Don't Ever Doubt That Trump's Ugly Racism Has Permeated Down Through The GOP-- Meet Jean Cramer, A New GOP Heroine In Michigan

Trump was never named Michigan GOP Man of the Year like he claimed, but it's just a matter of time before Jean Cramer is named Michigan GOP Woman Of the Year

Marysville, Michigan is a small town, population 9,959. It's a very red bastion of very, very conservative ideas in St. Clair County, part of Michigan's Thumb northeast of Detroit. It's part of the 10th congressional district (R+13), represented by Paul Mitchell who is retiring. In 2016 Bernie beat Hillary in St. Clair Co. but the Democrats are vastly outnumbered by Republicans. Trump won the general election in the county in a rout-- 40,067 (56.5%) to 24,583 (36.9%). Mitchell breezed to reelection last year despite the anti-red wave. St. Clair, the second biggest county in the district, performed especially well for him-- R+22.

When Mitchell announced he is retiring, Republicans began lining up to replace him. Two have already jumped in and another 8 are preparing tp. The two Democrats in the race are Kelly Noland and Kimberly Bizon, neither of whom has much of a chance and both of whom looks pretty progressive. Actually either probably could win... if the GOP puts up it's new Thumb star, Marysville City Council candidate Jean Cramer. On Thursday, Cramer was at a Republican Party candidate forum and was asked "“Do you believe the diversity of our community needs to be looked at, and if so, should we be more aggressive in attracting foreign-born citizens?"

Her response was kind of Trumpy. "Keep Marysville a white community as much as possible," she responded. The other candidates were shocked.

Council candidate Mike Deising and incumbent Councilman Paul Wessel were more succinct in their responses.

“Just checking the calendar here and making sure it’s still 2019," Deising said, while Wessel added that anyone "anyone who can find their way to Marysville should be allowed to live in Marysville."

Mayor Pro Tem Kathy Hayman said she took Cramer’s comments personally.

“I don’t even know that I can talk yet, I’m so upset and shocked. My father was a hundred percent Syrian, and they owned the Lynwood Bar. It was a grocery store at that time. So basically, what you’ve said is that my father and his family had no business to be in this community,” she said. Hayman's late father Joseph Johns, served 55 years as an elected Marysville official. The council meeting room where Thursday’s forum was held is named for him.

"My son-in-law is a black man and I have bi-racial grandchildren," she told Cramer. "And I take this very personally what you’ve said, and I know that there’s nothing I can say that’s going to change your mind... We just need to have more kindness-- that’s it.”

Cramer, a political newcomer who moved to Marysville fewer than 10 years ago, expanded on her comment when she spoke with the Times-Herald after the forum.

"As long as, how can I put this? What Kathy Hayman doesn’t know is that her family is in the wrong," Cramer said. "(A) husband and wife need to be the same race. Same thing with kids. That’s how it’s been from the beginning of, how can I say, when God created the heaven and the earth. He created Adam and Eve at the same time. But as far as me being against blacks, no I’m not."

...Mayor Dan Damman, who isn’t running for re-election in the city, condemned Cramer’s comments in a statement of his own following the forum.

"The racist comments by the City Council candidate at the Marysville city candidate(s) forum were as vile as they were jaw-dropping,” he said in an email. “It must be noted that this person has declared herself a City Council candidate for the November 2019 election but has never served on City Council for the city of Marysville.

“Mrs. Cramer’s disturbing and disgusting ideology is flatly rejected by me, our entire City Council, all of city administration, and our employees. The candidate forum was to be a mechanism to learn about the candidates and their viewpoints, thus empowering our electorate to make an informed decision before voting. The only positive result from this clear expression of overt and unapologetic racism is that this candidate’s views were put on display before our voters go the polls in November."

Damman later called for Cramer to step out of the race in another interview.

UPDATE: Cramer Still Refusing To End Her Racist Campaign

The day after the forum, Cramer spoke with the local ABC News affiliate and insisted she isn't racist, just the way Trump always does after his own blatantly racist outbursts. She told the TV reporter that she wouldn't have a problem with black people moving into Marysville and that it wouldn't bother her as long as they kept their properties looking nice.

Sounding very Trumpy, she said that she didn’t want "pushy" foreigners moving in and that they should "go back" to their native countries and fix issues there. And like Trump, she said her own ancestors were Nazis Germans.

