stevenkesslar

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.

I watched the whole Pelosi interview this morning. It was a master class in how to outsmart President Toxic. Of course, it's not the hardest thing to do in the world. She's been doing it since that first meeting in the Oval Office right after she became Speaker again, when she basically allowed President Toxic to be the mean asshole who would shut down the government in what turned out to be his last gasp in the losing battle to publicly defend The Wall. Geez. Why aren't we hearing about The Wall in 2020. I'd give Nancy much of the credit for that. The polls suggest to me that maybe 2 in 3 undecided voters are just starting to break for Biden. It's too early to tell. But the basic structure of the race suggests that the majority will go for the change candidate, which in this case is Biden. The language that the focus group types use is that they know that they don't want to vote for President Toxic. But Biden has not yet closed the deal. Even Republican pollster Frank Luntz asked this in a focus group he was running: The legitimate answer is that undecided people wanted to actually hear about policy. From Biden in particular, because they got the memo that President Toxic has no policies. He just rants and insults. Luntz has also suggested that perhaps Trump's goal was to prevent Biden from closing the deal. Or perhaps just discourage people from voting altogether. This answer Luntz drew out ought to concern anyone who fervently dreams of President AOC: Progressives who think Bernie would have done better winning the debate and persuading swing voters like Joe in swing states like Arizona might want to consider that. I've already decided to be cynical about this. Regardless of what Biden does, or how many Senate seats Democrats win, Rich Mitch will likely be around in 2022 to argue that Biden (and Treasury Secretary Warren) turned out to be socialists, after all. Joe in Arizona will buy the message, and vote Republican in 2022. The good news is that in 2022 Republicans have to defend the 24 Senate seats they won in 2016, including i blue states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. So even if Joe in Arizona flips back, Democrats have a good chance of having four years to get important things done. The latest polls released, including one by Rasmussen (!), all show Biden with a 8-9 % lead over President Toxic. But let's go with the latest RCP average, which is Biden 49.7, President Toxic 43.1. That leaves about 7 % undecided. Let's be generous and give Biden 5 and President Toxic 2. This could be a 55/45 race, minus some for third parties. After last night, it's quite possible Biden wins by a 10 point margin. It's hard to believe Trump will do better than Biden in a Town Hall format. Mostly, Nancy's interview this morning was a clear indication of how strong the hand of the Democrats is. Ideally, if Biden wins by 10 points, it's just game over on Election Night. But she's back stopping Biden by working on the weird, unlikely, but not impossible contingencies. Like what happens if the contest is thrown into the House, where the slave owners made sure that the slave states were protected? In modern terms, that means that California's 39.5 million residents get one House vote for President, just like Alaska's 750,000 residents. How democratic is that? I'll be broken record. We need to get rid of all anti-democratic vestiges of the Slavery Electoral College. Nancy's immediate goal is for the Democrats to take over one more House delegation, which would deprive President Toxic of a second term based on winning a majority (26) of votes from the 50 House delegations. Her other immediate goal, which was quite transparent, is to pull more principled Republicans away from their party. I don't even know that she was working on the election itself, since there are so few undecided. My read is that leading Democrats are already thinking about the post-Trump era. It is in the Democrats' interest to dig the trench between Trump Republicans and Party Republicans deeper. It's a 60/40 split, so the odds favor the Trump Republicans. But I think Nancy's goal is really to help them split apart, so that what we saw last night becomes the symbol of the losing Trump Republican Party. They'll whine, bellow, and feel like losers. It's sad that progressives who don't feel Nancy is open-minded enough to progressives are rigidly opposed to her sounding open-minded about bipartisanship. It's one more data point that suggests that some progressives, like Kute Kyle, are mostly interested in purity, not power.

Would everybody be okay with making Sandra Bernhard moderator of the next debate?

