Trump Lost the Debate-- But Biden Did Not Win It

 

The Challengers by Nancy Ohanian

Establishment conservative Democrats fear-- and in many cases, loathe-- the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton did all he could do-- which was a lot-- to bury the idea that the Democrats are a working class party. The party has been going downhill as a worthwhile vehicle for legitimate working class aspirations ever since, although it has certainly become a super-charged vehicle for the career aspirations of politicians themselves. The debate on Tuesday made me nauseous. Trump was Trump-- the worst excuse for a president in history by far and without comparison. But it was Biden's pandering to conservatives on healthcare that made me turn off the debate and go watch the 2013 Netflix crime thriller The Blacklist. In the morning, I watched the whole putrid debate.

Every poll I've seen-- and I've looked for them-- had Trump losing. The latest one-- from Morning Consult-- shows that when viewers were asked which candidate performed better, Biden was chosen by 50% and Trump by just 34%. (16% weren't sure). Among independent votes, 46% picked Biden and just 28% picked Donald.

Pelosi is right when she urges Biden to quit while he's "ahead" and not do any more debates. Sooner or later, someone will make it clear to Trump that if he just shuts his face and lets Biden talk, Biden will screw up and give Trump a chance to actually win some voters over. Right now, this election is just about how horrible Trump is. Trump is probably being told to back off and let voters see how horrible Biden is. Because, take it from someone who has been following his career closely since the 70's, he is.

Yesterday, Ron Brownstein took to twitter to put into words what made so many Democrats queasy about Biden's performance. Many Democrats don't understand just how conservative Biden is-- and right to the core of who he is. They assume because he has a "D" next to his name, he hold values associated with the Democratic Party. He never has and he still doesn't.

So here's Brownstein in paragraph form (and minus the twitterisms): "Trump's belligerent and dangerous behavior obscured how poorly Biden performed for much of the debate," he wrote. "On health care he totally misrepresented his own position-making it sound worse than it is. His lead on health fell dramatically in Stan Greenberg's focus groups of debate watchers." OK... and what exactly does Brownstein mean by "worse," which goes to the heart of why many were sickened by Biden and why he fell in the esteem of the Democrats and independents in the focus groups. Sorry for throwing in my two cents-- back to Brownstein:

Sure it was tough with Trump hectoring, but Biden not only failed to explain his plans to build on the Affordable Care Act but said his public option is "only for those people who are so poor they qualify for Medicaid they can get that free in most States." No it's not. It's available for everyone including those who pay too much for employer provided care. His website: "Whether you’re covered through your employer, buying your insurance on your own, or going without coverage altogether, the Biden Plan will give you the choice to purchase a public health insurance option." [This was the moment I went to watch Netflix.]

He would automatically enroll those eligible for Medicaid in GOP states that won't expand it, but importantly he makes this available to everyone. Again, tough with Trump hectoring, but Biden never mentioned any of his plan's elements that aid the middle-class. These include much higher subsidies for people buying on exchanges and allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices and forcing all drug companies who want to participate in Medicare to limit price increases to inflation.

Again: extenuating circumstances, but pretty astonishing that as Trump names a Justice who could overturn the Affordable Care Act, Biden portrays his biggest health initiative as something solely for poor-exactly the messaging Democrats have been trying to escape from the first day Obama unveiled the ACA.

Bottom line: in the Stan Greenberg dial groups, Biden's advantage over Trump dropped during the debate more on health care than any other issue, with a very big decline among non-college white women: precisely the group that were Democrats' most important target on pre-existing conditions in 2018.

Trump's ominous and erratic behavior, his open incitement and encouragement of white nationalists, his summons for violence and intimidation on Election Day, all justifiably overshadowed Biden's performance. But apart from Climate Change, Biden didn't effectively explain any of his plans. Focus group women re-contacted by Sarah Longwell reinforce[d this: they were] horrified by Trump but few were impressed by Biden. He's clearly ahead and any day that doesn't change the dynamic is good for him. But no one should pretend he performed well enough to resolve the doubts voters hold about him.

