Jamaal Bowman Finds His Voice. Some Republicans Don't Like the Sound

Interesting.

At NYT, "The Democratic congressman has made a habit of brashly confronting Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, often in public displays meant to attract attention":

Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Rep. Thomas Massie just got in something of a shouting match off the House floor over gun control pic.twitter.com/xvRAoxQQPL

— Emily Brooks (@emilybrooksnews) March 29, 2023

Many of his colleagues had already left for the night, but as Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, stepped out onto the Capitol steps on Wednesday, he had business left to do: heckling Republicans.

“Have some dignity!” he yelled toward Representative George Santos, the New York freshman who is fighting federal fraud charges, and to a sea of TV cameras waiting below.

“Listen, no more QAnon, no more MAGA, no more debt ceiling nonsense,” he said as he pivoted to another confrontation, this time with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who stood nearby. The theatrical back-and-forth ended as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a fellow member of the left-wing “Squad,” gave a slight tug to Mr. Bowman’s arm, repeating, “She ain’t worth it, bro” — but not before a handful of lawmakers whipped out cellphone cameras to capture the soon-to-be viral spat.

In this hyperpartisan era, the country has no shortage of politicians willing to savage each other from across a hearing room or on social media. But Mr. Bowman, a media-savvy democratic socialist from the Bronx, has rapidly made a name for himself this spring by going where most of them have not: up to his opponents’ actual faces.

Mr. Bowman’s platform includes far-reaching left-wing policies that split his party. Still, his style — “middle school principal energy,” he calls it — appears to have captured the id of even more moderate Democrats and has fueled party speculation about his ambition.

A video in which an AR-15-owning House Republican from Kentucky tells Mr. Bowman, 47, to “calm down” as they argue over how to stop gun violence has already been viewed more than seven million times. A friendlier confrontation, with a conservative House colleague, spawned a full CNN debate.

“I don’t mean any harm,” Mr. Bowman said in an interview. “I ain’t trying to hurt nobody. But we’ve got to take America to the next level, and we are not moving with urgency.”

The approach also carries risks, especially for a Black man, some of which came into sharp relief on Thursday. That is when Ms. Greene, a combative Georgian with a history of spouting conspiracy theories and directly confronting her own political opponents, said that she had felt threatened by Mr. Bowman, even though video showed her smiling as they sparred.

Ms. Greene said that Mr. Bowman had called her a white supremacist, an insult she claimed was “equal to” someone “calling a person of color the N-word.”

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She then said that the congressman’s “physical mannerisms are aggressive” and accused him of leading a “mob” targeting her when they both appeared outside a Manhattan courthouse where former President Donald J. Trump was being arraigned — an apparent reference to a crowd that consisted largely of members of the news media.

“I’m very concerned about Jamaal Bowman,” Ms. Greene said, “and he’s someone that people should watch.”

Another Biden-Trump Presidential Race in 2024 Looks More Likely

And there's been so much hope for DeSantis too. 

But this does seem about right.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Biden’s impending campaign entry and Trump’s lead in Republican field mean they could square off again":

WASHINGTON — America could be headed for an epic rematch.

President Biden is expected to announce his re-election campaign this week, putting to rest questions of whether he will seek a second term as the nation’s first octogenarian president. At the same time, polls show former President Donald Trump with a substantial lead in the Republican presidential field despite facing criminal charges in New York and the potential for more legal problems on the horizon.

While the race for the White House remains in an early stage and presidential campaigns can shift quickly, the start of the 2024 cycle shows that a rematch between Messrs. Biden and Trump is a distinct possibility, one that would play out before a divided nation as the two parties uneasily share control of the levers of power in Washington.

A second showdown, this time with Mr. Biden in the White House and Mr. Trump as the outsider, could determine how the U.S. proceeds in its support for Ukraine’s war against Russia and its work to counter the effects of climate change, as well as how it would balance domestic and military spending and economic policies at a time of high inflation.

A 2024 campaign would likely be different from the first encounter, when Mr. Biden limited his in-person campaign events and rallies because of the Covid-19 pandemic and Mr. Trump used the trappings of the White House in his campaign, often featuring Air Force One in the backdrop of airport rallies.

Mr. Biden is expected to open his re-election bid with a video announcement. Advisers are considering a Tuesday launch to coincide with the fourth anniversary of his entry into the Democratic primaries in 2019. Mr. Biden is scheduled to address the North America’s Building Trades Unions that day, allowing him to highlight his $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law before an audience of union members who have backed both Democrats and Republicans in the past.

Mr. Trump is planning a response to the announcement, aides said, and he has said the president is vulnerable on a range of issues, from immigration to inflation.

Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Trump three years ago in an election marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and heated protests over police tactics and racial justice. Since then, the aftermath of the 2020 election has lingered over the nation’s politics, with Mr. Trump facing investigations into his attempts to overturn his defeat, the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by his supporters and the former president’s storage of sensitive government documents at his residence and club in Florida.

Mr. Biden faces an investigation into his own handling of sensitive documents after his time as vice president, while his son, Hunter Biden, is facing a criminal investigation related to his taxes and whether he made a false statement in connection with a gun purchase.

“Our politics have only gotten more divided since Election Day 2020, as we saw most graphically on Jan. 6,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist. “Add to that we’ve never had an indicted nominee, nor potentially, a son of the incumbent president indicted, and thoughts of a high-road election on issues are foolish to the extreme.”

A Wall Street Journal poll released last week found Mr. Biden at 48% and Mr. Trump at 45% in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, a lead within the poll’s margin of error. In testing a potential field of 12 competitors for the Republican presidential nomination, the poll found that Mr. Trump had the support of 48% of GOP primary voters, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 24%. No other Republican candidate was in double digits.

