Progressive Democrats have a choice to make. We can have purity and AOC. But that also means we can't have a majority. We just got a perfect example of that in these House districts that are moderate. Two of the House districts in Orange County that Democrats won 51/49 in 2018 - Cisneros and Rouda - may be ones we lose this time 51/49. It's too early to tell. And in Orange County, the former heart of Reagan Republicanism, you have to be careful any time you use the word "tax". But I made a point to check the polls on how Republicans and Independents felt. If it's a wealth tax on Jeff Bezos to pay for child care or free college for the middle class, middle class Independents are strongly for the idea. That should not be a shocker. I've resigned myself to the idea that at least until after the 2022 midterms, all these ideas are probably off the table. More likely than not, Democrats won't have any choice since Rich Mitch will be Majority Leader. There's only been one model for Democratic Presidential power in my adult lifetime. It happened under 16 years of Clinton and Obama. You essentially have two years to get what you want. Because for the other six years you won't have the House or Senate, or both. Anything you get done after that has to be by executive order. Or by compromises that will feel painful, or even like losses, for many in the Democratic Party. This is now what Biden will have to live with. Probably even if we manage to win both Georgia Senate seats and have 50 Senate votes. That scenario would give lots of power to Democrats like Joe Manchin, who are not liberals. My point is that the model that Democrats should be thinking about now is the 1960's. What characterized John Kennedy's Presidency was that he DID NOT have the votes to get things done - at least things like civil rights. LBJ got that done, after winning a huge victory in 1964. Democrats actually LOST two Senate seats in 1960, even though they still had an overwhelming majority thanks to the Democratic South - which at that point was also the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. It may not be until 2022 or 2024 that Democrats have the votes to do what many of us were hoping could be done in 2021. Like actually doing something about climate change. To again use that Fox poll, 66 % of voters in Pennsylvania say they are "very" or "somewhat" concerned about climate change. Again, that means a substantial minority of voters who just voted for Trump worry about climate change. I actually think Biden has a pretty good hand to play. And he is the right guy to do it. It may be that at least the first two years of his Presidency is about making the case for laws dealing with things like climate change or infrastructure or income inequality that we don't yet have the votes to enact. That's okay. Again, that's what ended up getting landmark legislation passed in the mid-1960's, under LBJ. What Biden has, more than Obama, is he lives and breathes the very American norms of compromise and bending over backwards to get common sense shit done through the US Congress. However Biden actually feels about it, he now has a perfect excuse for not having to go to war over what could labelled as fraught jargony things like "The Green New Deal". What he can do is propose things the will be good for the planet, and good for US jobs. He can and almost certainly will put Republicans in the position of having to either support or oppose incremental changes that are popular with most Democrats and many Republicans. We can't guess where this is going. But we do know that right now we have a stalemate and a country split down the middle. That said, Biden will win by about 5 million votes. He'll likely have a margin of close to 100 electoral votes. This was not a small win. He rebuilt The Blue Wall, and smashed the Red Walls of Georgia and Arizona. Democrats should not feel bad. Democrats should be thinking about how to consolidate and expand our majority. I think economic populism is the way to do it. Biden is the perfect person to make it clear that, unlike President Toxic, he is not mostly working for the interests of Wall Street, and fat cats like President Toxic. I was impressed that his TV ads talked about how he was going to raise taxes on corporations, and very affluent Americans. Even if he lacks the power to do that in 2021, Democrats should be talking about it. It will help Democrats defeat Republicans Senators in 2022. One other thing that is critical to me in this context. Biden probably did better among seniors than Hillary did. It did not win him Florida. It may have helped win him Arizona and Georgia. And he did really well among Blacks, and also Latinos in most states. But if there is one group that is NOT really being given its due on TV, it is young voters. According to the preliminary NYT exit poll, Biden won the votes of people aged 19-24 by a 67/29 margin. That is crushing. And they were 9 % of the electorate. That's a big slice. If you want to know why Biden won Georgia, just stop right there. It was young people, often young people of color, that Stacey Abrams registered to vote. I could not ask for more than a Black pastor like Rev. Warnock and a young pragmatic liberal like Jon Ossoff to be the face of the Democratic Party in this upcoming Senate runoff. By contrast, the age cohorts of voters 50-64 and 65 + were 52 % of the electorate. And they both voted for Trump over Biden 51/48. So what we know is that in 2024 there were will be a lot more of those young progressive voters that support Democrats by crushing margins. And a lot fewer voters that this time tipped the scales for Trump more than we'd hope. It did not get a victory for Trump in 2020. It will be harder still to get a victory for Trump or Trumpism in 2024. I hope Biden fights to get those young progressive voters some of what they want. Like college debt relief. Or better pay. Let them watch Rich Mitch claim to be the voice of Blacks and the heart of Latinos, even as he pisses and shits over everything they want, and everything they believe in. And then see what happens in the Senate races in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2022. What just happened in 2020 suggests that may not go very well for Republicans. I'm used to thinking of the midterms as when Democrats get killed. But that does not have to be the case. Biden is proving to be as wise as a fox. If he does this right, the 2022 midterms is when Democrats could get the Senate votes for a popular and populist economic agenda that Rich Mitch and Wall Street simply don't like. Young voters deserve a huge amount of credit for taking President Toxic out. My nieces and nephews will not be happy. They liked Sanders or Warren. Joe Biden was never their guy. But they voted for him. And the votes of people of their age cohort was what just crushed Trump. And the shitty thing, thanks to older and more moderate voters, is that it fell short of getting a US Congress that will be able to do what most young voters want. That's not a horrible outcome. I think what we just learned is that if we organize, we can win. We can crush Trump, which we just did. Now we just have to organize more to consolidate the victory. Young people in places like Georgia under the leadership of people like Stacey Abrams, Rev. Warnock, and Jon Ossoff, are going to be the ones doing that. It excites me and inspires me.