My dearest and most darlingest sister. First of all, how shall I put this? It's ingenious. Granted, in our youth I was always the brainy and ugly duckling type. But if you'd perhaps spent just a little less time cock sucking at boarding school, and a little more time practicing for spelling bees with me, you would be an even more perfect woman today. Regardless, I still love you as a sister. Unlike certain other people, we can at least talk about what it means to be smart. You obviously watched CNN last night. There's a few things you didn't mention that I'll point out. David Axelrod and Rick Santorum both agreed that our ingeniusly smart President's performance mostly shredded support and sent the people he most needs to convince running for cover, or Pepto Bismol. Santorum pointed out the embrace of white supremacist groups and the refusal to ensure a peaceful transfer of power were both cringeworthy. Axelrod said this would do serious damage to President Toxic - as if he were not damaged goods already. When Santorum and Axelrod agree that President Toxic is in big trouble, he's in big trouble. Some unnamed Republican pollster who tweeted Dana Bash put it more succinctly. What the Independent women Trump desperately needs saw tonight is everything about Trump they hate, the Republican pollster said. Not to be disrespectful or disagreeable, my darlingest sister, but Bob Woodward disagrees with you. He stated on MSNBC that one of his conclusions after many hours of conversations with President Toxic is that he never has a plan. About anything. So the irony is that everyone in America is now talking about what President Toxic's secret plan to steal the election and destroy democracy is. When, in fact, Trump's only plan was to walk on stage, bellow, and lie. Frankly, I thought his snorting and stalking debate performance in 2016 was more interesting. I agree with Woodward and the Republican pollster. It may be a good look for a challenger attacking Hillary. It's not a good look for an unpopular incumbent President. Even Chris Christie, who actually helped President Toxic prepare for the debate, said Trump was "too hot". I don't think he meant that in the sense we used the phrase to describe the muscular young football players at boarding school whose cocks we loved to suck. Biden Jumps Ahead by Rasmussen Reports When even President Toxic's favorite Republican pollster says he is losing, and his decision to say "fuck you" to the majority of Americans who don't want the seat filled has backfired, there's a big problem. Rasmussen's approval ratings for President Toxic show the same thing. They went from +4 net approval on Sept. 25th to - 7 % net disapproval today.. And this is BEFORE the performance at the debate everyone loves to hate is factored in. Poor thing. It suggests that as the Democrats lay in every day about how right wing court packing will kill the ACA, kill Roe v. Wade, kill voting rights, it's not going to help President Toxic or his party. I have to assume that if President Toxic lost something like 10 % of voters on his unwillingness to listen to or care about the American people, this isn't going to help Republicans down the ticket, either. Like all those Republican Senators running in what are now "swing" states. Including South Carolina, Georgia, Alaska, Montana, and .............................. wait for it.............................. Kansas! I'm clicking my ruby red heels in hopes that a poll saying Barbara Bollier is 2 points ahead in Kansas is accurate. When I quote the wisdom of Rick Santorum twice in one post, something strange is definitely happening. Santorum said on CNN that if he were a down ballot Republican running now, he'd be really pissed at President Toxic. Because he indulged his darkest self and worst impulses, probably at the expense of all the Republicans he is running with. I suspect Santorum is right. Oh well. Couldn't happen to a nicer and more ingenius guy, could it? I should be fair, and at least provide a hint of the wisdom of President Toxic's base, to whom the debate was clearly pitched. I read several articles praising Trump's geniousness. Here's my favorite lines: Here's how I read that. They feel like losers. And they are already rationalizing why they will lose to the "ruling class". They don't expect an incompetent President to actually do something about their rage, and their "slowly declining wages". They just expect him to be an animal. I agree. President Toxic is an animal. And if suburban women or Blacks or Hispanics or college graduates - aka all the "unaccomplished strivers" - wanted to elect an animal President, he would no doubt win. Personally, were I voting for an animal for President, I might have chosen a panda. Or perhaps a horse. At least a horse would have one attractive feature to offer you and me, sis.

Dane and I solved the problem. We'll take over. Two old whores could do better than those guys. My problem is I feel like I was born to be a First Lady. If Dane takes the Presidency, could you take the Veep slot? We'll somehow figure it out. I mean, how could we possibly make it worse?

