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Jess Piper: Why Uncontested Seats Are Undemocratic and Breed Extremism

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2024 //
14

Jess Piper is an educator, a blogger, and a farmer in rural Missouri. In this post, she describes an extremist in the state legislature who wants to defund public libraries, Planned Parenthood, and public schools.

Now Rep. Cody Smith, chair of the House Budget Committee, is running for State Treasurer, and no Democrat is running against him. He can flourish as an extremist because he is unopposed.

She writes:

Uncontested seats are undemocratic. This is the story of one of those seats:

Last year, Missouri Representative Cody Smith, the House Budget Committee Chairman, proposed a motion to defund public libraries in the state? Why? Because lawmakers were trying to pass a bill to ban “pornography” in libraries. The bill would actually limit classic books and literature that may be offensive to some, but is literature none the less. 

So, the ACLU, the Missouri Association of School Librarians, and the Missouri Library Association sued the state. In retaliation, Rep Smith moved to strip public libraries from the state budget. To defund public libraries. He failed…

Now he’s going after Planned Parenthood, which no longer provides abortion services, but does offer women’s health services, like screening for breast cancer.

He also is promoting a universal school voucher program that would subsidize every student currently enrolled in private and religious schools. The cost might be as much as $1 billion a year.

Here is the worst part, friends. He’s running for State Treasurer…against two other Republicans. Not one Democrat has filed to run as of today.

We. Can’t. Win. When. We. Don’t. Run.

Representative Smith also ran unopposed in 2022. He just walked right into the Capitol and wrote bills to defund public libraries, public schools, and Planned Parenthood. He has been made near-invincible by the power to not have to answer to constituents. If he has no fear of opposition, he can be as extreme as his donors would like. And, that seems to be exactly what he’s doing.

Last year, 40% of Missouri House seats went unopposed. We let 66 Reps win by default, and friends, this is undemocratic. Most of these seats are in rural parts of the state…Rep Cody Smith is from Carthage, population 15K. Cody faced no opposition, won without any contest, and then wrote bills that could harm millions of folks in our state.

I work with Blue Missouri for this reason—I believe in running everywhere. Even in rural races. Even in places we know won’t flip for a few cycles. Robert Hubbell wrote about our organization a few days ago after hearing about what we are doing in Missouri…here it is. 

Run Everywhere. Contest every damn seat.

So many statehouse races have gone uncontested and unsupported. Democrats in these districts, especially rural Dems like those in my community feel abandoned, ignored…forgotten. Meanwhile, GOP nominees get free passes to the Capitol to do the business of extremist donors.

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

We can show up for Missouri’s Democrats, making sure no Democrat gets left behind. No Missouri voter is left without a choice. No Republican gets a free ride.

That’s the plan to deal with folks like Representative Smith. We take back our state seat by seat. We contest every single one of them on every ballot across the entire state.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Libraries, Missouri, Vouchers

Trump’s Debt to Putin

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2024 //
35

Our occasional commenter, who uses the sobriquet “Democracy” posted the following analysis of Putin’s involvement in the 2016 election. Russia and Wikileaks crippled Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and at least eight Republican Senators knew it. They endorsed a report which reached that conclusion. Yet they continued to defend Trump.

Democracy posted:

Volume V of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigative report on the 2016 election:

“the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s highlevel access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat…”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”

Click to access report_volume5.pdf

And if you’ve not read it before, here’s Adam Silverman, a national security expert, on that investigative report:

The Real Takeaway From the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence’s Bipartisan Report On Russia’s Active Measures Campaign and Interference In the 2016 Election: They All Knew Before They Voted To Acquit!!!!!

It’s quite clear…Trump and Republicans (and the NRA) are enthralled by and beholden to Putin.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Hillary Clinton, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP is a Dying Party

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2024 //
43

Historian Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly analyzes the current moment.

She writes:

Behind the horse race–type coverage of the contest for presidential nominations, a major realignment is underway in United States politics. The Republican Party is dying as Trump and his supporters take it over, but there is a larger story behind that crash. This moment looks much like the other times in our history when a formerly stable two-party system has fallen apart and Americans reevaluated what they want out of their government.

Trump’s takeover of the party has been clear at the state level, where during his term he worked to install loyalists in leadership positions. From there, they have pushed the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and have continued to advance his claims to power. 

The growing radicalism of the party has also been clear in Congress, where Trump loyalists refuse to permit legislation that does not reflect their demands and where, after they threw House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of office—dumping a speaker midterm for the first time in history—Trump lieutenant Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened holdouts to vote him in as speaker. Jordan failed, but the speaker Republican representatives did choose, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is himself a Trump loyalist, just one who had made fewer enemies than Jordan. 

The radicalization of the House conference has led 21 members of the party who gravitate toward actual lawmaking to announce they are not running for reelection. Many of them are from safe Republican districts, meaning they will almost certainly be replaced by radicals.  

The Senate has tended to hang back from this radicalization, but in a dramatic illustration of Trump’s takeover of the party, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today announced he would step down from his leadership position in November. McConnell is the leading symbol of the pre-Trump party, a man whose determination to cut taxes and regulation led him to manipulate the rules of the Senate and silence warnings that Russian disinformation was polluting the 2016 campaign so long as it meant keeping a Democrat out of the White House and Republicans in control of the Senate.

The extremist House Freedom Caucus promptly tweeted: “Our thoughts are with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate on the retirement of their Co-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-Ukraine). No need to wait till November…Senate Republicans should IMMEDIATELY elect a *Republican* Minority Leader.”

Trump has also taken control of the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself. On Monday, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel announced that she is resigning on March 8. Trump picked McDaniel himself in 2016 but has come to blame her both for the party’s continued underperformance since 2016 and for its current lack of money.

Now Trump has made it clear he wants even closer loyalists at the top of the party, including his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. She has suggested she is open to using RNC money exclusively for Trump. This might be what has prompted the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity to pull support from Nikki Haley in order to invest in downballot races. 

But the party that is consolidating around Trump is alienating a majority of Americans. It has abandoned the principles that the party embraced from 1980 until 2016. In that era, Republicans called for a government that cut taxes and regulations with the idea that consolidating wealth at the top of the economy would enable businessmen to invest far more effectively in new development than they could if the government interfered, and the economy would boom. They also embraced global leadership through the expansion of capitalism and a strong military to protect it. 

Under Trump, though, the party has turned away from global leadership to the idea that strong countries can do what they like to their neighbors, and from small government to big government that imposes religious rules. Far from protecting equality before the law, Republican-dominated states have discriminated against LGBTQ+ individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. And, of course, the party is catering to Trump’s authoritarian plans. Neo-nazis attended the Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago. 

But these changes are not popular. Tuesday’s Michigan primary revealed the story we had already seen in the Republican presidential primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Trump won all those contests, but by significantly less than polls had predicted. He has also been dogged by the strength of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. With Trump essentially running as an incumbent, he should be showing the sort of strength Biden is showing—with challengers garnering only a few percentage points—but even among the fervent Republicans who tend to turn out for primaries, Trump’s support is soft.

It seems that the same policies that attract Trump’s base are turning other voters against him. Republican leadership, for example, is far out of step with the American people on abortion rights—69% of Americans want the right to abortion put into law—and that gulf has only widened over the Alabama Supreme Court decision endangering in vitro fertilization by saying that embryos have the same rights as children from the moment of conception. That decision created such an outcry that Republicans felt obliged to claim they supported IVF. But push came to shove today when Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) reintroduced a bill to protect IVF that Republicans had previously rejected and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) killed it again. 

The party has also tied itself to a deeply problematic leader. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four different cases—two state, two federal—but the recently-decided civil case in which he, the Trump Organization, his older sons, and two associates were found liable for fraud is presenting a more immediate threat to Trump’s political career.

Trump owes writer E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million; he owes the state of New York $454 million, with interest accruing at more than $100,000 a day. Trump had 30 days from the time the judgments were filed to produce the money or a bond for it. Today he asked the court for permission to post only $100 million rather than the full amount in the New York case, as required by law, because he would have to sell property at fire-sale prices to come up with the money.

In addition to making it clear to donors that their investment in his campaign now might end up in the hands of lawyers or the victorious plaintiffs, the admission that Trump does not have the money he has claimed punctures the image at the heart of his political success: that of a billionaire businessman.   

Judge Anil C. Singh rejected Trump’s request but did stay the prohibition on Trump’s getting loans from New York banks, potentially allowing him to get the money he needs.  

As Trump’s invincible image cracks with this admission, as well as with the increased coverage of his wild statements, others are starting to push back on him and his loyalists. President Biden’s son Hunter Biden testified behind closed doors to members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees today, after their previous key witness turned out to be working with Russian operatives and got indicted for lying.

Hunter Biden began the day with a scathing statement saying unequivocally that he had never involved his father in his business dealings and that all the evidence the committee had compiled proved that. In their “partisan political pursuit,” he said, they had “trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism—all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.” 

After an hour, Democratic committee members described to the press what was going on in the hearing room. They reported that the Republicans’ case had fallen apart entirely and that Biden had had a “very understandable, coherent business explanation for every single thing that they asked for.” While former president Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself more than 440 times during a deposition in his fraud trial, Biden did not take the Fifth at all. 

The discrediting of the Republicans continued later. When Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) tried to recycle the discredited claim that “$20 million flowed through” to then–vice president Biden, CNN host Boris Sanchez fact-checked him and said, “I’m not going to let you say things that aren’t true.” 

That willingness to push back on the Republicans suggests a new political moment in which Americans, as they have done before when one of the two parties devolved into minority rule, wake up to the reality that the system has been hijacked and begin to reclaim their government. 

But can they prevail over the extremists MAGA Republicans have stowed into critical positions in the government? Tonight the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump appointees, announced that rather than let the decision of a lower court stay in place, it would take up the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That decision means a significant delay in Trump’s trial for that attempt. 

“This is a momentous decision, just to hear this case,” conservative judge Michael Luttig told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case…. Under the constitutional laws of the United States, there has never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office.” 

–- 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Republicans, Trump

Texas: Vote for These Brave Legislators Who Stood Up for Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2024 //
2

I am a native Texan. I was born and raised in Houston. I attended Houston public schools from kindergarten until my high school graduation. The public schools of Texas gave me a strong foundation, and I will always be grateful to my teachers and my schools.

The public schools in Texas will be harmed by vouchers. Yet Governor Greg Abbott is demanding that the Legislature endorse vouchers, so that the public will subsidize every student who goes to private and religious schools. No wonder he campaigned for vouchers by visiting private and religious schools.

Some Republican legislators know that vouchers will hurt their public schools.

Governor Abbott has spent millions of dollars to defeat those brave Republican legislators who oppose vouchers.

The primary is March 5.

Funded by oil and gas billionaires and by Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire, Abbott has tried and repeatedly failed to pass a voucher bill. He failed because these Republican legislators stood up for their communities and their public schools.

These legislators know their local teachers. They are friends and neighbors. The legislators know they are hard-working dedicated teachers. They teach the children; they don’t “indoctrinate” them, as Governor Abbott falsely claims. Many have taught in the same schools for decades, raising up the children in the way they should go.

The teachers are underpaid, and the school buildings need upgrades. But the Governor won’t put another penny into paying teachers and funding public schools unless he gets his vouchers.

In every state that has vouchers, most of them are used by students who never attended public schools. Vouchers are nothing more than a public subsidy for students already attending private and religious schools.

Voucher schools are free to discriminate and are excused from all accountability.

These heroic and principled legislators deserve your thanks and your vote on March 5:

  • Steve Allison, District 121, San Antonio
  • Ernest Bailes, District 18, Shepherd
  • Keith Bell, District 4, Forney;
  • DeWayne Burns, District 58, Cleburne;
  • Travis Clardy, District 11, Nacogdoches
  • Drew Darby, District 72, San Angelo
  • Jay Dean, District 7, Longview
  • Charlie Geren, District 99, Fort Worth
  • Justin Holland, District 33, Rockwall
  • Ken King, District 88, Canadian
  • John Kuempel, District 44, Seguin
  • Stan Lambert, District 71, Abilene
  • Glenn Rogers, District 60, Mineral Wells
  • Hugh Shine, District 55, Temple
  • Reggie Smith, District 62, Sherman
  • Gary VanDeaver, District 1, New Boston

For their courage in defending their community schools, their teachers, their parents, and their students, I place them on the blog’s Honor Roll.

Now get out there and vote for them!

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Honor Roll, Privatization, Students, Supporting public schools, Teachers, Texas, Vouchers

Jess Piper: Don’t Forget Rural Democrats

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2024 //
19

Jess Piper is a Democratic activist in rural Missouri. She is a fierce advocate for rural communities and public schools. She lives on a farm where she and her husband raise hogs and chickens. She blogs, she makes videos for TikTok, she tweets, she hosts a podcast called Dirt Road Democrats and is executive director of Blue Missouri. She taught American literature for 16 years. She often writes about the absurdity of vouchers and school choice. In this post, she goes to towns in her district to gather signatures to restore abortion rights in Missouri..

I live at the tippy top of NWMO on a small 7 acre farm in a 125 year old farmhouse with a few dogs, a couple cows, a gaggle of kids and grandkids, and a miniature donkey. Everyone perks up when I mention the donkey…he’s 36 inches high and his name is Augustus.