Anything is better than Trump. I had hoped we would have someone as great as Trump has been horrible, instead of just someone terrible but not as terrible. Corporate America gets its way again! Which reminds me... the new poll from YouGov for The Economist asked Biden voters if they are voting for him or against Trump. 54% said they are voting against Trump and just 44% are voting for Biden. This is especially pronounced among young voters (between 18 and 29) only 26% of whom are for Biden-- while a whopping 73% are motivated to vote because of their animus towards Trump. I hope Biden remembers that when he "wins" the mammoth landslide Donald is going to lose next month.

Why Can't The Conservative Brain Grapple With Science-- And Will The Climate Crisis Destroy Us All Because Of That Flaw?

 

Audrey Denney is running for Congress in the northeast corner of California (CA-01), where the state meets Oregon and Nevada. It's a largely rural district with the most exposure to Climate Change-induced wildfires anywhere in the state. She told me yesterday that the Trumpist incumbent, Doug LaMalfa "does not believe in human induced climate change. He has recently called climate change policies 'radical.' He either has been bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry (as his FEC reports show)-- or he doesn’t have the capacity to wrap his mind around science. He has also been quoted as saying abortions cause breast cancer-- so I am leaning toward both."

Denney, whose campaign leans heavily on talking with voters about the Climate Crisis said that "Climate change is not a threat in the distant future. It is taking the lives, homes, and livelihoods of people who live in my district today. We lost 93 lives in 2018 in the Carr and Camp Fires and we lost at least 15 lives last week in the North Complex fire. In 2018 the Carr fire and Camp Fire alone emitted nine times as much CO2 as the state of California was able to reduce our emissions by that year.  Our federal forests are MASSIVE carbon sources-- but have the potential to be carbon sinks-- actually helping us turn the dial back on climate change. Forty-one percent of my district-- and fifty seven percent of the state of California-- is federal forests. And the vast majority of them are in desperate need of vegetation management work and forest restoration work to bring them back to a state of health. This is the only way we will reduce our fire risk and be able to mitigate climate change. If you do not think this work is critically important than you are not paying attention. Or perhaps live in one of the few places that is not shrouded in smoke from the West’s fires... Only by restoring our forests to health by doing the critical thinning, selective logging, and fuels-reduction work, will we be able to lessen our wildfire risk and mitigate the dangerous result of climate change. We can create economic incentives to find new industry utilization for the woody biomass removed from our forests. This will look like manufacturing sustainable building materials like cross laminated timber (CLT) and processing woody biomass into low carbon transportation fuels. We can set policies in place to support the career and technical education programs and apprenticeship programs that will be necessary to build the required local workforce. All of these opportunities mean high paying jobs and more economic opportunity for the real people of California’s first district."

Yesterday, Ron Brownstein's Atlantic column asks a simple question millions of Americans probably have asked themselves at one time or another, Why is it that Republican officials still don’t care about Climate Change?. He begins by introducing us to Mary Nichols, who's been "part of the struggle to prevent catastrophic climate change for about as long as anyone in American life. For years, she’s directed California’s pathbreaking efforts to reduce carbon emissions as the chair of the California Air Resources Board-- a position she held first in the 1970s before taking it up again in 2007. Nichols has also served at the federal level, working as the chief regulator for air pollution at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. And yet even Nichols has never seen anything that crystallizes the dangers of climate change more clearly than the historic outbreak of wildfires scorching California and other western states this year. 'Yes, absolutely,' she told me earlier this week, when I asked her whether this year’s fires are the most tangible danger to California that she’s seen from climate change. 'It’s not suddenly going to reverse itself … to years when there’s no fire season, or it’s not going to happen until October. The changes are going to be real, and they are going to be long-lasting.'"

Then he introduced us to Carol Browner who served as the EPA administrator for both of Clinton’s presidential terms and later worked as Obama’s first White House adviser on climate. "When she looks at the confluence of extreme-weather events battering the United States in recent years-- not only the wildfires, but also the Gulf Coast hurricanes, Midwest flooding, and the Southwest’s extreme heat-- Browner likewise sees stark evidence that climate change is disrupting American life earlier and more powerfully than almost anyone expected when the debate over these issues seriously began about three decades ago. 'What we have now is the absolute environmental demonstration or evidence of just how dramatic the impact of climate change is going to be. This is not going to stop,' Browner told me. 'There is going to be something next year, and the year after, if we don’t get on it.'"