I agree with most of what you said. The part I disagree with, strongly, is what I quoted. I don't think that Americans are being fooled by the corporate media. The polls show the media is less trusted than ever. I think people are responding to what is actually happening in their lives. More than anything, it's the economy, stupid. Which was probably good enough in 2019 for President Toxic to win. We'll never know. But it is almost certainly bad enough in 2020 for him to lose. And we will know that soon. I think the project for Democrats for the next decade is to relentlessly pound on a progressive economic message the way the conservative trickle downers did before, during, and after the election of Reagan. My view is that we have the facts mostly on our side. I'll concede the point that Reagan can be viewed as the guy who grew the economy, and won the Cold War. And that was enough to get George H.W. Bush four years. Lichtman would argue that voters saw it that way, which is why they went for 12 continuous years of Republican rule. Even if you stipulate that, George W. Bush and now Trump have proven that the supply side ideology of tax cuts for the rich mostly leads to huge budget deficits and the rich getting richer. Branding it as "trickle down" was effective enough to get Bill Clinton and Obama in power for eight years. "Trumped up trickle down" did not work for Hillary. So what Democrats and progressives need to now do is figure out how to push that message further. You can blame 2016 on Hillary. Or you can blame it on the fact that by 2016 too many people were left behind, even by Democratic policies. There's something else that Lichtman's theories have changed my mind about. I used to think Reagan won because his ideas won, right or wrong. Or that after a few decades of conservatism's failures, starting with Goldwater and Reagan in 1964, the time for his ideas had finally come. I've changed my mind. I now believe that Lichtman is right, and Reagan won mostly because Carter lost. It's as simple as, "A isn't working, so let's try B." That's a vast oversimplification. But I think it's mostly right. The polls show that conservatism became more popular AFTER Reagan was elected, not before. He offered in simple and sunny words a theory for why things were getting better. So a lot of people said, "Yup. Things are getting better. We buy the theory." I read a long essay by Teddy White about the 1980 race. He pointed out that Carter spent Fall 1980 going on boat rides on the Mississippi and staging these photo ops about how everything was fine. Meanwhile, America had long gas lines, high inflation, bad feelings, and a hostage crisis in Iran. It's not unlike Fall 2020. President Toxic can try to paint a sunny picture all he wants. But it's pretty clear that most Americans see a pandemic, wildfires, and an economic mess. While 2020 may not be a 1980 landslide, the key similarity is this: "Not A, therefore B." It's up to B to make it work better. And to explain to the American people why it is working better. Reagan was able to do that. Trump wasn't. There is a huge downside for Biden, even if he wins. We don't even need to create a hypothetical because it already happened in 2009. Axelrod said he knew by Spring 2009 that Democrats would have to carry the baggage of an economic nightmare they inherited into the 2010 midterms. This is why I think we need a 50+ vote majority in the Senate. And we need to end the filibuster. Having made it work in 2009, Mitch - if capable - will play the obstruction card again. One upside to his right wing Court packing is that it is now obvious to Americans that he is way more interested in raw power to attain conservative ends than he is in bipartisanship or compromise for the good of America. Here's a hypothetical. The closest analogy to 2020 is 1918/1919. There was a sharp but short V-shaped recession that coincided with the pandemic. Then the economy recovered. Then in 2020 there was a post-war, post-pandemic depression. If Biden inherits something like that, 2022 could be really ugly for Democrats. Again, I think Democrats need a majority, they need a clear plan, and they need some success to be able to persuade people in 2022 that the plan is working. Reagan managed to do that. He also managed to gradually persuade Americans that his conservative ideas were working, based on what they perceived as success. In 1982 Democrats won 1 Senate seat, and 26 House seats. If Democrats win big in 2020 and can hold their losses in 2022 to something like that, four years is enough time to set up a strong recovery and another Democratic victory in 2024. The part of what you wrote that I quoted above is the part I disagree with. I'll restate some of what I said above that I found persuasive about Steve Cortes' argument. And this time I'll overstate it, so that it sounds like I agree with Cortes. What part of "lowest poverty rate ever" do you not get? True, about 1 in 6 children are poor. Guess what? It was 1 in 5 under Obama and Biden. Whether it is 1 in 5 or 1 in 6, most Americans know that it's just wrong to say "the majority of Americans are dirt poor and getting poorer", as you claim. They know it because their iPhone and