Auschwitz Revisited by Nancy Ohanian-- property was always nicely kept up

3 Republicans Just Announced They're Retiring From Congress But Just One Of The Districts Is Even Remotely Winnable

There was no Blue Wave in 2018-- the Democrats were basically offering runny gruel. Instead there was a massive anti-Trump/anti-red wave. Unless the Democrats wind up nominating Bernie-- better yet Bernie + Elizabeth Warren-- there will be no Blue Wave in 2020 either. Even if the Democrats nominate the worst possible candidate-- Status Quo Joe, setting up the contest between 2 profoundly evil evils that Trump is so eager for-- there will still be another massive, perhaps more massive, anti-Trump/anti-red wave, a true tsunami this time. The GOP explains what happened last cycle not in terms of waves or Trump's toxicity, but whines how there were too many retirements for them to deal with. There's some truth to that, but a better way too look at the retirements is to understand how Trump's toxicity helped bring many of those retirements on. Look at the 2018 cycle like this:

• Turnout was the highest for a midterm election in more than a century (1914), with over half the electorate casting ballots.
• The Democrats won/Republicans lost the popular vote 60,572,245 (53.4%) to 50,861,970 (44.8%)-- a margin of 8.6%, the largest margin on record for a House majority party switch
• The Republicans lost 42 or 43 seats (NC-09, nearly a year later is still undecided after the GOP was caught trying to steal the election), their biggest loss since Nixon was thrown out of office after Watergate
• Republicans lost a net of 7 seats in California, 4 seats in Pennsylvania and 4 in New Jersey, 3 each in New York and Virginia, 2 each in Iowa, Florida, Texas, Michigan, Illinois and one seat in Utah, New Mexico, Washington, Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Maine, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Colorado.
• 13 Republicans retired or left the House to run for other offices in districts that were subsequently won by Democrats

But however the NRCC wants to paint it, 30 Republican incumbents were beaten by Democrats, while not one single Democratic incumbent was beaten by a Republican. Yes, the fact that Dave Trott (MI), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL), Charlie Dent (PA), Dave Reichert (WA), Ed Royce (CA), Darrell Issa (CA), Frank LoBiondo INJ), Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ), Pat Meehan (PA), Steve Pearce (NM), Martha McSally (AZ), Ryan Costello (PA) and Mark Sanford (SC) left open seats that Democrats won was a very big deal, but

a- many of them retired because they knew they had next to zero chance to be reelected;

and

b-it doesn't explain the 30 incumbents who lost.

Now GOP retirement season has kicked off with a bang. Last week alone, 3 Republicans announced their premature retirements, at least 2 of whom would certainly have been reelected.Five Republicans-- Bradley Byrne (AL), Rob Woodall (GA), Susan Brooks (IN), Greg Gianforte (MT) and Rob Bishop (UT)-- had already beaten them to the punch.

Paul Mitchell, basically can't stand Trump and what he's done to American politics. So, after just 2 terms, he's retiring from Congress. He didn't blame Trump per se; he blamed the "rhetoric and vitriol" in DC. Before Congress, Mitchell had been a very right-wing member of the Michigan state legislature. MI-10, north of Detroit, is a thumb-like protrusion into Lake Huron. About half the voters come from the northern part of suburban Macomb County. The county used to be the bluest suburban county in America. In 2016, it was the Trumpiest county in Michigan. The PVI is R+13 and although Obama almost won in 2008 (50-48%), Trump beat Hillary 63.8% to 31.6%. (Bernie won the district in the primary and beat Hillary in 5 of the 6 counties, and essentially tying her in the 6th.)

There are at least 8 Republicans talking about jumping into the race. The only Democrat running so far is Kelly Noland, an Army veteran and a nurse who supports Medicare-for-All-- which means the DCCC will likely recruit someone to run against her.

As of the June 30 FEC reporting deadline Mitchell had raised only $232,501, and Noland hasn't raised the $5,000 that would have triggered a report.

Friday Martha Roby announced she's had enough of Congress. AL-02 is another prohibitively red district, gerrymandered so that as many African Americans living in Montgomery are dumped into AL-07 (Alabama's one black district). The PVI is R+16 and Trump's 64.9% of the district's vote was stronger than either McCain's or Romney's. The anti-red wave barely lapped around the edges of the district last year. Incumbent Martha Roby was reelected 138,879 (61.5%) to 86,931 (38.5%). Although Roby lost Montgomery County, the biggest in the district, and two tiny rural counties, Conecuh and Bullock, she won the 12 other counties in the district-- massively (except by Barbour, which she won by the skin of her teeth).

Roby was no fan of Trump's and didn't vote for him in 2016. After the Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing escapade was revealed, she said, "Trump’s behavior makes him unacceptable as a candidate for president, and I won’t vote for him." His fans refused to vote for her in 2016 but they were back in the saddle last year after she showed them that she was basically another garden variety Trump enabler.

