Most Americans Are Ready-- Eager-- To Vomit On Trump's Grave

Some of the best members of Congress are freshmen who were elected in 2018-- AOC (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Rashida Tlaib (MI), Ayanna Pressley (MA), Andy Levin (MI), Joe Neguse (CO), Chuy Garcia (IL), Veronica Escobar (TX), Sylvia Garcia, Debra Haaland. Those 10 are the only freshmen whose voting records have earned them "A" grades from ProgressivePunch.

Last cycle, Democrats netted 41 House seats but none of those 10 listed above are included in that count. Each of them won a blue seat that had already been occupied by a Democrat. And, with the exception of Andy Levin's suburban Oakland and Macomb counties district, each is overwhelmingly urban. The story of the media emphasizes about the 2018 election is that the action was flipping suburban districts from red to blue. Unfortunately pretty much all of those Democrats in flipped suburban districts turned out to be conservatives or, at best, "moderates." They're not for-- or not willing to go out on a perceived limb for-- peace, economic equality, real reform or anything else that drove voters to the polls for in 2018.

Most disappointing of all are the 9 freshmen who joined the right-wing, corporately-funded Blue Dogs-- Joe Cunningham (SC), Jared Golden (ME), Kendra Horn (OK), Ben McAdams (UT), Max Rose (NY), Anthony Brindisi (NY), Mikie Sherrill (NJ), Abigail Spanberger (VA) and Xochitl Torres Small (NM). Each has a record rated "F" by Progressive Punch. They represent a combination of urban, suburban and rural districts. And they are hardly the only freshmen with "F"-rated voting records. These are the members of the class of 2018 who did NOT earn "A" ratings:

• Mary Gay Scanlon (PA-05)- B (suburban)
• Madeleine Dean (PA-04)- B (suburban)
• Jahana Hayes (CT-05)- B (suburban)
• Donna Shalala (FL-27)- C
• Mike Levin (CA-49)- C (suburban)
• Sean Casten (IL-06)- C (suburban)
• Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (FL-26)- C
• Chris Pappas (NH-01)- C
• Greg Stanton (AZ-09)- D
• David Trone (MD-06)- D (suburban)
• Jennifer Wexton (VA-10)- F (suburban)
• Steven Horsford (NV-04)- F (suburban)
• Tom Malinowski (NJ-07)- F (suburban)
• Lizzie Fletcher (TX-07)- F (suburban)
• Dean Phillips (MN-03)- F (suburban)
• Haley Stevens (MI-11)- F (suburban)
• Colin Allred (TX-32)- F (suburban)
• Kim Schrier (WA-08)- F (suburban)
• Gil Cisneros (CA-39)- F (suburban)
• Lauren Underwood (IL-14)- F (suburban)
• Sharice Davids (KS-03)- F
• Harley Rouda (CA-48)- F (suburban)
• T.J. Cox (CA-21)- F
• Susan Wild (PA-07)- F (suburban)
• Josh Harder (CA-10)- F (suburban)
• Susie Lee (NV-03)- F (suburban)
• Lucy McBath (GA-06)- F (suburban)
• Antonio Delgado (NY-19)- F (suburban)
• Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06)- F (suburban)
• Andy Kim (NJ-03)- F (suburban)
• Katie Porter (CA-45)- F (suburban)
• Max Rose (NY-11)- F
• Mikie Sherrill (NJ-11)- F (suburban)
• Angie Craig (MN-02)- F (suburban)

[all the members below this line vote more frequently-- like below 50%-- against progressive substantive roll calls than for them]

• Elissa Slotkin (MI-08)- F (suburban)
• Xochitl Torres Small (NM-02)- F
• Abby Finkenauer (IA-01)- F
• Elaine Luria (VA-02)- F
• Cindy Axne (IA-03)- F
• Jared Golden (ME-02)- F
• Ben McAdams (UT-04)- F (suburban)
• Kendra Horn (OK-05)- F
• Abigail Spanberger (VA-07)- F (suburban)
• Anthony Brindisi (NY-22)- F
• Joe Cunningham (SC-01)- F

Trump's niece, Mary Trump, recounted in her book, Too Much And Never Enough, how Trump paid someone to take his SATs so he could get into college, a fairly easy college to get into. She also noted that "Honest work was never demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable. He continues to be protected from his own disasters in the White House." Some low-achievers-- say in Mississippi or Wyoming-- might think that was a smart move. Well-educated college graduates in the suburbs are not likely react the same way and that anecdote isn't likely to endear Trump to them.