I drive across the state often these days and I am usually headed to a small town and this week was no different—I visited Chillicothe (the home of sliced bread), Carrolton, and Marceline and you’ll never guess why. I was getting rural folks and their Bible groups to sign the petition to restore abortion rights in Missouri.

Dirt Road organizing.

Missouri is in the process of putting abortion on the ballot and I have the petition—I have to tell you it’s kind of hard to get a petition, so I was excited to get them and also overwhelmed. I have to get this out to rural folks, and it’s not as easy as it would seem. 

First, there is the opposition to the petition—the Missouri Right to Life (Right to force others to gestate and deliver) has a literal snitch line to report folks accepting signatures. Now, I have no idea what they plan to do if they find us accepting signatures. I was raised to take care of myself and they shouldn’t mess with me, and I’m not the least bit intimidated, but I don’t want them to harass other rural folks who are signing quietly.

Second, folks have written off my congressional district—even some progressives who need signatures on a ballot initiative. They assume that we are too red to get enough signatures, so what’s the point, right? I’ll tell you the point: it creates excitement and solidarity in rural spaces. It acts to uplift us living in among MAGA extremists. It gives us hope.

Chillicothe was my first stop, and it is a pretty big town at over 9K folks. Chilli is also known for having a “patriot” group who have been successful in putting their extremists on the local health board — they also regularly object to school library books. Folks were on long text chains to get others to the event. I was able to gather about 30 signatures on a Tuesday at 9am. 

I was directing folks to the petition and how to fill it in correctly. One woman filled it out, stood up, and started texting. She told me, “I’m reminding my Bible group to come sign.” 

Wait…what?

The second place I drove was Carrolton, with a population of about 3,400. Still not tiny, but small. I sat in the basement of the library for almost 2 hours with…wait for it…a local pastor. A woman pastor. She signed the petition and then stayed the length of the signing event and visited with every single person who came in. Several folks attended her church or a neighboring church. 

Are you seeing a theme here?

My last stop of the day was in Marceline, population 2,100. I sat in the fire station with a local Dem organizer and we accepted signatures a few feet from the active train crossing. I met with a local candidate running for state house and again, folks signed, stood up, texted friends and relatives and their church community, and then headed back out to their farms and rural life.

This is why I organize in rural spaces across the state. This is why I drive 5 or 6 or 10 hours to meet with rural folks. They matter—we matter.

When we cede ground because it’s too red, because it’s too evangelical, because it’s too far of a drive, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s become more red, more uncontested. When we tell rural folks that their votes and signatures don’t matter because there aren’t enough of them, they agree and stop showing up. When we say Democrats and progressives support everyone, yet fail to have a presence in rural spaces, they notice…they know it’s a lie.

We can’t win Missouri if we avoid rural parts of the state. Missouri is 1/3 rural…33% of the state is outstate. 

I’m here and so are thousands of my friends. If state-level organizers will remember us, we can bring sanity back to the entire state.

Dirt Road Democrats are here.

~Jess

Categories Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Gender, Missouri, Science

Anand Giridharadas: The Supreme Court’s Attempted Suicide

By dianeravitch
February 29, 2024 //
155

Anand is a brilliant writer and thinker who blogs at The Ink. Consider subscribing.

Here is his take on the Supreme Court’s decision to delay judgment on Trump’s claim of absolute immunity for criminal actions while he was president.

Yesterday the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court decided to step in and rescue Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations, agreeing to hear his claim of broad immunity and to delay his federal trial on charges of election interference stemming from his involvement in the January 6 insurrection. But it’s much worse than that. We agree with Timothy Snyder that this is no simple stalling tactic. By taking up the question of whether a single American citizen is above the law — simply by entertaining a question that shouldn’t be — the right-wing justices are undermining the legitimacy of the Court itself, and the very notion of a nation of laws.

The Supreme Court is attempting to end its own life as an institution above politics. If it has been doing moving in this direction for some time, this week it came to a head.

This can only be read as a blow to democracy itself. With this stay now in place, it’s unlikely that any trial could be concluded by (and even more likely that it will be delayed entirely until after) Election Day. Of course, at that point, should Trump win re-election, the case would not move forward at all: the Justice Department would be unlikely to pursue a case against a newly elected president, and of course in his second term Trump could stop the proceedings entirely. Which, of course, is the plan.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Trump

Lincoln Project: What Fred Trump Thinks of Donald

By dianeravitch
February 29, 2024 //
16

The Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans, create videos intended to get into Trump’s head. This is one of their best.