Environmental scientists and policy experts around the country agree that the massive wildfires are just the latest indicator that climate change has thrust the U.S., and the world, into a dangerous new era. But it’s far from certain that the growing recognition of that threat can break the stalemate over climate policy in Washington. The accumulating evidence about climate change’s destructive power represents an irresistible force for action. But it’s colliding with an immovable object: the unbreakable resistance to any response among both Republican voters and elected officials.

Polling shows that, overall, a growing share of Americans believe climate change is happening, that human activities are driving it, and that the threat is manifesting right now. But as on many issues, the gap on all of these questions is widening between voters in the Republican coalition and other Americans. Annual polls by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that although the numbers have increased markedly for Democrats, Republican partisans are no more likely than in 2008 to believe that human activity is causing climate change, and they express even less concern about its impact now than they did then. (Belief in human causation has declined somewhat among independents, but concern about the effects of climate change has increased substantially.)

These attitudes within the GOP coalition both reflect and reinforce Republican officials’ rejection of any effort to reduce carbon emissions. [The Donald], echoed by many prominent conservative commentators and congressional Republicans, continues to dismiss the evidence that climate change is even contributing to the spike in extreme-weather events. With Joe Biden offering the most aggressive climate-change agenda of any Democratic presidential nominee in history, the conditions for the long-stalled debate over the issue in Washington are becoming as combustible as the dried forest floors of California.

Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale climate program, says that in the past, even those Americans concerned about climate change tended to see it as a remote problem. “It was distant in time, [in] that the impacts won’t be felt for a generation or more,” he told me. And it was “distant in space”-- “this is about polar bears and maybe some developing countries, but not the United States … not my friends, not my family, not me.”

Seen through that lens, he said, climate “just blended in the background with 1,000 other issues out there... so we can deal with it later. That’s where more of the country was in 2007 and 2008. Now we skip forward to today, that’s not true anymore because of the [weather] events we’ve been talking about.”

In Yale’s polling, the share of Americans who say that climate change is affecting weather at least somewhat reached nearly three-fifths in 2020, up from about half in early 2013. But Leiserowitz said more disruptive weather events aren’t the only things moving attitudes on climate. Another important factor is the broad, diverse chorus of voices expressing worry about it. Ten years ago, he noted, Americans might have heard concern about the climate only from “environmentalists and liberal politicians like Al Gore”; now it’s much more common to hear concerns raised by public-health professionals, business executives, and even faith leaders, such as Pope Francis.

The result has been an undeniable, though not overwhelming, shift in public opinion. In Yale’s latest national survey this spring, slightly more than three-fifths of Americans said human activities are causing the climate to change, a new high. The share of Americans who say they are very worried about climate change’s impact is relatively modest, at 27 percent. But it’s nearly double the level it was in 2008; overall, about two-thirds of respondents are now either very or somewhat worried.

Americans’ attitudes about the imminence of the danger have changed more drastically: 45 percent in the latest survey described climate change as a threat to Americans now, a big increase from 33 percent in 2008. The share who say climate change won’t be a problem for 25 years or more is at 42 percent, down 10 points compared with 2008.

Yet, on all of these fronts, the movement has not been symmetrical. Democrats are expressing much more concern than they were a decade ago, and most independents slightly more. Republicans, meanwhile, are either no more or even less concerned. (Rigid GOP attitudes largely explain why the overall shift in public opinion on many questions hasn’t been more dramatic, despite the quickening pace of weather disruption.) Since 2008, for instance, the share of Democrats who say human activity is causing climate change has spiked from 70 percent to 85 percent; among Republicans, it’s virtually unchanged, at just 37 percent. And although nearly half of Democrats now say they are very worried about climate change (almost double the level in 2008), only about one in 14 Republicans is equally concerned. That share is essentially unchanged from 12 years ago.

This pattern of public attitudes looks very similar to opinions on racial-equity issues: Compared with a decade ago, substantially more Democrats of all races accept that systemic racism against Black Americans is a serious problem; however, many Republicans are even less likely to agree it exists compared with 10 years ago. The divergence between the parties on climate, as on race, reflects the larger resorting of the electorate along lines of culture rather than class. (Republicans, as I’ve written, increasingly rely on a coalition of older, non-college-educated, evangelical, and rural white voters, while Democrats depend heavily on young people, people of color, and college-educated white Americans.)