laptop, which enables them to telecommute, tells them so. No, they and their kids are not poor. Cortes uses Fed data to claim median incomes went up $4,379 dollars in 2019. I'm sure we'll hear something like that from President Toxic tonight. Comparing 2019 to 2018, median incomes went up $4,889 in Pennsylvania, $3,591 in Wisconsin, and $5,292 in Michigan. Does that sound like the rich got richer at the expense of the middle class to you? It doesn't to me. It sounds like the middle class got richer, and the rich got richer, too. Cue up Margaret Thatcher, who would argue Democrats hate the rich so much they'd rather punish wealth and work and have the poor be poorer. My view of reality is that people don't read these Fed numbers. But it actually does describe the reality they live and vote in. Here's an interesting factoid. In Pennsylvania, median incomes are higher than ever. In Wisconsin, in 2019 they went back to their prior peak, in 1999. In Michigan, median income is still way below their 1999 peak. That may explain why Biden is doing better in Michigan than Pennsylvania. It may be that voters in Pennsylvania do feel like President Toxic has made it better than ever for them. This brief report from Steve Kornacki shows that in 2016 Trump had leads with White voters with no college degrees of + 32 % in Pennsylvania and + 31 % in Michigan. Now he has poll leads with the same group of + 18 % in Pennsylvania and + 6 % in Michigan. In both cases, the margin has shrunk and he's losing the state overall. But it may be that part of the difference is that incomes in Pennsylvania in 2019 were higher than they've ever been, unlike Michigan. I'll keep repeating. I like Lichtman's idea that most voters are smart. And that his system tells you not just who will win, but why they will win. If Democrats want to win Pennsylvania, they have to offer voters some theory of why they'll do better. The way I look at these numbers is that President Toxic got lucky, and unlucky. He got lucky to inherit an economy that was growing from Obama and Biden. He got unlucky that a pandemic fucked it all up for him, and us. Beyond that, Biden can and should argue that Obama and him inherited a Republican economic mess and figured out how to make it good. Trump inherited a good economy and has figured out how to again create another Republican economic mess. In large part by lying to Americans about a deadly virus and completely bungling the economic response. Those same three states lost thousands of manufacturing jobs in 2019. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the big picture in each state, which was a rising tide in 2019. That said, even without COVID-19 Biden had a pretty good argument that President Toxic promised to help those ailing factory towns. And he utterly failed. Lichtman would have argued that Trump would have won regardless, I suspect. Lichtman now argues, and I agree, that what has happened in 2020 is enough to win Biden one election. But what happens after the election determines whether Democrats can win again in 2022 and 2024. It also determines whether Democrats can persuade voters that "progressive" or even "democratic socialist" ideas make sense. I think it would help to just be sober about the fact that Sanders and Warren failed. Period. If the idea is to convince people that some class-oriented ideology is better, progressive Democrats have a lot of rethinking to do. And the first thing that would help is to agree that people - especially Independents - will pay more attention to what really happens, as opposed to how any ideology tells them to think about it. In 2020 terms, Biden is having a hard time closing the deal on "the economy" because at least in 2019 "the economy" was actually better for the average voter in swing states. It is stunningly clear that Bernie's 2020 experiment in "democratic socialism" failed. What I saw led me to think that a similar experiment in 2030 or 2040 could succeed. Because at some point young Berniecrats who were his base will be an older majority - maybe. But if the idea was that White voters without college degrees (or even Black voters without college degrees) in Michigan or Wisconsin were really closet social democrats, that theory just didn't pan out. It wasn't even close. If anything, those are the people that will increasingly form the base of the post-Trump/toxic/"truck driver" Republican Party. Same with Warren. The theory of the case for me in 2019 was that she had the best argument that fit with people's actual experience. Yeah, I'm a born capitalist. But then when you look at what happens, capitalism sure crushes a lot of people. Like factory workers. Like big chunks of the middle class that get screwed by predatory lenders or greedy drug companies. She did have a plan. And it looked for a while like it might work. There is your theory that she was an evil snake all along. All that tells me is that progressives are 100 % certain to fail. Because we are too stupid or purist to actually build coalitions. My theory is that Warren's failure tells us a lot about exactly where we are. In retrospect, many say it was a strategic mistake for her to embrace Medicare For All. It was a bridge too far for most