While Mr. Biden faces minor opposition in the Democratic primaries, polls show that the public holds deep reservations about his presidency. In the six Wall Street Journal surveys dating to late 2021, an average of 43% of voters have said they approve of Mr. Biden’s job performance, while an average of 48% said they approved of how Mr. Trump handled the job when he was president.

When a Journal poll asked this month about Mr. Biden’s work on eight issue areas, voters rated him more positively than negatively on only one—his handling of Social Security and Medicare. By 22 points, more people disapproved than approved of his handling of the economy, and the gap was 27 points on dealing with inflation, 26 points on border security, and 21 points on fighting crime.

Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist and a member of the Democratic National Committee, said that Mr. Trump would seek to make a rematch about retribution and revenge over the 2020 election and that Mr. Biden would be tasked with making the campaign about his agenda and the future...

Still more.

Fox News Defamation Settlement

Is this the big decimation denouement that the left's is jonesin' for? 

There's a lot of churn at Memeorandum, with what looks like is absolute glee at this defeat for Rupert Murdoch.

At the New York Times, "A $787.5 Million Settlement and Embarrassing Disclosures: The Costs of Airing a Lie":

Fox News’s late-stage agreement with Dominion Voting Systems came with a rare acknowledgment of broadcasting false claims by the conservative media powerhouse.

In settling with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has avoided an excruciating, drawn-out trial in which its founding chief, Rupert Murdoch, its top managers and its biggest stars would have had to face hostile grilling on an embarrassing question: Why did they allow a virulent and defamatory conspiracy theory about the 2020 election to spread across the network when so many of them knew it to be false?

But the $787.5 million settlement agreement — among the largest defamation settlements in history — and Fox’s courthouse statement recognizing that the court had found “certain claims about Dominion” aired on its programming “to be false” at the very least amount to a rare, high-profile acknowledgment of informational wrongdoing by a powerhouse in conservative media and America’s most popular cable network.

“Money is accountability,” Stephen Shackelford, a Dominion lawyer, said outside the courthouse, “and we got that today from Fox.”

The terms of the agreement, which was abruptly announced just before lawyers were expected to make opening statements, did not require Fox to apologize for any wrongdoing in its own programming — a point that Dominion was said to have been pressing for.

Shortly after the agreement was reached, Fox said it was “hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

The settlement carries an implicit plea of “no contest” to several pretrial findings from the presiding judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, that cast Fox’s programming in exceptionally harsh light.

In one of those findings, the judge sided with Dominion in its assertion that Fox could not claim that its airing of the conspiracy theory — generally relating to the false claim that its machines “switched” Trump votes into Biden votes — fell under a legally protected status of “news gathering” that can shield news organizations when facts are disputed. The judge wrote, “the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.”

In another finding, the judge wrote that the “evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”

Through those findings, the judge seriously limited Fox’s ability to argue that it was acting as a news network pursuing the claims of a newsmaker, in this case, the president of the United States, who was the lead clarion for the false Dominion narrative.

In those heady days before the first day of trial, Fox had been indicating that if it were to lose at trial, it would work up an appeal that would, at least partly, argue with those judicial rulings. Now they stand undisputed.

By the end of the day on Tuesday, it was clear that Fox’s lawyers were engaged in an urgent calculus to take the financial hit rather than risk losing at trial.

As so many legal experts before the trial had argued, Dominion had managed to collect an unusual amount of internal documentation from Fox showing that many inside the company knew the Dominion election conspiracy theory was pure fantasy. That extended to the network’s highest ranks — right up to Mr. Murdoch himself.

That evidence appeared to bring Dominion close to the legal threshold in defamation cases known as “actual malice” — established when defamatory statements are “made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or not.” (That bar, however, is not always easy to meet, and there are no guarantees in front of a jury.)

“Dominion Voting had elicited much critical evidence that Fox had acted with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth, which it could have proved to a jury, so the only question remaining would have been damages,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “Trial of the case also might have undermined the reputation of Fox when the evidence was presented in open court.”

It was less surprising that Fox settled than that it did so at such a late stage on Tuesday...

Keep reading. 

Robert Draper, When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind

At Amazon, Robert Draper, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind.

Americans Pessimistic on Congress

A new USA Today/Ipsos poll, "What's going to happen in Washington over the next 2 years? Americans don't expect much: An exclusive USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll shows pessimism about the prospect for compromise or action by a divided government."

Via Susan Page:

ICYMI: Why is bipartisanship so difficult? In our new @USATODAY @IpsosUS poll, only one in ten Americans thinks neither major political party is too extreme. How can you compromise when you think the other side, or both sides, are out of the mainstream? >>> https://t.co/1o7heVVM8W

— Susan Page (@SusanPage) January 16, 2023

House Passes Rules Package as Republicans Regroup After Speaker Fight

At the Wall Street Journal, "Procedures are set for new Congress, clearing way for GOP to pursue legislation."

How the 2022 Midterms Rewrote American Politics

At Vanity Fair, "Honey, We Dumped the Playbook: 10 Ways the Midterms Rewrote American Politics in 2022":

The counterintuitive takeaways from November’s Big Blue Surprise election.

One of the few absolute constants of American politics is that every election cycle brings its own surprises. Which, like good drama, makes elections interesting and entertaining—and, often, real nail-biters.

Inevitably, no matter how much analysis or how many polls are conducted, the results prove the experts wrong. In fact, arguably—despite advances in knowledge, data, and technology—we’ve been getting it more wrong than ever before. How does that happen?

