stevenkesslar

With all due respect, my beloved sister, you're no help whatsoever. I'll be watching the debate with Dane Scott tomorrow night. He's Italian heritage. Why aren't you at least offering to cater the fucking cannoli? This does work both ways. Granted, these days my brain is too active, and my cock is not active enough. So maybe I do need to lay off the politics for a while. I took a break for a few months a little while back. But it didn't break my bad habits. You know what they say. Once a political whore, always ......................... Flip side, I remember the moment in 2008 in Dane's apartment when he still lived in New York when I asked him whether he'd be voting for Hillary or Barack. His eyes glazed over. Frankly, it's the kind of look you'd want to see in an escort when your cock is deep inside him and he is about to cum. That said, it's not a good look when you're trying to have a political conversation. Like so many others, President Toxic has politicized Dane. Now he's all about watching the debate, sending donations to Biden, and voting against President Toxic. We all get older, of course. But how sad is that? My brother who, like you, liked Bloomberg in the primary, has nearly been radicalized. He lost his job earlier this year due to the pandemic. We both recently agreed that the only thing we could think of that would make us seriously consider suicide is four more years of President Toxic. Who knows. Perhaps even Poor Brad ended up feeling that way. Of course, Brad is in my thoughts and prayers. So whatever it is that's going around, other than COVID-19, seems to be catching. Not to worry. Since you won't be making good on the promised cannoli, we'll just make do with a few bottles of cheap wine. And wishing and hoping that Uncle Joe makes us cum ............... I mean, in a political sort of way, of course.

Well, maybe you're not talking with White voters without college degrees in Michigan and Wisconsin. I sort of have a Top 10 charts and graphs that I think explain a hell of a lot about what's going on in one picture. That's one of them. It's stunning. First, Hillary Clinton did worse than Obama - a Black man - among White voters. Second, the Democrats that did best and worst during these 40 years are both named Clinton. Bill was uniquely good at appealing to "Bubba" Whites. Hillary was uniquely bad at it. It matters why you think that happened. If you think these White voters are sexist, piggish, and deplorable, then fuck 'em. Then the only problem you have to solve is how you actually win an election without them. If you think Hillary was uniquely good at sounding like both the government bureaucrat and corporate lawyer everyone loves to hate, then pick someone else. That poll data you posted was only two states. But it suggests that Biden is somewhere between where Obama was in 2008 and 2012. I find that very believable, based on mountains of poll data. It's not a great place to be. Ideally, the goal would be to get back to where Democrats were in 1992 and 1996 with Bill Clinton. In theory, Bernie (and to a lesser degree Elizabeth) tried to do that in 2020. If the Democrats are the party of the working class of every race, these voters without college degrees should be our bread and butter. Bernie could not close the deal. He clearly looked better than Hillary to lots of these voters in 2016. But replace Hillary with Biden in 2020, and Bernie didn't look so good. And, again, it's not like Biden looks so good, either. Wisconsin and Michigan are more blue than red. When you add all the Whites without colleges degrees in Alabama and Idaho, Biden will get clobbered by this group of Whites. The good news is that if he "only" loses them by 20 to 25 points like Obama, as opposed to 39 like Hillary did in the chart above, he'll win. So the polls suggest he'll win. I think there's going to be a big sorting if he wins. The first level of problems is this: will you wear a mask? Or will you go to the State Capitol with your AR-15 and complain about how America has gone socialist? It sounds like some weird horror story no one would believe. But it's actually a pretty good political test of how White "Bubba" men are going to react to Biden. There is some part of me that feels like we should treat coal miners in West Virginia with the same affection that they treat us. We've lost them, anyway. If we can win college graduate Millennials and Hispanics in Texas, do we really need Joe Manchin? So maybe Democrats should say this: "Take your shitty little depressed towns and your drug addictions and sorrows and pities and whine all you want. You voted for President Toxic, and he ignored you. You'll be nice to Bernie at a town hall, but you won't elect people like him. So we'll do what Trump did. We'll ignore you." Am I being insensitive? That may actually be a viable political strategy, even though Biden won't be blunt about it. How about Ohio? Can we kiss that goodbye? President Toxic will lose in part because their jobs picture sucks right now. Overall unemployment fell to where it was in 1992. I'll be shocked if they buy his Best Economy Ever Reality TV show and let him off the hook. The factory job picture in Ohio is even worse. They're back to the depths of The Great Recession. They'd love to get back to 1992. But hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs have just gone away. Trump did nothing about it, despite his promises. In all those Rust Belt states, factory job growth was flat to down in 2019, when we supposedly had the best economy ever. The job producers got their huge tax cuts. But they didn't use them to build US factories and US jobs. All this explains why those poll numbers are probably correct, and President Toxic will lose. As Lichtman would say, this is a referendum on him. And it's about governing, not campaigning and texting. President Toxic doesn't have a clue. He thinks if he goes out to Nevada and violates state law and endangers the lives of his supporters it will make his inability to actually govern look better. Biden is probably smart to just let President Toxic go. It's like a big commercial that says, "Look at me! Look at what a remarkably incompetent and selfish asshole I truly am!" So what do we do with those 700,000 or so factory workers in Ohio? What do we do with the roughly 5.6 million Ohio workers who want jobs? And the roughly 500,000 or so of them who lost their jobs since this Spring? Do we try to bring factories back to the Rust Belt - a strategy that has mostly failed for 30 years? Do we basically say fuck the factory workers and do something else? Or do Democrats just forget about Ohio and focus on Texas, where college graduates of every race are not going to work in factories but are building a promising future? The Democrats have a huge amount of work to do. The good news is that voters in the Rust Belt may have at least figured out that President Toxic and Trumpism is not the answer to any of those questions. I do believe this. The Establishment does not have the answers. So Team Biden has to do a major rethink. I actually believe that he gets that. He knows that what worked for Clinton or even Obama won't work for him. I'll end this with a rant about my Independent friend who I mentioned in another post I just spent four hours on the phone with last week. There's a series of points him and I have debated for years that go to the heart of the challenge. This is not meant to offer any actual solutions. It's meant to suggest we are stuck, and we are nowhere near any type of national plan that might effectively turn the problems around. He started to tell me that he was asked to give an address to Very Important People about how to do education during a pandemic. He decided not to because he didn't want to say what he really thinks. Which is that we're just pissing away the futures of disadvantaged kids who aren't set up for remote learning, while rich (mostly White) parents pay for their own private teachers to teach their kids. He's not wrong. And he is an Independent, not a conservative. But my view is that he was just doing what he does. He was rehashing a not very thoughtful set of sound bites about how all these Democrats who want to shut down everything suck. And are really hurting the Black kids they say they really care about. I asked him if he knew about Dr. Birx's grandmother. He didn't have a clue. Dr. Birx's grandmother brought home the Spanish Flu in 1918, which killed her Mom (Dr. Birx's great grandmother.) Her grandmother spent the rest of her life feeling regret for something that was obviously not her fault. Dr. Birx has repeated the story to basically beg people to be thoughtful and wear masks. My friend got the point. He agreed that given the choice between losing a year in school, and losing a mother, losing the year in school is probably the better option. I asked him if he knew about what women leaders in Germany or Demark did to reopen schools safely. he didn't have a clue. The verdict is in that at least in April Denmark could reopen schools safely. Denmark, like most of Europe, is now experiencing a second wave in cases, but not (yet) a second wave of mass death. My point is that this is a huge challenge. Women leaders like Merkel and Frederiksen are working hard to figure it out, with some real success so far. Meanwhile, in the US, my friend is interested in what I view as a mostly thoughtless rant, which suggests that the way we help poor Black kids is to send them to shitty school buildings during a plague. It would be more interesting to talk about 10 smart things that Germany and Denmark are doing to educate kids AND keep them safe, I think. I use this as an example because to me it symbolizes a whole lots of things about our current failures. We can't even agree as a nation about using masks in schools. We talked about factory jobs. My friend mentioned that there are going to be lots of factories built in the US, like where he lives. They will have relatively few jobs. And the people hired to fill them will need college degrees equipping them to operate advanced machinery. It doesn't replace the 300,000 lost factory jobs in Ohio, for example. So it's not really a viable solution to one of the things that drove Trumpism. What's his solution? He doesn't have one. He gets what Andrew Yang was talking about. I'm 99.9 % sure he would never support Yang's solutions. At some point in this conversation I went to the heart of it: income inequality. I reminded him of something he said to me maybe 3 or 4 years ago that has stuck with me. We were probably at some luxurious resort in Mexico. And he said this was the first generation of Americans that will be worse off than their parents. He didn't say it as if he felt it was a good thing, or a bad thing. Or with joy or regret. It was just an observation of a likely fact. But it has stuck with me. The feeling it leaves me with, which may or may not be fair to him, is that the Establishment corporate and political types he pals around with are perfectly okay with this. They know the factories will make money for stock holders, like him. They know they won't be replacing those 300,000 jobs. They just don't care. It really isn't their problem. Fill their bank accounts with millions of dollars in salaries and investments and stocks and that's good enough for them. They're not chomping at the bit to elect Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or even Joe Biden. This is the guy who told me even Kamala is suspect for her liberalism. Again, he's not a right wing conservative. I think he's probably accurately expressing how a lot of affluent Independents who are right in the middle feel. I don't feel that these people have real solutions. They'll sympathize with Republicans who say that even the steps Obama and Biden were willing to take - Obamacare, marginal tax increases on the wealthiest and the most profitable corporations - were going too far. And then when W. or President Toxic rule, they'll just enjoy the tax cuts and consulting fees to express their Very Important Thoughts. Which will mostly not solve Actual Working Class Problems. Back to our White ex-factory workers without college degrees, why are they NOT chomping at the bit to elect Bernie Sanders? For now, I think it's a good thing they are probably going to elect Joe Biden. My friend got a good line off on those ex-factory workers, too. He went into his Very Important Thoughts riff about how the biggest problem is that the job producers are all trying so terribly hard to help those people. But they just lack the appropriate jobs skills. When you think about it, what's a benevolent job creating billionaire to do? I mean, it's not really fair to go all socialisty and ask them to pay more taxes, after all. I used to be very polite when he said this shit, in part because he was paying me to be nice. I know. I know. I'm a whore. So this time I just ranted about what I read all the time. Do you know how condescending and arrogant these people think that sounds? Do you realize how sick they are of being told THEY are the problem? Do you realize that's why they voted for Trump? They know he probably can't just bring the factories back. But at least he doesn't tell them they're stupid. He tells them he loves the poorly educated. My friend didn't really try to disagree. So we are mostly left with the fact that working class ignorance and Trump greed is not a very attractive combination. And it is certainly not a solution. My best solution expressed as a bumper sticker is this: GO TO COLLEGE. DEBT FREE. My friend, who knows way more about college than me because he spent his life working on this whole college thing, has spent years telling me that lots of professors just produce crap. And that lots of college students are wasting their time and money. It's very easy to make Reaganesque arguments about "waste, fraud, and abuse." And let's add this. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that many Whites without college degrees who vote for President Toxic think that college basically is good at making you liberal, and Gay. And now they want to say you're supposed to go piss next to some man that used to be a woman. Fuck that shit. I don't need that. The reality I focus on, and my friend does not deny, is that we have more college graduates than ever before. We have a higher rate of college completion than ever before. And having a college degree does still mean you'll make a lot more money and build more wealth. Even the losers - the ones who drop out with no degree but some college debt - are no worse off than the ones who never went to college at all. Meanwhile, Blacks going to college is a primary driver of why Black poverty was lower than ever under both the end of Obama and pre-pandemic Trump. There's still huge income gaps based on race, with Blacks doing the worst. But Blacks going to college and earning above median based on higher educations are doing the best, as are the more highly educated Americans of every race. This doesn't solve the problem for the 50 year old Ohio ex-factory worker. It may solve the problem for their college-educated kids. Some part of this is the same old same old. The kids who used to stay on the family farm because their labor was essential did what my Dad did. He got an architecture degree so he could leave the farm. We have to have a massive rethink. Like in the New Deal or Great Society, we need to try different things, knowing some will fail. But we do know from both eras that raising taxes on the well off and making the government one of the big job creators did help create middle class jobs. That will be Biden's starting point, if he has the votes. He probably won't do Bernie/Elizabeth on college debt relief. But the pandemic gives him a great excuse to do something to make going to college easier, including wiping out debt for young adults who already went. To sum up my rant, part of how I feel is that the ball is in the court of those White voters without college degrees. If they went from Obama to President Toxic and now they are going back to Biden, that's a good start. What happens when Biden tells them to wear a mask? Will he - and can he - raise taxes on Jeff Bezos to do some infrastructure program that will create jobs for some of them? Can he use previously successful tools like going to college and buying homes to create skills, higher incomes, and net worth? Can he add new tools to the tool box? Lichtman's theory is that the is Trump's election to lose, and he is going to lose it. All that means is that Biden gets a chance. And it does mean that some of those Whites without college degrees are at listen willing to listen to Biden and Democrats again. Because they know that the President Toxic TV experience did not work so well for them. I believe those polls. But if Biden and Democrats win, the challenges are massive. And I've already decided that Independents like my friend will be the first to suck up every Mitch McConnell sound bite and repeat it. About how whatever Biden is doing is socialism, and it sucks. Biden better figure out things that work. Because like in 2009, he's not going to have a very long honeymoon. Especially with those White voters without college degrees. Even if Democrats do well in 2020, it can easily all be wiped out in 2022.