Democrats, as the primary results show. So if Biden wins and there is a Senate majority, Bernie and Warren will live to fight another day. I think what is most important now is that Biden wins, and wins a Senate majority. Like in 1932 and 1960, I think the right progressive mindset is that the best progressive legislation is yet to come. In a nutshell, Reagan succeeded by convincing the middle class it was better to tie its fate to the rich. The economy worked well enough that the country moved gradually to the right. The same thing happened under Clinton in reverse. His economy worked well enough that it nudged the country to the left. So what Democrats need to do is figure out how to nudge the country further to the left. Thomas Picketty is a scholar, and he would likely have a hard time winning an election for dog catcher. But his ideas are the best ones for gradually moving the country into an economy that works better for the middle class, based on ideas that make sense. They make sense because they fit with what is actually happening in most people's lives. To me, those two charts summarize the winning arguments Democrats (or "democratic socialists") need to make relentlessly. And part of the problem is that charts and theories are useless. Part of what progressive Democrats need is a Ronald Reagan, who can make it simple and sunny. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were not quite it. Not is Joe Biden. Nor, as it turns out, was Barack Obama. Americans always get it wrong before they finally get it right, I guess. Any factory town in the Rust Belt can tell you the bottom chart is right. Productivity has grown, but at the expense of the people who produce the goods that productivity is based on. Yang argues, correctly, that more of that is on the way. Biden actually does have an inner Bernie, which we may see glimpses of tonight. I posted a YouTube clip a few weeks ago I can't find today, but in 2007 in New Hampshire he was saying he voted against all Bush's trade deals because free trade was not fair trade. He pointed out that millions of factory jobs were going to China. Partly because W. would not enforce the trade deals. But partly because corporations and US stock holders were making fortunes shipping factory jobs to where they could get really cheap labor. The first chart explains the Democrats' opportunity, and problem. The opportunity is that Democrats can argue that concentrating wealth at the top, among "job creators" who actually suck at creating well paying jobs, has not paid off. Yeah, we have productivity growth. But it is lagging behind what it was when the pie was shared more evenly. Back then the middle class could grow, rather than just paddle dead in the water. This argument should sell in Michigan and Wisconsin. Because it is true. President Toxic can say median incomes in both states were higher in 2019 than in 2018. Biden can say that's because of the economic recovery Barack and him created. He can also say those incomes are actually still below what they were when Bill Clinton was President. And he can say that's because every time Republicans fool Americans into voting for them we go right back into this failed economic theory that bankrupts America. If it worked for Clinton and Obama, the argument can work for Biden. If Biden is the political animal he seems to be, he knows in his bones that he actually has to nudge America to the left in order to succeed. He has to enact more progressive laws. He has to have the votes. And he has to tax Jeff Bezos to help people in the middle and the bottom. He also has a modern version of the Civil Rights Movement. So BLM will have a much bigger soapbox, just like MLK did, from which to argue there is no good reason 1 in 6 American children grow up poor. That ties right into the idea that we'll have more racism, more crime, and more jails if we just keep ignoring the pain we inflict on our children. Like in 1960, there does seem to be a growing will now to actually do something about it. If central casting is sending an FDR or an LBJ our way, I don't think Joe Biden is it. I think he knows that. He says he is a transitional figure. At the very least, he gives progressives a platform to win some victories that help them make the case that these policies actually do improve the lives and digital wallets of the majority of Americans. Figuring that out is the political and ideological project of the decade for Democrats and progressives when Biden wins. One way to think about both 2016 and 2020 is that Lictman would argue history closes one door and opens another. Maybe the door is slammed shut, like in 1980. Or maybe the breeze blows it barely shut, like in 2016. It's up to the winner to walk through the new door and claim the prize. Lichtman's argument, which I buy, is that voters will reject President Toxic because he failed to make things better. Democrats have to make things better, an have a good theory for how they will do it, if we're going to claim the prize long enough to transform the economy. Let alone deal with climate change. Quite honestly, I don't think we need a charismatic Thomas Picketty. I think we could probably make do with a progressive Indiana Jones.