Well, this election was a good example of how we become seduced by convenient narratives. One of the obvious tools we use is history. We look back at the accumulated experience of past elections to project what might happen in the future. But this can be extremely misleading and misguided. Because it leads to the kind of thinking I hear all the time from political insiders: “X won’t happen because X has never happened before.”

Then you have a Black man elected president. And a real estate huckster from New York City. And a peanut farmer from Georgia. And an actor from California. All things never thought possible. Until they happened. So, the only real rule here is: Things aren’t possible in politics—until they are.

Let’s look back at the Big Blue Surprise of November 2022. In this election, by using history as a guide, a red wave was predicted. In only two midterms since 1934 has the president’s party not lost seats in the House, and one of those was simply due to a post–9/11 blush of support for the incumbent.

Also, over the last decade, Republicans had won most redistricting fights and were therefore expected to pick up seats simply as a result of more GOP-favorable electoral maps.

On top of that, the Republicans seemed on the offensive on three key issues that were plaguing the Democrats: the troubled state of the economy, crime, and immigration.

Reporters are often criticized for reporting and writing analysis and predictions from their offices in places like Washington, DC, and never getting their boots on the ground around the country.

But, wait a moment. I can testify to how misleading this sort of anecdotal canvassing can be. For the work I do for the weekly political series The Circus, on Showtime, I spent most of the fall traveling all over America, going to coffee shops, truck stops, bus tours, house parties, and small-town rallies. In fact, since 2016, I have adopted a sort of “momentum test” based on what I see on the ground in the last two weeks leading up to an election. My fieldwork out on the hustings six years ago, for example, told me something tangible during that Hillary Clinton–Donald Trump face-off. Yes, I certainly believed, along with 99% of the rest of the country, that Clinton was likely to win. But about seven days before voters went to the polls, I made the assertion on Megyn Kelly’s show, on Fox News, that a person out in the heartland—in the political thick of things during the last week of a campaign—usually gets a sense which direction the momentum is headed. And I said that Trump seemed to have some winds at his back.

This past November, as well, those winds were all blowing in a seemingly discernable direction. Our team from The Circus put on a full-scale blitz and went to 17 states in the final few days of the campaign. And if you judged what the outcome might be—simply by the size and enthusiasm of crowds—you’d likely have guessed: red wave.

New Hampshire was a good example. Democratic senator Maggie Hassan had seemed in solid shape until the final weeks when polls showed the race tightening. I went to an event at her campaign headquarters, which by any objective standards was modest. A small group of supporters appeared earnest, committed, and dutiful, but hardly excited. On the other hand, Hassan’s MAGA-leaning, Trump-endorsed opponent, retired Army general Don Bolduc, held one of his many town hall meetings and he drew an SRO crowd of supporters who were enthusiastic, committed, and energized.

Hassan won comfortably by 10 points.

So who are you gonna trust? The partisans and hucksters or your own lyin’ eyes?

With this in mind, let’s go down the list of some surprises and counterintuitive lessons we learned in these topsy-turvy, down-is-up midterms...

Keep reading.

 

Rise of the DeSantis Democrats

From Olivia Reingold, at Bari Weiss's "Free Press" (formerly "Common Sense"), "Like Reagan Democrats once upon a time, these voters have already reshaped the political landscape in Florida. Can they do the same nationally in 2024?":

MIAMI—It’s almost 11 p.m. on a recent Friday night at ONE Gentlemens Club, and it’s dead except for the girls in their thongs, sitting on pleather couches, waiting for someone to give a lap dance to. No one can talk to anyone else. It’s too loud for that, what with the electronic drum, the incessant rapping. The rap is supposed to inspire twerking—and tens. Tonight, no one’s twerking.

Tory Williams is alone at the bar in fishnets and boots. She should be mixing drinks.

“Did you vote in the recent election?” I write in my notebook, then pass it to her.

She nods. When I ask who she voted for, a grin appears. “DUH-SAN-TIS,” she mouths.

“Why DeSantis?” I shout. Williams is a black woman who looks to be pushing forty. She has a fiancé and, after two slow years, a job. It was her brother, she says, who made her rethink her politics.

Finally, she shouts back, over the bar, through the din: “Money.”

Williams is one of the DeSantis Democrats: Florida voters who, until recently, identified as Democrats but in November opted to reelect Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis—he who resisted the Covid lockdowns, tangled with Disney, and governed with a record budget surplus—in a landslide.

It’s unclear how many DeSantis Democrats there are: DeSantis’ vote count jumped from roughly 4 million in 2018 to 4.6 million in 2022. Lots of those voters are presumably independents or Republicans who didn’t vote last time.

But some are disaffected Democrats alienated from the party they once belonged to. That’s evident from the longtime Democratic strongholds that DeSantis flipped, including Hillsborough, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, where DeSantis skyrocketed from a 21-point loss in 2018 to an 11-point win in 2022—a net gain of more than 30 percentage points.

Democratic Palm Beach County Commissioner Dave Kerner says he identifies as a DeSantis Democrat, “and I can tell you I’m not the only one.”

“As I traveled around the state and throughout my county over the past several years, at first it was quiet, you know, ‘This governor is doing a great job’—and this is amongst my Democratic colleagues,” he told me. “Then I started hearing it more and hearing it more. And then I saw my own county—which has been majority blue throughout probably its entire history—we saw more people vote for the Republican candidate over the Democratic candidate.”

Kerner is 39, a former cop, and a former member of Florida’s House of Representatives. He’s best known for successfully strangling a bill, strongly backed by the National Rifle Association, that would have made it harder to prosecute anyone in a Stand Your Ground-related shooting. In 2022, he says, he backed DeSantis because he’s not anti-cop. And because, Kerner says, he makes things happen. “It wasn’t necessarily about partisan identity but the man himself—even if you didn’t agree with his policies, the way that he was so effective,” he says.