Just as many Republican voters have cheered GOP attacks on public-health experts during the coronavirus crisis, portraying them as “elites” who look down on and want to control ordinary people, they have embraced similar accusations against climate scientists. “Climate change is an issue... where most people don’t know that much... and in those circumstances-- especially for an abstract, seemingly far away, invisible problem like climate change-- they look to their leaders to help guide them through that incredibly complicated landscape,” Leiserowitz told me. “Republicans who began talking about climate change as if it was a ‘hoax’ had an incredible impact on other Republicans.”

Many environmentalists have hoped that more and more exposure to the furious effects of weather disruption might soften resistance among Republican voters and leaders to acting on climate change. But in dramatic polling last year from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post even Republican voters who acknowledge that their communities are facing more extreme weather overwhelmingly reject the notion that climate change is significantly contributing to those events.

Detailed results provided to me by Kaiser underscore an astonishing gap between the parties. Among people who agree that their communities are experiencing either more hot days, more floods, or more droughts, at least three-fourths of Democrats say climate change is a “major factor” in those events; but at least seven in 10 Republicans in each case say it is only a minor factor, or does not contribute at all. Slightly more than seven in 10 Democrats living in places experiencing more wildfires consider climate change a major factor in causing them; three-fourths of Republicans see climate as little or none of the cause. Even after this summer’s searing events, an Economist/YouGov poll released yesterday found that although three-fourths of Biden supporters said “the severity of recent hurricanes and Western wildfires is most likely the result of global climate change,” fewer than one in five Trump voters agreed.

Those contrasts offer very little reason for optimism that even if Biden wins, any meaningful numbers of congressional or state-level Republicans will feel pressure to support measures to reduce carbon emissions. Among other reasons for pessimism: In both presidential and Senate elections, Republicans are more and more reliant on the states that produce the most fossil fuels, which tend to be the same states with large populations of non-college-educated, Christian, and rural white voters drawn to Trump’s message of racial and cultural backlash.

Across the 20 states that emit the most carbon per dollar of economic output-- a good proxy for states’ integration into the fossil-fuel economy-- Republicans now hold 35 of their 40 Senate seats. That’s nearly enough senators to sustain a GOP filibuster against climate action on its own. The final brick in the wall of GOP opposition is that fossil-fuel producers, once an important source of campaign funding for southern Democrats such as Lyndon B. Johnson, are all-in on bolstering Republican power. Over the past 30 years, oil and gas producers have directed more than 80 percent of their massive $711 million in total federal campaign contributions toward Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Gene Karpinski, the longtime president of the League of Conservation Voters, the environmental movement’s principal electoral arm, sees little prospect for GOP participation on climate even if Trump loses. “Because of the fossil-fuel influence on the Republican Party and the leader of the party still calling climate change a ‘hoax,’” GOP skepticism about “climate change is out of step with the rest of the country,” he says.

But others see some cracks in the resistance. Kenneth Medlock, the director of the Center for Energy Studies at the Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, says the terms of daily discussion in Texas and in neighboring states have changed since Houston was deluged with historic floods during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. “Even in the Gulf Coast, the conversation around extreme-weather events and the like is more the norm than it was five years ago,” he told me. “Up until Harvey happened, nobody really wanted to address the elephant in the room, which is that the climate is changing and this is a real risk.”

Even with that evolving dialogue, Medlock doesn’t expect big changes among Republican elected officials in Texas. He predicts that, to the extent that they acknowledge climate change, they would be more likely to talk about fortifying communities against its effects (an issue he considers important too) than to talk about reducing carbon emissions. But Medlock anticipates that position will become more and more untenable for Republicans over time-- not because their voters necessarily demand more action, but because the business community and institutional investors will keep moving ahead without them to cut carbon.

The dialogue among elected Republicans, he told me, “has kind of quietly shifted.” He explained that the Baker Institute, which is based at Rice University, is involved in several initiatives aimed at reducing net-carbon emissions in the region. “What’s really interesting about [those] efforts is that when we talk to state lawmakers and federal lawmakers [including Republicans], there’s no resistance,” he continued. “You open the conversation with, ‘The world is changing; consumers and investors are demanding lower carbon footprints; this is an economic opportunity for Texas...’ and immediately the conversation becomes very lively. So, in some ways, it’s about how you approach the conversation.”