There's one other subject I want to post about now as a separate point. Directly above was a diatribe about race and the racism of Trump. But this post is about "it's the economy, stupid." That is what the polls are saying to me explains what happened - or didn't happen - on Tuesday. Here's a NYT national exit poll, and a Fox News Pennsylvania exit poll. I'd strongly suggest everybody take 15 minutes to look over both. There will be even more protests about the validity of polling after Tuesday. The reality is that pollsters did overestimate how well TRUMP would do - if you refer to Trafalgar. Their polls said Trump would win Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania handily. Oops! Of course, most polls said BIDEN would do better than he did. But everybody was obviously guessing about how big turnout would be and who would actually vote. So what everybody should now get is that polls are not crystal balls. They are based on a set of assumptions made by imperfect people. This election again vindicated Allan Lichtman's view that people vote based on fundamentals, not stupid ads. And the two fundamentals he pointed to in predicting why Trump would lose were: 1) the economy, stupid, and 2) the social unrest which more than anything was a reaction to the racism of Trump's America. All the evidence from both polls suggest that this is at the core of what drove voting in Pennsylvania and nationally. It is likely why Biden will win Georgia and Arizona, I think. I'll bring up these polls and other better exit polls that will likely emerge in the weeks and months ahead in future posts. There's a lot of great data in them. But for now I'll just focus on the economy in these two polls. That NYT exit poll says that when asked the "are you better off?" question, 41 % of Americans who just voted said they are "better off" than they were four years ago. They voted for Trump overwhelmingly, 72 to 25. By comparison, the 20 % of Americans who said they are "worse off" than four years ago voted against Trump and for Biden 74 to 23. The 38 % who said "the same" voted against Trump and for Biden 64 to 33. I think it's helpful to do a comparison to the exact same question in 2016 from this CNN exit poll. 31 % of Americans said they were better off than four years ago in 2016. And they voted for CLINTON and against Trump 72 to 23. The 27 % who said they were worse off voted for TRUMP and against Clinton 77 to 19. And the 25 % who said "the same" voted for CLINTON, 54 to 38. So it's clear, people who said they were worse off voted overwhelmingly against the incumbent party in both 2016 and 2020. People who felt better off voted overwhelmingly for the incumbent party in both 2016 and 2020. The one difference between 2016 and 2020 is that people who said things were the same as four years ago were a much larger group in 2020 than 2016. Unlike in 2016, they voted against the incumbent in 2020. Since 2016 and 2020 both involved Trump, they essentially seemed to decide, "You promised to make the economy better, and you didn't - for me at least. So you lose." This all goes to the core of Allan Lichtman's (and Jim Carville's) theories. It's the economy, stupid. People vote on that, not stupid ads. So there is no surprise that people who feel better off voted overwhelmingly for the incumbent party in both 2016 and 2020. That may explain why people who are relatively affluent, or seniors who are sitting on a nice nest egg in a nice home, didn't end up repudiating Trump in the way some Democrats hoped. But young people - who by the way are mostly not big fans of Joe Biden but are struggling - did vote against Trump in a way that has assured the end of his Presidency. What is a bit surprising is that in the middle of a pandemic and recession there are MORE people that fell better off than four years ago in 2020 (41 % of Americans) than in 2016 (31 %). Based on that alone, it suggests Trump should have won - not lost. I question whether all these people that say they are better off really could prove that with bank statements, paychecks, and net worth. But whether they are really better off or not, that goes to my point. We've known all through the pandemic that polls suggested that the one thing Trump had going for him was this view that he was good for the economy. At the end of the day, that's probably what helped him almost pull through. That's what these polls say to me. Combine that with a wildly inflammatory message that Harris is a surrogate warrior for Black socialist America that will turn the US into the next Cuba, and you may do better in places like Miami Dade than expected. Again, it doesn't seem to win you Arizona or Georgia, though. It will win you Montana and Iowa. But if you understand that old White people from rural and small town America like their Trumpism red and raw, who could possibly be surprised by that anymore? I sent money to Bullock and Greenfield knowing that Iowa and Montana were almost certainly lost causes. This election confirmed I was right. You can now perhaps add them to the list of states that will vote for Trump's vision of America moving backward for a long time. Oh, and Biden cut Clinton's 2016 margin of defeat in Texas by almost half. Jeff Flake endorsed Biden saying that as a conservative Republican he worries that by 2024 Texas could go blue due to Trumpism. 2020 does not suggest Flake is wrong. It simply suggests that 2020 is not yet 2024. There is no way you can read the results of Texas as saying that Texas is moving in the direction of Trump and Trumpism. I'd read it as saying that Texas may be the next Georgia or Arizona. The same trends are pulling it towards Democrats - not Republicans. Just like they are pulling Iowa and Montana toward Trumpism. As a Democrat, I'd rather have Georgia and Arizona and Texas than Iowa and Montana. Nothing against "Iowa nice", of course. But there's a reason Steve King did well in Iowa for a very long time. Even in bluer Georgia, they just managed to create a House Q Anon caucus. Back to the polls, there's one other economic question that I think should be elevated, dealing with class. The 28 % of Americans who make over $100,000 a year voted for Trump 54 to 43, according to the Times survey. A majority of the other 72 % of Americans voted for Biden, by a roughly 57 to 43 margin. So that is incredibly clear. If you are the relatively well off, you voted for Trump. If you are "the little guy" or "the little girl", you voted for Biden. If you are a member of a union, more likely than not you voted for Biden, the polls say. So there will be all this rhetoric about how Trump is the blue collar billionaire. And how Democrats are the party of the elite and filthy rich. And how the Trump tax cuts and the stock market really benefit the have nots more than the rich. But it is total bullshit. And most voters know that. I included that Pennsylvania poll because it is a Fox poll. And it's of THE key swing state. I think it backs up everything in the NYT poll of all America. The one very important thing Trump pushed that clearly helped him was this view that he is better for "the economy". When asked directly in the Fox poll who they thought would handle "the economy" better, 50 % of Pennsylvania voters said Trump, 40 % said Biden, and the rest said both or neither. If they were ONLY voting on "the economy", I have to believe Trump would be about to win Pennsylvania and The Presidency. Not about to lose it. To understand why he is about to lose, read both polls. He loses on almost everything else. Handling the coronavirus. Health care. Support for extremist groups. Racism. An inability to unify Americans. A drive to divide Americans. Abortion. Global warming. People are basically with Biden and Democrats on all those issues. The Democrats are going to have to have a long debate about "economic populism". Or it might be better to call it by a name it had in US history: "prairie populism". I say that because the "prairie populist" tradition is how Democrats did well before, and maybe could do well in the future, in places like Minnesota and Iowa and Montana. It involves a relentless economic focus on the economic well being of the little guy and little girl. Which is what Trump says he is all about. The reality is that Trump is all about tax cuts to the rich and his own ego and power. The polls suggest most of America gets that. The well off vote for him. The people who are truly hurting voted against him. If Democrats want to peel off parts of the Trump coalition, that is where Democrats need to go. This should not be a surprise. It has been the # 1 weapon of Democrats ever since there was a Democratic Party. It is why a decade of trying to take out Reagan Republican Senators in Minnesota in the 1980's failed. I watched it while I was a college student, and while my friends who stayed in Minnesota after college climbed the ranks of liberal activist organizations. Nothing worked, until a populist like Paul Wellstone came along and convinced a majority of Minnesotans that Rudy Boschwitz wasn't really a blue collar millionaire. He was just a rich White guy that voted for the interests of other rich White guys like him. Amy Klobuchar is not what I would call a Wellstone Democrat. But she is smart to always mention Paul and his legacy. While she may not be the biggest populist in America, she is good at using populist language. I think it helps to explain her political success in Minnesota. For me, that is where the Democratic Party needs to go if we want to win a majority. I think this election confirmed it. We have won the culture wars. We are winning on most issues - like health care, abortion, Gay marriage, global warming. Biden gets that. He does laugh out loud when a reporter asks him about wealth taxes. I get it. As a guy who came to power in the Reagan Era, that's political suicide. Even though today getting Jeff Bezos and Amazon to pay more taxes is a wildly popular idea - even with Republicans. Biden is pushing for higher income taxes on the very well off. If Rich Mitch is Senate Majority Leader, even that may be off the table until at least 2022. The battle moving forward will be to deprive Trump and Trumpism of the opportunity to claim that they stand economically for the little guy or the little girl - whether they are Black or White or Latina. That is what the election results say to me. That is what Claire McCaskill has been shouting on social media. She should know. This is why she lost in 2018, and why Missouri is now a red state. If we Democrats ever hope to take back Missouri or now Iowa or Montana, that is where we will need to go, I believe. The very important thing that just happened is that we decapitated the snake. Unlike in a horror film, it will not just grow back. Even Trump himself gets that, which is why he slithered into the White House residence his sorry ass will soon have to vacate. He is hiding and pouting and saying epically stupid shit that will send him straight to the hell section of all the history books to be written for centuries. He is a bad loser. He is a bad person. That is why he just lost.