The big question is whether people like Kerner are just one-time Republican voters, or if they’ll become permanent Republicans. Whether people Tory Williams can be convinced to keep voting for a party that, until a few months ago, she never imagined voting for...

 

'Your Government at Work'

Here's Kim Strassel, on Twitter, slamming the $1.7 billion *bipartisan* "Omnibus" legislation coming out of Congress today. 

2. It's also that Congress, in a new trick, is attaching dozens of pieces of stand-alone legislation to this--retirement changes; public lands management; healthcare policy; cosmetics regulation; electoral count act changes; horseracing rules.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) December 20, 2022

Race for the Next RNC Chair Gets Ugly

Ronna McDaniel's performance as party chair since 2016 has been pathetic. I don't think about it that much, but with Harmeet Dhillon in the race with a bulldog campaign to replace her, one takes notice.

At the Associated Press, "Inside the ugly fight to become the next Republican chair."

And on Fox News with Laura Ingraham:

Ron DeSantis Holds Early Lead Over Donald Trump Among GOP Primary Voters, WSJ Poll Shows (VIDEO)

He's seen on Laura Ingraham's last night, below, and at the Wall Street Journal, "The former president’s standing among Republican voters has fallen after candidates he promoted lost in midterm elections":

Republican primary voters have high interest in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a potential 2024 presidential nominee and view him more favorably than they do former President Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal poll shows.

In a hypothetical contest between the two, Mr. DeSantis beats Mr. Trump, 52% to 38%, among likely GOP primary voters contemplating a race in which the first nomination votes will be cast in just over a year.

The poll found that Mr. DeSantis is both well-known and well-liked among Republicans who say they are likely to vote in a party primary or nominating contest, with 86% viewing the Florida governor favorably, compared with 74% who hold a favorable view of Mr. Trump. One in 10 likely GOP primary voters said they didn’t know enough about Mr. DeSantis to venture an opinion of him.

Among all registered voters, Mr. DeSantis is viewed favorably by 43%, compared with 36% for the former president. Favorable views of Mr. Trump were the lowest recorded in Journal polling dating to November 2021 and have been pulled down by a decline in positive feelings among Republicans. Since March, his favorable rating among GOP voters has fallen to 74% from 85%, while the share who view him unfavorably has risen to 23% from 13%.

The decline in Mr. Trump’s standing among GOP voters follows midterm election losses that some in the party have attributed to his significant involvement in candidate endorsements and promotion during the primary process.

Democrats had a net gain of two governorships and one Senate seat, while limiting their House losses to single digits, despite high inflation and with an unpopular president leading their party. The result bucked a historical pattern in which the party that holds the White House almost always suffers a double-digit loss of seats in the House during a president’s first term.

Mr. Trump is the only Republican who has announced a 2024 presidential bid, although others are expected to do so in the coming months. If Mr. DeSantis decides to run, aides have said he isn’t likely to announce a White House campaign until after Florida’s legislative session ends in May.

Mr. DeSantis has become a formidable force in politics, winning a second term last month in a landslide—by 19 percentage points—reflecting big gains in support in Florida since his first election, by less than half a percentage point, to the governor’s office in 2018...

 

Political Demonstrations in Open-Carry States Favor Right-Wing Viewpoints

Seems like an obvious point, since open-carry states are more likely to lean right than non-open carry states, so the New York Times has got something of a tautology going on here.

But in any case, here, "At Protests, Guns Are Doing the Talking":

Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense — increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one’s voice and, just as often, quieting someone else’s.

This month, armed protesters appeared outside an elections center in Phoenix, hurling baseless accusations that the election for governor had been stolen from the Republican, Kari Lake. In October, Proud Boys with guns joined a rally in Nashville where conservative lawmakers spoke against transgender medical treatments for minors.

In June, armed demonstrations around the United States amounted to nearly one a day. A group led by a former Republican state legislator protested a gay pride event in a public park in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Men with guns interrupted a Juneteenth festival in Franklin, Tenn., handing out fliers claiming that white people were being replaced. Among the others were rallies in support of gun rights in Delaware and abortion rights in Georgia.

Whether at the local library, in a park or on Main Street, most of these incidents happen where Republicans have fought to expand the ability to bear arms in public, a movement bolstered by a recent Supreme Court ruling on the right to carry firearms outside the home. The loosening of limits has occurred as violent political rhetoric rises and the police in some places fear bloodshed among an armed populace on a hair trigger.

But the effects of more guns in public spaces have not been evenly felt. A partisan divide — with Democrats largely eschewing firearms and Republicans embracing them — has warped civic discourse. Deploying the Second Amendment in service of the First has become a way to buttress a policy argument, a sort of silent, if intimidating, bullhorn.

“It’s disappointing we’ve gotten to that state in our country,” said Kevin Thompson, executive director of the Museum of Science & History in Memphis, Tenn., where armed protesters led to the cancellation of an L.G.B.T.Q. event in September. “What I saw was a group of folks who did not want to engage in any sort of dialogue and just wanted to impose their belief.”

A New York Times analysis of more than 700 armed demonstrations found that, at about 77 percent of them, people openly carrying guns represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.

The records, from January 2020 to last week, were compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a nonprofit that tracks political violence around the world. The Times also interviewed witnesses to other, smaller-scale incidents not captured by the data, including encounters with armed people at indoor public meetings.

Anti-government militias and right-wing culture warriors like the Proud Boys attended a majority of the protests, the data showed. Violence broke out at more than 100 events and often involved fisticuffs with opposing groups, including left-wing activists such as antifa

Republican politicians are generally more tolerant of openly armed supporters than are Democrats, who are more likely to be on the opposing side of people with guns, the records suggest. In July, for example, men wearing sidearms confronted Beto O’Rourke, then the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, at a campaign stop in Whitesboro and warned that he was “not welcome in this town.”