Sean McElwee, the Data for Progress pollster who analyzes progressive causes, sees a similar opening. Although most Republican voters still recoil from measures presented as addressing climate change, more are open to promoting clean-energy sources, he says. (Yale’s polling has found that too.) “When we do testing … clean energies are very popular among Republican voters, and people are really interested in the jobs framework,” he told me. Just as important: Relatively few Republican voters intuitively embrace arguments from Trump and others that defending oil, gas, and coal is a culture-war statement against “elitists” promoting solar and wind energies. “I don’t think voters have an allegiance to coal and oil the way Republican politicians have,” he said.

Browner, the former EPA head, is also a voice of relative optimism. “If Biden wins and they start moving forward” with a climate agenda, she told me, “there will be Republicans calling. Maybe I’m a minority on this, but when they see you are serious and you want to do something, they want a seat at the table.”

Even if Republicans remain obdurate, unified Democratic control of Congress and the White House is more likely to produce climate action than the last Democratic trifecta in 2009 and 2010, most experts I spoke with said. At that point, the House Democratic Caucus still contained a large number of southern and rural “blue dog” members who resisted cap-and-trade climate legislation the chamber passed in 2009. (Forty-four Democrats voted no.) Now the House Democratic Caucus is overwhelmingly centered on urban and suburban districts where acting on climate is popular. As Karpinski said: “If you look at 2018, the key reason why Nancy Pelosi is now the speaker [is because] it’s mostly suburban and some of the semi-urban districts. It’s a combination of young people, communities of color, and suburban women. They are the most supportive of this issue and want action.”

If Biden wins and Democrats gain the Senate majority, he could drive a big part of his climate agenda through a coronavirus-relief stimulus package; his plan includes massive spending to promote renewable power, electric cars, and energy-efficiency upgrades for homes and businesses. Obama did the same thing in the stimulus package he signed to counter the Great Recession, tucking in huge investments in clean energy (that Biden as vice president was assigned to oversee).

But to secure Senate approval for measures that directly limit carbon emissions, Democrats would almost certainly have to end the filibuster, which empowers what I’ve called the “brown blockade” of Senate Republicans who represent the fossil-fuel-producing states. (Unable to overcome a filibuster, the Senate never considered the cap-and-trade climate bill the House passed in 2009.) And even if Democrats do end the filibuster, serious climate legislation could face a tight squeeze to reach a simple majority, with Joe Manchin, from coal-producing West Virginia, and possibly other Democratic senators having to take a very tough vote.

All of those outcomes are impossible to predict. But what’s clear is that the tension will grow between a sluggish political system locked in a partisan standoff and a climate system that is poised to generate disruption at an accelerating pace. “This is not some ‘new normal’ that we can plan around … it’s a system that continues to spiral out of control,” says Vijay Limaye, an environmental epidemiologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There definitely is a signal in these record-setting months that … we are heading into a new era when we will see records set, and they will fall just as quickly … It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around now, but as bad as things have been this year, unquestionably, they will get worse.”

Nichols, the veteran climate regulator, is just as stark in her warning: Even today’s extreme weather may soon seem like the (relative) calm before the storm. “The rate of change is accelerating, so it is absolutely possible that we’ll see more visible signs of bigger storms,” as well as higher temperatures and sea-level rise, she said. “All of those things could happen much faster.”





She explained that the famous apocalyptic scene from the movie The Day After Tomorrow still isn’t likely to happen, where big waves wash over the skyscrapers of New York City. “But bigger storms and more damage and loss of property and loss of life as a result absolutely is likely going to continue-- not just in a gradual slope, but at a rate of acceleration that is greater than was predicted before,” she said.

The biggest message of the California wildfires may be that not only the terms but the tense of the climate debate is changing. Climate change has evolved from something that will threaten America to something that is doing so today. “The people who used to talk about how they were trying to save the world for their grandchildren need to start thinking about their children and even themselves,” Nichols said.