Categories Elections, Humor, Shame, Trump

A Right-Wing Think Tank and Its Plan to Destroy “the Administrative State”

By dianeravitch
February 29, 2024 //
21

We first heard the term “destroy the administrative state” when Steve Bannon used it in 2015 and 2016. Bannon, a close advisor to Trump, viewed the federal government as a danger to life and liberty. Now, Trump supporters echo that language, and it still sounds bizarre. They may be relying on Social Security and Medicare, they may be drinking clean water and breathing fresh air thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, they may enjoy daily safety and security thanks to federal regulations, but they are prepared to toss all of it overboard.

They want to get the administrative state out of our lives, except that they don’t. They want the state to control women’s bodies, to limit parental rights to seek medical care for their children, and to control what we can read and what entertainment we can see. They want frozen embryos and fetuses in utero to be declared children, with all the rights of personhood. They want women and girls to be forced to give birth, even if their pregnancy was caused by rape or uncest, even if it endangers the woman’s life, even if the fetus has fatal deficiencies.

No organization has been more influential than the Heritage Foundation in stoking hostility to the Federal government. This venerable D.C. think tank is now planning the second Trump administration.

Over the past year, Heritage gathered rightwing ideologues to draft a document called Project 2025. It is a plan for the next Trump administration.

Here is another link. The section on the federal role in education starts on page 351.

Trump’s allies believe that his ambitious goals in his first term were stymied by career bureaucrats. So they recommend that his first act must be to reorganize the civil service, removing job protections from civil servants, enabling Trump to replace civil servants with Trump loyalists. It’s worth remembering that the civil service was created to eliminate the “spoils system,” the routine practice of filling government jobs with political cronies. Every president currently has thousands of political jobs to fill, but the core functions of government are staffed by experienced civil servants who serve regardless of the party in power.

The Heritage plan would enhance the powers of the President. Every government agency would be staffed by his loyalists. The Justice Department would no longer enjoy a measure of independence; instead it would serve the President. If he wanted to use it to persecute his political enemies, he could. He could carry out his pledges to jail Hillary Clinton and the Biden family. His Justice Department, led by a Trump attorney (Jeff Clark? Robert Hur? Alina Habba?) would follow proper procedures, arrest Trump’s enemies, and charge them with something or other.

PBS described Project 2025:

With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking….

The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.

There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.

There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

As Politico described it, the Project 2025 plan is the product of numerous rightwing groups that are seeking to roll back nothing less than 100 years of what they see as liberal encroachment on Washington. They want to overturn what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal bureaucracy (as conservatives view it) under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, numbering about two and a quarter million federal workers today. They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.

And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative — not just for the next president but for a long time to come — and that the White House maintains total control of it. In an effort to implement this agenda — which relies on another Reagan-era idea, the controversial “unitary theory” of the Constitution under which Article II gives the president complete power over the federal bureaucracy — Dans has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices and install them in general counsel offices throughout the federal bureaucracy.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Deregulation, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Justice, Republicans, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: Trump Showed His Vulnerabilities in South Carolina

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2024 //
7

Jonathan V. Last edits The Bulwark, an outstanding Never Trump site. He thinks that South Carolina showed big holes in Trump’s vote.

He writes:

Let’s start with the exit polls. 

Haley kept it close: independent voters made up 22 percent of the electorate and she won them 62-37. South Carolina is an open primary, so this was a case of independents showing up to vote against Trump in a meaningless contest. That’s bad news for him.

Among people who thought the economy was either “good” (Haley +73) or “not so good” (Haley +1) Haley fought Trump to better than a draw.

This matters because Biden’s theory of the case is that the economy is good and people are going to recognize that. If Biden can even get voters to “ehhh, the economy is not so good,” suddenly voters are much less receptive to Trump.

Haley beat Trump by +9 with voters with a college degree. That’s expected, but still a point of weakness.

Not expected: Among married Republicans Trump was only +3. In recent elections, married voters have been a huge area of strength for Republicans—Trump was +7 among marrieds in 2020. South Carolina shows us that half of a core Republican bloc is turning out to vote against Trump even when his opponent has no chance of winning. Not great for him.

But it keeps getting worse: Nearly a third of the voters said that Trump isn’t fit to serve as president and Haley won them by Saddam Hussein numbers.

Last data point, which is something I’ve been fixated on since I did The Focus Group a couple weeks ago: Among voters who believe that Trump lost in 2020, his numbers are ghastly.