I saw some poll that said Biden and President Toxic are now tied with active military and vets. That would be extraordinary, and another reason for a decisive Biden win.

It's always a good time to worry about election integrity. That said, it's not like absentee voting or mail-in ballots are the only way to fuck things up. It happens with in-person voting, too. Did you ever hear of a thing called Bush v. Gore? Florida now maintains they have learned from their mistakes, and after years of trial and error they have an excellent system for voting either way. With no sense of irony whatsoever, President Toxic agrees. One of the silver linings in the cloud of COVID-19 for me is it is advancing what we needed to do anyway at warp speed. Will there be mistakes? Of course. But this should be a sprint both before and after the election to dramatically increase voter participation. I'd be happy if the debate about mandatory voting starts in January. If only to hear the Liberate The Virus crowd argue that the best thing about democracy is that no one can force you to vote. Democrats Bail on Their Mail-Voting Experiment That's a right-wing hit piece. I'm posting it because there's data in there about the large number of ballots that are not counted - people don't sign them, signatures don't match, etc. I'm not even 100 % sure I understand the guy's point. But I think it's to mock AOC types who are all "vote in your pajamas!" The implication is that maybe Democrats won't like mail-in voting so well if it means largely Democratic mail-in ballots with flaws are not counted. My strong hunch is that this is a big net gain for Democrats. The number of additional votes cast through mail-in voting will likely vastly exceed the additional number of ballots not counted due to errors. There is always a learning curve. Just like there was a learning curve in Florida in 2000. I'm hoping that Biden wins decisively, and gets a Senate majority. Then in 2021 Congress passes legislation that moves states along, in any way we legally can, to let as many people as want to vote do so in any way they want to. This is an issue where it could make sense to pick fights with a right wing Court. In one week I've made the transition from thinking of SCOTUS as an institution I really want to respect, to thinking of it as an institution that I will systematically demonize for the rest of my life. It is now a wounded bird. And the sense that I think will develop is that every progressive in America will want to put the cute little right wing bird out of its misery. So one fight that probably just makes SCOTUS look bad is any fight where they say voting is bad. They won't say it that way, of course. But the message of Democrats should be that democracy is based on voting being easy, safe, and a civic duty. Let SCOTUS make it hard. Every time they try to disenfranchise voters, we can use it to say we need Democratic Senators to pass progressive laws and eventually get rid of a bunch of SCOTUS justices that suck up to elites and despise the very idea of democracy. Maybe it won't go that far. But that's the idea I already have in my mind. We do have a checks and balances system, and I think most Americans want checks and balances. So if we are going to have a right wing SCOTUS, it can be used as an opportunity to build progressive power in the two other branches of government to balance it out.