You're an honorary Black today. What strikes me having non-stop channel flipped between CNN, MSNBC, and Fox for two days is the almost overwhelming reactions of Blacks. And it sounds a lot like what you just wrote. And by "Blacks" I mean everybody from known liberals like Van Jones to known Republicans like former RNC head Michael Steele. The polls bear out that they speak for maybe in the ballpark of 90 % of Black America. I think Bakari Sellers said it most succinctly and poignantly. He expressed the initial big sense of disappointment that it turns out America really isn't ready to repudiate Trumpism, or the racist views embedded in it. He spun it from the angle of a Black man talking about race. But as a White Democrat, I feel much the same. It was a big disappointment. But the next thing Sellers said, again speaking explicitly as a Black man, is there is no surprise here at all. None whatsoever. I agree with him. Several other Black pundits took it further and talked about the fact that Blacks of all people understand this is a long slog. Ask John Lewis. These days the fight is no longer whether you get your head bashed in on a bridge marching for the right to vote. It's about whether you can be Rev. Warnock or Stacey Abrams and be elected Senator or Governor of Georgia. It's a better America for Blacks than the one John Lewis lived in and fought in. Thanks to Blacks like John Lewis. Again, let's not be too polite here. When racist President Toxic says stop counting the vote, he is explicitly saying that the votes of Blacks in Philadelphia and Latinos in Phoenix should not be counted. He is saying "FUCK YOU LOSERS" to people of color who don't like having immigrant kids thrown in cages, and efforts to demonize and take away "Obamacare". That is what is driving what is happening in Arizona and Georgia. So Trump and Republicans can pretend they are the very beating heart of Black America and Latino America. All that says is they are delusional racist liars who don't have a fucking clue why they just lost. Go on denying, guys. It means you'll lose more. In fairness, there's the Black and Latino crowd on Fox, including the very poised and smart sounding Latina that just took Donna Shalala out in Florida. They talk about a hope that the Republican Party will become a truly working class party that welcomes in Black and Latino working class masses. And that does appear to be what happened in one specific area: Dade County. Thanks in part to Republicans whipping up a frenzy about socialism. But it did not win them the Presidency. And it may have lost them Georgia and Arizona for a long time. That's a pretty shitty trade off. You can argue that more Latinos in Texas voted for Trumpism than some Democrats hoped. But guess what? Nobody should be surprised. I'm waiting to post about what happens AFTER the election until we really know the results of the election. As of now my guess is in California we held every House seat Democrats won in 2018, and we will flip back the House seat Garcia won in the special election last year after Katie Hill resigned. So if there was backsliding, it was in a few districts in Trump America - Iowa, Oklahoma, Cuban American parts of Florida. That's no real surprise. In Georgia Lucy McBath won handily. And it looks like Carolyn Bordeaux will flip another formerly red Atlanta suburban seat that hasn't gone blue since 1994. Again, it's a long slog. I love the idea that in January 2021 Blacks in Georgia will be told this: THE FUTURE OF ALL OF AMERICA DEPENDS ON YOUR VOTE. I say that because whether Democrats have 48 Senate seats and a minority or 50 and a majority will likely depend on that January special election in Georgia. And if I were writing the script for the reality TV version, I'd put right in the middle of that debate somebody like the Black pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and an articulate White liberal Jew who speaks powerfully to the aspirations of the emerging new Georgia. From a narrative perspective, it just doesn't get better than that for Democrats, I think. We may lose both Georgia Senate seats 51 to 49. But if there was any confusion about whether Black votes matter, that election will clarify it. If there was any confusion about whether coalition politics matters, that election will clarify it. If there was any confusion about whether Donald Trump is the beating heart of Black hope in America, and Fox News is the very voice of Black and Latino aspiration, that election will clarify it. We may lose those January 2021 special elections narrowly. History suggests we will. But when you consider that Lucy McBath sits in Newt Gingrich's old seat, and Blacks in Atlanta and Philadelphia and Latinos in Phoenix are about to hand The White House to Biden and Harris, let's not be confused about just how well Trumpism is doing. So let Republicans crush Rev. Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Let them piss all over the living legacy of MLK. And then let Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson explain to us again how Trump and Trumpism is the voice of Black America. Rather than the voice of racism in America. I'm listening, you old White guys. A majority of America rejected Trump, and Trumpism. Period.

I'll keep my powder dry on the election outcome until we get decisive results. As of now, it's looking like Biden will have Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania locked up by Thursday. Wouldn't it be odd if the one state he lost was Nevada? Nobody knows. But it ain't looking good for soon to be ex-President Toxic. In the meantime, I thought this was a nice essay by Politico's John Harris that works some of the same themes about the American house divided I described above. Election night proved me more right than I wish to be. Biden will win. But he will govern a deeply divided nation. Democrats Look at Trump Voters and Wonder ‘What the Hell Is Your Problem?’ A narrow victory for either side does not fundamentally alter the country’s unstable political balance. It's interesting that both sides agree on much of the diagnosis. One of the less rabid anchors on Fox had a commentator on tonight, a conservative professor, who stated just what I did above. Trump is the symptom of deep national division, not the cause. Interestingly, Claire McCaskill was saying much the same on MSNBC tonight, and on social media today. They both credited many of the same things: "cultural" issues from abortion to same sex marriage, religious versus secular values, and other deeply felt moral issues that divided America deeply. As the Fox pundit pointed out, it's no coincidence that the small percentage of Blacks who support Trump tend to be deeply religiously conservative people. Which is to say that these divisions are not going away - not anymore than racism or Jim Crow did after the Civil War. For many, not all, they are based on identity, values, religion. These aren't John's exact words in his essay above. But I think 2020 proved that for many Trump is very much now part of their identity and value system. This isn't about negotiating about whether tax rates go up for people who make more than $500,000, or people who make more than $1 million. Compromise on abortion and whether Gays should be able to marry is not very easy. This is being lived and fought like a battle for "cultural" survival. I'm quite sure many Trumpians think if Trump goes, the America they love goes with him. So let's not be too polite about this. These are the people that don't want Gay marriage. These are the people who don't want abortion. These are the overwhelmingly White people who think racism is Blacks saying "Black Lives Matter". These are the people who say that liberty means no government lockdowns, never having to wear a mask, but being able to own as many AR-15's as you damn well choose. At core, that is the America they believe in, and are fighting for. Not everybody who voted for Trump feels this way. But many do. That is why we are, and will be, a house divided. Poltico had a headline yesterday saying this: "Joe Biden looks screwed even if he wins." That's true enough. I have some contrary thoughts to it I'll share once we know for sure Biden actually won. But it will be difficult for Biden to govern an America this divided. That said, I think the Republicans are even more screwed. Holding on to a 51 or 52 seat Senate majority is not a victory. So if they did well, it's only in relation to Democratic expectations that did not play out as grandly as hoped. The Morning Joe crowd, who has all the top Republicans and Democrats on speed dial, made this point very well. Had the US repudiated Trump and Trumpism, it would have allowed the Republican Party to move on to something that is not an ever deeper slog into ever shallower waters. If you don't know, Republicans, losing the Presidency by millions of votes is NOT an indicator that you have a majority. In fact, you don't. And since Biden did even better than Hillary among young voters, your prospects will likely be worse in 2022 and 2024. There are only so many Cuban Americans you can work into a frenzy to replace dying White men. The opportunity to abandon Trumpism is now gone - even if Trump is gone, as well. Poor Republicans! That's kind of fucked up, I think. You don't get a majority. Or The White House. But you do get Trump being viewed as a martyr and a hero, with a base that is a majority of Republicans now that loves their Trumpism red and raw. Even as it sends a majority of America into the arms of Joe Biden. Biden may have a very hard time sustaining the 50 % + of America that voted for him. But given how they have now defined the core values and beliefs of their party, I think Republicans will have an even worse time. One more point about majorities. I remember what it was like to be a Democrat that lost by landslides in 1980 and 1984. I also remember what it was like to be a Democrat that won a majority in 2000 and 2016, and still had to "lose". So I feel like I get what majorities are, and what democracy requires. So it might help if Republicans could admit it was a fact that Joe Biden won a vast majority of Americans - even more than Clinton. She had a 2 % margin over Trump and 3 million votes or so. Biden will likely end up with 3 % + over Trump and 4 million votes plus. Like Obama, he will have over 50 % of voters. And 50 % + of voters in the largest turnout US election ever. So for soon-to-be-ex President Toxic and Sean Hannity to be using a vocabulary centered on words like "fraud", "corruption", "stealing the election." and "we did win" is just bullshit. If the Republicans think we Democrats or Independents are prepared to buy this, or pander to it, or accept it as fact, they really have no clue why they just lost. If you add what John Harris, Claire McCaskill, Michael Steele, and even some people on Fox are saying together, it means there should be opportunities for Democrats to pick off pieces of the former Trump coalition in the next few years. I'll hold my thoughts on that until we know in a few days that Biden is President-Elect.