Kara Eastman is the Democratic candidate running for the Omaha-based congressional seat (NE-02) occupied by Trumpist stooge, Donald Bacon. The Climate crisis is a big issue she talks with Nebraska voters about constantly promising to help lead the battle when she replaces-nothing-Bacon in Congress:

Climate change-- appropriately called climate chaos by many-- is clearly the result of human activity. The wildfires on the West Coast bring this reality into dramatic relief. In order to reverse this trend we need immediate action from policy-makers from the entire political spectrum. In the past, there was an environmental consensus. Major environmental legislation from the Clean Water Act through the Montreal Protocol Treaty were passed by huge majorities on both sides of the aisle. Unfortunately, due to the extremist takeover of the Republican party, led by Donald Trump and Don Bacon, the GOP is no longer the party of the environment. On the contrary, they continue to give voice to the fringe belief that the massive climate upheavals we are witnessing in real-time today are part of some "normal" weather cycle, moreover, that these events we can see with our eyes and choke on in our lungs aren't really even happening.

Don Bacon wants to have it both ways. In front of a Republican audience, he says the the science is "uncertain" on climate, but on the other hand he claims membership to the bipartisan but largely ineffectual climate solutions caucus when he's confronted by local voters. Meanwhile, in Nebraska's Second Congressional District, we suffered from one of the hottest and driest summers on record, a year after central Nebraska suffered from devastating floods.

When I am in Congress, I will join my colleagues in putting climate front and center of the agenda. Nebraskans will be able to count on me to push a climate agenda, not simply push greenwashed window dressing. It's no longer some distant future crisis. It's here and now and we need to get to work.

Beth Doglio is in a D v D congressional general election in Washington. She's a progressive, endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus and her opponent is a ConservaDem endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street owned and operated New Dems. There is no issue more important in her campaign than Climate. And Beth has a stellar record while her opponent's record is putrid and, basically, Republican. Yesterday Beth told me that "As the wildfires rage on the West Coast, lives are being lost, towns are burning to the ground, and millions of acres of land are now charred deserts. This is climate change. The stakes have never been higher and the consequences of failing to act have never been more clear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that we have just one decade, one last chance to act, before it’s too late." She continued:

The United States must step up and must act with the urgency this moment demands. And the reality is that beyond its dangers, climate change actually presents us with a great opportunity. We can build a clean energy economy, strengthen our middle-class, and create millions of good union jobs. But we need leaders with expertise to get us there. Leaders who have stood up to the fossil fuel industry and won. Leaders who have actually passed policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and grow jobs.

As a climate advocate, I led the effort to stop the development of 7 coal export terminals dead in their tracks, while my opponent as mayor was busy working to site the world’s largest Methanol plant in her town. While she points in part to her support for community gardens as her track record on climate issues, I point to playing a pivotal role in passing legislation that significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions-- like the nation’s best 100% Clean Electricity Bill that integrates equity and labor standards with hard deadlines to remove fossils fuels from our electric sector and grow clean energy jobs. Or my first of its kind Green Buildings Law that makes our buildings more healthy and efficient at the same time it creates jobs. I’m calling for a sector-by-sector decarbonization of our economy. I am serious about and experienced in pushing for and passing emission reduction policies that will leave a safe planet for my kids.

You can ask anyone-- I love gardening and, in fact, I helped build a robust garden program at my children's elementary school-- but gardening is not what is going to get us out of this! This issue can no longer take a backseat, play second fiddle, remain an afterthought. We must have a plan, it must be ambitious, it must go far enough. I am calling for Washington, D.C. to follow Washington state’s lead and get serious about passing legislation to address the issue at scale.

Does Anyone Think Trump Hasn't Been The Worst President In History? And The Most Dangerous?

Slimeball by Nancy Ohanian

Everyone I know is having psychological problems right now-- some very mildly and some... well, at least one person I know committed suicide. In the middle of an out-of-contril, deadly pandemic, we have enough to worry about without a narcissistic madman threatening to destroy our democracy and the nation itself. Could Putin have ever imagined that for an investment of just a few million dollars he would have laid America this low, helping elevate the ultimate anti-patriot to the Oval Office? Joshua Benton tweeted this yesterday. It's literally horrifying:

Trump's incompetence and dysfunction are horrific enough on their own. Saturday morning, in a letter to the Democratic conference, Nancy Pelosi wrote that progress on the negotiations for a pandemic relief bill are "complicated by the complete disarray on the Republican side-- as Trump contradicts his own negotiators and his own position." But, alas, there's more to the dire national dilemma than Trump's shortcomings as a party leader.