Ron Brownstein's a good reporter with interesting insights but when he writes about electoral politics, it's a Democrat vs Republican thing, not a progressive vs reactionary thing or a reformer vs corrupt sack-of-shit thing. And his CNN.com post yesterday was all about how the massive anti-Trump wave is headed towards more suburban districts held by Republicans that remained after the 2018 wave. He sees it as well-educated votes in the 'burbs turning against the Trump and his congressional enablers. He wrote that "In 2018, a suburban revolt against Trump powered Democrats to sweeping gains in white-collar House districts from coast to coast. The backlash left the GOP holding only about one-fourth of all House districts that have more college graduates than the national average, down from more than two-fifths before the election... Now, recent national and district-level polls signal that many of the well-educated voters souring on Trump are also displaying more resistance to Republican congressional candidates than in 2018-- potentially much more. That movement could frustrate GOP hopes of dislodging many of the first-term House Democrats who captured previously Republican suburban seats in 2018. It also means Democrats see further opportunities in white-collar House districts-- from Pennsylvania and Georgia to Indiana and especially Texas-- where the GOP held off the 2018 suburban tide, often only by narrow margins."

"The suburban exodus has continued, and my gut is as long as Trump is identified as the leader of the party, that continues," says former Republican Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Even if Trump's strength outside the metro areas allows the GOP to recapture some of the non-urban seats Democrats won last time, Davis warns, further suburban losses could still leave the party in a deeper hole after November.

"You can't afford that," says Davis... "[Suburbia] was the base of the Republican Party just a decade and a half ago. And there just aren't enough rural voters to make up for those kind of losses. It means for the Republicans that instead of picking up seats in the House, that the bleeding could continue."

...Public polling this spring consistently showed Trump and the GOP facing grim numbers with well-educated voters. National surveys released in the past few weeks by Monmouth University, the Pew Research Center and CNN all showed Trump's approval rating among White voters with at least a four-year college education sinking to 33% or less, with at least 64% disapproving.

By comparison, even during the 2018 Democratic sweep, exit polls found that 38% of college-educated White voters approved of Trump's job performance, according to results provided by Edison Research, which conducts the exit polls for a consortium of news organizations that includes CNN.

That decline contrasted with Trump's showing among minorities in the new CNN and Monmouth polls, which found the President's approval rating with voters of color was almost exactly the same as in the 2018 exit poll, just over 1-in-4 in each case.

...The Monmouth and CNN polls and a national New York Times/Siena College survey all found Biden leading Trump among well-educated White voters by about 30 percentage points, a much bigger advantage than any data source on the 2016 results recorded for Clinton. (The exit polls showed Trump narrowly carrying those college-plus White voters.)

Critically, some of the recent public surveys found that weakness trickling down to GOP congressional candidates. In last week's Monmouth survey, college-educated White voters preferred Democrats over Republicans in House races by a resounding 59% to 36%.

If that disparity held through November, it would represent a huge deterioration for Republicans since 2018, when the exit polls showed Democratic House candidates nationwide carrying those voters by 8 percentage points, about one-third as much. (That came after the exit polls made a methodology change that analysts believe provided a more accurate estimate of the vote among college- and non-college Whites than in previous years.)

Even the more modest swing among well-educated voters that exit polls recorded in 2018 was sufficient to fundamentally reconfigure the House battlefield. The Democratic wave that year crested highest in well-educated and often racially diverse urban and suburban districts. Before that election, Republicans held 43% of the House districts where the share of people 25 and older with at least a four-year college degree exceeded the national average, according to a CNN analysis of the 2018 results.

But now Republicans hold only 23% of such seats, according to a new analysis of results from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey conducted by CNN senior visual editor Janie Boschma. In all, Democrats control 135 of the House districts with higher-than-average college education levels, while Republicans hold just 41. (Those numbers reflect the new district lines drawn under court order in Pennsylvania, but not the new lines that state courts have approved in North Carolina.)

Many of the top Democratic House targets for November are within those remaining 41 Republican districts with more college graduates than average, including incumbent Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, Ann Wagner in Missouri, Chip Roy in Austin, Don Bacon in Nebraska, David Schweikert in Arizona and Steve Chabot in Ohio, as well as opportunities in open seats around Indianapolis, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and Raleigh, North Carolina. Several more potentially vulnerable GOP seats (including those held by incumbent Reps. Rodney Davis in Illinois, John Katko in New York and Scott Perry in Pennsylvania) come in just below the average education line.