Republican officials or candidates appeared at 32 protests where they were on the same side as those with guns. Democratic politicians were identified at only two protests taking the same view as those armed.

Sometimes, the Republican officials carried weapons: Robert Sutherland, a Washington state representative, wore a pistol on his hip while protesting Covid-19 restrictions in Olympia in 2020. “Governor,” he said, speaking to a crowd, “you send men with guns after us for going fishing. We’ll see what a revolution looks like.”

The occasional appearance of armed civilians at demonstrations or governmental functions is not new. In the 1960s, the Black Panthers displayed guns in public when protesting police brutality. Militia groups, sometimes armed, rallied against federal agents involved in violent standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco in the 1990s.

But the frequency of these incidents exploded in 2020, with conservative pushback against public health measures to fight the coronavirus and response to the sometimes violent rallies after the murder of George Floyd. Today, in some parts of the country with permissive gun laws, it is not unusual to see people with handguns or military-style rifles at all types of protests.

For instance, at least 14 such incidents have occurred in and around Dallas and Phoenix since May, including outside an F.B.I. field office to condemn the search of Mr. Trump’s home and, elsewhere, in support of abortion rights. In New York and Washington, where gun laws are strict, there were no

Many conservatives and gun-rights advocates envision virtually no limits. When Democrats in Colorado and Washington State passed laws this year prohibiting firearms at polling places and government meetings, Republicans voted against them. Indeed, those bills were the exception.

Attempts by Democrats to impose limits in other states have mostly failed, and some form of open carry without a permit is now legal in 38 states, a number that is likely to expand as legislation advances in several more. In Michigan, where a Tea Party group recently advertised poll-watcher training using a photo of armed men in camouflage, judges have rejected efforts to prohibit guns at voting locations.

Gun rights advocates assert that banning guns from protests would violate the right to carry firearms for self-defense. Jordan Stein, a spokesman for Gun Owners of America, pointed to Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager acquitted last year in the shooting of three people during a chaotic demonstration in Kenosha, Wis., where he had walked the streets with a military-style rifle.

“At a time when protests often devolve into riots, honest people need a means to protect themselves,” he said.

Control of Congress Comes Down to California

Basically. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "‘It will absolutely come down to California’: Control of the House hinges on 9 state races."

The Normie Center Strikes Back

Do what you will with this.

From Andrew Sullivan, "Democracy works, survives, and can surprise us (including me). A great night":

Let’s first herald the truly good news. Democracy surprised almost all of us, as it sometimes does. It made some of us look a bit foolish (more on that in a bit). It defied most predictions and historic analogies. The election ended up with a super-close race for both House and Senate — highly unusual for a midterm when inflation is soaring and most people are super bummed about the country.

More good news: Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” failed to materialize in Georgia. And most important of all: there are (currently) no widespread allegations of fraud or illegitimacy, despite many close races; and the candidates who made election denial their platform lost decisively. The thumping defeat of nutjob Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and the way he helped drag down other Republican candidates in the states — is just fantastic. According to the exit polls, “79 percent said they were very (47 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) confident that elections in their state were being conducted fairly and accurately.” Huge and encouraging news.

And it behooves me to note that Biden’s speech on democracy last week was in retrospect right in its priorities. Voters are worried about democracy’s survival and Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest obviously worked with some, including Republicans. Voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s record nonetheless broke for the Dems when the alternative was a MAGA loony.

Yes, as I anticipated, there was pushback to Democratic extremism. Republicans look set to win the popular vote overall. Where CRT was on the ballot — in school board races, where it belongs — it lost badly everywhere. The Latino vote kept trending GOP, making even Miami-Dade a Republican bastion. In New York City especially, Asian-Americans’ support for the GOP soared. We even have the first openly gay MAGA congressman. The Squad members of Congress all saw their support slide in their safe districts.

On the “LGBTQIA+” question, “26 percent said our society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better, 50 percent for the worse.” That’s a huge backlash against “queer” and trans extremism, and it’s hurting gays and lesbians. And in the face of media insistence that America is an objectively white supremacist country, 45 percent said racism was either not a problem at all or a minor one. (Fifty-three percent said major.)

This is striking: around a third of non-white, non-college voters went Republican. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans went from 77 percent Democrat in 2018 to around 60 percent now. Latinos went from 70 to 60. (One irony is that Republicans gained many minority votes in solid red states, which didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome, but bolsters their raw numbers.)

But these trends were overwhelmed by other issues, and did not amount to the kind of decisive rejection of Democratic leftism I favored and suspected would happen. I was wrong. I remain convinced that wokeness is terribly destructive to liberal society, but my obsessions are obviously not everyone’s. And my fault was in not seeing how MAGA extremism — the sheer anti-democratic crazy of the GOP — was seen by independent voters as far more dangerous than the crazy left. I actually agree — see this recent piece, for example — and if I didn’t live in a super-blue city, I might have felt differently about my protest vote. But from the broadest perspective, I was simply wrong to emphasize the impact of the far left as much as I have. You’ve told me this many times. I should have listened more, and I will.

Let’s first herald the truly good news. Democracy surprised almost all of us, as it sometimes does. It made some of us look a bit foolish (more on that in a bit). It defied most predictions and historic analogies. The election ended up with a super-close race for both House and Senate — highly unusual for a midterm when inflation is soaring and most people are super bummed about the country.

More good news: Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” failed to materialize in Georgia. And most important of all: there are (currently) no widespread allegations of fraud or illegitimacy, despite many close races; and the candidates who made election denial their platform lost decisively. The thumping defeat of nutjob Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and the way he helped drag down other Republican candidates in the states — is just fantastic. According to the exit polls, “79 percent said they were very (47 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) confident that elections in their state were being conducted fairly and accurately.” Huge and encouraging news.

And it behooves me to note that Biden’s speech on democracy last week was in retrospect right in its priorities. Voters are worried about democracy’s survival and Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest obviously worked with some, including Republicans. Voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s record nonetheless broke for the Dems when the alternative was a MAGA loony.

Yes, as I anticipated, there was pushback to Democratic extremism. Republicans look set to win the popular vote overall. Where CRT was on the ballot — in school board races, where it belongs — it lost badly everywhere. The Latino vote kept trending GOP, making even Miami-Dade a Republican bastion. In New York City especially, Asian-Americans’ support for the GOP soared. We even have the first openly gay MAGA congressman. The Squad members of Congress all saw their support slide in their safe districts.

On the “LGBTQIA+” question, “26 percent said our society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better, 50 percent for the worse.” That’s a huge backlash against “queer” and trans extremism, and it’s hurting gays and lesbians. And in the face of media insistence that America is an objectively white supremacist country, 45 percent said racism was either not a problem at all or a minor one. (Fifty-three percent said major.)

This is striking: around a third of non-white, non-college voters went Republican. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans went from 77 percent Democrat in 2018 to around 60 percent now. Latinos went from 70 to 60. (One irony is that Republicans gained many minority votes in solid red states, which didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome, but bolsters their raw numbers.)

But these trends were overwhelmed by other issues, and did not amount to the kind of decisive rejection of Democratic leftism I favored and suspected would happen. I was wrong. I remain convinced that wokeness is terribly destructive to liberal society, but my obsessions are obviously not everyone’s. And my fault was in not seeing how MAGA extremism — the sheer anti-democratic crazy of the GOP — was seen by independent voters as far more dangerous than the crazy left. I actually agree — see this recent piece, for example — and if I didn’t live in a super-blue city, I might have felt differently about my protest vote. But from the broadest perspective, I was simply wrong to emphasize the impact of the far left as much as I have. You’ve told me this many times. I should have listened more, and I will...

 

After Midterm Election Disappointment, GOP Faces Leadership Choices

McConnell might be out.

At WSJ, "Trump is set to launch another presidential bid as party considers McCarthy’s and McConnell’s roles on Capitol Hill":

WASHINGTON—Republicans face a week that will be crucial in deciding the future direction and leadership of the party in the wake of disappointing midterm elections.

Former President Donald Trump is expected to announce another bid for the White House at 9 p.m. Tuesday in Palm Beach, Fla. House Republicans are scheduled to vote the same day on whether to choose House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) as their candidate for speaker. Some Senate Republicans are pushing to delay beyond this week a decision on whether to hand Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) another term as their leader.

Those moves will come after elections that many Republicans believed would deliver the party a sizable majority in the House and control of the Senate. Instead, they failed to capture the Senate majority and appear headed for only a slim edge in the House.

Some Republicans contend that Mr. Trump’s influence and endorsement choices cost the party winnable races in key states, partly by repelling some independent voters. Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, a Republican who previously supported Mr. Trump, said on Fox Business that she couldn’t do so again after the midterm results.

“The voters have spoken, and they’ve said that they want a different leader,” she said. “And a true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage.”

In response, a spokesman for Mr. Trump said: “Winsome Sears rode a wave of President Trump’s voters to election victory in 2021. Her comments are a slap to the face to all of the grass-roots Republicans that worked so hard to get her elected. They won’t forget this, and there will be a reckoning.” ...

A reckoning? Or a crackup? 

Stay tuned. Trump's expected announce his 2024 presidential bid on Tuesday.

More at the link.

 

American Politics Is Being Shaped by the AWFLs (Affluent White Liberal Feminists)

From Mary Harrington, at UnHerd, "A sex war is coming":

“Gas prices? They’ll go down. But sure, tell me more about how you want the government to tell me what to do with my body.” So writes one liberal feminist on Twitter, following it up with: “Republicans suck. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to hear your side. I don’t care. Y’all are bad people.”

If 21st-century politics is shaping up as class war, the American midterm elections have concretised a troubling facet of this political landscape: this class war is also a sex war.

Writing about the dynamic as a feminist is uncomfortable in the extreme because it’s difficult to do so without being accused of misogyny. This is not least because among the very online Right, there really is more than a tinge of misogyny to the term most commonly used to denote progressive-leaning Virtual women: AWFLs.

Coined by Right-wing commentator Scott Greer, AWFL stands for “affluent white female liberals”, and generally connotes not just the demographic but its perceived characteristic worldview — a mixture of progressive moral piety, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and unexamined class snobbery.

Whether or not you agree with this hostile evaluation, the AWFL class has been growing in relative power and influence for some decades. This is for wholly non-conspiratorial reasons: very simply, technological advancements have delivered new opportunities for well-qualified knowledge workers of both sexes, even as the same changes have automated and de-industrialised away the physically more arduous work previously performed mostly by working-class men. This virtualisation of work has, overall, benefited women much more than men.

Accordingly, women have seized the opportunity. American colleges have been majority-female since the late Seventies, and today, women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most colleges, with the disparity as large as 60%-40% in some elite institutions. And this has turned out a steadily compounding supermajority of knowledge-class women, which forms an increasingly heavy-hitting part of the rising Virtual elite.