Thanks for posting that. Wow. Income inequality. Why am I not surprised? It is a complicated study. Obviously the Fed's goal is not to stoke class war. But all the stuff about the "SCF Augmented Next 9" model versus the "WID Next 9" model makes it seem like they went out of their way to blunt the message by making it incomprehensible. The thing that jumped out at me is the education correlation. Which is not surprising. 87 % of those in the Top 1 % are college grads. 72 % of the Next 9 % are. 45 % of the Next 40 % are. And only 22 % of the Bottom 50 % are. Another argument for free college as a path to income equality. And, no surprise, the Top 1 % is almost entirely White and has 0 % Blacks. The Bottom 50 % is 53 % White, 20 % Black, 14 % Hispanic, and 13 % Other. But, no. There's no systemic racism in America. Just Black Marxists who want to abolish suburbs. I was going to post this anyway, so I'll fit it in here. The themes revolve around income. Biden: Skilled at Debate, Awful at Economic Results That's a good preview of what President Toxic will say tomorrow night, albeit not as intelligently as his adviser Steve Cortes does. I give them credit for basing their arguments on the points Democrats would make: Black net worth, child poverty, rising incomes for the middle class. Before I get to the part of what Cortes says I genuinely like, let me first pick a few of the really stupid low hanging fruit. First, I read this as an acknowledgement that they think Biden will win the debate. Their point is even if he is a good debater, he still sucks with the economy. Second, I hope President Toxic tries to portray Biden as the guy who organized our "abusive" relationship with China and handed them 60,000 factories and over 3.2 million manufacturing jobs. I guess Biden must have done that before he was senile, since it sounds pretty complicated. It sets Biden up to respond that President Toxic played up Xi as a great guy who was handling the virus earlier this year. Even as he downplayed a deadly threat to Americans, which has now killed over 200,000 of us. It's hard to imagine President Toxic is stupid enough to hand this to Biden on a silver platter. Then again, maybe not. Biden is debating Trump, not W. But I'll be interested to see whether and how Biden points out that all those factory jobs were lost under W. and Republican tax and trade policies. Which boiled down to let the rich stockholders and corporations do whatever they want. There's more than a bit of that with President Toxic, too. Biden will say that he was for NAFTA in the 90's, when Clinton was President and it did create hundreds of thousands of factory jobs in the US. Including Delaware. He voted against most of W.'s trade deals, which at the time he said did not meet "fair trade" and union standards. Then he'll talk about how part of his job as Veep was to save and restore jobs in states like Michigan after him and Obama got left holding the bag for the Republican's disastrous follies. Finally, he can point out that President Toxic failed to bring those factory jobs back. In 2019 Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin all lost a few thousand factory jobs. Even without COVID-19, Biden would have had a decent argument to make that Trump just broke his promises to communities decimated when the jobs went overseas by the millions under W. Now let me say what I like about this article. It is one of the best summaries I've read of why President Toxic continues to poll well on "the economy", even though we are in a recession. As the article argues, the economy was in fact growing pretty well in 2019. If Biden is having a hard time pounding the final nail in Trump's coffin, it's because the economy actually was working well enough for many. By the end of Obama's second term, median US household income was slightly higher than ever before ($62,898) and Black and Hispanic poverty were lower than ever before. As that Fed chart shows, there is no question that median incomes rose more under President Toxic ($68,703 by the end of 2019) and poverty went lower still. In 2019 median incomes, in adjusted dollars, were close to 10 % higher than they've ever been. Mostly the way I view that is that Trump inherited a growing economy, which he managed to keep growing. Now he's fucked it up worse than most other countries by completely mismanaging COVID-19. But the economy was definitely growing. Had COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter not hit, I'm pretty sure Lichtman would have been calling this election for President Toxic. And he more likely than not would have won. That new study the Fed just put out about income inequality stated that median household income rose 5 % between 2016 and 2019. That slightly contradicts the Fed numbers above, which are closer to a 10 % increase over three years. Either way, it does help me to understand why Mexican American families can look at Trump and feel like before COVID-19 he was good for the economy. On most metrics, the rate of growth between 2010 to 2016 under Obama and from 2016 to 2019 under President Toxic was pretty much the same. Trump can and will take credit for a good economy. The other thing I like about that article is Cortes made me think about what the debate SHOULD be about, but won't be: income inequality, poverty, racial injustice, and all the other reasons that what the Fed calls "The Bottom 50 %" is suffering. If President Toxic loses, I think the right way to view it is that for two elections in a row, the party in power failed the referendum. And the biggest reason why is "it's the economy stupid". At least for the