The flip side is also true: Many of the Democrats elected in 2018 who Republicans most hope to oust hold seats in districts with many more college graduates than average, including Reps. Lizzie Fletcher and Colin Allred in Texas, Sharice Davids in Kansas, Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens in Michigan, Lucy McBath in Georgia, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, Tom Malinowski in New Jersey and all the newly elected Democrats from Orange County, California.

In 2016, when exit polls showed Trump running more competitively among college-educated White voters, he won many of the white-collar districts on both lists. With far fewer voters than in earlier generations splitting their tickets between presidential and House candidates, the outcome in many of them may be tipped by whether he does so again.

Perhaps the best test of Trump's standing in white-collar districts will come in Texas, which Republicans have dominated since the early 1990s. Even in 2016, the state was only marginally competitive, with Trump beating Clinton there by 9 percentage points or nearly 800,000 votes. But in 2018, Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke rode a surge of support in Texas' big metropolitan areas-- he won its five largest counties by about six times as much as Barack Obama did in 2012-- to hold Republican Sen. Ted Cruz to a victory of only about 2.5 percentage points. Democrats rode O'Rourke's strong performance to sweeping gains in state legislative and local elections across urban and suburban areas, as well as the election of Fletcher and Allred.

"In Texas, the Democrats performed about as well in the suburbs in 2018 as they've done in 20 or 25 years," says Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant and GOP chair in Travis County (Austin).

Trump's increasingly polarizing strategy for reelection helps explain why many strategists in both parties believe it will be difficult for as many House candidates as in the past to win in districts that vote for the other party in the presidential contest. That may help Republican challengers against Democratic incumbents in blue-collar and rural districts where Trump has been stronger, such as Reps. Collin Peterson in Minnesota, Jared Golden in Maine and Abby Finkenauer in Iowa. But it looms as a huge challenge for the GOP in these suburban areas.

Carlos Curbelo, a former GOP representative who lost his urban Miami district during the 2018 Democratic sweep, agrees it will be tough for the party's candidates to escape the undertow if Trump doesn't improve his position in those places.

"It's almost impossible," he says. "All candidates [are] encouraged to run their own races and maneuver however it is they need to in order to win. But with this heavy overlay, it's very difficult. The space in which to maneuver is very tight."

Like the NRCC's Salera, GOP consultant Mackowiak says he believes Trump will perform better in these suburban districts than the party did in 2018. While Mackowiak believes that "if it's a referendum on Trump he's going to get killed in the suburbs," he maintains the President can win back previously red-leaning college-educated voters by tying Biden and Democratic House candidates to liberal ideas such as the Green New Deal and single-payer health care that might advance under unified Democratic control of government.

Still, Mackowiak acknowledges that if 2020 produces an electoral divide in Texas similar to the one in the 2018 Senate race-- with Trump holding the state by maximizing rural turnout while suffering huge losses in the big metro areas-- it will "be a category five political hurricane" for local Republicans.

"The state House will be gone," he said. "We will lose three or four congressional seats. That's an unthinkable scenario."

Yet many observers in both parties believe that's exactly what the November election may produce in virtually every state: a widening trench between the preponderantly White small-town and rural areas that remain bonded to Trump and a deepening recoil from him in the diverse and well-educated urban and suburban population centers.

Trump may be comfortable with that trade since he is trying only to finesse one more Electoral College victory even if he loses the popular vote again. But many Republicans say Trump's vision of squeezing bigger margins out of shrinking places at the cost of generating more resistance in communities that are growing is a losing long-term trajectory for the party. Nowhere is that more true than in the battle for control of the US House.

"It's a strategy that is divorced from the reality of the country," says Curbelo. "And there are Republican leaders in both chambers who are aware of this. This is not an important [consideration in] the President's strategy because in his team's mind they only have to win one more election. But for everyone else it's a longer-term game. A lot of Republicans have been willing to be shortsighted and taken what they can get from the Trump era. But ultimately they know this is not the future of the party."

"Shooting rubber bullet grenades at protesting priests. Catastrophically botching the pandemic response, resulting in a public health and economic calamity. Tweeting 'white power' memes. Ranting in front of empty arenas about how he navigated a 'slippery ramp.' Being MIA while his Russian benefactors put out a hit on American soldiers in Afghanistan. The last 3 months have been a political dumpster fire, for President Trump," wrote Tim Miller at Rolling Stone this week, "and the flames have engulfed Republicans up and down the ballot." Miller, a #NeverTrump Republican, spoke with 9 GOP political operatives to find out how they perceive Trump's performance impacting their candidates. "Are there discussions," he asked, "about either storming the cockpit or gently trying to #WalkAway from Trump? And finally, why in the hell aren’t they more pissed at this incompetent asshole who is fucking up their life?"