The gradual extension of ever more spheres of work to relatively equal participation is, to a great extent, an effect of the transition away from physical toward knowledge work — but is routinely framed as “progress” in an abstract sense. In suggesting a more material interpretation of this change, I’m not making the opposite argument, that this represents decline. More women in public life is not in itself a bad thing, unless you really are a misogynist. But as female graduates have embraced professional life across knowledge-economy and bureaucratic roles, and their influence has compounded over time, this shift has redrawn the political map in important ways — not least by tilting visible public discourse Left, in ways that only ambivalently reflect the electorate overall.

At undergraduate level, women are especially heavily represented among arts and social sciences courses – topics so overwhelmingly progressive that only 9% of undergraduates vote Republican. These overwhelmingly Left-wing female graduates then cluster in the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms, such as education, media, and HR. In American nonprofits, for example, 75% are female, while HR, the division of corporate life most concerned with managing the moral parameters of everyday working life, is two-thirds female.

And those progressive graduate women who aren’t busy shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments are busy doing so for the next generation in schools: 76% of American teachers are women. Inevitably, given that all US states require teachers to hold at least a bachelor’s degree, these are also uniformly drawn from the female demographic most likely to be very liberal.

When Meghan McCain’s husband talked about how the Democrats will soon be dominated by “millennial girlboss energy” types and described the prospect as “crazytown”, progressive firebrand Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was strictly correct to point out that women make up less than a third of the Senate, and millennials only 7%. But this is to miss the point.

The AWFL demographic, relatively underrepresented in the Senate, is overrepresented across media, journalism, nonprofits, HR departments, academia, and school teachers. Their views can expect enthusiastic signal-boosting and institutional support from such bodies. They’re also the demographic most overwhelmingly likely to vote Democrat. No wonder their political priorities increasingly shape Democratic political platforms: their high visibility makes it easy to mistake them for the entirety of the Left.

Even the staunchly liberal New Yorker has worried recently that this constitutes a blind spot, while the far-Left Jacobin described the emphasis of New York’s Kathy Hochul on abortion rather than inflation as “girlboss politics”. Much was made of a WSJ poll last week, that suggested, albeit based on a small sample, that even white suburban women (an affluent demographic that overlaps with the derisive “AWFL” designation) were swinging against the Democrats based on economic concerns.

But results so far suggest that this swing, if it’s come at all, has been muted. And perhaps this makes sense. For the changing nature of work isn’t the only way this political bloc relies on technology for its ascendancy...

 

How the 2022 Midterms Became a Squeaker

At the New York Times, "Interviews with more than 70 current and former officials show the outside forces — and miscalculations and infighting — that led to an improbable, still-undecided election":

Late one mid-September evening, the leaders of the House Democratic campaign arm were in the middle of a marathon meeting, grappling with an increasingly hostile midterm landscape. Two choices were on the table: a more defensive posture to limit their losses in the face of a potential red wave or a more aggressive approach in hopes of saving their paper-thin majority.

Leftover Chinese food was strewn about. The hour approached midnight. The decision was made. They would go all in for the majority — the pundits, polling and punishing political environment be damned. Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the group, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, walked to the whiteboard and scrawled a single word.

BELIEVE.

The man who made that Ted Lasso-style exhortation went down to defeat on Tuesday. And Democrats are still facing the likelihood of ceding control of the House of Representatives to Republicans, no matter their morale-building exercises.

Yet Democrats turned in the strongest midterm showing in two decades for a party holding the White House, keeping the House on such a razor’s edge that control is still up for grabs days after the polls closed. In the Senate, Democrats have a path not only to keeping power but even to expanding their majority if the remaining races go their way, including a Georgia runoff. And the party won several key governorships, too.

The breadth of success caught even the most optimistic corners of the party by surprise. House Republicans had planned a big victory party on Tuesday, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi was hunkered down behind closed doors at a Democratic headquarters.

All the conditions appeared to have been set for a Democratic wipeout: inflation at 40-year highs, concerns about crime, elevated gas prices, the typical thrust for change.

How the midterms turned out so improbably was, in many ways, a function of forces beyond Democrats’ control. A Supreme Court decision that stripped away a half-century of abortion rights galvanized their base. A polarizing, unpopular and ever-present former president, Donald J. Trump, provided the type of ready-made foil whom White Houses rarely enjoy.

But interviews with more than 70 people — party strategists, lawmakers and current and former White House officials — also revealed crucial tactical decisions, strategic miscalculations, misreading of polls, infighting and behind-the-scenes maneuvering in both parties that led the G.O.P. to blow its chance at a blowout...

Keep reading.

 

Why Independent Voters Broke for Democrats in the Midterms

Trump's radioactive, it turns out. 

If he's not now, we'll know for sure after he makes his big announcement on November 15th. See how the Democrat Media Complex responds to that.

At the Wall Street Journal, "GOP candidates closely aligned with Trump turned off some centrists and in-play Republicans":

Lisa Ghelfi, a 58-year-old registered Republican in Arizona, voted for Donald Trump for president two years ago but has grown tired of his election-fraud claims. It is the main reason she voted for Democrats for governor, senator, secretary of state and attorney general this fall and plans to change her registration to independent.

“Not allowing the election to be settled, it’s very divisive,” Ms. Ghelfi, a semiretired attorney from Paradise Valley, said of the 2020 race. “I think the election spoke for itself.” She said she voted for Republicans down-ballot who weren’t as vocal about election fraud or as closely tied to Mr. Trump, yet couldn’t support Arizona’s four major Republican candidates because they echoed Mr. Trump’s false claims.

Republicans succeeded in one of their top goals this year: They brought more of their party’s voters to the polls than did Democrats. But in the course of energizing their core voters, Republicans in many states lost voters in the political center—both independents and many Republicans who are uneasy with elements of the party’s focus under Mr. Trump.