My Dearest and Most Darlingest Sister: We both know that if I were as psychologically well put together as we both wish I could be, I wouldn't be the dirty little whore I am today. Our President himself is proof that things don't go well when you aren't just yourself. He's obviously really just a super big asshole. And yet he acts as if he is the world's biggest power top. Me, I'll at least be the proud and dirty little whore I am. Try as I might to sleep, or not pay attention, you know me. I simply can't resist watching the show as the exciting parts reveal themselves.

So, trigger warning. Even by my own standards, this is going to be be a particularly obtuse and rambling post. Every month or so I Google Allan Lichtman's name to see if he has anything new up. This month he didn't. But I found a long essay (actually a book chapter) I linked below that I found really interesting. It's another author who admires Lichtman's theories commenting on their validity. Reading it generated two ideas. I'll summarize them, and then return to them in more detail in my rambling below: 1. Lichtman's model provides an interesting way to think about how President Toxic could win. The three keys in his system that turned this year that led Lichtman to call the election for Biden are the short-term economy (recession), the long-term economy (laggard GDP growth), and the social unrest. In theory, those are decisive nails in President Toxic's political coffin. That said, Trump is clearly trying to get people to ignore those three things. If he succeeds with a majority of voters in the Electoral College states, he could win. If he fails, he'll lose. 2. 2020 is only the third time that Lichtman has called his "social unrest" key against the party in power. The other two times were 1932 and 1968. I932 marked the beginning of a new political era. Arguably, so did 1968. Could the social tumult that ignited in 2020 be an indicator of a major political turning point? Like I said, I'll return to those two ideas below. Lichtman's claim to fame is that his system can predict who will win the Presidency. What I actually find more interesting is that his system describes why they will win or lose. Which boils down to governing effectively. I think it explains what is happening right now. So far, nothing President Toxic is saying is really sticking to Joe Biden. And Biden is mostly being Silent Joe. Some of that is Biden's staff trying to avoid gaffes, I suspect. But probably they agree with Lichtman's basic theory. This election is a referendum on President Toxic that he is going to lose. So they just don't want to get in the way of letting Trump lose it. Biden's staff has pretty much told reporters as much. CHAPTER 5: WHAT DOESN'T WIN THE PRESIDENCY That's 33 bold-faced pages from a 2006 book called Campaigns Don't Count from an Ohio newspaper columnist named Martin Gottlieb. He declared in his column early in 2004 that Bush had already "won" the 2004 election. He did that using Lichtman's model. But this chapter goes through each of Lichtman's keys as they relate to the 1988 election. It was interesting to read a smart journalist's take on Lichtman's own analysis. The reason Gottlieb chose 1988 is he argues that was an election that everyone thought Dukakis would win. Especially in May 1988, when Lichtman published his article in the Washingtonian saying George H.W. Bush would win. Here's the Gallup polls from 1988: You can see that in May Dukakis had a lead of 16 points. So the prediction was as outside the box as Lichtman saying in September 2016 that Trump would win. Here's the last paragraph of the chapter: Just to make sure it's clear, Lichtman says that if the party in power has six or more "keys" turned against them, they lose. Right now, President Toxic has seven turned against him. In 1988, Bush only had three. So it was an easy call that Bush would win. And by the end of the race, reality reflected Lichtman's prediction about the voter's imminent judgment. The whole 33 pages is a good read. But a brief summary is that this had nothing to do with Willie Horton or Lee Atwater's campaign gimmicks. It had to do with a growing economy, Reagan winning The Cold War, and other "big picture" factors that led people to conclude they wanted four more years of Republican leadership. What I learned reading this that I didn't know is that when they built the model, Lichtman and his Russian seismologist colleague tested all kinds of theories of what might drive an election. Including, for example, campaign messages and campaign tactics. When the tested possible algorithms, characteristics of leadership and governing always trumped campaigning as predictors pf who won. So many of Lichtman's keys are right most of the time. If all you do is say any incumbent President running will win, you are right about 2 times out of 3. The key that is the most accurate on its own is whether there is a serious contest for the nomination of the party in power. In 2020, President Toxic had no real opposition. So that in itself would predict that about 80 % of the time, that candidate running o behalf of the incumbent party will win. So the idea of the 13 keys is that it's not armchair judgment. They went through a larger menu of possible factors that could predict the winner, and picked 13 that seemed to be the most reliable. Another interesting point is that when this article was written, there were 14 "subsystems" - combinations of some portion of the 13 keys - that were just as good at predicting the winner. The reason they picked 13 keys is they figured that it gave them the best chance of being consistently right every time. That leads to this statement from the caper above: i thought that was interesting in the context of the 2020 election. Here's the list of 13 keys. If you only pay attention to the six listed in that quote, President Toxic gets four of the six. Meaning that in 2020 that subsystem says Trump should win. Lichtman was saying last year that Trump had lost Keys 1 and 13. But he had 2, 3, 4, and 7, and still does. So this subsystem contradicts what Lichtman predicted based on the full 13 keys: that Trump would lose. The three keys that turned against Trump this year are 5, 6, and 8. Basically the economy went to shit, and all hell broke loose in the streets and there was suddenly mass social unrest. Lichtman has called it the quickest turnaround in Presidential history. Because mostly these keys are big picture items, and they don't turn in a day or month like polls do. So Trump went for having four keys against him in 2019, which is two short of a loss, to seven turned against him, which is one more than needed to predict loss. Here's what I find very interesting about that. I think this is a good way to think about what President Toxic is clearly trying to do, and what he in fact has to do to win. In effect, he has to be The Wizard Of Oz saying, "Ignore that man behind the curtain." He has to get people to pretend like the economy is fine, and the social unrest doesn't matter. That's what his show on The White House lawn was intended to do. Lichtman's keys say that President Toxic does not get to decide how voters judge him. That said, if you buy the idea that Trump runs a cult, in theory he could be uniquely able to control how people judge his successes and failures. The real question is whether President Toxic can get people outside his core base, plus Republican party stalwarts, to see the economy and the unrest that started with Black Lives Matter as he wishes them to. So far, it looks like he simply does not have the unique ability to change the verdict of history, which Lichtman says is definitely against him. We'll see. Again, what interests me the most about Lichtman is not the voodoo prediction part about who will win. It's the deeper meaning of why they win or lose. So if Lichtman is right, it means that Trump simply can't script his own Reality TV Presidency. He is stuck with reality. And with voters who think like Bob Woodward. They will conclude he's the wrong person for the job. The second thing I mentioned above that jumped out at me reading this article is that the 8th key, social unrest, was last turned against the incumbent party by Lichtman in 1968 and 1932. Like his other keys, Lichtman is focused on big picture things that suggest a political earthquake is coming. Those two years were very eventful years. So now I'm straying from anything Lichtman says. But it struck me that 2020 could be one of those really eventful years. When people say it's the most important election of our lifetimes, they may be right. 1932 was obviously a really big deal. It was a landslide that shattered an old political coalition and birthed a new one of Democratic dominance that basically endured (with a pause under Ike) from 1932 to 1968. I'm not sure 1968 fits in the same category. If there is a conservative version of a realigning landslide like 1932, it is obviously 1980 and the Reagan Revolution. 1968 was actually a fairly close call between Nixon and Humphrey. But the sense in which 1932 and 1968 fit together is that the social unrest did signal a political earthquake. You can view 1968 as a signal that a coalition and liberal ideology that more or less prevailed from The New Deal to The Great Society was really starting to fall apart. It actually did start to fall apart in 1969, when Nixon began picking SCOTUS justices that gradually ended the Warren Court's activism. There was also the Silent Majority, the Southern strategy to take over the White South, and then the 1972 landslide against "McGovernment". On Election Night 1980 historian Teddy White argued that Carter lost because of the weight of history itself. The old Democratic coalition just no longer worked, he said. I think you can argue that a political coalition that was clearly starting to fall apart in 1968 finally just collapsed by 1980. It took until 1992 for Clinton to start rebuilding a different coalition, in part by co-opting conservative ideas. This is where @tassojuniormight argue that even Obama and his ilk were essentially closet corporate Republicans pretending to be liberal Democrats. At the very least, Obama explicitly wanted to change history in the way Reagan did. I don't think Obama quite did that. All of this sounds very esoteric. And this stuff about 1932 and 1968 is my thinking, not Lichtman's. I'm not even sure why Lichtman picked only 1932 and 1968, because there were other years in US history when there were mass movements and protests. But after thinking about it I buy the idea that 2020 and 1968 and 1932 are fairly unique Presidential elections that all have a depth of spontaneous social unrest that doesn't happen very often. I also buy the idea that each year may represent a fundamental turning of the tide. 1932 for sure was a massive tidal wave shift to liberalism. 1968 can accurately be described as the beginning of the end of a liberal era, that climaxed 12 years later in the Reagan Revolution. There's a few other things about 1968 that fit to me. Nixon was himself a transitional figure. By today's standards he would be too liberal for Republicans. The lowest the poverty rate ever got in the US before Bill Clinton was under Richard Nixon, in 1971. He basically embraced most of the anti-poverty programs Reagan later used as his whipping boy. Biden is likely to be a Nixon-like figure in that sense. He explicitly calls himself a transitional figure. It does make sense to me that just as Nixon lead to Reagan, history could be arcing so that Biden ultimately leads to a figure like Sanders or Warren or AOC a decade or so down the line. The other comparison that strikes me is "The Silent Majority". When Kenosha happened there was a lot of concern that President Toxic might be able to adopt a Nixonian "law and order" tone that would wipe out Biden's lead. "Law and order" is the issue some Trump supporters list as their top priority. But Biden is the candidate a majority of voters see as better at dealing with the issue. And his lead in Wisconsin has held steady at 7 %. What the polls seem to be saying consistently is that there actually is a Silent Majority, and Biden is the one who is building it. The Liberate The Virus crowd with guns on State Capitol steps and the maskless MAGA rallies are the minority. That's now 100 % clear. Overwhelming majorities are for masks mandates. Meanwhile, there is at least a slender majority that says there is systemic racism in America. And that views Black Lives Matter mostly favorably, and not as a radical group out to abolish suburbs. If 1968 can be viewed as the end of a liberal era with the Warren Court and a series of liberal Presidencies, the social unrest of today could be a signal that Trumpism has basically failed. John Harris of Politico wrote a nice piece last week that argued just that. Essentially that Trumpism and McConnellism is the bastard child and dying gasp of the sunny ideal of Reagan conservatism that climaxed in the 1980's. Before someone points it out, I recognize that the kinds of people protesting in 1968 were the same kinds of liberals and progressives and Blacks protesting today. The difference is that in 1968 Nixon had the support of The Silent Majority. I can't find polls about MLK or the Viet Nam War protests in 1968. But here's a poll about views on Nixon and the war in 1969. All adults supported Nixon's Viet Nam policies 64/25. Even college students supported Nixon's war policies 50/44. Today, Biden seems to have the support of 2020's Silent Majority. 54 % of Americans say they view Black Lives Matter favorably. Only 44 % view President Toxic favorably. Who has the majority now? Like I said, this was just a long intellectual masturbation about Lichtmanland. Some part of my feeling is that I would much rather choose cynicism than hope. The cynical part of me does have to consider the possibility that President Toxic may be able to pull off his Great And Mighty Donald routine, and convince people to ignore the economy, the virus, and the social unrest. More likely, I think hope will win in 2020, like in 2008. I'd like to believe that like in 1932 and 1968 the tumult signals a major change in the tide. And this time it's going to shift decisively from a waning conservatism to a rising progressive and Democratic majority.

Wilson had the Spanish Flu, and survived it. My guess is back then there was a lot more "stiff upper lip" thinking. Today a lot of people just don't have a choice, which is why the infection and death rates were highest in The Bronx and Queens. Back then a lot higher percentage of the population didn't have a choice, most likely. Merkel would NOT say 70 % of Germans will get COVID-19 today. She said that at the beginning. But it is clear that both she and the German people decided that they were not going the herd immunity route. China and all the Asian countries have clearly said "fuck you" to herd immunity. I presume that when we know there is a safe vaccine, all those Asian nations that have almost zero natural herd immunity will acquire it through vaccines. Germany and some other countries (Australia, New Zealand) now have ended up sounding a little overconfident. I don't know that anyone ever actually said, "We are now 100 % COVID-19 free." But some countries that did well in crushing the virus in the first wave sounded in that ballpark. To some degree it was understandable pride that the country rallied together, put on masks, and got through it together. Assuming that a safe vaccine is rolled out by Spring 2021, I think we're going to have to have a big national education on what immunity and vaccines mean. I'm pretty sure we will not have a "sterilizing" vaccine. Meaning you get a shot and you are close to 100 % sure not to get COVID-19. I don't understand it. But the vague picture I do get is that there is a race between a virus and an immune system. And you want the immune system to win. And the vaccine at least gives the immune system a head start, with a lot of people who get it. That's about what I understand. That story you posted on masking reducing disease severity is an idea I've read several times as well. One idea I've read is that you could have multiple exposures, never get very sick, get a vaccine shot or two, get a booster shot the next year or two, and gradually acquire immunity piece by piece. When I read something like that, if I got it right, I'd actually rather not think about it. I will get a vaccine shot. But in terms of whether I can get smaller doses of COVID-19 in the air filtered through a mask that end up helping me develop immunity all sounds beyond my control. Wearing a mask is in my control. But the part that happens invisibly and microscopically is a mystery to me. At least until I get sick, and then maybe things go south - or maybe not. I think the key things we'll need to be told very clearly is when it is safe to get a vaccine, and when and why is it safe to start to relax with the masks and social distancing. That's all something to worry about in 2021, when Joe Biden is our President.

John Zogby of Zogby Polls would agree with you. I posted it already in some other thread. He told some academic writing about predictions and polls about 2016 that he could not say who was going to win in 2016. He could tell you what the polls said on any given day. And he said he could make a pretty good guess - if you told him the turnout. But he couldn't predict turnout, of course. Therefore he could not predict who would win. That's even more true in 2020, as you say. There's this idea that President Toxic has the best organized ground game ever. And Democrats are freaking out that Biden folks are not knocking on doors. So maybe the Trumpians will just roll over Biden. Then there's also the idea, which is showing up in poll after poll, that youth turnout will be through the roof. Much higher than in 2018 when it was enough to win a strong House majority. We won't know how any of that plays out until it happens. (Although we will have a preview in terms of the number of mail in ballots.) The state polls are almost always weaker. Usually they have higher margins of error. And another problem is they tend to be older: Pennsylvania 2016 Clinton Trump I keep bringing up Pennsylvania as an example, because it's a good one. The final poll average ( Clinton + 1.9) was not horribly wrong. But that average included poll data that was up to a week old. A lot can change in a week. Especially if it is the LAST week of the campaign. If you only count the two most recent state polls, which are themselves 3-5 days old, one says toss up and the other says Trump + 1. The final result was Trump + 0.7 %. Those last two polls were both very close. Ohio 2016 Clinton Trump Wisconsin 2016 Clinton Trump Those are two good examples of what you are talking about. Ohio was off by 4.5 %. Wisconsin was off by 7 %. In all four Rust Belt states Trump way did better than expected. But it's not clear why Wisconsin would be off so much, compared for example to Pennsylvania. That said, I think every one of those polls used to arrive at the Wisconsin average was a week or more old. So the idea that nothing changed in a week is just not realistic. In Pennsylvania the two most recent polls, several days old, turned out to be correct. I think one big clue is that in all four Rust Belt States Hillary's percentage was pretty much dead on. In Wisconsin she was predicted to get 46.8 and she got 46.5. The real driver was President Toxic got 7 more points than the polls said he would. That trend happened in all four states to one degree or another. We know for sure from exit polls that the last minute deciders broke for President Toxic. We also know that nationally Hillary got 100,000 fewer votes than Obama, and President Toxic got 2 million more than Romney. That suggests it was likely most of the pollster's turnout models were all just off. If they were going from 2012, which I'm sure was part of the model, they would overestimate Hillary's turnout and underestimate Trump's turnout. I don't find "quiet" Trump voting to be a good explanation. These are states where White working class people were proudly saying this time they were voting for Trump. I think the obvious thing is that there was a sort of grassroots movement, built on anger and frustration, that President Toxic tapped into - by design or luck or both. There's just no way the pollsters could measure that. Even though if you were paying attention, it was obvious. We are both saying the same thing. We both agree that polls can't tell you who is going to win - at least not when it's relatively close, which it was in 2016. And we both agree that the national polls are marginally better. In part because they are marginally fresher. All the polls used to predict the final national popular vote in 2016 were from November. And they appear to be mostly Nov 3-7 data. Again, all the Wisconsin polls were taken before then. The oldest Wisconsin state poll used in the final average was Oct 26-27, almost two weeks before the election. That is just asking for trouble in a fluid race. Texas 2016 Clinton Trump Arizona 2016 Clinton Trump Nevada 2016 Clinton Trump I posted those polls as well because they were wrong, too. But in exactly the opposite way. In Texas President Toxic won decisively, but by 3 points LESS than expected by the final polls. He won Arizona, and it was close to the expected result, but still 0.5 % LESS for Trump. In Nevada, the polls were also off by about 3 points. The final average showed President Toxic winning narrowly. He ended up losing by two points. So in all three states, in a different region with different voters, the trend seemed to be going in Hillary's direction. Hispanic voters in the Southwest seemingly were acting differently than White voters in the Rust Belt. Again, the age of the polls matters. The last two state polls in Nevada were 3-4 days old, and they indicated a small Clinton lead. The state poll showing a big Trump lead was from the end of October. I know for a fact that the last few days before the 2016 election I was worried. I noticed that the final poll up on RCP in both Michigan and Pennsylvania showed a very small Trump lead. I noticed that in the last week the race was tightening pretty rapidly. That alone scared me. It's not good news when the trend is going against you in the last week of an election. So if people thought these polls were wrong, a big part of it is that just don't have much experience interacting with polls. There's a whole bunch of things that could explain why Hillary lost those Rust Belt states that only have to do with Hillary: 1) mediocre Black turnout, 2) medicore youth turnout, 3) votes for Jill Stein that exceeded Hillary's losing margin in all the key Blue Wall states. Any one of those three factors, by itself, is sufficient to explain why Hillary came up 70,000 or so votes short. Combined, those three factors account for way more than 70,000 votes. That said, the polls were not that far off on Hillary in any of those states. Where they were way off was on President Toxic. They dramatically underestimated his turnout. But that DID NOT happen in Texas, or Arizona, or Nevada. They actually overestimated how well he would do in those states. So if I had to pick one bumper sticker to explain 2016, it's this: WHITES WITHOUT COLLEGE DEGREES ABANDONED HILLARY. That's just a known fact. It was stunning. Bill Clinton is the only Democrat in my adult lifetime that split the vote of Whites without college degrees in both his 1992 and 1996 races. His ability to appeal to the "Bubba" vote is what won him the Presidency, twice. Hillary did way worse than any other Democrat, including Obama in 2008 and 2012, with Whites without colleges degrees. At this point, it's not a shocker that happened in 2016. And now it's also not a shocker that a lot of those people have left Team Toxic in disgust. I would not be at all surprised if President Toxic in 2020 underperforms with his base, like Hillary did in 2016. He's not just throwing red meat at them every day. He's throwing the whole fucking cow at them, every hour. It could be that means that they'll have record turnout. Or it could mean he's desperate. I don't think we'll know until it happens. But poor Brad. He's supposed to be riding this wave of enthusiasm. Not in a hospital on suicide watch. That can't be a good sign. When it's all said and done, the single best day of the year for me so far, in terms of this election, was when I read Lichtman saying Biden would win. Obviously I pay a lot of attention to the polls. But I agree with Lichtman that ultimately the election is about the big picture fundamentals. He'd say 100 % of what happens with polls is just noise. I'd say more like 80 %. Either way, I agree with him. It will be very hard for President Toxic to win this election, as long as Biden doesn't massively fuck it up in the last month. I don't mean that to say we should be overconfident. We should donate and volunteer like we are losing. But to me it is motivating to think that if we do this right we are on the cusp of bringing the baby home. This feels more like 2008 than 2012 or 2016. It feels like the task now is to be confident, execute, and bring the baby home.

I agree with your point @tassojunior that Democrats should not make this a political football. That said, I'll repeat what a new poll said that surprised me. Americans agree 3 to 1 with Nancy Pelosi's $2 trillion relief package. They did not call it Nancy's plan. If they had described Mitch's plan, maybe people would have said they support that 3 to 1 as well. Either way, it's good news there is that much public support, I think. So in a sense there is some political footballing, about how to help the American people. And also on whether to have a mask mandate, which Americans overwhelmingly support. That is the way I think Democrats should play pandemic politics. Support things that help people who need help, and that most Americans support. (As an aside, this is true in Kentucky, too. That state poll that showed Rich Mitch way ahead of Amy also showed very strong majority support for federal pandemic relief.) I'd be careful about density. Some of the densest cities in the world - Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong - have had some of the lowest infections rates. It's not a coincidence that they are Asian. Being Asian (stereotype: communitarian) helps compared to being an American or Brit (stereotype: individualistic) in this pandemic. It's not unlike @lookin's theory about a genetic basis for authoritarianism. Any of those Asian cities I just named is a good example of how a communitarian ethic helps when it comes to a pandemic. And any White asshole with a gun outside a State Capitol ranting "Liberate The Virus!" is an example of how individualism is hurting the US very badly. On the face of it, individualism or libertarianism has a lot more to due with why 200,000 Americans are dead than density. And speaking of assholes and libertarians, Rand Paul doesn't know shit. Maybe there is herd immunity somewhere. Maybe COVID-19 cross-reacts with with antibodies from prior and less deadly Coronaviruses. But he doesn't know that. Nor does Dr. Fauci, as he said when he bitch-slapped Rand. This completely wrong article is worth a peak: "New York and California May Have Already Achieved Herd Immunity, Data Scientist Says." That's from an Israeli scientist who also said that Israel had reached its COVID-19 peak. On Aug. 30, the day before that article came out, Israel had 555 cases. By Sept. 23, it had 11,316 cases. Oops! So much for herd immunity. I do not believe for one second California has herd immunity. Like you said, if California went back to normal the virus would be free to roam and kill mercilessly here. Anyone who talks about herd immunity, or "herd mentality" to quote President Toxic, is suspect to me. Sweden has 581 deaths per million. As I said above, South Korea has 8 deaths per million. And they took a much less severe economic hit than the US, Germany, or Australia to prevent mass death. Sweden would have done better if they acted like South Korea. Or Finland or Norway, which have 50 to 60 deaths per million, or 90 % less than Sweden. i had not seen that figure on New York having 33 % herd immunity. And it's not quite right. That number is for the lowest-income and hardest-hit boroughs of NYC where people had to go to work, and often get sick or die. 1.5 Million Antibody Tests Show What Parts of N.Y.C. Were Hit Hardest It would be great to think that New York has herd immunity. But there's no scientific basis for thinking that. On the face of it, if everybody uniformly threw caution to the winds the next wave of death in New York would disproportionately kill rich people who've been hiding out in The Hamptons. But even if 1 in 3 lower-income or Black or Brown residents of The Bronx who had no choice but to face the virus every day are now immune, that leaves 2 in 3 Bronx residents. And we still don't know how long "herd immunity" lasts. The good news is that the incidences of presumed re-infection are few and far between. We now know it is easy to get COVID-19. If it were easy to get it twice, we'd probably know that by now, too. Here's some other sobering numbers. The overall death rate is 1707 per million in New York state. Compared to 8 per million in South Korea. If we assume that the cost of ending the pandemic is letting every state work its way to the level of herd immunity in New York, that's about 560,000 dead Americans. Queens had 7,248 deaths, which works out to be about 3188 dead per million. That's a little over 1 million dead Americans. The Bronx had 4,947 dead, which works out to about 3488. That's about 1.15 million dead Americans, if we assume the whole nation needs to get to 33 % herd immunity. And that's assuming what happened in The Bronx is as bad as it can get. It's assuming that, for whatever reason, the other 2/3rds are naturally immune, or at least won't get sick enough to die. I can't think of any particular reason to believe that. If you roll out these numbers, we're getting to the point where you can compare this to the Spanish Flu, in terms of potential fatalities. No one knows for sure. But a common estimate is that 675,000 Americans died. That was out of a population of about 100 million, so roughly one third the size of today. It's believe that in 1918 about 28 % of Americans were infected. Which is in the ballpark of what has happened already in The Bronx and Queens. There is some good news to that. If you project the Spanish Flu death toll on the US with the population of today, it's about 2.1 million dead. So if we assume that COVID-19 has infected about the same percentage of people in a few NYC boroughs, that would make it about half as deadly as the Spanish Flu. Very importantly, it also means that all those 20 and 30 somethings that were particularly susceptible in 1918, and died in droves and left orphaned children behind, have been spared. They are the ones that can get COVID-19 and probably just walk away with a sneeze. Once it's all sorted out, the death rate for older Americans between COVID-19 and the Spanish Flu may be pretty similar, if it continues to spread and take out older Americans. If COVID-19 is less deadly, it's probably in large part because of its inability to kill lots of young adults. Another reason COVID-19 likely won't hit 1 or 2 million is dead that we are being smarter about keeping more people alive. I don't think you can do a clear apples to apples. But there was a V-shaped recession in 1918, followed by a Depression in 1920. So it's not like by having more people die more quickly the US avoided paying a steep economic price from 1918 to 1920. I think we now know that the countries with the highest death toll are also the ones that pay the steepest economic price, as well. I'm a deficit hawk, so I'm not happy about adding on trillions of debt. But I think even many conservative economists agree that if there was ever a time to go into debt and a reason to do it, now is the time. And sparing hundreds of thousands of lives and long-term illnesses is a very good reason. The interesting question no one knows the answer to is this: why did the Spanish Flu only infect 28 % of Americans? 28 5 is at best an educated guess. So basically we don't know. Like I said, it would be nice to think that New York is not seeing a spike because they have achieved something in the ballpark of herd immunity. But on the face of it, we know that most other parts of New York are vulnerable to be hit at least as bad as those two boroughs. The state death rate (1707 per million) is only half that of the Bronx death rate (3488 per million). So there is every reason to think that even in New York, let alone California, things could get a whole lot worse. Reviewing these numbers reinforces what I've been noticing for a few months. Which is that among the people I know, who all take COVID-19 seriously, I'm more optimistic than most. I know a bunch of people that think we're into this for two or three or even five years. I'm guessing this will play out similar to the Spanish Flu. Meaning there will be multiple waves, and in a year it will start to move into the rear view mirror, like it did in 1919. Since this started this Spring, I think by next Spring we will have been through the worst of it. Some of that is I think that even though the US is the problem child in the world today, we're probably handling it much better than in 1918. We understand viruses and how to protect ourselves from them better. We might understand how to treat them better, as well. But mostly I think that with the masks and social distancing and shut downs we're just being better at avoidance. And living in suburban homes rather than being crowded into unsanitary tenements helps. The other big difference is once a vaccine hits that will also knock the ability of the virus to spread way back - assuming people agree to be vaccinated. No one knows why the Spanish Flu went away, mostly, after a year. I'm hoping that part of history repeats itself. I'm not assuming we have to get to 70 % or 80 % through either natural immunity or a vaccine for the virus to start to disappear.

Of course I could. I mean, you've always had better taste than me in men. You've always been more skilled in deep throating. So, to be blunt, it would not be a shocker if you were right about this as well. In fact, let's just say it, okay? You have always been a stronger and smarter woman than me. I'm not ashamed to tell the truth. So here's a couple other truths. First, I just decided to stop posting for a few months. Daddy and I had a sort of falling out that was a long time coming, I'd say. It's multi-dimensional, and better left unsaid. But the fact that he started a racist thread (in my opinion) that essentially said Black Lives Don't Matter was my last straw. And I don't miss the useless ranting back and forth with Toxic Trump supporters. As should be very clear, these posts are mostly my own intellectual masturbation. If other people enjoy them, great. But I mostly just use them to learn things I didn't know and think them through out loud. There was a specific reason for the timing of when I started posting here. And it was the topic of my first post: Allan Lichtman. I actually was thrilled when I read he called 2020 for Biden. There's two things about that. Number one, he has been right on every call so far, since 1984. Number two, whether he is right or not in 2020, his theory explains why he SHOULD be right. His basic argument is that Americans are smart enough to judge how well Presidents govern, not how well they campaign or text. So I agree with him. President Toxic WILL lose, and President Toxic SHOULD lose. He fucked up the economy, he divided America to the point of mass social unrest, and he is going to lose for those reasons and more. That said, Lichtman has been quoted this year as saying he gets butterflies in his stomach every time he makes such a call. This time he might be wrong. Stay tuned. Right or wrong, I did make a mental adjustment when I read his stuff. It's been a shitty year. And if you asked me six months ago, I would have said Biden has at best a 50/50 chance at winning. If you asked Lichtman before the pandemic, I'm pretty sure he'd have said that as of today Trump will probably win. So my optimism is sincere, and intentional. I am more confident than I was in both 2012 and 2016. In both years the polls were close enough - like within a point or two - not very long before Election Day. So far, in 2020, that has not happened. The polls change, of course. But what is interesting this year is actually that they don't. Biden has had a poll lead of like 5 % + every single day going back to last year. I think of it the way I did back in our youth, when we were just two girls in finishing school. Granted, what were the odds that an ugly little duckling like me would get to suck the 9" cock of the captain of the football team? But if you recall, my dear, I did end up sucking it. And I think I did an excellent job, all 27 times. So it never hurts to hope for the best. That's true whether it is chewing on a horse hung cock, or making sure that one of the biggest assholes to ever lead our country ends up being as fucked as he can possibly be. And please forgive my blunt talk and rude manners. You know me. I'm just an overstimulated whore.

Oops. Correction. I feel like I'm getting dementia. I said above that if each SCOTUS justice had 16 year terms, and each President appointed two, that would recycle a 9 Justice court. As I said a few posts up, I meant 18 year terms. I guess I suck at math. Apparently I suck at geography, too. I knew something was wrong when I typed that quote above. I left out North Carolina. The four Senate must wins are Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina. Iowa is one we don't have to win, and may not. I caught it because I went to that 538 Senate odds thing @tassojunior posted above. It's interesting that of the four must wins they give Mark Kelly the best odds (79 %) and Sara Gideon the worst (59 %). I actually see Senator Susan Coverup as the most likely to lose. What Silver is saying makes sense. Iowa is a true toss up, Montana is probably next best but Bullock is an underdog, and in all the other states - South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Kansas, Alaska - Democrats maybe have a 1 in 4 chance. One way to look at that is that if Democrats pull off the four must wins, flip Iowa to offset losing Alabama, and then pick up just one of the long shots, that's a 52/48 Democratic majority. If things mostly stay the same through November, that's a very realistic possibility. But again I'll just double down on my point about polls. Republicans must be hoping that Democrats will blow it and look like children throwing a temper tantrum, and Americans will soften when they see this nice, smart woman. Democrats are hoping that they'll mostly ignore the individual nominated and attack the Republicans for process bullshit and wanting to repeal the ACA in the middle of a pandemic, as well as abortion and voting rights and God knows what else. Silver can not tell us a thing about how any of that will impact any of these races. He's way behind the curve, not ahead of it.

There's no 2016 problem to fix. The RCP and 538 averages were right on the money in both 2016 and 2018. Within about 1 %, which was much less than the margin of error on any polls, they predicted that Hillary would win the popular vote in 2016 by a few points, that the 2016 generic Congressional lean was a wash, and that in 2018 Democrats would win the House by about an 8 % margin. If you go back to when RCP started their "poll of polls" around 2000 I think, they got every Presidential race right within about 1 %. The biggest outlier was Obama 2012, when the RCP average said Obama would win by 1 % and he won b y 4 % instead. It's pretty common in any election that there are a few points or more who are undecided. And often there is a moderate to strong last minute break, which is what helped Obama in 2012 and helped Trump in 2016. But at least at the national level, the polls pretty much captured that. If there was a big mistake in 2016, it was that there wasn't a loud debate - like there is now - about President Toxic losing the election by millions of votes but still winning in the Slavery Electoral College. To me anybody who is a progressive ought to be saying if you live in a swing state DO NOT vote third party, especially with the Slavery Electoral College in place. I actually feel disenfranchised. I'll vote, but it's a throwaway vote. The outcome in California is clear. So millions of votes are essentially not gonna count. So you can consider me as 3/5ths or 4/5ths a voter, since my vote really does not have the same impact as a vote in Wisconsin. The real issue with these polls is that nobody knows who will turn out. I think that is more true than in past decades, because turnout has been spiking up for both parties due to the partisan brawl. So in 2016 Rasmussen was the most right, and in 2018 they were the most wrong. My guess is their assumptions in both years were about the same. But turnout changed. If Rasmussen is right in 2020, President Toxic may win. Whether it should or not, averaging the polls seems to get us very close to the "correct" result in terms of what actually happens on Election Day. That may or may not be the case in 2020. The number of young people who say in polls that they are going to vote is off the charts, even compared to 2018 when there was a big surge in young voters. If that plays out, all these polls could be underestimating Democratic turnout. I certainly hope that's the case. By the way, I've now heard various pundits talk about why this "red mirage" stuff is probably more media-generated BS than reality. They mention that in states like Florida and Texas where early votes or mail-in votes are counted in advance, that actually favors Democrats in terms of initial returns. One pundit mentioned that is exactly what Bloomberg has in mind in Florida. The idea is not only for Biden to win, but also for Biden to win in a state that reports on Election Night. So if he wins, that flashes, "Game Over! Biden wins!" on Election Night.

Which is exactly my point. If Booker had been nominated, maybe it would be a 5 % chance. By the way, I increasingly just ignore 538. They can be very good at data, as in facts. Like what I posted today from 538 about the partisan lean of each state, or the urban v. rural split of each state. But this stuff you cited about probabilities isn't very helpful, or accurate. Their guesses in 2018 on House races I followed were just so-so. The problem with polls is that it's always a snapshot. And it might be a blurry snapshot at that. So what Silver does is takes snapshots and makes predictions of what will happen in the future. It's borderline just stupid. It encourages bad behavior. It encourages people to think these horse race polls tell us what will happen in a day or a week or a month. In another hour the horse may be dead. The polls just can't tell you that. I think what happened on Super Tuesday is a great example. First, the polls as recently as 48 hours prior did not predict or foreshadow the Biden blowout. Hindsight being 20/20, you can go back and either cite anecdotal statements or polls that showed a lot of churning and discontent among primary voters. Arguably the most important poll findings all year were that people consistently said that picking a nominee who could win the November election was the biggest priority. And, for whatever reason, people saw Biden as the guy most likely to actually beat President Toxic. So, in hindsight, what happened on Super Tuesday was not the biggest shocker ever. But nobody, including me, saw it coming. The polls did not tell us it was coming. They told us it would be a good night for Bernie. Same goes for McConnell. It is possible this election will be like 1980. Very unlikely, but possible. If something like that happens, it could take McConnell out. But if that happens, I very much doubt we'd even know until it happens. The polls may hint at it. But they won't tell us. The one valuable thing Nate Silver is doing is saying that if you want to send money to or volunteer for candidates who can win, you might want to look elsewhere.

Do you actually believe this shit when you write it? It's sort of Q Anon grade bullshit. You can do better. Amy was one of my few House losses in 2018, meaning House candidates I sent money to. My priority in 2018 and again in 2020 was my own back yard. So in 2018 my money helped flip 6 CA House seats, including all three in Orange County. Ammar is the only one who lost in 2018. This year I'm only sending to 2 of the winners - Cox and Rouda, who seem the most vulnerable, as well as Garcia's seat to try to knock him out. All of these CA seats have definitely been trending red to blue. So essentially I am betting on the trend. You can argue I love right-wing war monger Democrats because I supported both Rouda and Amy. But here's the thing. Rouda won. Ammar lost. So did Amy, of course. That was entirely predictable. So for people who want moral purity, and don't care if President Toxic wins and packs the Court with right wingers, go ahead and vote for The Green Party every time. I view it as a vote for four more years of President Toxic. But it's clear that people like Kyle are cute and stupid enough to prioritize purity over stopping the Republicans and right wingers. This year the one House member I'm sending money to is Lucy McBath. She's vulnerable, I admire her, and she has a powerful message on guns. Plus my minimum for 2020 is I want Georgia and Arizona as blue states. If we can do that and rebuild The Blue Wall and keep chipping away at Texas, that means three things to Republicans: 1) They are fucked, 2) They are fucked, 3) They are fucked. In this context, supporting Amy in her 2018 House race was betting against the trend all along. I knew that. It was mostly a bet on whether "Ms. Bipartisan" could win. I thought that could work in Kentucky. It didn't. In part because they don't see her as a right-wing Democrat, or warmonger. They see her as a radical. Her views on abortion alone probably disqualify her in Kentucky. I didn't take a position on the 2020 Kentucky primary. Other than that having two Democrats run against each other in a state either is very likely to lose probably was unhelpful. This article explains why: I'm not sending money to Amy this year, despite my deep contempt for Rich Mitch, because I think it is a waste of money. But I'd feel exactly the same way had Booker won. I did decide to stop sending money to Doug Jones and instead send it to Harrison. Jones is an emotional thing for me. I like him, and I like the idea of a moderate Democrat being able to win in Arkansas. I also like the idea of Black Senators from South Carolina and Georgia. In October if things look better still for Democrats I'll stop sending money to Kelly and Hickenlooper and start sending to Rev. Warnock. The key thing now is to get Rev. Warnock in the run off. All eyes will be on the Senate race in Georgia after Election Day. So that can wait. My main point is that I'm all for having more Black Senators, whether they are Establishment moderates or progressives. But Booker is the wrong cause to fight. To me, Democrats need 4 Senate pick ups. Period. It is a matter of basic success or failure. Period. So that's Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and probably Iowa. If we can win the first three, which should be very doable, getting one more out of half a dozen possible races is very doable. But to me Kentucky is not even in the running. I think pulling a rabbit out of a hat in Alaska or Kansas are both more likely than Kentucky. https://filesforprogress.org/memos/2020-senate-project/week-1/topline-reports/DFP_KY_Week1_Senate_toplines.pdf I figured I'd check. In the most recent poll, she's only 7 points behind Rich Mitch, 46/39. The 12 % undecided are almost all Independents or Democrats. So while I would say it's a waste of money, I would not say it's throwing money down the drain. She could win. It's just that there are so many other Senate races where a Democrat win is more likely. Dumping Rich Mitch is simply a luxury I can't afford. If Bloomberg or Soros have $100 million to blow, let them do it. Even then, their $100 million is perhaps better spent elsewhere. The only way Rich Mitch loses is a 1980-like landslide, which is possible but unlikely. And if the goal is a 1980-like event that wipes out even Republicans like Cornyn and McConnell, Cute But Stupid Kyle ought to be shouting that nobody should vote Green Party in 2020. But he won't do that, because he prefers purity to power.

This is a continuation of my debate with myself. This new NYT/Siena poll has some numbers on abortion that are very close to the Pew findings. Which is to say, something like 60 % of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. All year long, the NYT/Siena polls have been a bit more conservative (or favorable to President Toxic) than the poll averages. What struck me about this poll is that Trump's net disapproval is only - 4 % (46/50), which is better than the current poll averages. So, if anything, this poll's assumptions are a little more favorable to President Toxic than the average poll. They are NOT as favorable as Rasmussen, which has President Toxic at net approval of 4 % So if this poll's findings are perhaps skewed a little bit conservative, this is mostly just awful news for Republicans, I think. Here's what the abortion numbers say (on Page 5). Do you think abortion should be .................... ? Always legal 31 % Mostly legal 29 % Mostly illegal 19 % Always illegal 14 % Independents, who I assume are the only undecided/swing voters left, are slightly more pro-choice. 71 % of them say abortion should be legal all or most of the time. These numbers are even more favorable to abortion being legal than the Pew survey I posted above. Both suggest that 60 % of Americans are not sympathetic to Amy Coney Barrett's rulings and views on abortion. As I said above, the Gallup poll draws a different picture and suggests more support for severe restrictions on abortion. But having seen two polls by good pollsters with almost the same results, it seems likely that Pew and the NYT are right and Gallup got different results because they used different and vaguer wording. In this survey, 62 % of voters support Roe v. Wade and only 20 % oppose it. 51 % of Americans, including 48 % of Independents, think it is very or somewhat likely that Roe v. Wade will be overturned if President Toxic is allowed to fill this seat. That suggests to me that this may help Democrats more than Republicans in two ways: 1) getting pro-choice people to vote, and 2) getting Independents to vote for Biden. There's one other area that this poll suggests could hurt Democrats, but probably won't. Asked what they think should happen if President Toxic tries to fill the seat, which we know he will, the country is split. 48 % say the Senate should NOT act on the nomination, and 47 % say the Senate should. Not surprisingly, almost all Republicans think the Senate should act on the nomination, and almost all Democrats think the Senate should not. I am surprised that Independents skew to having the Senate NOT act by a 52/43 margin. That's kind of good news for Democrats, too. Independents usually seem like voters who say, "Yeah, you got screwed. But be a good sport, for the good of the country, and don't make a big deal about it." This poll suggests that the majority of Independents will be okay with Democrats making a big deal about it. The history of the ACA was that it was somewhat unpopular until the Republicans actually tried to kill it. Now it has majority support. So these numbers may actually underestimate the trouble the Republicans could get into. They already have process working against them. In this poll, 56 % of voters say the President elected in November should fill the seat. So they are not listening. But that's even worse when they are driving this through to do something a very solid majority of Americans oppose. People were much more split on Justice Rapist, and it still hurt the GOP in 2018. I think this has the potential to hurt the GOP even more than in 2018. Like the ACA, legal abortion may look better than ever now that Republicans have a real chance of killing it. Speaking of the ACA, this poll data reinforces some of the things I said on earlier posts. In this poll, 57 % of voters support the ACA, and 38 % oppose it. Independents support the ACA by an even wider margin, 63/31. So Ron Brownstein is right. The Democrats should go nuts about how the Republicans don't give a shit about helping Americans through the pandemic, but they are hellbent on killing the ACA. That said, at least in this poll support for legal abortion is even stronger than support for the ACA. So I'm not sure I agree with Brownstein that it might be better for Democrats to downplay abortion. Here's another thing that works very badly for Republicans. The last question in the poll, on Page 10, asks Americans if they support a "new 2 trillion dollar stimulus package to extend increased unemployment insurance, send stimulus checks to most Americans, and provide financial support to state and local government." That's basically the House Democrat's compromise. They started at $3 trillion this Summer, Republicans said $1 trillion, and then Pelosi said let's do $2 trillion. Americans support this, 72/23. Independents support it, 69/26. In other words, support for pretty much exactly what the House Democrats want to do is even stronger than support for the ACA, or for legal abortion. The hearings are on filling a SCOTUS seat. But this will be part of the Democratic rant. Why are we rushing to fill a seat that Americans don't want filled? When we should be rushing to help them survive the pandemic - which is what they overwhelmingly want. Going back to 2018, I checked from the 538 summary of the partisan lean of each state. So here are the three Senate seats Republicans flipped in 2018, ranked by partisan lean. (The # 1 most Republican state is Wyoming. So the lower the number the more Republican) 7. North Dakota +34.2 % Republican lean 16. Indiana + 19.3 % Republican lean 18. Missouri + 18. 8 % Republican lean So, yeah. This helped Republicans. But only in very red states. Now here's the three Senate seats that Democrats either held, or flipped in 2018, where the Senate candidate opposed Justice Rapist being confirmed. 15. Montana + 21.1 % Republican lean 25. Arizona + 7.4 % Republican lean 33. Nevada + 1.0 % Democratic lean Democrats had 24 seats to defend, compared to 9 Republican seats. So the bottom line is no Democrat in a blue state came close to losing. Democrats actually made inroads in red states like Arizona and held red states like Montana. There's one other factor that probably matters. Charlie Cook nailed it in 2018 when he said that the Justice Rapist fight was a "color intensifier". That 538 chart proves it. Part of the reason Democrats lost Senate seats in Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota is that in 2016 all three seats got more red than in 2012. Meanwhile, Arizona and Nevada got more blue. Montana got more red, too, but Tester survived it. Probably because he comes off as a decent, independent guy. Mostly, what happened is that 2018 just intensified whatever the trend was from 2012 to 2016. So here are the Senate seats that are up for grabs, like above ranked in order by partisan lean. I also included whether the trend from 2012 to 2016 was more blue, more red, or little change. 15. Montana + 21.1 % Republican lean (moderately more red in 2016 than 2012, Democrats won Senate seat in 2018) 20. South Carolina + 15.9 % Republican lean (no significant shift between 2016 and 2012) 21. Texas + 13.2 % Republican lean (significantly more blue in 2016 than 2012, Republicans won Senate seat in 2018) 22. Georgia + 8.3 % Republican lean (slightly more blue in 2016 than 2012) 23. Iowa + 8.1 % Republican lean (significantly more red in 2016 than 2012) 25. Arizona +7.4 % Republican (significantly more blue in 2016 than 2012, Democrats won Senate seat in 2018) 35. Colorado +2.5 % Democratic lean (no significant shift between 2016 and 2012) 36. Maine +3.5 % Democratic lean (significantly less blue in 2016 than 2012) My assumption is that Doug Jones in Alabama has almost no chance of winning. Meanwhile, I think Democrats have some chance of winning any of these nine seats. I decided I'd send money to candidates in all but Texas, since Cornyn is a popular incumbent and it would take a 1980-like landslide to knock him out. I think Beto fucked up. I was desperately hoping he'd run for Texas Senate again in 2020. Had he done that, I think he could have been like John Tower way back when. The second time might well have been the charm in a blue year. With the exception of Montana, which Democrats won in 2018, all nine seats are LESS Republican than the three seats Democrats lost in 2018. In terms of partisan lean, Georgia is a lot like Arizona, except it is moving toward blue more slowly. There's four things Republicans are doing that are toxic. 1) They are not listening to the solid majority of Americans who oppose filling this seat. 2) They are trying to kill the ACA. 3) They are trying to kill Roe v. Wade. 4) They are doing things Americans don't want them to do and not dealing with a Democratic House proposal on the pandemic which 3 in 4 Americans support. Once again, everything President Toxic touches dies. Any of the four by themselves would be toxic. As a Republican brew, I won't be surprised in the least if this wipes out the Republican Senate majority and sends President Toxic packing.

This is an extension of what I posted directly above. Kind of morbid, but I think over six months in the death rates tell us a lot about what has worked and what hasn't worked. These are the deaths per million citizens for various countries, and then several US states, ranked from deadliest to least deadly. New York - 1707 dead per million Spain - 668 dead per million Brazil - 665 dead per million Florida - 653 dead per million USA - 631 dead per million Texas - 546 dead per million California - 394 dead per million Canada - 245 dead per million Germany - 114 dead per million Australia - 34 dead per million South Korea - 8 dead per million Here's also some relevant statistics for GDP decline in the second quarter of 2020 Germany - 10.1 % GDP USA - 9.5 % GDP Australia - 7 % GDP South Korea - 2 % GDP When the dust settles, I think we'll learn that the countries that had the least deadly health impacts also had the least painful economic impacts. China is # 1 on that list. Since there is doubt about the credibility of their numbers, I didn't post any. But there's all kinds of evidence from external numbers that their economy took less of a hit, and it is growing again. South Korea is basically a different version of the same thing. They were on masks and contact tracing and containment from Day One. As a result, their economic contraction was not as deep as many other countries that had to shut everything down. There was no avoiding taking a huge economic hit for countries that have had way better health outcomes so far, like Germany and Australia. In fact, that was partly the point. To hammer it into control with an abrupt and effective shut down, and meanwhile put all kinds of mitigation steps into place. It has not stopped the virus from rebounding, which is not a shocker. But if you just go by number of deaths Germany and Australia spared their countries of lots of sick and dead people as a result of the measures they took and the economic hit they absorbed. It will always be a mystery to me why New York got hit so much harder than California. Maybe the China travel ban helped, but it was leaky. California shut down earlier, but only by about a week I think. So mostly it was probably just bad luck for New York, which was flooded with Europeans when the virus was silently spreading like crazy. I was more optimistic about how things would go in California. When the virus spread through the Sunbelt states, it essentially worked the same way. Florida took less precautions, California took more. But in both states, infections spike. I blame part of that on President Toxic. We didn't have the "Liberate The Virus" crowds with guns at the state Capitol like Michigan did. But California was not immune from the right wing pushback. And part of it is that even the most obedient children - like Germany and Australia and South Korea - have learned that this virus is not easy to contain. The difference is those three countries have a national consensus to relentlessly try to contain it. More than anything, in California it's disproportionately Hispanics that have to go to work and risk their lives. 61 % of the cases and 48 % of the deaths in California are Latinos, which are 39 % of the state's population. If California had the same death rate as New York, there would be 50,000 or so more dead Americans in California alone. It was just sad, and cruel, when President Toxic went after the "blue states". It is true that Cuomo and DeBlasio could have acted earlier. Like I said, the slightly earlier shut downs in California is one reason our death rate was lower than New York. But Cuomo was not get briefings like President Toxic was every day, which we now know from Woodward President Toxic understood very well. We'll never know what would have happened in February if Trump did his job and actually warned Americans of the wave of death that was coming. This sad, sorry, incompetent, and miserable excuse for a leader will lose in November, and lose very badly. His name will be remembered by history for being exactly as bad as he was. The only question left, really, is whether the poor pathetic man goes to jail before he goes to hell. I wouldn't bet either way on that one.

It is interesting. The thing that is obvious is that while some countries - like Spain and France - are having as many or more infections as the first wave, they have a small fraction of the deaths they had in the Spring. Meanwhile, other countries - like India and Argentina - are in a very different place. Their pattern is like what happened in the first wave almost everywhere - more infection simply means more death. The US is more like India than like Europe. More infection means more death. But what might be called our "second wave" involved more infections but fewer deaths than the first wave. Some of that has to be that the people who are most affected are now better informed and playing it safe. Some of it is because of states like New York. Whatever they are doing to mitigate infection - and death - seems to be working. New York, unlike France or Spain, has kept the number of infections low. So New York's deaths are a very small fraction of what they were this Spring. Like 10 deaths a day now on a bad day, as opposed to 1,000 deaths a day this Spring. It all fits into what seems to be the global mantra for managing this: The Hammer And The Dance. If you haven't read that, it's worth reading it or glancing through it. Tomas Pueyo, the author, published several papers this Spring as we were just starting to become aware. As far as I can tell, the most influential one was Why You Must Act Now, which hit on March 10 and motivated the idea of immediate shut down - like today. Which is exactly what California did, starting in the Bay Area. (Pueyo used to be a data analyst at Facebook, I think.) In retrospect, everything important Pueyo argued turned out to be correct. That was back when President Toxic was still saying "only a few cases" ..... "miraculously go away" ... blah blah blah. Pueyo said this is way deeper and broader than we suspect, as New York and New Jersey sadly learned within a matter of weeks. This phrase "hammer and the dance" is being used all over the world to describe government efforts. The most recent I can remember is watching some interview of John Kasich where he was asked about the conflict between keeping people safe and alive, and the economic impact of keeping things closed. He immediately referenced the idea of "the hammer and the dance" and said we have to all get as good as we can at "dancing" around the virus. Masks and social distancing are the basics, of course. But after the initial "hammer" - which pretty much all of Europe did well - now they are doing a bunch of things. None of it is awful news. Spain and France fall in one category, and the case and death charts I hyperlinked tell the story visually. In Spain the number of infections climbed back to its Spring peak. But the number of deaths is maybe 10 % of what happened in Spain this Spring. Everyone seems to agree its because young adults are getting infected a lot more. But they are not dying. That said, some of them may be dying, or they may be spreading it to more vulnerable adults who are dying. There is a spike in the number of deaths, but nothing like what happened this Spring. France is even more extreme. They've blown way past the number of infections they had this Spring - like 15,000 a day now versus 5,000 a day this Spring. But, again, the number of deaths is maybe 10 % of what they had this Spring. It seems like this is a natural experiment that could go well, or be really bad. As far as I can tell the message in Spain and France to young people is be responsible, and don't spread this virus. So far, it seems like it is being contained among parts of the population that mostly don't get very sick, or die. Whether that can last through Winter is a whole different question. It could get very ugly again. That said, a more optimistic view is that once these young adults get sick and recover, they are immune and can no longer spread the virus. Like I said, it seems like it's an unplanned experiment in herd immunity, mostly driven by the fact that young adults are not as concerned about following the rules. It's too early to know what the outcome will be. Germany could be the poster child for "the hammer and the dance". They did crush the virus as effectively as any country. They were probably too optimistic after doing that in thinking they could effectively make Germany COVID-free. The number of case loads has gradually risen. But so far it is staying at a plateau much lower than what was going on in the Spring. And the number of deaths is maybe 2 or 3 % of the number they had this Spring. So business is picking up again, and they seem to have it contained more like a very bad flu year than like the Spanish flu. By comparison, India and Argentina just look sad. It is what you'd expect with an uncontained and deadly virus. The number of daily infections just keeps going up, and as that happens the number of deaths just keeps going up. The shape of the infection curves and death curves look exactly the same. So for some reason, in some parts of the world a lot more infection means a lot more death. In Europe, so far, a lot more infection does not mean a lot more death. Our neighbor Canada looks a lot more like Europe than the US. Their daily caseloads are climbing substantially, and they are definitely into a second wave. But, unlike the US, the death curve looks very low. People are getting "sick", but mostly not dying. I think the main explanation is that some countries are way better than others, both at the initial "hammer" of crushing the virus - which President Toxic never really even tried to do - and now in the continuous "dance" around keeping it contained and not letting it kill lots of people.