Alabama is likely to lose a seat after the 2020 election and AL-02 will surely be impacted. So far there are 4 Republicans talking about running: Bobby Bright, a former Blue Dog Democrat who took the logical step that all Blue Dogs eventually take and hopped the fence to become a fascist/Republican; crackpot state Senator Clyde Chambliss of Prattville; far right state Rep. Will Dismukes ad a lunatic fringe former state Rep, Barry Moore, who will fight anyone who claims he endorsed Trump before Moore did. Roby beat Moore and Bright in the 2018 primary.

The third seat-- the one that the DCCC was already targeting-- is TX-22, from which Pete Olson announced his retirement on Thursday. Although an R+10 PVI normally looks like too steep a hill for a Democrat to climb, Hillary had improved on Obama's 2008 and 2012 score by around 8 points and the Houston suburb's hostility towards Trump was making the district competitive. When Olson was first elected the district was over 60% white. The demographic shift has been fast and now just 42.9% of his constituents are white. That made Olson's 96.2% Trump adhesion score problematic. Olson's win number last year was just 51.4%. He was forced to spend $1,921,992 (more than he raised) to hold onto his seat as newcomer Sri Kulkarni (D) threw $1,539,576 into his campaign. Neither the DCCC nor the NRCC spent any money in the district. This year it looked like a lot of money is being set aside for this district (by both party committees), which starts the suburbs south of Houston, includes Pearland and Alvin and then twists west to Sugar Land, Brazos Bend State Park, past Rosenberg and almost as far as East Bernard in Wharton County. Olson had already raised $635,183 and spent $221,320 this year and Kulkarni had raised $415,249 and spent nearly $100,000. Both Olson and Kulkarni have primary opponents.

There are already half a dozen Republicans looking at the seat. Kulkarni and 2 other Democrats are already campaigning. Local KHOU confirmed that political insiders think TX-22 "could change parties... The traditionally conservative district has gotten a lot more competitive in recent years. Rep. Olson’s margin of victory dropped from just under 19 points in 2016 to within five points in 2018, the same year Fort Bend County went blue."

KHOU 11 political analyst Bob Stein said the best chance for a switch in party control is always an open seat.

“My sense is (Rep. Olson) would have been ‘primaried,' ‘Tea-Partied,’” Stein said. “What you’re seeing here is really the last of the old guard. Pete Olson was not a strong conservative but held the line. His legislative record was modest.

Olson had already been on the 2020 DCCC retirement watch list-- as had been Rob Woodall (GA) and Susan Brooks (IN), each of whom has announced their retirements. Still left on their list:

• Don Young (AK)
• David Schweikert (AZ)
• Druncan Hunter (CA)
• Ross Spano (FL)
• Vern Buchanan (FL)
• Fred Upton (MI)
• Ann Wagner (MO)
• Chris Smith (NJ)
• Peter King (NY)
• John Katko (NY)
• Chris Collins (NY)
• Steve Chabot (OH)
• Mike McCaul (TX)
• Kenny Marchant (TX)
• John Carter (TX)
• Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA)

Starting The Week With Another Republican Leaving Congress?

I can't say I was ever a fan of Dan Coats, the conservative Indiana politician, but as a Director of National Intelligence, he was considerably better than what anyone has a right to expect from Trump. And Trump hates him and has been trying to get him to resign for months. By announcing he would be replacing him with congressional crackpot John Ratcliffe (R-TX), Trump gave him no choice.

Yesterday Ratcliffe was on Fox with Maria Bartoromo to give Trump another public blow-job, this time barking that he trusts Barr to lock up Obama and Hillary-- though not naming them-- and any other Trump enemies.

It will be a pleasure to have Ratcliffe out of Congress, but he represents one of the most backward districts in America, so don't expect the seat, TX-04, to flip blue. The PVI is R+28 and Trump beat Hillary 75.4% to 21.8%, her third worst performance in Texas. The godforsaken district is in the northeast corner of the state, tucked in between Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Louie Gohmert's district. It's a real hellhole, 73% white, poorly educated (48% high school or less), 45% rural, fairly poor.

Ratcliffe was elected with no opposition although in that district it's the primary that determines the member, not the general election. In 2014, he primaried Ralph Hall, the oldest member of Congress (91) and beat him in a runoff, in part by claiming that he would oppose reelecting Boehner speaker. He voted for Boehner anyway.

Last year he had his first Democratic opponent, Catherine Krantz, who he beat 75.7% to 23.0%. Ratcliffe raised $1,072,295 to Krantz's $29,171. Bowie, Camp, Cass, Delta, Fannin, Franklin, Grayson, Hopkins, Hunt, Lamar, Marion, Morris, Rains, Red River, Rockwall, and Titus counties along with areas of Collin and Upshur counties make up the district. None of them offer Democrats even a whiff of a hope to build a base. The least Republican county is tiny Morris where the PVI is "only" 42%. So far no one has mentioned running against Ratcliffe.

Here's Trump's favorite Republican questioning Mueller: