All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Mister Mets]

The problem with setting up a more liberal candidate to defeat Manchin in a primary is that West Virginia is a very conservative state, and any Democrat to the left of Manchin could lose to almost any Republican.

Manchin's 2018 primary challenger won the Democratic party's nomination in 2020.

She lost by a margin of 43 percent. Not with 43 percent, but by 43 percent.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/2020_Uni..._West_Virginia

That said...

What, exactly, is a winner who kneecaps getting anything worthwhile done worth?

Except he's not preventing Democrats from doing anything worthwhile.

Presumably they prefer the bills that pass on a party-line basis to those that McConnell would pass in a party-line vote.

The argument about the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act exemplifies the bad faith criticism the left has of Manchin.

I've seen a conservative argument that the infrastructure bill is a bad thing because the United States has spent so much money on Covid relief, and because construction costs are currently higher than usual due to supply chain issues and pent-up demand for construction projects. The only left-wing argument against it I've seen is one legislators don't seem willing to make, that it is important for popular legislation to die on the vine to push the American people against Republicans.

Generally, the infrastructure bill seems to be stuff the left supports. It is something they would like to see passed, that they see as preferable to the status quo. But they're not allowing it to come to a vote because they're worried other stuff they like won't have enough congressional support.

[Mister Mets]

I could be wrong, but I suspect Yang's pride was hurt after he failed to gain any traction in 2020 or in the recent mayoral primary in New York, so he decided to take his ball and go the third party route instead of sticking it out and helping Democrats.

I'm sure he legitimately thinks he's doing the right thing, but it's not helpful. It does show the consequences of failing to treat political outsiders with respect.

When Congress is always close in the numbers, that one member is enough to swing the balance from D-controlled to R-. Even if it's like pulling teeth to get anything done, at least it's not a struggle to stop the other side from doing what they'd like to do (which is making things even more difficult on the Biden Administration and likely weakening things like Covid restrictions).

The main solution here is for Democrats to win more.

I'm wondering if a problem in American politics is that parties aren't willing to do popular stuff with broad support.

They prefer narrow wins and rhetoric that excites the base to sweeping wins that might come with moderation. And because the other party's not moderating, there isn't enough incentive to change, because there's a good chance of a win.

Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.

That's disgusting.

[numberthirty]

When Congress is always close in the numbers, that one member is enough to swing the balance from D-controlled to R-. Even if it's like pulling teeth to get anything done, at least it's not a struggle to stop the other side from doing what they'd like to do (which is making things even more difficult on the Biden Administration and likely weakening things like Covid restrictions).

Which sets the stage for them to potentially have to do if they hit the midterms with next to nothing to show for having had a chance to get things done.

Never mind that the "I will whup the covid..." thing most likely will not pan out the way Biden planned.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Sadly, that did not last long.

This back and forth must be torture for women.

This is why i made a comment earlier that I don't like how much power a judge has. They keep playing ping pong with issues.

[Tami]

Democrats edge toward dumping Iowa’s caucuses as the first presidential vote

President Biden is not a big fan. Former Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez is openly opposed. And elsewhere in the Democratic inner sanctum, disdain for Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucus has been rising for years.

Now the day of reckoning for Iowa Democrats is fast approaching, as the national party starts to create a new calendar for the 2024 presidential nomination that could remove Iowa from its privileged position for the first time since 1972, when candidates started flocking to the state for an early jump on the race to the White House.

The caucuses’ reputation has been damaged by high barriers to participation, a dearth of racial diversity, the rightward drift in the state’s electorate and a leftward drift in the Democratic participants. The state party’s inability to count the results in 2020 only deepened dismay in the party.

Biden, who handily won the party’s nomination in 2020, noted the lack of diversity in the caucus during the campaign — “It is what it is,” he said of the calendar — and called his fourth-place finish in the state a “gut punch.”

“We have to be honest with ourselves, and Iowa is not representative of America,” Perez said Friday in an interview. “We need a primary process that is reflective of today’s demographics in the Democratic Party.”

Others in Biden’s extended orbit have come to similar conclusions about the caucuses, for varied reasons.

“It is not suited to normal people, people that actually have daily lives,” South Carolina State Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a former chairman of that state’s Democratic Party and a longtime Biden ally, said of the caucuses. He described the laborious process of participating, over multiple hours, in person, on a weeknight, as far more restrictive than the requirements of a new voter law in Texas that Democrats universally oppose.

“I just think the caucus process as it exists in Iowa is not suitable in 21st-century America,” he said.

[worstblogever]

Democrats edge toward dumping Iowa’s caucuses as the first presidential vote

GOOD. Iowa's demographics and its focus on issues are not reflective of the nation. Not just the "large majority white" part... like, Ethanol subsidies are a dealbreaker issue for candidates overall presidential aspirations, when outside of corn country, it's mostly irrelevant.

[Tami]

GOOD. Iowa's demographics and its focus on issues are not reflective of the nation. Not just the "large majority white" part... like, Ethanol subsidies are a dealbreaker issue for candidates overall presidential aspirations, when outside of corn country, it's mostly irrelevant.

In my opinion, the states should go in the order of their population, from smallest to largest.

[edit: In one of my opinions, as I have more than one. This is inspired by what I heard and read on the subject recently. ]

Usually there are 5 months for the primaries, February to June

If you include DC and PR, there are 52 states, districts, etc holding elections. The very smallest of the territories can be fit into this scheme wherever works best for them.

So, we have about 10 primaries each month (plus two)

In 2024, it would go something like this, with each state going in order (or occasionally doubling or tripling up on a date as needed):

February

• Wyoming
• Vermont
• District of Columbia
• Alaska
• North Dakota
• South Dakota
• Delaware
• Rhode Island
• Montana
• Maine

March

• New Hampshire
• Hawaii
• West Virginia
• Idaho
• Nebraska
• New Mexico
• Kansas
• Mississippi
• Arkansas
• Iowa

April

• Nevada
• Puerto Rico
• Utah
• Connecticut
• Oklahoma
• Oregon
• Kentucky
• Louisiana
• Alabama
• South Carolina

May

• Minnesota
• Wisconsin
• Colorado
• Maryland
• Missouri
• Indiana
• Massachusetts
• Tennessee
• Arizona
• Washington
• Virginia

June

• New Jersey
• Michigan
• North Carolina
• Georgia
• Ohio
• Illinois
• Pennsylvania
• New York
• Florida
• Texas
• California

So, for example, you could have Wyoming, Vermont, and DC voting in the first week of February.
Alaska, North and South Dakota holding their primaries on the second week of February
Delaware and Rhode Island on the third week
and Montana and Maine on the fourth week of February

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of the U.S. House Representative from Tennessee's 4th Congressional District, Scott Desjarlais, an Episcopalian physician from Tennessee whose religious background would have made him the perfect Republican to push their social agenda against abortion, contraceptives, and gay rights, while also giving them a guy with the credibility to argue against the Affordable Care Act. The problem with that, though, is Desjarlais has proven to be an embarrassing hypocrite, because while he portrays himself a champion of the pro-life movement, his divorce records were unsealed, and the media discovered he protected the sanctity of marriage by cheating on his wife with four women, and pressured not only his wife (on tape, no less) into getting an abortion, but one of his mistresses. And that mistress was also apparently one of his patients (and she wasn’t the only patient he slept with)… so there went the credibility of the “doctor against the ACA” angle. Also, the “family values Republican” angle, considering he admitted sleeping with six women — including two patients, three co-workers and a drug company representative — during his three-year marriage. But don’t worry, he’s assured everyone that “God has forgiven him”.

Desjarlais is also a big hard-liner on immigration, what with the time he told an 11 year old girl that he was going to deport her dad, and all.

Desjarlais has been dodging facing his constituents like a coward these past few years. and his voting record makes it clear that he has no intention of explaining anything to them:

• December 3rd, 2019: Rep. Desjarlais votes against a resolution to disallow Russia from re-entering the G7 and makes it the G8 until it leaves Ukraine.
• December 18th, 2019: Desjarlais ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the impeachment of Donald Trump.
• December 10th, 2020: DesJarlais signs his name to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, begging them to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The same election that he won re-election in.
• January 7th, 2021: Scott DesJarlais votes for the objection to the electoral college’s votes in the 2020 election, a failure to send any sort of message that he wasn’t intimidated or sympathetic to those who attacked the Capitol to attempt a violent coup.
• January 13th, 2021: Rep. DesJarlais votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because the Republican Party no longer feels like they should be accountable for anything, including failed coups that result in the deaths of both their participants and police officers.
• February 4th, 2021: Scott DesJarlais votes to keep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments, because he wouldn’t want her to be accountable for all the bigoted remarks and conspiracy theories she’s spread online (probably because she’s a kindred spirit).
• February 25th, 2021: DesJarlais votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. DesJarlais votes against HR 1, a bill created to prevent the corruption of money in politics, and protect voter access to the ballot box.
• March 3rd, 2021: Scott DesJarlais votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: DesJarlais votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he feels people deserve to die in poverty during a pandemic.
• March 17th, 2021: Rep. DesJarlais votes against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).
• May 19th, 2021: Rep. DesJarlais votes against HR 3233, the creation of a commission to investigate the Capitol Attack.
• May 20th, 2021: DesJarlais is one of 63 Republicans who vote against the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act.
• June 16th, 2021: Scott DesJarlais is one of 14 Republicans who vote against celebrating Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
• July 22nd, 2021: Rep. DesJarlais is one of 16 Republicans who vote against HR 3895, the Allies Act, which was passed without his support to raise the amount of visas offered and to expedite their issue to Afghan translators and their families to honor our promise to protect them against the Taliban after U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, thus feeling we should go back on our word and leave them to die.