What I found in their answers was one part Stockholm Syndrome, one part survival instinct. They all may not love the president, but most share his loathing for his enemies on the left, in the media, and the apostate Never Trump Republicans with a passion that engenders an alliance with the president, if not a kinship. And even among those who don’t share the tribalistic hatreds, they perceive a political reality driven by base voters and the president’s shitposting that simply does not allow for dissent.

As one put it: “There are two options, you can be on this hell ship or you can be in the water drowning.”

So I give you the view from the U.S.S Hellship, first the political state of play, and then the psychological.

The Politics
The impact of Trump’s disastrous 3 months on down ballot candidates was best summed up in the first text message I got back.

“Could you use a poop emoji for my comments?”

The assessment was excreta across the board.

• “Every shred of evidence points to a likely ass kicking in the fall.”
• “Well it’s as bad as it gets right now.”
• “Right now most campaigns are thanking baby jesus every day the election isn’t held today.”
• “I’ve got Trump down in Texas. [Republican Senator Steve] Daines down in Montana.”
• “It’s certainly better than public polling, but it’s not good.”
• “I told very high ranking people in the Trump Administration that it hasn’t been like this since October of 06”-- when President Bush’s numbers were tanking over fallout from the Iraq War, Katrina, and the Mark Foley scandal.

But in 2006, Republican candidates could strategically distance themselves from an unpopular president without facing a mutiny within the ranks. That won’t work in 2020, as-- though Trump’s numbers are plummeting with some demos-- they are solidifying or improving among his core support demographic. Which makes running afoul of Trump fatal in the eyes of these strategists.

“There are practical realities-- we ran a bunch of red district primaries, and it would come back that the number one issue for 80+% of Republican primary voters was loyalty to Donald Trump. I’m not making that number up,” a respondent told me.

Several consultants pointed to the situation that Sen. John Cornyn faces in Texas to illustrate the problem. They indicated that internal polling shows Trump either tied or very slightly ahead in the Lone Star State. One said Cornyn should be feeling very lucky that Beto O’Rourke ran for president, rather than tacking slightly center and spending $90 million on a campaign to unseat the incumbent senator. Another said Cornyn’s “quietly in trouble.”

But rather than addressing this by creating some strategic separation from Trump to solidify the historically conservative Dallas and Houston suburbs where Trump is bleeding out, Cornyn has become a Mr. Trump fan girl, echoing his virus denial and defending the attack on nonviolent protestors in Lafayette Square.

Why? According to one: “You have 25% of the state is rural and Trump gets like Saddam Hussein level numbers here. 87% in 25% of the state… Cornyn gets 69. And so Cornyn can’t find a place to break from because he could really put that in jeopardy.”

And thus the polarizing nature of Trump makes it impossible for Cornyn to make a move that helps him in the swingy suburbs without risking the floor falling out from under him in West Texas.

This same calculus pervades no matter the race, no matter the district, no matter the geography: The operatives insist that the pro-Trump zealotry the president’s supporters demand makes it far more difficult for candidates to win over anyone else.

A consultant who advises a challenger in a swing house seat that Hillary Clinton carried, for example, indicated that they thought they had less ability to distance from Trump than those who are in safer, more MAGAfied districts. “No dissent is tolerated [with the base],” and “If my candidate is going to win, it’s going to be by 1 or 2 percent they can’t afford to lose any votes [on the pro-Trump flank].”

In fact some candidates in competitive house seats are going the other direction because of what it takes to win a primary. A different consultant said: “My candidate didn’t vote for Trump. But we’re running ads right now about being a big Trump supporter,” because in that district “drap[ing] yourself in Trump is still a good decision.”

This view is so widespread that when asked, all of the consultants but two said they haven’t even had a conversation about the possibility of distancing from Trump with any of their candidates or campaign teams. Another put it this way: “The idea of distancing, if it’s discussed, it’s discussed very quietly, it’s discussed one-on-one. You wouldn’t talk about it on a conference call…maybe someone would, but let’s just say it hasn’t happened yet and I’m on a lot of those calls.”

Sit with that for a second. The idea of separating from Trump is so verboten in GOP circles that the best consultants won’t even talk about talking about doing it in mixed company, for fear of being stigmatized, and thus losing potential client work on other campaigns.