I wish Beto would have run again. One of my big disappointments during the primary was that Beto stupidly decided not to be a John Tower and run (and maybe win) the second time out. His decision to run for Prez instead was even stupider. That said, it may pay off in some position in Biden's Administration, or a future in some other political venture. But no dumber a Republican than Michael Steele pointed out yesterday, correctly I believe, that the results in Texas might have been different if someone inspiring like Beto had been on top of the state ticket. While things did not get worse for Texas Republicans, they did not get better. They simply dodged the bullet for now. Biden lost the state, but by several points less than Hillary. As Steele pointed out, states like Texas don't flip overnight. Just ask John Tower. The Divine Miss Graham politely accused me of being one of those stupid liberals who wasted a lot of money in South Carolina. I'll give Miss Graham her due. She won handily. But Steele also made some good points about that. This is how you build a bench. This is how you take power. I did send money to Harrison. He lost. Just like I sent money to Ossoff in that special House race in 2017, when he lost. Then, in 2018, McBath won. I sent money to her this year to keep the seat. It was probably unnecessary, because now she owns what used to be Newt Gingrich's seat. Meanwhile, my guess is that Biden will narrowly win Georgia. If Warnock and Ossoff don't win runoffs, they'll come close. Things are looking better for Stacey Abrams when she tries to take Kemp out in 2022, I think. So was I really wasting money on Blacks who want to take power? I don't think so. I love the people on Fox News who are still wanting to delude themselves that because maybe 12 % of Black men voted Republicans rather than 8 % they somehow can't be racist. And they somehow speak for Blacks. Really? I'd feel better if they fit that into an analysis of why they are seemingly going to lose Arizona and possibly Georgia. I think those red states turning gradually blue actually has a lot to do with Blacks, Latinos, racism, and anti-Latino immigrant hate. What part of losing Arizona, Georgia, and the Presidency does the GOP not get? I'm fine if Sean and Tucker and that ilk think they speak for Black America, and Latino America. I give President Toxic credit for being his worst self, and whipping Cuban Americans into a frenzy about their legitimate fears about how "socialism" was practiced in the countries they were born in and fled. But that didn't really work outside Florida. President Toxic lost Michigan and Wisconsin because of Blacks and Latinos. Within a few days it will be clear that he lost Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada as well, I think. Thank Blacks and Latinos for that, too. Which is not to say that the Republicans have a problem with Blacks, Latinos, racism, and immigration. Obviously Blacks and Latinos love Republicans! Republicans are smart enough ton realize people like Jaime Harrison are losers and wastes of time and money. That's why 88 % of Blacks voted Republican, I guess. I still feel like I did not waste money on Harrison, or McBath, or any of the other Senate candidates I supported - some who won, some who lost. This is how you build a bench, and a majority. It's not a shocker that Rich Mitch or Miss Graham survived. By my calculation, they just lost a lot of power. Including the grand prize: a President that will let them do whatever they want. Miss Graham might want to reflect on that.

I'm posting a few very long, data-filled, and thoughtful articles recently written by two of my favorite political pundits: Ron Brownstein and Stan Greenberg. The themes of the two are similar. Mostly, it's very good news for Democrats. I'm not very worried about the Democrats losing, like I was in 2012 and 2016. This is going to be more like 2008, I think. That said, I feel none of the joy that I did in 2008. Maybe COVID-19 and a recession and death has something to do with it. But this does not feel like it is going to be a fresh beginning. It feels more like survival. Like we escaped a close brush with death. If anything, what I'm worried about now is what happens if Biden wins. Which is essentially the topic of both of these excellent articles. This first one is by Ron Brownstein: Why the 2020s Could Be as Dangerous as the 1850s As my thread title says, I think a Biden victory will quickly enough serve as a reminder that Trump was more the symptom than the disease. I agree with The Economist Biden endorsement @AdamSmithposted. We'll be living with "Trumpism" for years to come. That said, we were living with "Trumpism" before anyone imagined Trump would run for President - let alone win! Hindsight being 20/20, it is clear that all those "moderate" Republicans that really didn't like Obama and by 2014 were calling him and Obamacare "evil" - or worse - just needed some dark-souled asshole scammer like President Toxic to come along and make all their worst fears, hatreds, and paranoia seem not only legitimate, but noble and patriotic. The likely scenario tomorrow is that just like in 2017 and 2018 and 2019 the part of the Republican Party, and the Independents, that can't stand any more of this hate and horror will vote for Biden and Democrats. That said, that just makes Trump go away. Not the disease itself. Brownstein is more generous with his language than me. As much as anyone, he's had his finger on the pulse for a long time. He calls Trumpism "the coalition of restoration". As opposed to the ascendant "coalition of transformation" that is likely to win tomorrow. If Biden does actually win North Carolina or Georgia or both, it will be a signal that the old politics of The South really has changed. Both states could be part of a Democratic majority for a generation. If Trump wins Iowa, which used to be a solid blue state in Presidential elections, it's more proof that places with few big cities and loads of Whites are shifting into the "coalition of restoration". But as Brownstein says, the losers will be indignant and angry. Even more than they are today. 2020, meet 1850. In this article published Nov. 2, 2016 Brownstein came closer than anyone I read in 2016 in describing how Clinton could lose - and, in fact, did lose. She was focused on the Democratic Party of the future (Georgia, Arizona, Orange County) enough that she overlooked the Democratic Party of the past. Brownstein named "Colorado, Wisconsin, and Michigan" as the states she needed that Hillary could lose in 2016. So had he written "Pennsylvania" instead of "Colorado" he would have nailed it perfectly. 