In explicably, even as the #MeToo movement continues, Scott Desjarlais remains in Congress, now re-elected with 67% of the vote to a sixth term in spite of being a complete hypocrite and creep.

How hypocritical? He currently is railing against the Biden Administration for mandating federal employees get the Covid-19 vaccine, because he suddenly feels like people should have the freedom to make their own medical choices. Y’know, provided they’re not a woman seeking an abortion unless the women in question haven’t had sex with him.

[Malvolio]

Sadly, that did not last long.

This back and forth must be torture for women.

Eventually, it will go to the Supreme Court. But even if Roberts and, say Gorsuch, join the three liberal Justices and strike down the Texas law, that won't be the end of it. The Republicans in Texas will just go back to the drawing board and rewrite the law to address whatever specific technicalities Roberts specifies in his opinion.

[Mister Mets]

GOOD. Iowa's demographics and its focus on issues are not reflective of the nation. Not just the "large majority white" part... like, Ethanol subsidies are a dealbreaker issue for candidates overall presidential aspirations, when outside of corn country, it's mostly irrelevant.

An additional problem is that caucuses exclude a lot of Americans.

The only people able to go are those who have a few hours free in the evening. You have to work late? You have kids? Too bad. It's against the small-d democratic instinct that the large-D Democratic party has been valorizing for the last few years.

In my opinion, the states should go in the order fo their population, from smallest to largest.

I cut the post for space, but I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Small states are not representative, because you're going to generally have a lot of rural communities, which lean right. The main exception would be Washington DC, and relatively big cities within small states like Anchorage, Alaska. Many of the early states will have low population densities, which makes travel for candidates harder.

If the same states go first every time, candidates will figure out how to cater to those voters.

My preference is for the first states to be chosen by some kind of measure of how representative they are of the country, like the extent to which they match the national popular vote. So you won't have states that are too left-wing or right-wing going first, and ambitious members of Congress won't know which states to suck up to for the next twenty years.

[Tami]

How big can WBE's Queue grow?

Multiple GOP 2022 candidates haunted by domestic violence allegations

Four years later, the GOP is facing a similar situation — though this time, it's allegations surrounding Republicans hoping to be elected to the U.S. Senate.

The Washington Post reported yesterday, for example, on the large number of high-profile Republicans rallying behind Max Miller, a former Trump aide who's running for Congress in Ohio, and "who faces allegations of domestic violence."

Miller, it's worth noting for context, has already received Trump's support for his congressional candidacy.

What's more, as the HuffPost noted yesterday, there are related controversies surrounding other GOP candidates running for Congress in the 2022 cycle:

Like Ohio's Miller, Walker and Parnell have received Trump's public backing.

There are plenty of caveats to a story like this one. For one thing, each of the Republican men have denied wrongdoing. For another, it's not yet clear how many of these GOP candidates will end up winning their respective primaries and advancing to the 2022 general elections.

That said, there's a distinct possibility that all of these candidates will be Republican nominees in next year's midterm cycle, which should leave GOP leaders with some difficult questions about the extent to which the party cares, if at all.

[Jack Dracula]

Democrats edge toward dumping Iowa’s caucuses as the first presidential vote

As an Iowan, I have to say that I don't care either way whether we have the first caucus here. Due to the internet and the current grade-school level of political debate, I think the relevance of a "first caucus" to determine a front-runner no longer applies.

[Mister Mets]

Writing for the New York Times, Ezra Klein spotlighted the disagreements between pollster David Shor and progressive activists regarding the best practices going forward for the Democratic party.

Shor gained public notice when he was fired from a polling firm for citing research that protests might hurt the party's brand heading into the elections.

But it was a tweet that changed his career. During the protests after the killing of George Floyd, Shor, who had few followers at the time, tweeted, “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2 percent, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon.” Nonviolent protests, he noted, tended to help Democrats electorally. The numbers came from Omar Wasow, a political scientist who now teaches at Pomona College. But online activists responded with fury to Shor’s interjection of electoral strategy into a moment of grief and rage, and he was summarily fired by his employer, Civis Analytics, a progressive data science firm.