Control of the House and Senate, which had seemed poised to land with the Republican Party, is coming down to a handful of races that so far are too close to call, though the GOP remains on track to winning a narrow majority in the House. Republicans have won nearly 5.5 million more votes in House races than have Democrats, a tally by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report finds, as many voters were motivated by anxiety over high inflation and a low opinion of President Biden’s response.

At the same time, Republican analysts said their unexpectedly weak showing in the election indicated that they had failed to press hard enough on those issues. In Michigan, the Republican Party’s state committee said a failure to talk to voters in the political center was a central reason that Tudor Dixon, the party’s Trump-endorsed nominee for governor, was crushed in a 10 percentage point defeat by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“Tudor’s efforts focused largely on Republican red-meat issues, in hopes of inspiring a 2020-like showing at the polls,” a memo from the GOP committee said. “There were more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread-and-butter issues that could have swayed independent voters.”

More than 30% of the midterm voter pool, by one measure, were independent voters, or people who don’t affiliate with either political party. David Winston, a Republican pollster who consults with the party’s House and Senate leadership, said polling showed that they were unhappy with the country’s direction and assigned blame for high inflation to President Biden.

“So, the door was open for Republicans to have a good interaction,” Mr. Winston said. “If everyone was focused on turnout of their base, they missed almost a third of the electorate—and basically the third of the electorate that’s in play.”

Mike Cernovich, a conservative blogger and supporter of Mr. Trump, said in an online analysis of the election outcome, “I would say the single biggest issue was, if your focus in 2022 was the 2020 election, then you were going to have a bad night with independents.”

Nationally, Republican candidates this year had the advantage of a favorable voter mix. Some 49% of midterm voters were Republicans, and 43% were Democrats, a 6-point GOP advantage, AP VoteCast, a large survey of the midterm electorate, found.

The GOP edge was similar or larger in states with competitive Senate races: 5 points in Pennsylvania, 8 points in Georgia and 11 points in Arizona. Despite those advantages, Republicans lost the Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona and will compete again in Georgia, where the race goes to a runoff next month.

Undercutting the GOP advantage was that independents favored Democrats by 4 points nationally, the survey found, and by a far more substantial 18 points in Pennsylvania, 28 points in Georgia and more than 30 points in Arizona.

Polling shows that independent voters have little enthusiasm for either party. Both parties were viewed favorably by less than 30% of independents and unfavorably by 50% or more, the AP VoteCast survey found.

“It’s picking the lesser of two evils sometimes,” said Micki LePla, 65, a retired respiratory therapist near Port Huron, Mich., who backed Ms. Whitmer for governor...

Trumpism Is Toxic

From Tim Alberta, at the Atlantic, "And three other lessons of the midterm elections":

The Republican Party swaggered into Tuesday’s midterm elections with full confidence that it would clobber President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party, capitalizing on voters’ concerns over inflation and the economy to retake majorities in both chambers of Congress. The question, party officials believed, was one only of scale: Would it be a red wave, or a red tsunami?

The answer, it turns out, is neither.

As of this morning, Republicans had yet to secure a majority in either the House or the Senate. Across the country, Democrats won races that many in the party expected to lose. Millions of votes are still to be counted, particularly in western states, but this much is clear: Even if Republicans eke out narrow congressional majorities, 2022 will be remembered as a triumph for Democrats, easily the best midterm cycle for an incumbent president’s party since 2002, when the country rallied around George W. Bush and his GOP in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Given the tailwinds they rode into Election Day—a fragile economic outlook, an unpopular president, a pervasive sense that our democracy is dysfunctional—Republicans spent yesterday trying to make sense of how things went so wrong. There was a particular focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three battleground states that went from red to blue on Election Day 2020, and states where Democrats won major victories on Tuesday.

Based on my reporting throughout the year, as well as data from Tuesday’s exit polling and conversations with Republican officials in the immediate aftermath of Election Day, here are four lessons I believe the party must learn before the next election in 2024...

Still more.

Red States Are Growing, While Blue States Are Mired in Decline

From Joel Kotkin, at Spiked, "A tale of two Americas: Red states are growing, while blue states are mired in lawlessness and decline":

Yesterday’s Midterms were not a victory for conservative or progressive ideology, but an assertion of the growing power of geography in American politics. It was less a national election than a clash of civilisations. Virtually nowhere in blue areas did Republicans make gains. Both the north-east and California – the central players in Democratic Party politics – stayed solidly blue. Even the most well-regarded GOP candidates, such as Lanhee Chen who ran for California state controller, struggled to make inroads in Democratic territory.

Meanwhile, the senators and governors of the leading red states – Texas’s Greg Abbott, Georgia’s Brian Kemp, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Ohio’s Mike DeWine – all won handily. Almost all blue-state governors remained the same as well, although the Democratic incumbents often won by smaller margins.

So, what is happening in this increasingly inexplicable country? Essentially, there are now two prevailing realities in the US. One is primarily urban, single and, despite some GOP gains in this demographic, still largely non-white. It functions on the backs of finance, tech and the service industries. The other is largely suburban or exurban, family centric and more likely involved in basic industries like manufacturing, logistics, agriculture and energy.

Usually, the media assume these two Americas represent equally viable political economies. But this is increasingly not the case. In population terms at least, red America is now growing far more rapidly than blue America. And this makes it more important politically. Since 1990, Texas has gained eight congressional seats, Florida five and Arizona three. In contrast, New York has lost five, Pennsylvania four and Illinois three. California, which now suffers higher net outbound-migration rates than most Rustbelt states, lost a congressional seat in 2020 for the first time in its history.

This decline in blue America has accelerated since the pandemic, due to rising crime and the availability of remote work...

Keep reading.