2020 will revisit this battle between past and future. But after four years of President Toxic, it now seems like the future is ready to win. Just don't tell that to the past. Because they don't believe it. And it is really going to piss them off. After Trump, the Republican Party May Become More Extreme If Biden wins, Democrats will face a harsh political landscape. That article by Stan Greenberg hits many of the same positives and negatives. If Brownstein and Greenberg are essentially saying the same things, I think there's a good chance they are right. Add lots of other smart voices to that mix - like Axelrod, Carville, the Morning Joe crowd. The good news for Democrats is the Democrats are going to win. The bad news for Democrats is the Democrats are going to win. It will make the obstructionism and resistance that greeted Obama in 2008 look like child's play. It was amusing and sad that while I was typing this I got a call from an escort buddy, a strong Biden supporter, telling me about the vitriolic texts going back and forth today between his family members - some of whom support Biden, and some of whom support Trump. Is anyone surprised? Like me, he doesn't believe for a minute this will end after Election Day. I'm going to throw yet a third article into this mix. Because I think it touches on another important aspect of the problem of victory going forward for Democrats. This article, unlike the first two, is not particularly thoughtful in my mind. But I think it is important because it accurately reflects how a lot of Independents will feel if Biden wins. Post-Election Choice for Dems: Retaliation or Reconciliation There's a few things about this article I genuinely like. I agree with the implicit standard that reconciliation is better than retaliation. I agree the idea of governing should be you at least try to bring everyone along. And you reach out to the other side. And reaching out to the losers of course involves compromise. In the run up to 2016, and for decades prior, polls consistently showed that a majority of Democrats favored compromise. Meanwhile, a majority of Republicans favored sticking to their principles rather than compromising. Now, after four years of Trumpism, a majority of both parties see compromise as a bad word. So it's a good thing if there are people willing to speak up for compromise. That said, some of what is being proposed here is wrong, and just plain dumb. Silly me. I apparently had the very misinformed idea that my favorite 2020 candidate, Elizabeth Warren, would make a great Treasury Secretary under Biden. Not because she'll usher in socialism. But because had she been Treasury Secretary in 2005 or 2006 she would have done everything in her power to crush the balls of the rich white male predatory lenders. We wouldn't want that kind of radicalism, would we? In fact, what real American would even seriously consider "confiscating" the hard earned wealth of the "job producers" through higher taxes on the very rich, like Biden himself proposes? If that's not socialism, then what is? Needless to say, if I'm wrong and Trump wins it is of course certain that within 24 hours Ricj Mitch will resign as Senate Majority Leader and ask Joe Manchin or Mark Kelly to take his place. Not that Mitch isn't the greatest guy in the world. But somehow Democrats have this silly idea that he is a roadblock to compromise. It's just ridiculous to suggest that the standard for a Democratic win should be hiring Romney and McSally, and firing Pelosi and Schumer. Just like when we won wars before, we made sure generals like General Grant and General Eisenhower got nowhere near power, right? It's important to make the winners suffer, right? The reason this article still rings very true to me is that I was hired by people like this for years. At least the ones I know are smart, powerful, and driven. There is absolutely no way in hell they would take their own political advice when it came to doing things like running their own businesses. They don't view competitors as people you make Chair of the Board. They view them as people you grind into dust, and annihilate if possible. Maybe that's why they have such an unrealistic view of how politics really works. What they suggest is good for Washington DC has little to do with how they actually operate in the real worlds they live in - at least in my experience. That said, I posted the article because it rings true. Biden and Democrats will be greeted with total obstruction and resistance by the losers. And many of the people in the middle, like this author, will have standards like the ones he describes. Meaning standards Biden can't possibly meet. My read of it is that they are already predisposed to be disappointed. And vote against Biden in 2022, just like they voted against Obama in 2010. And Rich Mitch will play to them. His argument will be that he wakes up every morning with only one goal: to seek compromise with Democrats. At least the very few Democrats who don't wake up every morning with horrific new plans to turn America into a socialist hell. Had I gotten my wish, and we were about to elect President Warren, I think she would have won. I think Allan Lichtman will prove to be right again. This election is a referendum on President Toxic. Which he will lose . Period. Almost any Democrat, including Warren, could have won, I believe. Had she won, what I would worry about is how Warren (or Sanders) could get 50 votes, even with a Democratic Senate, for anything she really viewed as good policy. So that may be the saving grace of Joe Biden, which I understand and appreciate. He won't be overly concerned with good policy. I think he will be smart enough to be overly concerned with getting shit done. And getting the 50 votes to get it done. Biden will at least try to create the impression that he genuinely wants to bring everyone along. And reach out to the other side. I think that may be one of the best explanations for why Biden flopped in his past races for President, and hit it right in 2020. You can't bullshit a sincere and lifelong interest in compromise and civility. With Biden it appears to be the way he has lived, and legislated. That may be one of the best things going for Democrats as we face the obstruction and resistance and rage that is going to greet us in victory.

You might want to read what Charlie Cook has to say about your way of thinking. Cook is one of three of my favorite political pundits I will quote today. As far as I can tell, he is a fully nonpartisan and objective observer who tends to call it right. And also offers insight into what is driving what is happening. This whole article is probably a good read on what's about to happen. But I'll quote the parts you might want to reflect on if you guessed wrong. You didn't exactly make a wise guess, in Cook's view. The Six Faulty Assumptions on Which the Trump Campaign Rested It seems like there is an awful lot of wishful (or perhaps delusional?) thinking going on among the fervent core of President Toxic's beloved and loving and devoted base. They love him so much that they would be shot on 5th Ave. for him. Which perhaps explains why they don't see the bullet coming. Not like the objective moderates like Cook do. To piggyback this thought on another post I'm about to start, this all goes to the point that Trump has been more symptom than disease. He was the logical culmination of trends that were building for decades, and really took off with the Tea Party revolt in 2010. Which President Toxic essentially took over. It was baptized in "birtherism", and has spewed out racism and polarization and hostility ever since. Although is you are in the Trump tent, you don't call it racism and hostility. You call it "healing" and "unity". In fairness, Democrats were perhaps thinking wishfully in 2016. The RCP poll average at this point in 2016 - the day before the election - said Clinton would win the national vote by 3.2 percent. She won by 2.1 percent. So it was close. Today the RCP average says Biden will win the national vote by 6.7 percent. If the poll averages are within a point or so of the national result like in 2016, meaning Biden wins by a 5+ percent margin, it's hard to imagine he loses the three states President Toxic barely won in 2016. If Biden wins Georgia or North Carolina, which lots of smart people are predicting is quite possible, it's an early game over. President Toxic certainly used his bully pulpit - in this case, it was literally a bully pulpit - to spread and aggravate the disease. But again, he's a symptom. 40 % or so of America won't be happy after the election is over. And my guess is they will want to buy guns, resist, buy more guns, resist more, buy even more guns, and fight. That is the nature of the disease. Trump was just a sad, fucked up mess of symptoms.