For Shor, cancellation, traumatic though it was, turned him into a star. His personal story became proof of his political theory: The Democratic Party was trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members. It had lost touch with the working-class voters of all races that it needs to win elections, and even progressive institutions dedicated to data analysis were refusing to face the hard facts of public opinion and electoral geography.

Shor notes the disadvantages Democrats have in the Senate, where victories in the popular vote correspond to comfortable Republican gains.

In 2022, if Senate Democrats buck history and beat Republicans by four percentage points in the midterms, which would be a startling performance, they have about a 50-50 chance of holding the majority. If they win only 51 percent of the vote, they’ll likely lose a seat — and the Senate.

But it’s 2024 when Shor’s projected Senate Götterdämmerung really strikes. To see how bad the map is for Democrats, think back to 2018, when anti-Trump fury drove record turnout and handed the House gavel back to Nancy Pelosi. Senate Democrats saw the same huge surge of voters. Nationally, they won about 18 million more votes than Senate Republicans — and they still lost two seats. If 2024 is simply a normal year, in which Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote, Shor’s model projects a seven-seat loss, compared with where they are now.

He suggests that Democrats need to do more to appeal to swing voters.

Atop this analysis, Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.

All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff. “Traditional diversity and inclusion is super important, but polling is one of the only tools we have to step outside of ourselves and see what the median voter actually thinks,” Shor said. This theory is often short-handed as “popularism.” It doesn’t sound as if it would be particularly controversial.

It is.

One of the arguments is that issues that excite the base can upset voters in the middle (or technically the center-right, because of the composition of the Senate and electoral college) so message discipline is needed to avoid that problem.

Shor’s example speaks to the hardest questions raised by popularism. “Talk about your most popular, most energizing ideas” isn’t controversial advice. The real disagreements come on the ideas that don’t poll so well. There are a lot of issues that Democrats want to talk about that Shor thinks they’d be better off not talking about.

Hillary Clinton “lost because she raised the salience of immigration, when lots of voters in the Midwest disagreed with us on immigration,” Shor said. This is where popularism poses its most bitter choices: He and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration. He often brandishes a table showing that among voters who supported universal health care but opposed amnesty for unauthorized immigrants, 60 percent voted for Obama in 2012 but 41 percent voted for Clinton in 2016. That difference, he noted, was more than enough to cost her the election.

This can read as an affront to those who want to use politics to change Americans’ positions on those issues. “The job of a good message isn’t to say what’s popular but to make popular what needs to be said,” Shenker-Osorio told me.

Shor’s rejoinder to this is that the best way to make progress on race and immigration policy is for Democrats to win elections. Obama’s twin victories loom large in his thinking here, since he watched Obama’s brain trust carefully decide what to avoid and the result was the election and re-election of the country’s first Black president, to say nothing of all the policies he passed.

Shor is right about how the Obama campaign understood the electorate. David Simas, the director of opinion research on Obama’s 2012 campaign, recalled a focus group of non-college, undecided white women on immigration. It was a 90-minute discussion, and the Obama campaign made all its best arguments. Then they went around the table. Just hearing about the issue pushed the women toward Mitt Romney. The same process then played out in reverse with shipping jobs overseas. Even when all of Romney’s best arguments were made, the issue itself pushed the women toward Obama. The lesson the Obama team took from that was simple: Don’t talk about immigration.

This obviously fits my priors, but I'm curious what you guys see as the smart approach.

[Tami]

I'm still trying to process this passage from a US Justice Dept court motion this week... In which feds say a Jan 6 defendant was a marijuana distributor in .... elementary school ==>

[Zauriel]

In my opinion, the states should go in the order fo their population, from smallest to largest.

Usually there are 5 months for the primaries, February to June

If you include DC and PR, there are 52 states, districts, etc holding elections. The very smallest of the territories can be fit into this scheme wherever works best for them.

So, we have about 10 primaries each month (plus two)

In 2024, it would go something like this, with each state going in order (or occasionally doubling or tripling up on a date as needed):


So, for example, you could have Wyoming, Vermont, and DC voting in the first week of February.
Alaska, North and South Dakota holding their primaries on the second week of February
Delaware and Rhode Island on the third week
and Montana and Maine on the fourth week of February

I never cared for Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary being the first two states. But the current primary system and what you are proposing are both wasting gasoline for the candidates to ride in airplanes, buses and automobiles to rallies and contributing to the climate change.

So Better start a straight campaign trail zig-zagging from California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, D.C., Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and the final destination will be Maine.