bottom half of America. Even the Top 50 % who has done well, or at least okay, includes lots of people who are just sick of the turmoil. Many might agree to pay higher taxes if it means being able to get off the Toxic Rollercoaster and have peace and calm and a growing economy. If we don't address these core economic issues, there is every reason to think the next President and the one after will fail the referendum, too. Just as Cortes tries to blame Biden for the factory jobs shredded under W., he also tries to blame him for the Black net worth shredded by the subprime lending the Republicans allowed when they ran everything. It's fair enough to say Black net worth declined under Obama. But that's only because of all the foreclosures that were headed into the slow foreclosure pipeline by January 2009. Cortes doesn't mention that one reason Obama may not have pushed for a more aggressive bailout for home owners is that Rich Mitch would have obstructed it. That said, this is where Elizabeth Warren would say she was there. And Obama's folks like Summers and Geithner were no help. So we are left with this horror show, which now takes on more urgency since Black Lives Matter has called the question: I suspect that the 50 % + of Americans who sympathize with the goals of Black Lives Matter and agree there is systemic racism in America also agree that until we deal with wealth and poverty, the problems won't get any better and may get worse. I think going back to Clinton's home ownership initiatives and ring-fencing it with anti-predator laws is one idea to debate once Biden wins. If Warren is Treasury Secretary, that will help. Cortes wants to give President Toxic credit for reducing child poverty. That's fair. From 2010 to 2020 it reduced continuously under both Obama and President Toxic. That said, it's still a huge problem: It's the same core debate as what I said above with Black Lives Matter. If we really want to address the roots of the unrest in America this Summer, child poverty is where we need to go. The sad news, as you can see from that chart, is we've just been going sideways since the end of the 60's War On Poverty. In most Western European nations, child poverty is a single digit number. We ought to be able to do better. That chart surprised me. My understanding of US poverty is this. It reached an all time low in 1971, as The War On Poverty programs mostly continued into Nixon's Presidency. It hit a new low in the latter years of Bill Clinton's Presidency. And then it hit a new low again at the end of Obama's Presidency, and continued to decline under Trump. All that is true for total poverty. It's not true for child poverty. Here's why: Medicare, Social Security, and wealth creation have been remarkably successful in eliminating poverty among seniors. With children, not so much. While the government interventions involved are different, there's no reason 1 in 3 seniors had to be poor, or that 1 in 5 children still have to be poor. COVID-19 has raised the stakes, simply by making it harder for children to learn. But the reality we ought to be debating is that most rich kids will be fine, anyway. Whereas many poor kids would not have been fine, anyway. The other issue that Cortes didn't even mention that is the most important one to debate is income inequality. Why am I not surprised? That Fed report is good timing. But I like this chart better, since it is just easier to understand: It also covers the rough timeframe in which President Toxic and Biden have been active in real estate and politics. So they won't be debating this. Trump could argue Biden was in power the whole time, and he just let it happen. Biden could argue that President Toxic is the poster child of the sleazy fat cat who wins by cheating and not paying taxes. I actually like that chart from a Pew report better, because I think it is more useful for understanding why this is proving to be difficult to change. The median income of what they call upper income is $207,400. The median income of what they call middle income is $86,600. So neither of those groups are hurting. And as Cortes argues, they almost all probably got a good size bump in income from 2017 to 2019. One reason there may not be overwhelming political opposition to the rich getting richer is that the people in the middle don't necessarily feel poorer. In some other universe, if we didn't have a Slavery Electoral College and Hillary had won in 2016, we'd have a 6-3 liberal Court, And Bernie and Warren could be planning in 2021 to legislate a Jeff Bezos wealth tax. That would be my ideal solution, which most Americans - including a majority of Republicans - support. Biden has ruled that idea out. Which is probably just as well, since it would never survive a 6 - 3 conservative court, anyway. If I'm right that we're seeing a major change in tide toward a dominant progressive majority, then just as Nixon in 1968 led to Reagan in 1980, Biden in 2020 may lead to [...................] in 20[..]. Even if I'm right, it's gonna take a while for that to play out. In the meantime, Biden wants to raise taxes on corporations and people who make over $400,000. That should be doable with a Senate majority, just like it was under Clinton and Obama. But just like under Clinton and Obama, there's no reason to think that alone will reverse, or even slow down, the further concentration of income and wealth. All this is what I wish the debate tomorrow would be about. It's going to be weird, after being used to Bernie and Biden and Warren slugging it out over a bunch of good ideas. That's definitely not what is going to happen in this debate.