Important to note: 36 percent of the electorate said that yes, Biden won fair and square. And with those people, Haley was +64.¹

I am growing convinced that forcing Trump to claim that he actually won in 2016—and belaboring that point over and over and over again—is a key to victory in 2024. When people see Trump lying about something they know isn’t true, it pits him against them, makes the relationship between Trump and the voter adversarial. The voters say, “Wait a minute, this guy is trying to scam me.”

And Trump is trapped because he’s so committed to the Big Lie that he can’t back down from it now. 

Categories Elections, Opinion Polling, Republicans, South Carolina, Trump

Dan Rather: Trump’s Electoral Weakness Is Showing

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2024 //
4

Dan Rather analyzed Trump’s primary wins and spots signs that he is vulnerable because his well-defined base is limited. Due to his extremism, he is not able to have a big tent that would attract independents and even dissident Democrats. Even more telling is that Trump is not unifying the Republican Party. As soon as Trump won the South Carolina, he proclaimed that he had never seen the Republican Party more united. As Rather explains, that’s not really true.

He writes:

NBC’s “Meet The Press” this morning characterized Donald Trump’s South Carolina primary victory as “delivering a crushing blow to [Nikki] Haley in her home state on Saturday, trouncing her by 20 points with nearly 60 percent of the vote. The former president dominated nearly every key group.”

While he did indeed win handily, a deep dive into the numbers provides some interesting context. 

The part of the story missing from many news reports is that Trump is slipping from his 2020 numbers. His support is strongest among his MAGA base, which pollsters put at no more than 33% of the electorate. Clearly, he will need more than MAGA to win the White House again. 

President Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary with 96.2% of the vote. Trump, who is essentially an incumbent up against a novice at running for national office, could not muster even 60% of his party’s vote. Exit polls from Saturday night should have GOP leaders nervous. 

The makeup of South Carolina’s Republican voters does not mirror the country. They are heavily weighted with hard-right “conservatives,” older, white, male, evangelical election deniers. Trump won overwhelmingly among them. But Haley won among independents, moderates, and those who care about foreign policy. And that’s the crux of it.

To win the presidency again, Trump will need to bring all Republicans into the tent. Gallop estimates that 41% of the electorate identifies as Republican. Then it gets really tough. He has to convince a large number of independents and Democrats to vote for him. But how?

  • Not by favoring a 16-week national abortion ban 
  • Not by threatening to pull out of NATO
  • Not by defunding Ukraine and supporting Putin’s invasion
  • Not by promising “ultimate and absolute revenge” against his political opponents 
  • Not by refusing to accept the results of elections he’s lost
  • Not by promising to be a dictator on day one of his second term

Not by saying things like: “These are the stakes of this election. Our country is being destroyed, and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me.”

Trump is winning primaries while underperforming. Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to President Obama and current host of “Pod Save America,” writes: “You cannot win the White House with the coalition that Trump is getting in these primaries. He must expand his coalition, persuade people who aren’t already on board and get beyond the Big Lie-believing MAGA base. Through three primary contests, Trump has gained no ground.”

Polls also indicate a majority of voters in swing states would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he’s convicted of a crime. That could happen as soon as April or May. 

As Axios writes: “If America were dominated by old, white, election-denying Christians who didn’t go to college, former President Trump would win the general election in as big of a landslide as his sweep of the first four GOP contests.” Fortunately, it is not. America is a rich tapestry of heritages, races, and creeds. Immigrants have long been one of our strengths.

But the likely GOP nominee continues to feed fears about immigration using language tailored to his MAGA base. “They’re coming from Asia, they’re coming from the Middle East, coming from all over the world, coming from Africa, and we’re not going to stand for it … They’re destroying our country,” Trump said Saturday at CPAC, a conference of extreme-right Trump supporters.

“No, Mr. Trump, they’re not,” is the answer of many Americans. There is strong public opinion that what is tearing our country apart is the divisiveness and rancor that comes from Trump, the Republican Party, and their right-wing media machine.

The mainstream press may begin to offer more of this context and perspective as we get deeper into the presidential campaign. One of the things Steady was created to do was offer reasoned context and perspective to news stories. This writing is an example.

Trump remains a real and present threat to win the presidency again in November. But that is not assured. Not nearly, as a deep analysis of early primary results indicates.

There is still a long way to go and many rivers to cross for both major candidates.

Categories Biden, Bigotry, Character, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Lies, Republicans, Scandals, Trump
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