Since I mentioned that ABC/WaPo poll in the post above, I'll add a few more things that are good news for Biden. overall, Biden is leading by 10 points, 54/44. Independents in this poll say they favor Biden 59 to 37. That is mind boggling. Independent women say they favor Biden 77 to 20, a 57 point spread. In 2016, Hillary won Independent women with a 4 point spread. In the last three elections, Independents broke for Obama, then Romney, then Trump. In each case, the winner had maybe a 5 % spread among Independents. So I doubt Biden will win Independents by 20 %. But anything even remotely close to that would be a major blow out. In this poll 11 % of voters say they care about the SCOTUS appointment more than anything else. Those voters favor Biden 54/46. That's a reversal from 2016. I don't remember the exact numbers. But Trump won the voters who cared most about SCOTUS, something like 54/45. What really matters is how this plays out in swing states, including in Senate races. But it's not a bad sign that this may be helping Democrats at the margin, not Republicans.

Like President Toxic, you flood the zone with so many specific things that are not even remotely true that it's impossible to respond. I look at the polls all the time, and they don't say 70 % of Americans want single payer. But if you want to believe that, you go right ahead. Let's talk about The Green Party. They say they are for Medicare For All. They say they want to do something about climate change. They say they want to pay reparations to Blacks and advance racial justice. Good for them. Here's the thing. President Toxic is against all those things. He dumped the Paris climate agreement. He almost completely killed the ACA. Now he will have a 6-3 conservative court, whereas with Hillary it possibly would have been a 6-3 liberal court. This court will spend the next 10 or 20 years being where climate change goes to die, where civil rights goes to die, where economic justice goes to die, where wealth taxes go to die. Is that The Green Party platform? Is that what they want? Because by getting President Toxic elected, that is what they got. I think the statement, "I fucked up. I need to rethink what I did.", is a good statement. I think that way about 2016. I think I should have gone with my heart and voted for Bernie. Would he have lost? Probably, I think. I say that only because I think Lichtman is right, and it was an election Republicans were likely to win. My point is, there's no harm in saying maybe I fucked up. So I don't see the harm in asking Greens to think about whether they fucked up and helped President Toxic win a tiny Slavery Electoral College victory. It undermines 100 % of what The Green Party says it wants. Kyle seems to think it's okay to ask people like me to question why they supported Hillary, but it's off limits to ask Greens to do the same. Kyle is cute, but stupid. Apparently, Green Party leader Howie Hawkins is stupid, but not even cute. A new ABC/WaPo poll says Biden is leading by 10 points, 54/44. Add Libertarian Jorgensen and "How About More Trump?" Howie and that changes to a 6 point spread, 49/43, with Jorgensen getting 4 % and "How About More Trump?" Howie getting 3 %. I'd guess most of "How About More Trump?" Howie's 3 % is coming out of Biden. So as the pollster says. So the path to reparations and climate change and Medicare For All is to make it so that maybe President Toxic wins in The Slavery Electoral College again. I guess I'm stupid, too. I just don't get the logic of that. I'm mostly ignorant about Germany. But I know that The Greens in Germany have spent decades building from the bottom up. So now they are a coalition player in federal and state and local government. And they have been willing to compromise to get some of what they want on energy policy and climate change and other issues. They created a model of how you win and actually accomplish some of what you wanted to do. The US Green Party has not done that. Running someone for President will not achieve that goal. The Green Party has something like 143 officeholders in the US, mostly in California. Oh, and they have a very nice platform. Saying they have a very nice platform is another way of saying they have not won shit. Well, there is this. Their biggest win is getting a Mayor elected in Richmond, CA, population of about 100,000. It's a start. But it probably is not a very good platform to take on the global fossil fuels industry. Having three SCOTUS seats would be a much better platform. But those seats are taken by right wingers, thanks in part to Jill Stein. I have a friend you should talk to about this. Maybe you could advise "How About More Trump?" Howie to talk to him, too. My friend's name is Bernie Sanders. Ever heard of him? Bernie spent 10 years running for offices like Governor on third party platforms and got nowhere. Then he ran for Mayor, which is a seat he could win. Then he ran for House. Then he ran for Senate. Only then did he use those platforms to run for President - as a Democrat. Some people feel strongly that even that was a decisive nail in Hillary's coffin. They may be right. But mostly what I think is that he created a model for how you run and win and actually move the debate. I'm not surprised a democratic socialist lost. I am surprised he almost won the nomination. So it is 0 % cute and 100 % stupid that the Green Party and "How About More Trump?" Howie are saying they want Medicare For All, but they are actually undermining what Bernie "Medicare For All" Sanders is trying to do. He is trying to help Biden win, just like he was trying to help Hillary win in 2016. Taking votes away from them in Pennsylvania is not helpful. It should be a big clue that in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court 5 Democrats ruled to keep "How About More Trump?" Howie off the ballot, and 2 Republicans ruled to keep him on the ballot. Geez. What does that tell us? They've been at this thing running for President for decades. On the minus side, they may have contributed to the loss of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. On the plus side, they did elect a Mayor in Richmond, CA. Something tells me that might need to rethink how they build power and win.

First, I like that definition. Foster awareness of the downside of lots of people following authoritarian leaders. And find ways to diminish the flames, not fan them. On a less serious note, I was thinking if we're going to put a committee together, Don, Jr. would be a great Chairman. That way, he can get some experience as a leader. What do you think?

My favorite community organizing mantra is Saul Alinsky's "the action is in the reaction". The more I read about this SCOTUS nomination, and its potential long term consequences, the more I think this could be the mother of all political reactions for much of the 21st century. So far, the title of Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson's book has been more right than wrong. In 2018, the Republican House majority died. No one is even suggesting they'll get that back in 2020. For the next month we'll hear endlessly about the amazing mandate the Senate Republicans were given in 2018 to do what they're about to do. One big clue that they had no mandate is that the majority of Americans oppose Republicans filling the seat now. Another big clue is that in 2018 Democrats had 24 seats to defend, and Republicans only had 9. So Republicans netting 2 seats isn't a mandate. They won Missouri and North Dakota and Indiana - red states - in 2018. But losing red states like Montana and purple states like Arizona wasn't exactly a huge Republican victory. 2020 will be the real test of Wilson's book title. As of now, it's looking like the Republican Senate majority will die. And the grand prize - the Toxic Presidency will die, too. Boo hoo. Boo hoo. Now there's a new question. If Barrett is seated, President Toxic will definitely have touched the Supreme Court. So will it die, too? My guess is it will. It will die in the sense that in a decade it will have lost much of the legitimacy it has today. This article is a good compilation of what a bunch of legal scholars think about the likely impact of Barrett (and President Toxic's other justices). I'm quoting two of scholars, who express one of the strongest themes of the various prognostications. How Amy Coney Barrett Would Reshape The Court - And The Country Of course, we don't know whether Barrett will be confirmed, let alone what she'll do. But this seems to me like a grim and realistic prognosis. If correct, it suggests that the legitimacy of SCOTUS will diminish. Depending on how far they go, SCOTUS could simply be seen as an appendage of the Republican Party. Or of corporate America. Or of climate change deniers. Or even the most right-wing religious organizations in America. None of these legal scholars mention anything about political reactions if their predictions come true. But the reactions could be massive. It's one thing to be a conservative bulwark that blocks what even many Republicans in 2020 would view as progress: child labor laws, minimum wage laws, income taxes that fund popular social programs. It's another thing to actually roll back progress, or repeal it. I assume that a 6-3 conservative court will do everything they can think of to NOT repeal Roe. v. Wade. Instead, they will incrementally kill it in all but name. That won't work as easily with the ACA. They've already killed part of it. But now it's sort of all or nothing. Another one of the themes of the Politico piece is that this is probably the end of the line for efforts by Justices like Kennedy and Roberts to zig zag in a way that kept SCOTUS near the center of American political gravity. No matter how well they try to disguise it, Americans will figure out that the Court has swung hard to the right. That will likely cause a huge political reaction. A lot of that reaction will happen at the state level. Including in the state elections of two US Senators. Long term, this could address the Democrats' biggest structural problem. There's a lot of data being put up right now about how the Senate naturally favors Republicans. I'll post some of it below. My point is that a far right SCOTUS might have the effect of gradually loosening the Republicans' hold on some of those states, and thus the Senate. I'll use abortion as an example. I don't think anyone knows what the political implications of a repeal of Roe v. Wade will be. I cited poll data above from Pew that suggests that right now 61 % of Americans support legal abortion in all or most cases, and 38 % oppose abortion in all or most cases. Pew also found no difference between men and women - 60 % of both sexes support abortion in all or most cases. This Gallup poll which is also recent provides a significantly different picture. It is perhaps a classic example of the answer depending on how you ask the question. When you ask about "pro-choice" or "pro-life", it's much more of a 50/50 split. And a gender gap appears. A slight majority of women are "pro-choice", and a slight majority of men are "pro-life". On the bottom line question of whether it should be legal, Gallup's numbers suggest that as few as 43 % of Americans support abortion that is legal in most cases. And up to 55 % of Americans want abortion to be legal "in only a few circumstances", or not at all. If you believe the Pew numbers, Republicans appear to be asking for massive long-term pushback in most states, with the exceptions being ones like Alabama. If you believe the Gallup data, it might explain why McConnell and The Divine Miss Graham are pushing full speed ahead. They may believe this will help them in all red states, and most purple states. The 2018 Senate results don't suggest that. Nor do the polls in 2020, so far. But nobody knows. We will have a very good indication when we know what happened in Senate races in Montana, Kansas, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Texas. (Of those purple to red state, three had Senate elections in 2018. Democrats won Montana and Arizona, and came closer than expected in Texas. Like I said, 2018 was not a Republican mandate.) The same goes for the ACA and a long list of other issues. My guess is that Mitch McConnell is politically unassailable in Kentucky. But Andy Beshear just won the Kentucky Governor seat back in part because of the ACA, basically avenging his Dad's loss to a one-term right wing Governor. If SCOTUS repeals the ACA, it's not completely clear what reaction that will cause even in a deep red state like Kentucky. If we are doomed to repeat the obstructionist conservative court of the 1930's, it's even less clear what the political reaction will be when they throw out whatever watered-down parts of the Green New Deal Biden and Democrats are able to pass. I agree with the authors I cited above. The Supreme Court will likely revert to being what it was for much of US history: a block against democratic and progressive majorities, and a protector of powerful minorities and elites. The reaction at the state level could be to move more states to the left, driven by social issues like abortion and economic issues like health care and minimum wages. If that happens, I could also see it eliminating any structural advantage Republicans have in the US Senate. The Senate’s Rural Skew Makes It Very Hard For Democrats To Win The Supreme Court That article has good data on two things: the partisan lean of all 50 states, and the urban/rural geography of all 50 states. I don't buy the idea the the Senate is the biggest obstacle to Democrats "winning" SCOTUS. I think it's obvious the Slavery Electoral College is the biggest obstacle. Were Hillary Clinton the winner in 2016, we'd potentially be looking at a 6-3 liberal majority (assuming Kennedy resigned.) If you also assume Gore was President in 2000, there would never have been a Bush second term during which he appointed two justices. Arguably, up to 8 of the 9 SCOTUS justices would have been appointed by Democrats. What screwed Democrats (and democrats) first and foremost is not the Senate, or McConnell. It's the Slavery Electoral College. If we want democratic politics in America, we have to get rid of the Slavery Electoral College. The idea that the woman who wins the most votes is the winner is NOT a radical idea. I'm assuming any court packing scheme designed to give liberals a court majority will be politically toxic. An effort to restructure the Senate to look like more like the House would be even more politically toxic. What Democrats should be thinking about is getting and keeping a 50+ vote majority in the Senate. And then getting rid of the Senate filibuster, which relied on a level of bipartisanship and comity that is now just dead. I've read a bunch of good articles this year that suggest that "it's the geography, stupid" is even more important today than "it's the economy, stupid." The way I understand the first phrase is that it incorporates the economy. Areas that are more rural and Whiter tend to be more culturally conservative as well. They tend to be the areas that feel, and often are, left behind economically. Everything about the sunny and outward optimism of Reagan (California, pro-trade, pro-immigrant) is now associated with the Democratic Party. Reagan was the one who said Hispanics are Republicans, but they just don't know it yet. The post-Trump Republican Party fits more into the pessimistic tradition that America and American values have been lost. I love the phrase "coalition of restoration" to describe the Republican Party as it will probably exist for a long time to come. So if all that is accurate, if you look at that 538 list of states by partisan lean the Democrats can probably just forget about states that are the most rural. They already have been the least Democratic: like Wyoming and Idaho and perhaps Montana. That said, Tester survived 2018, right after voting against Justice Rapist. And they have a Democratic Governor that may be their other Senator soon. There are only three states that have 0 % of their population in the big urban cores and small cities that are supposed to favor Democrats. They are Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Given that Vermont is both one of the most rural AND the most Democratic, it's obviously more than just the geography, stupid. Here's numbers 20-24 on the list of states by Republican partisan lean, in order: South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio. If those five states were always in play for Democrats, plus the next 25 states that are most favorable to Democrats, that would mean Democrats ought to be able to have realistic chances to get up to 60 Senate seats in any cycle. Right now, it looks like Iowa and Georgia and even South Carolina are toss ups. Again, what happens in 2020 will give us a really good read on how hospitable those states are to Democrats. But my basic premise is that when the SCOTUS turns hard right, there will be a broad and deep reaction. My guess is that as this plays out it will make it easier, not harder, to win Senate seats and state legislatures in states like Ohio, Georgia, Texas, and maybe South Carolina. I'm actually most pessimistic about Iowa, which used to be a pretty solid Democratic state. It has neither significant concentrations of urban areas, nor significant concentrations of non-Whites, which are the the trends favoring Democrats the most. South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and Ohio do have concentrations of either urban areas, or minorities, or both. So if Iowa is going to stay Democratic, it's going to be despite the trends rather than because of them. I'm trying to get my head around the bright side of a 6-3 conservative SCOTUS. It pisses me off, because but for the Slavery Electoral College Democrats won 6 of the 7 last Presidential elections, and therefore should have "won" the SCOTUS as well. But being pissed off isn't a good place to be. For a lot of US history slave owners and robber barons and corporate interests used SCOTUS and the Slavery Electoral College to dominate and secure their interests, including owning Black people as property. I don't have a big conceptual problem with letting them go back to being just that. In a system of checks and balances, it will create a reaction. The more conservative a little club of nine people gets, the more liberal the nation's reaction will likely be. At least in a majority of states, which are the ones Democrats should target. Arizona, Ohio, Georgia, Texas - those should all be in play. In the last three Senate election cycles (2014, 2016, 2018), Republicans won a total of 57 seats, and Democrats won 46 (that includes special elections). Meanwhile, Republican Senate candidates in those elections won a total of 100 million votes, whereas Democrats about 125 million votes. That right there speaks to the structural advantage of Republicans winning all these smaller, Whiter, and rural states like Wyoming and Idaho. I think Democrats have to elevate the issue of democracy and legitimacy. I'm now ready to let the SCOTUS damn themselves. Let them be the opposite of the Warren Court. Let Blacks and Hispanics and lesbians and liberals and progressives see this club of nine as the place where religious bigots thrive, White racism has a welcome home, civil rights legislation is viewed with hostility, and progressive ideas go to die. It would be consistent with much of US history. It really did not have to be that way. But the Slavery Electoral College, Gore and Hillary would have been elected. And it would not have been that way. But, as President Toxic says, it is what it is. There is no mandate for conservatism. So whenever Republicans say "mandate", we should do what President Toxic does and say, "No, assholes. You stole it. In a democracy, the person who gets 3 million more votes wins. So yeah, asshole. You stole it. If Democrats get 125 million votes and Republicans get 100 million votes, that's not a Republican mandate. Even if it means you got more Senate seats. Mostly, I think what Democrats need to do is lock down the Presidency and the Senate. Time and demography is on our side. We ought to be able to win and hold both a lot more than Republicans do. And a hard right wing SCOTUS ought to be able to help Democrats do it as this plays out. It probably won't work in Alabama or Idaho. But it should help tip states like Georgia and Texas. We'll know a lot better whether I'm right or wrong two months from now.

The problem is we have too many corporate Democrats like Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly. If we could just get rid of them, and replace them with Republicans like Josh Hawley and Mike Braun, America could heal. And we could stop right wing Justices from being confirmed. What scares me is that we never seem to learn. There are actually people in 2020 that think that electing a Black corporate Democrat like Jaime Harrison would be a good thing. As if it would really make a difference. Quite honestly, I sent $50 to Harrison a few days ago. And then when I read the tweet from the Movement For A People's Party I broke down in tears. I now realize my $50 donation is the type of thing that keeps America from healing. Until we have candidates like Jill Stein running in every state, the nation can not heal. Granted, having a Black Jill Stein in South Carolina right now could help Lindsey Graham win in 2020, and 2026, and 2032. But that is only temporary. Only Jill Stein can produce the kind of fundamental change that will heal the nation, and make her unelectable. Sure. In the short run, we might lose. But in the long run, we retained our moral purity. Isn't that all that really matters? I commend you for urging people to think long and hard about this, @tassojunior.

And, by comparison, President Toxic has made America great again. Other than the fact that if you're an American, you suck. U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly Not surprisingly, 88 % of Germans think their country has done a good job dealing with COVID-19. 9 % of Germans think the US has done a good job. Schade! Citizens in a bunch of the 13 countries polled say they did a similarly "good job": Demark (95 %), Australia (94 %), Canada and Germany (88 %), South Korea (87 %), and Netherlands (86 %). The median for the 13 countries polled is 74 % say they did a good job. On average, 15 % of people in these 13 countries say the US did a good job. These countries were all of course poster children for how to attack the virus quickly and effectively with aggressive national leadership. Germany under Merkel is the opposite of Hitler and authoritarianism. It's noteworthy that she opened the debate as probably the bluntest of any global leader, saying maybe 70 % of Germans would get the virus. She is center-right. But she basically decided to listen to her citizens. And to science. Hitler bent over backwards to figure out how to leave his country in a shambles. Merkel bent over backwards to figure out how to keep people alive and healthy, and get the economy back on track. If the US deaths had occurred at the same rate as Germany, adjusted for population, there would be 37,800 dead Americans - as opposed to 208,000. In effect, Merkel kept it like a particularly bad flu season. President Toxic is well on his way to making it like World War II in terms of the number of Americans who died in combat. Germany's economy slowed down less. Schools reopened quicker. Their economy is recovering more quickly. Merkel is not unique. That's good news. You don't have to be a rocket scientist. Or even a chemist. A lot has been written about the style of managing this used by female European leaders. That works for me, if you look at the countries that have done the best. That said, it's hard to argue that Scott Morrison is a woman, or a feminist. But Australian leaders did quickly reach a consensus and acted, as did JT's Canada. To stretch the analogy, South Korea and even China acted like a country of women. They were more open to putting the needs of their family and community first. I have a really tough question to ask you guys that I can't answer. Why am I completely NOT surprised that in the US the fucked up response that led to unnecessary mass death was associated with men, and guns? @lookin, there's a question in there you will like about authoritarianism. Not a shocker, but President Toxic is actually pretty well liked by one type of European: the ones who are members of the most authoritarian, right-wing party in each country. I guess authoritarianism is a global language. Authoritarianism is also still globally unpopular. It now turns out that these 13 capitalist democracies trust President Toxic even less than Putin or Xi. Only 16 % said Trump will do the right thing. That said, all three authoritarian leaders are wildly unpopular. No surprise, Merkel is far and away the most popular of the bunch, with 76 % confident she'll do the right thing. This made me think about some other things about authoritarianism, which are mostly just armchair theories. For several years I've asked a trick question to friends or people I know: "If you could change history and simply replace Bush with Gore, or Trump with Clinton - but only one - which would you pick?" Liberals almost always say they'd replace Trump with Clinton. My oldest brother who voted Obama/Obama/Trump predictably said he'd dump Bush for Gore. He is a poster child for the "truck driver" brand of Republican. When I asked him why, he said "the Iraq War." Here's the trick. When we had this conversation last year, I surprised a lot of my family by agreeing with him. I'd replace W. with Gore. Mostly because it would have wiped out the Iraq War and all the tragedies that followed. I've now changed my mind. From 2017 to 2019 I got the fact that the economy was growing and we were not into new wars. Everything that happened this year now makes me think that President Toxic turned out to be even worse than W. based on lots of objective standards. It was probably just a matter of time and luck, anyway. Those charts about views on the US in each country are interesting. In France and Germany, the centers of global opposition to the Iraq War, we are now back to being as unpopular as we were under W. In other countries that were not as opposed to Iraq, like Canada and Australia and the UK, the US is viewed more unfavorably than ever. I keep going back to John Dean's phrase about how to deal with authoritarians: "They understand defeat." We did not "lose" the Iraq War. But we kind of did. Just like we kind of lost the Viet Nam War. One way to understand what President Toxic did is he took a party that was ready to admit Iraq was a sort of defeat and gave them another scapegoat to fear and punish. In his case, it's more like a Superman comic book. The list of villains is long, and it keeps changing. The good news is that lots of Republicans now agree that W. did not "keep us safe" on 9/11. Like my brother, they don't view the Iraq War as a good thing. The bad news is that they've kind of swapped one brand of authoritarianism for another. It goes to your point, and Dean's point, that these people won't just go away. This begs the question you keep asking: what do you do with them? In a sense, they were persuaded that W. and his ideas about safety were wrong. But getting them to that point did involve a type of defeat. They did agree W. did not "keep us safe". They did agree Iraq was a debacle. And then they chose another authoritarian leader who gives them Muslims and Mexicans and the China virus to fear and hate. Merkel is an alternative model. She gave people a feeling of safety and security, and jobs. More work in factories and shops, less COVID-19. They still have the AfD. But they haven't gotten close to taking power nationally. At least not yet. As you stated, there was Adenauer. He had authoritarian tendencies. He used Marxists as his whipping boy. But he also got people focused on building Volkswagens. I think there are lessons in that for Biden. He is just not going to convince "Trump Republicans" that their fearless leader is the problem, not the solution. But he can at least try to focus them on another problem: their safety, and their jobs. That will happen gradually, if it happens, when he has the soapbox and ex-President Toxic doesn't. It's 80 years past the start of World War II. But Merkel does offer a model for how you get there. All this data reminds me of the story I posted about a week ago about these interviews with people waiting in line for President Toxic's unsafe rally in Nevada. There was the woman who said it seemed like Trump had done a better job managing COVID-19 than "any other country around here". Maybe she never heard of Canada. But my guess is if you showed her the numbers of COVID-19 in Canada and these polls about views of the US, she'd still insist with no hint to irony that America is stronger. After all, who cares what socialists think anyway? Some of these authoritarian followers are just not going to change. The good news is that President Toxic is getting more desperate. He went to Nevada because he needs some blue state he can actually flip, since the ones he flipped in 2016 are back to being blue it seems. When he held his rally on Sept. 14, he was losing Nevada by 5.8 % in the poll averages. Today he's losing it by 6.5 %. Everyone quoted in that article at the rally said it was perfectly obvious Trump was going to win. How could he lose? So we'll see. They are not prepared for defeat. We'll see if they understand it when it happens.

Democrats’ SCOTUS Message Could Really Work in Swing States Another great article by Ron Brownstein. It's a little bit of an opposing view from what I said about abortion above. As always, Ron goes straight for the data. And he grounds his argument in state data on abortion, although the references he hyperlinks don't actually give the state data. His point is that there are solid (55 % +) majorities for what he calls "favoring abortion rights" in Arizona, Colorado, and Maine. He quotes a left-of-center strategist as saying that Democratic focus on abortion is "net unhelpful" to Democrats in Iowa, North and South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Montana, Kansas. One reason that makes sense is that Rich Mitch is not stupid. I have to presume that they thought pushing ahead was going to help them win, rather than lose. That said, all the numbers he cites are around 50 %. Like 52 % favor abortion rights in Iowa. 49 % in North Carolina and Georgia. The worst case is Alabama, where only about 40 % favor abortion rights, and poor Doug Jones is now even more likely to lose. But even in most of these purple or red states it seems like this could just go either way. Because at the statewide level you have an even split. You'd need highly disaggregated data to figure out which voters in either camp this might move in any of these states. Brownstein's other assumption is that focusing on the ACA and pre-existing conditions is cleaner. But he states he has no state-level polls on that at all. This very recent Kaiser study says 57 % of voters "disapprove" of President Toxic's effort to overturn the ACA. Swing voters overwhelming side with Biden over Trump - like by 52 to 29 on who would be better to determine the future of the ACA. Those are obviously all very good numbers for Democrats. But the polls I posted above say even more people, 60 %, are in favor of abortion rights. The real no brainer on this issue is pre-existing conditions. As Brownstein points out, that clearly helped the Democrats in 2018. The Kaiser poll says 72 % of voters think it is "very important" that the protections for pre-existing conditions in the ACA stay in place. Some of this data reinforces my views about Biden I expressed above. Simply by virtue of his Catholicism and his legislative history, he's not going to come off as a radical abortionist. So if there is a danger of hitting some hot button with moderate Republicans on abortion, Biden is not the one likely to hit it. As Brownstein notes, Biden hit exactly the right button for Independents. Instead of arguing to ratchet up the tone from nuclear to apocalyptic, he argued we should slow down and calm down. It's a good thing Biden has little hair. Because he's doing a pretty good job of letting President Toxic be the one to always light his hair on fire. There could be a way for the Democrats to have their cake, and eat it, too. The motto might be: when you're attacking you're winning, and when you're explaining you're losing. If there's any issue for Democrats to go to war on, Brownstein is probably right. It probably is the ACA. That's first up on the SCOTUS agenda after the election. And if 72 % of Americans say pre-existing conditions are very important, that's almost certainly a majority in every state. Other polls I've seen over a period of years suggest it is of particular concern to the part of President Toxic's base that is not well off - a big chunk of the Whites without college educations. I think ACB has also made some statements that pretty much said Roberts' ruling to NOT overturn the ACA was wrong. So it may be a cleaner way to attack her, based on her own words, as well. With abortion, it could be that when you're explaining, your losing. Democrats can ask her all kinds of questions without sounding radical. She will have the phrase "precedent" pasted on her forehead, just like Justice Rapist did. And a few of her rulings suggest that at least at the level she was at, she was willing to follow the SCOTUS precedents. Anything beyond that is speculation. But the very fact that we're talking about making abortion illegal or impossible should help get the message through to anyone who is paying at least a little bit of attention. This reminds me of what Morning Joe said during the Justice Rapist fight in 2018. He said that often in politics the winning side loses, and the losing side wins. I would argue he was right about 2018. The Democrats lost the confirmation fight. But they won the House. Republicans are very likely, if not certain, to confirm ACB on whatever timeline they want. But all these numbers suggest to me it will contribute to them losing the Senate, and The White House. Poor President Toxic. He just can't catch a break.

Exactly. After winning both the House and Senate in 2016, President Toxic gave $1 million + tax cuts to billionaires. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi earlier this year followed Bernie's lame-brain idea of sending low- and moderate-income workers $600 a week. This is not only essentially what Republicans would have done. It is worse. I'm quite sure Ritch Mitch would have sent $1 million to every low- and- moderate income worker in America. The Democrats are obviously exactly the same as Republicans. Although Nancy has better taste in masks than President Toxic. But, as you say, that's just optics.

This is going to be interesting. I am assuming, and hoping, that we won't have the ambiguous sexual shenanigans and character quandaries we did with Justice Rapist. The good news is that you can be a left-wing woman, or a right-wing woman, and you can be powerful in America 2020. Both RBG and ACB sound like really good human beings, spouses, and parents. I am also assuming, and hoping, that "the dogma lives loudly within you" is a preview of what is to come. Republicans, being the paragons of decency and fairness they are, will of course complain about the attacks on religion. And Catholicism in particular. Let them. As long as we're somewhere in the ballpark of abortion and the ACA, that's the debate I want. This comment relates more to the Presidential debates than the hearings. President Toxic didn't look so bad standing next to Hillary in part because Bill Clinton was always in the picture. President Toxic standing next to Joe Biden is just a very different thing. This is especially an area where I think voters are quite capable of figuring it out for themselves. It's not about complicated or obscure policy. It's about what kind of people Americans want leading them. Simply by being a devout lifelong Catholic, Biden brings a whole different slant to this. He's been on the national scene pretty much just as long as Roe v. Wade. Go back to the 1970's or 1980's in particular and he said and did plenty that sounds like undermining Roe v. Wade. Maybe President Toxic will try to use that against him. But it undermines the idea that Biden is a radical. Mostly I think it will be easy and natural for Biden to look like a devout man of faith who over time has developed a strong conviction about a woman's right to chose. President Toxic is the opposite. He's not a man of faith, and he used to be in favor of abortion. Not only is Trump on the wrong side of this issue. It goes back to the basic idea that he has no principles, other than empowering and enriching himself. My guess is that neither man can pretend to be someone he is not. Simply by being who they are, Biden wins this debate. People don't want the seat filled now. And they don't want it filled by someone who will either overturn Roe v. Wade, or substantially weaken it. If anyone in America can say, "The dogma lives loudly in me, too, and I'm for a woman's right to choose," it's Joe Biden. That's a good place for Democrats to be. As the poll posted below shows, 56 % of Catholics think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. As does a majority of every religious affiliation except White evangelical Protestants. Public Opinion on Abortion Views on abortion, 1995-2019 That's a very handy summary of where various segments of the US population have been on abortion, and are today. The only thing that surprised me is that there's very little difference in views on abortion between men and woman. So maybe Republicans are thinking this could help them with center-right women who are drifting away from the party. And in some cases, I'm sure it will. That said, 60 % of women and 61 % of men think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. As that first chart in Pew's research shows, that's the highest it's ever been. Those are bad numbers for Republicans. As are these: 75 % of conservative/moderate Democrats think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Meanwhile, 57 % of liberal/Republicans think the same. That Pew study doesn't tell us what percentage of Americans are in each group. But the number of anti-abortion Democrats who could tilt to President Toxic are probably way smaller than the number of pro-choice Republicans who could tilt to Biden. Not surprisingly, the young - who are least likely to vote and most likely to become pregnant - are most in favor of abortion being legal all or most of the time, 70 to 29. Right out of the gate, ACB is on the wrong side of more than 2/3rd of 18 to 29 year olds. That can't hurt Democrats in terms of turnout. The thing I find scary is that right now Rasmussen Polls says President Toxic has a + 4 (52/48) approval rating. That's compared to a - 8 % (45/53) RCP average net disapproval for President, and an outlier - 14 % disapproval for him in one CNBC polls. So there's an almost 20 % margin between the best and worst polls for Trump. (As an aside, this morning Willie Geist on Morning Joe read part of a long ranting tweet by Trump about polls. Geist ended by saying, "And the President's long tweet ends by saying something .......... something ................ Rasmussen. Joe Scarborough just laughed.) In the last few election cycles, the poll averages were very close to the final results, including the 2016 Presidential race and the 2016 and 2018 House Congressional vote. So odds are the averages are right. And as of today Biden would win. I was reading this long and dry academic analysis of which prediction models (not polls) got it right in 2016. Allan Lichtman was one of the few. In the report, pollster John Zogby was quoted as saying something like this in Fall 2016: "I can't tell you who is going to win the election. If you tell me who is going to vote, I can tell you." He gave a range for turnout and said if it's "x" Clinton will probably win and if it's "y" Trump will probably win. As it turned out Democratic turnout was flat and Republican turnout was up 2 million in 2016. My own guess is that the revolt of Whites without college degrees in the Rust Belt states had way more to do with that than abortion. The crumbling of the Blue Wall in the Rust Belt pretty much screams that. My guess is also that the Justice Rapist fiasco in 2018 helped Democrats a lot more than it hurt them - first and foremost simply by driving up Democratic turnout. The smart people in the room are saying there's no way to predict how this will turn out. I agree. But the polls are flashing lots of red warning signs for Republicans. And they seem to be listening to them about as well as they are listening to the American people.

Poll: 57 percent say election winner should fill Ginsburg's seat Republicans thus far have not been deterred in their effort to reshape the ideological balance of the Supreme Court. I'm hardly objective. But I have a feeling this is going to work out real bad for Republicans. They knew the momentum was NOT on their side. So maybe this is a political Hail Mary pass. Maybe they think it will help them, like they think it did in 2018. Except, it hurt them in 2018. As I said, they may have taken out McCaskill and Donnelly. But it may have won Democrats Arizona and Nevada. And as Sen. Tester pointed out in that quote a few posts up, most of the vulnerable seats in 2018 were Democrats. In 2012 Obama did help drag every vulnerable Senate Democrat over the line. So gaining a House majority and losing "only" two Senate seats was not really a loss. This time it is the Republicans who are all the vulnerable ones, except for Doug Jones. McCaskill herself said on MSNBC that now it is all Republicans that are in the position she was in in 2018. One fundamental aspect of the 2018 fight was ignorance. I will die still enraged about what I view as the Justice Rapist fiasco. That said, if I were on a jury, I would never have convicted Kavanaugh. How could anyone? The defining thing was you had two credible people but no fully credible evidence. Absent that, it forced everyone to come down on two sides of the culture war. There was no middle ground. President Toxic made it radioactive by being the poster child for how to portray an alleged female victim as a ditzy shrew who just wants to castrate men, with some billionaire Jew like George Soros backing her. There's another thing about 2018 that may be worth mentioning. At the time, I recall reading that right after the floor vote, Chuck Grassley left the Senate floor and went into a cloak room and started crying. I've read his full final committee report, and I'll also die feeling like it was a shoddy cover up. It brushed known facts under the rug and adamantly refused to look for any other facts that might not fit President Toxic's narrative. But if what I read is true, I have to assume Grassley's tears were genuine. I would guess the driver was relief. I'd also guess Grassley felt justice was served. I don't view him as an "I just don't give a shit" guy like McConnell is. My point is that I've read stories about how that whole experience "radicalized" Republicans. It's very hard for me to be objective about that, because it also radicalized me. Then again, that's what President Toxic has done. He took every significant rift in America and turned them all into a Grand Canyon. I'm not sure that the Republicans are being very clear-eyed right now. They did not "win" in 2018. They may be surprised what happens in 2020. However this plays out, this isn't about ignorance. More the opposite. The Republicans know very well that the majority of Americans don't want them to do what they are about to do. That poll above seems like an even wider margin than the first snap polls. Biden's RCP average right now is about 50/43, a seven point margin. Voters are against filling the seat now 57/38, a 19 point margin, at least in this poll. So as this plays out it seems like Biden has room to grow, and President Toxic has room to shrink. Wow. The incredible shrinking asshole. Sounds great for a porn movie. But this is a horror story. That's just based on the idea that the Republicans are not listening. Add all the stuff about overturning Roe v. Wade, repealing Obamacare, letting people with pre-existing conditions suffer, making it still harder for everyone but Trump cult members to vote, and it doesn't look very pretty to me. The Republicans are counting on the hearings being a "circus". They may simply be a daily reminder that Republicans are 1000 % better at being cruel than they are at listening. We'll see. In addition, they will potentially be a daily reminder that President Toxic's sole reason for existence is to tear America apart unnecessarily, and then go directly to hell. I read some article I won't post about Democratic Senate candidates like Kelly and Cunnigham that just made me laugh my ass off. They are all saying that of course they are against court packing. So if the idea was that this kills Democrats in swing states, good luck with that, Rich Mitch. McSally was actually quoted as saying that Kelly is another radical Democrat and he's lying about court packing. She sounded desperate to me. At least she got the "l" in lying right. This is about listening. She was on the wrong side of this issue in 2018. Now she's on the wrong side again. She lost in 2018. And what makes 2020 different? She's still a sorry excuse for a Senator who listens to voters. I decided to add Jaime Harrison to my list of donations. South Carolina is a long shot. And in red states I have to assume this will help Republicans like The Divine Miss Graham. If this is 57/38 nationally, that probably means voters in South Carolina are a toss up on whether they should fill the seat now. Which is exactly what the Harrison/Graham horse race polls show. A tie. So if Graham's committee just ignores voters and forces this through, I would not be so sure. Harrison is using this brilliantly to tie it back to the ACA and Graham's original sin of giving a shit only about himself - and the racist who he thought was a racist in 2016 but now thinks is a great golf buddy. I made a math error above about possible Constitutional amendments that everyone may have caught, anyway. Having each President appoint two justices with 16 year terms fits with an 8 justice court. I meant to say 18 year terms, since that would be a nine justice court. There would still be premature vacancies from retirements or heart attacks. But that could be figured out if a majority agreed we want a bipartisan court and we want people to serve for 18 years, not try not to die while serving. That poll above notes that voters are against "increasing the size of the nation's court" 54 to 32. It confirms what I think we already knew. "Court packing", defined as such, would be political suicide for Democrats. After the election, I think it's a great debate. The 1 in 3 or so voters who like the idea, no doubt mostly Democrats, can be loud about it. What I thought about after posting above is that if Democrats do anything, it should be to put Merrick Garland on the bench as a temporary 10th member, hearkening back to what Republicans did a few times in the 19th century with Lincoln and Johnson. To me the wise position for Democrats, like I said above, is to fight for a bipartisan or nonpartisan 9 Justice Court that is appointed fairly. Perhaps by adding an amendment to The Constitution. That's not inconsistent with saying that McConnell did lots of things that were wrong and divisive. And that what happened in 2016 was just wrong. On a partisan level, it was a wrong to Democrats. On a personal level, it was a wrong to Garland. The majority of Americans felt in 2016 that he should be seated. He's a center-left or "moderate" unifier. And the debate around seating him, and the act of seating him, would send a very clear signal that we don't want a conservative SCOTUS to veer hard right. I think that's a good debate to have.