Which to me is a great argument for a wealth tax. Even Republicans support the idea that Jeff Bezos can afford to pay more. I don't dispute the idea that what I will call "upper middle class" people would prefer to pay less taxes. Probably everybody would prefer to pay less taxes. The history of tax revolts is long and consistent in America. And all over the world, for that matter. The polling on wealth taxes was incredibly clear. Even Republicans supported it. If you focus grouped it you'd likely learn most people just don't see themselves as Jeff Bezos. And they don't have a problem that after paying a wealth tax he is still richer than 100,000,000 of them will be, ever. So they won't wake up one morning and say, "Oh my God! Jeff Bezos' net worth went from $175 billion to $170 billion. What have I done! I am a socialist! Oh my God! I will never vote Democrat again!" Biden's reaction when asked about a wealth tax was informative. He just laughed dismissively. I took it to be what happens when you survive the Reagan era and instinctively know that as soon as you use the word "tax" some supply sider will come out with the knives and start fileting you over the idea that you just want to destroy small businesses and cripple growth and jobs. So Biden is clearly comfortable saying "tax the rich" and "tax corporations". And if he gets a Senate majority they will likely do that. But Democrats of his age who lived through The Era Of Trickle Down are appropriately cautious about not doing things that will get them replaced with a supply sider. It honestly amazes me that people still buy that shit. Under Reagan, we at least had respectable levels of growth - and, of course, a higher deficit. Under W. it was a fucking disaster. And now under President Toxic, we have another fucking disaster. Even before COVID there was a $1 trillion a year deficit and a manufacturing job recession. And yet last night there was Mike Pence, mouthing the same shit about how these tax cuts to fat cats just always create the best economy ever. My guess is in 10 or 20 years we could have wealth taxes in America, when the Millennials are in power. They did not grow up in the Reagan era. They grew up in an America where Jeff Bezos gets it all and they get a job at Starbucks. They are Black or Hispanic, or they are Whites who grew up with Blacks and Hispanics, so they don't respond to the same racial dog whistles, or overt racism. What's sort of inexplicable to me is that these labor union guys in the Iron Range or Michigan just love them a big fat slice of Trumpism. They'll gobble up that Trumpism stuff all day. Add a but of misogyny and racism and they may say that's not their favorite condiment on their Trump Sandwich. But at the end of the day they'll eat their Trump sandwich anyway, because they just love them that Trump red meat. Why is that? It's not clear to me what President Toxic actually delivered for them. It is clear that they had every opportunity to vote for Bernie. They could have voted for Bernie in Michigan. They could have voted for Bernie in Wisconsin. They could have voted for Bernie in Pennsylvania. And yet they didn't. Many of them will instead say, "Give me another Trump Sandwich. I just love that Trump read meat." Why is that? There's no metric that shows that it has actually helped them, other than perhaps they feel more "hope" and "pride". We'll see what happens in November. But it seems like those guys - and it seems like they are mostly guys and mostly White - are now the core of the Trump Party. This is a political no brainer. If your point is that the upper middle class won't tolerate being taxed to death, you are right. So you don't tax them to death. And you get very good at responding to the Mike Pences of the world when he does what he did last night. Confronted about tax cuts that mostly helped the very rich, he made poor Kamala sound like she just lived and breathed to raise taxes on the middle class. She won the debate in the polls. So I guess other than committed Republicans people just don't buy it. And by the way, I'm not sure I agree with the idea that all people or even most people flee high tax cities or states. A lot of liberals are perfectly okay with paying taxes. California, which is a high tax state, surpassed the UK to become the 5th biggest economy in the world in 2018. So it's not clear at all that living in a state run by Democrats where taxes (and gas, and electric bills) are higher than in Texas has forced everyone to abandon the state. People may be fleeing some cities now. But that's because of COVID, not taxes.

Believe it or not, I'm not the most verbose guy around. I'm citing two articles that are both very long, and very well written. The first is Ezra Klein on why it makes sense to get rid of the filibuster. The definitive case for ending the filibuster Every argument for the filibuster, considered and debunked. By Ezra Klein I can make the argument in one sentence. Getting rid of the filibuster is the only way President Biden can succeed. Period. That's assuming he has a Senate Democratic majority, which is looking more likely by the day. But he won't have 60 votes. If McConnell has the opportunity to replay 2010 to 2016, he's already said he will. His obstructionism is likely part of what cost Hillary the election in 2016, I think. It kept Obama from being able to get important things done in his second term. Had he been able to enact laws on immigration reform, climate change, etc., it would have helped Hillary make the case for a "third term", according to Lichtman's keys. I agree. I think Americans know this. They are seeing McConnell right now prioritize getting a right-wing SCOTUS majority over a pandemic relief bill. So Republicans lost the Presidential election by millions of votes. And their Senate majority rests on the idea that fewer than 1 million people in Wyoming can overrule 40 million people in California. Democrats have to become increasingly clear that the only reason for Mitch McConnell to have power is to block what most Americans want. And do things most Americans don't want - like fill that court vacancy as quickly as they can, before they lose power. That's not democracy. This second article is a long profile piece on Elissa Slotkin, one of the moderate Democrats who won a House seat in a Trump district in Michigan in 2018. It looks like she's likely to be re-elected in 2020. I think it's a good companion piece to Klein's article. Slotkin is a good example of what happens when you are obsessed with listening to moderate and relatively affluent Republicans - especially the female type. This article perhaps speaks to what you worry about when Democrats are being too kind to suburban women, @tassojunior. To me, it's a story about what Democrats have to do if they are going to be smart about getting power and keeping it. It is baked into the cake that if Democrats don't have Elissa Slotkin, we don't have a majority. And if Slotkin ignores liberal to moderate Republican members of her district, she's history. Has Elissa Slotkin Detected Early Hints of a Biden Blowout? I liked the political system I experienced in the 80's and 90's when I was lobbying as a consumer activist in the US Congress and Oregon Legislature. It was built on the idea of having to get both parties to go along, somehow, in order to get things done. I could actually see it start to evaporate in the 90's in Oregon. Liberal suburban Republican state legislators were taken out in primaries by right wingers. Conservative Democrats from Eastern Oregon were replaced by Republicans. Everything became more polarized. I think Rahm Emanuel is right. Democrats need to be very good at building metropolitan alliances between cities and suburbs. That is at the core of why Nancy Pelosi became speaker again in 2018. It is also what allow Democrats to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate and prevail. Poor Doug Jones will almost certainly lose in Alabama. And states like Montana and Iowa may mostly be off limits, because they are overwhelmingly White and not very urban. We'll see how many White voters without college degrees return to Biden this November. But they look increasingly likely to form the base of the Republican Party, not the Democratic one. 2020 Demographic Swingometer That's a fun toy from the Cook Political Report that makes my point. It shows the impact of Democrats increasing or decreasing their base among certain groups of voters. What it shows is that Biden would be ahead for 304 electoral votes right now, if you simply adjusted the 2016 results for demographic changes in the last four years. Note that in 2016 President Toxic got 69 % of the White non-college vote. The last Democrat to split the votes of Whites without college degrees was Bill Clinton, who did it in both 1992 and 1996. Right now, according to RCP, Biden is actually leading in states with 374 electoral votes. That's because he has won back at least some of those non-college Whites. If you shift the percentage of White non-college voters Democrats get from 31 % in 2016 to 35 % in 2020, you just picked up North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona - all states which Biden looks like he may win. It still doesn't get you Ohio or Iowa, where Whites without college degrees dominate. If you increase the percentage of White college graduates Democrats get from 54 % to 59 %, you also just picked up Ohio and Texas. That would get Biden a landslide 406 electoral votes. I actually think something like this is a realistic best case scenario right now. Increasing Black turnout has far less significant an impact. If you increase Black turnout from 57 % in 2016 to 65 % in 2020, it wins you one more state: Georgia. Same with Hispanics. If you increase turnout from the 45 % in 2016 to 55 % in 2020, you pick up one more state: Arizona. If Democrats like Slotkin do a good job of listening to the voters in the middle, who are mostly White, Democrats have a decent shot at getting rid of the filibuster without pulling the party so far to the left that they get shellacked in the 2022 midterms.

Only in your dreams. I think this is the group he was referring to.

Quite frankly, I've always thought you are your sexiest when you are sulking and bitching. It's a very good look for you. Me, I just got stuck with good looks and a big cock. Just the normal shit. So count your blessings!

Awesome article. Thanks for posting that. I agree with the author. It's part of the weirdness of the President Toxic era that Steven "Foreclosure" Mnuchin, the guy who said the fat cat tax cuts would pay for themselves (Oops!), is arguably the most shining light in this Administration. The other two survivors that come to mind are Pence and Pompeo. I see both of them as both ass kissers and conservative ideologues who play to Trump's right. What's interesting about Mnuchin, as the article documents, is that he excels at both ass kissing and centrist pragmatism and compromise. This is the line from the article that best sums it up to me: I'll take it one step further. The saddest thing about Mnuchin as a historical figure is that he symbolizes what a Trump Presidency could have been. There was talk between November 2016 and January 2017 about how Trump, having won, might come out of the box as an "art of the deal" consensus builder that lived to cut deals, like Mnuchin appears to. Karl Rove was talking up a big infrastructure bill. Had President Toxic listened solely to people like Mnuchin and Rove, he might be in a very different position today. Instead, Steven Bannon wrote his red meat Inaugural address. Where has that gotten him? One obvious problem for President Toxic is his conservative base. But they've followed him off the cliff, anyway. I have to imagine they'd have also followed him if he'd decided to build a bridge over the cliff, instead. And then there are all the conservative GOP Senate and House members. But they've turned into his lap dog, anyways. Even though it likely means many of them are on the verge of losing elections. Surely they would have preferred to follow him if it actually meant winning. My theory is that the real problem is just President Toxic. Steve Mnuchin is everything Trump is not. Including someone who knows when and how to ass kiss when he needs to. And how to cut deals with Pelosi, rather than just tweet about her. I'll leave it to the historians to figure it all out for us. But it is a tragedy, even before the tragedy of COVID.

Rumors of my death ....................................... I know, I know. You've been lusting after my dildo collection every since we were horny teenage girls. Sorry, my dearest and most darlingest sister. But you'll just have to wait. So are you saying the racism ban at Daddy's is over? Like, did he stop being a racist? Maybe if you say so, sis. But I have my doubts. Anyway, I'm not dead or gone. I haven't posted for a week or so because I was just doing other things. Sometimes even I choose to keep my mouth shut. In terms of President Toxic, I'm in complete agreement with Nancy Pelosi. First, I wish him well and am glad he seems to be recovering. Second, hopefully it's a lesson that leads everyone to wear masks and be more thoughtful about NOT getting others sick. Hopefully none of the Republican Senators or power brokers who infected each other will get really sick or die. For the record, Daddy timed me out twice this year, both a long time ago. Both times were due to his deep racism, as far as I can tell. Needless to say, I'm quite sure he'd disagree. But I've spent enough time with Daddy in person and over the phone that I think I know a deeply racist man when I talk to one. What follows is a screed that probably is best left unsaid. But after all, sis, you know me. And I do think my arguments are valid about how Gays like Daddy should perhaps challenge themselves just a little bit more to really try to live in the 21st century. The first time Daddy timed me out was when I got way deep into arguing that The Birth Of A Nation was the most racist film ever made. It's actually funny looking back at that. Because it was early this year, before Black Lives Matter became a huge thing. In retrospect, it's very easy to see the film as the kind of racist toxic waste that's been brewing under the surface forever, and finally exploded this year. Saying the film is deeply racist is NOT a very controversial position. At least among almost all Blacks, and Whites who are not racists. Daddy is a Scorpio. According to astrology, Scorpios either fly high like a eagle, or slither like a snake. I have seen both of those sides of Daddy, personally. What I found sad about my time out this Spring was that the poor girl took the snake route and tried to make me look anti-Semitic. Which I suppose makes sense. Because he's smart enough to at least know he couldn't really win an argument about racism. Especially about what most Blacks seem to view as the most racist film ever made. The main racist poster I was taking on, Bigjoey, was basically arguing that The Birth Of A Nation was just portraying Blacks as they were seen at the time, in 1915. Not that there was anything racist about that, of course. I mean, it wasn't like the Director picked up a KKK book and KKK play because he intended to cause the Black Holocaust that actually followed, leading to mass terror, death, and the Black Great Migration, right? Since Bigjoey is a Jew, and Gay, I kept making the point that a film saying "Blacks are like raping ape-like predators and thus should be killed" is like saying "God hates fags and they all need to die" or like saying "Jews are vermin and they need to be exterminated". I cited murderous propaganda films - including The Wandering Jew and The Birth Of A Nation - that actually incited the mass murder of Jews, Gays, and Blacks. Bigjoey would have none of it. It was actually a surprise to me that someone who I thought of as thoughtful, and rightfully sensitive to anti-Semitism, could have such a massive blind spot to racism. Daddy timed me out and erased everything I wrote in one post, except for cutting and pasting the example I used of anti-Semitic statements like "Jews are vermin". It was very clear he wanted to make me sound like an anti-Semite. Even that didn't work, because the thread went on forever (with me posting, who could be surprised?), and I was incredibly consistent. The bumper sticker I used - "racism = homophobia = anti-Semitism = Islamophobia" - was pretty much in every page of the post. In order to argue I was saying I hate Jews, you'd also have to argue I was saying I hate Blacks and I hate Gays, such as myself. Again, this is what happens when Daddy knows he can't openly make a winning argument about racism. When Black Lives Matter exploded several months later, it actually made me feel good that I was a stubborn bitch about calling out racism. And defending Black Lives Matter activists who do so. The second time he timed me out was when I went after his own racism pretty much directly. He started that racist anti-Black Lives Matter thread, which is when anybody Black and anybody under 40 or so seemed to head for the exits of his website. While I did not name Daddy directly in my screed about racism, he is not stupid. The message was intended for him as the OP of the thread. And I'm sure he got the message. Because about 24 hours after I hit the post button I found myself timed out. I think I waited something like three months before I started posting here. First, I didn't want to just come here and spew bile. Second, I thought it might actually make sense to shut up for a while. If only to be reminded that I obviously like writing. But it was quite easy to reach the conclusion that I don't really need a gun-loving conservative racist to pass judgment on what I write. It also became clear to me that getting into arguments about films like The Birth Of A Nation with racists doesn't make all that much sense. Of course, I knew that anyway. Go ahead, sis. Say it. We both know I'm a stubborn bitch. Mostly it reinforced the idea that the best thing I can do right now is send lots and lots of money to Democrats from Joe Biden to Rev. Warnock - who actually looks like he can win a Senate seat in Georgia. If it works, Daddy and his racist gun-loving conservative views may run into a huge Wall-like obstacle in 2021 that he can't just time out. I noticed Daddy made a few posts recently that were not outwardly racist and hostile to Blacks. So maybe he got the memo. Regardless, I like posting here. There are fewer screeching conservatives. For years and years part of my job as an escort was actually having thoughtful conversations with conservatives. I think I was quite good at it. That's harder in the era of President Toxic. And I've probably just grown more stubborn. I don't miss debates, or arguments, with conservatives at all. There were much better days with Daddy. So I guess this is sad. I have to mention some words of gratitude here, as I have over there, and as I have told Daddy repeatedly to his face. I am very grateful to both Daddy and @TotallyOz, and especially Hooboy, for creating websites that made my escort career wildly successful. And also gave birth to friendships that have now lasted several decades. That was my motivation several years ago in hitting up lots of my clients and other regulars on his site to create monthly pledges for Daddy that generated I don't know how many thousands of dollars in monthly donations for a year or so. It helped solve Daddy's chronic cash flow problems for a while. And it allowed me to feel like I had paid back any debt due to the fact that he ran a free review website that worked out incredibly well for me. I'll say again. I will always be grateful to Daddy for that. And I wish him well. That was also the beginning of the end. Probably out of gratitude to me, Daddy made me a moderator on his website. That was an honor I didn't ask for, didn't want, and actually really didn't perform at all. In retrospect, I should have immediately said, "No." When he offered to give me the ability to time people out, I practically screamed into the phone, "No." I've never run a website like that. So I suppose I can't really judge. But I'm a huge freedom of speech advocate. So I'm not really into this idea of banning people for being, to quote Daddy, "toxic". It's quite ironic, in that I feel very sure that Daddy himself harbors some fairly toxic views, IMHO. My guess is Daddy came close to timing me out simply for using the phrase "President Toxic". He certainly made it clear I was skating on thin ice. The irony is that President Toxic has created such a huge backlash because of his toxic words and hate mongering that it will likely elect Biden in a landslide. And I laughed my ass off when Biden himself called President Toxic "toxic" and "racist". So Daddy has a lot of issues. Freedom of speech appears to be one of them. If Joe Biden were a member of Daddy's website, he'd probably ban poor Joe for being "toxic". Meanwhile, for someone with aspirations of being Miss Manners, Daddy's own silence on President Toxic's lies, hate, and racism is deafening. One of my biggest problems in life has always been that given the choice to be diplomatic and back off, I almost always chose to be blunt and confrontational. That worked very well for me as a community organizer and consumer activist. I picked lots of big fights and won almost all of them. With Daddy, it was a different game. I do give myself credit for being mostly diplomatic for about 15 years or so. For some strange reason, I actually never told Daddy that I essentially view him as a racist, gun loving conservative. So the idea of being a moderator over there just didn't seem like a very promising idea. The sole and very small contribution I made as a moderator was offering some language, basically from Chuck Schumer's Senate floor speech, defining the purpose of Daddy's website as "harm prevention". That way if DHS or any other agency ever tries to bust him he can point to his TOS and say that the website is doing EXACTLY what the Senators who voted for FOSTA/SESTA said they were for. Like preventing harm to vulnerable Gay minorities. You will notice that the only thing I said recently on Daddy's was a very long rant about how welcoming in more religious conservatives to our courts, including a very conservative SCOTUS majority, can only create problems for people like Daddy in the future. These are the very same religious conservatives who are the primary crusaders against prostitution, men who hires escorts, and websites like Rentboy. Again, I wish Daddy the best. But websites like his could easily be a target in a judiciary that takes a strict conservative/religious view on matters like abortion, prostitution, and even same sex marriage. Daddy also has a problem with kids. I also took him on about that. And in so doing I know Daddy well enough that I was quite sure no good deed would go unpunished. I found that images I posted including children kept being deleted. Example: a picture of Nancy Pelosi on the dais of the House when she became Speaker of the House again, and was surrounded by the children of newly elected House Democrats. When Daddy timed me out for a week because of my rant about The Birth Of A Nation, he actually cited that I posted a picture of children. In the context of that thread, I believe he was referring to this picture: That's "the girl in red" from Schindler's List. You can say a lot of things about that image. I might say that it is one of the most iconic and heart-wrenching images of the horrors of Nazi anti-Semitism ever created. My point in posting it was just that. Whites in America in the 21st Century ought to be able to agree - finally! - that The Birth Of A Nation was as horrific to Blacks in America as Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda was to Jews. And had just as horrific real life consequences in terms of mass terror and mass death. But one thing you simply can't say about that image is that it is child pornography. After Daddy kept removing images of children, I finally decided to post this video. In my post, I intentionally put him on the spot by asking his explicit permission as to whether it was okay to post, since it involved an image of a child. Again, Daddy is not stupid. He graciously thanked me for posting the video, and wondered out loud what it was the child handed to Mayor Pete (a bracelet he had made). Meanwhile, I used that to take Daddy on in the private moderator's forum. His argument was that posting any images of children is a "slippery slope", because the next thing you know it's child porn. My argument was that in the 21st century Gay men can be legally surrounded by naked kids. As in their own babies, whose diapers they are changing. Daddy's way of thinking is a throwback to an ugly and hateful anti-Gay past. Of course child pornography is wrong. But it's very Salem Witch Hunt to base your website on the idea that Gays and kids are just a bad match. Because "we all know what kind of perverts Gay men are." In fact, Gay men in the 21st century are actually a lot like Mayor Pete. Someday perhaps Chasten will be First Lady, and they'll grace The White House with their own children. Probably the worst thing I did is make an argument that one of the other moderators, also a liberal, agreed with. My experience is that Daddy doesn't particularly like being told he is wrong. Sometime shortly after that I found that I had been un-made a moderator, without explanation, just like I had also been made a moderator, without explanation. Almost everybody who hired me for years who knew and interacted with Daddy took exactly the same approach I did: slather him with praise, pay for his hotel room, and then talk about what you really think about him behind his back. Because he is intolerant of dissent. This is something I obviously feel very passionately about. Gay men, lesbians, transgendered people, and our allies pulled off the organizing victory of my lifetime, and of millenia. We took all the ugly and hateful and discriminatory things said about Gays and Gay love and Gay sex and turned thousands of years of bigotry around. And we did it by being deeply personal. We did it by opening our hearts. Gay men and lesbians pulled off one of the most amazing organizing victories of all time. With all due respect to warriors of Good Trouble like John Lewis, we showed the world how it is done. So I find the closed and closeted petty little world Daddy lives in sad. I'm not being too blunt, am I? I understand why he is the way he is. He's had many crosses to bear. As have we all. I think we are on the verge of changing America into a better, fairer, and more loving country. People are disgusted with the division and the hate. Gay men were on the front lines of learning how to win massive political change. Mostly because so many of us lost and lost and lost. And we kept our hopes up and our hearts open. And we continued to fight. Until we won. Daddy's is not a website that runs on that ethos. I spent a lot of time talking to him and to all the Gay men that come to the Palm Springs pool party about how we could defend a website like Daddy's from being the next Rentboy. Mostly those men are closeted and scared. Their ethos is to keep your head down. Don't fight, don't push back. Go with the flow, and hope you don't get busted. Don't go out on a limb. Don't take risks. These are guys I've known for years and years. I can respect their way of thinking. And Daddy's way of running his website. But I've lived my adult life pretty much doing the exact opposite. And I'm proud of it. Mostly, I'm glad that I gave Daddy a little bit of help when I could. And I stood up for what I view as moral things that I deeply believe in. And I'll say again that I will always be grateful that he ran a website that was very lucrative for me. Like I said, all this was probably better left unsaid. But you know me, sis. Like Daddy, I just can't help being the way I am. He isn't going to change. And neither am I. I have a very clear vision of where I hope Gay men, and America, go in the 21st century. It's just not a journey that I think Daddy feels particularly comfortable with. I wish him the best.