I think millions of us have been asking exactly the question Ron Brownstein posed in his Atlantic column this week: Just How Far Will Trump Go?. Is there another Civil War on the horizon if he feels his personal safety is in jeopardy if he loses? Would he actually steal the election and refuse to leave office even if he loses, even he loses-- as seems likely-- resoundingly?

Brownstein wrote that Trump’s open admission on Friday "that he’s sabotaging the Postal Service to improve his election prospects crystallizes a much larger dynamic: He’s waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage. Trump is systematically enlisting agencies, including the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security, that traditionally have been considered at least somewhat insulated from political machinations to reward his allies and punish those he considers his enemies. He is razing barriers between his personal and political interests and the core operations of the federal government to an extent that no president has previously attempted, a wide range of public-administration experts have told me. 'There’s always been temptation... but no president in modern times has taken action so explicitly and obviously-- or transparently-- to influence and actually direct these agencies to favor the party in power,' Paul Light, a public-service professor at New York University, told me. 'None. None.'" Maybe when he chose that portrait of Andrew Jackson for the Oval Office we could have figured out where he was heading. J.M. Opal, a historian at McGill University and author of Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation: "Trump is the first president to so openly admire and point to Jackson as a model, and to borrow so clearly and explicitly from the language of Jacksonian 'democracy.'"

Trump’s seeming fondness for Jackson comes at something of a low reputational ebb-- a historical moment when many Americans have begun to focus on the darker side of Jackson’s record.

...High on this list are his personal history as a slaveholder and his implementation, as president, of a policy of "Indian removal" from eastern lands that culminated in the "Trail of Tears," which led to the deaths of an estimated 5,000 Cherokees.

In recent years, "Jackson's offenses against Indians and blacks and his propensity for personal gun violence have overshadowed his economic policies among liberals and progressives," [historian Harry] Watson said.

...[Historian H. Lee Cheek:] "The Trump endorsement of Jackson follows from his very limited understanding of Jackson as a man of action. He has no knowledge of the misdeeds of Jackson that are central to a complete understanding of his political career."

...Some historians also see an intriguing shared dichotomy: Both Jackson and Trump professed to care about the ordinary man, and both came from great wealth. They each railed against political elites, but were less outspoken in their criticism against other types of rich and powerful Americans.

"Jackson had been a large import-export merchant, a lawyer and judge, and was as of the 1820s one of the largest slave-owners in central Tennessee, a man of immense power over the days and hours and even the lives of about 100 enslaved blacks, not to mention dozens of white debtors," Opal said. "Yet in his idea of ‘the people,’ he was an ordinary fella, a regular Joe. That is a strange kind of populism."

For all his flaws, though, Jackson wasn't nearly as bad a president as Trump has turned out to be-- and, unlike Trump, no one could accuse Jackson of being a traitor. Unlike Trump, Jackson was a patriot. Certainly with him in mind, Brownstein wrote that "Presidents have always put their stamp on the federal government. It’s common for regulatory agencies, for instance, to dramatically shift direction in their attitude toward Big Business when partisan control of the White House changes. And presidents have always rewarded their political supporters, at times causing scandals because of questionable Cabinet appointments or procurement decisions. But no matter which individuals were appointed to lead them, some agencies have always been considered more protected from politics. It’s those barriers that Trump, with the tacit support of congressional Republicans, is steadily dismantling. Presidents have used the Postal Service to reward loyalists with jobs since the country’s earliest history. But they didn’t expect what Trump does from the agency. 'The whole spoils system goes back to having supporters who were appointed as postmasters,' says Kedric Payne, the general counsel of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center and a former top official at the Office of Congressional Ethics. 'But it wasn’t to disrupt the election.' The result of Trump’s moves: an executive branch whose full reach and power is being conscripted to serve the president’s immediate interests. 'All of it comes from a place that whatever is in his personal interest-- whether it’s financial, reputational, or political-- if it benefits him, the government is merely a tool for serving himself,' Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics under former President Barack Obama, told me. 'He has simply crossed lines that no one would even conceive of crossing in the past.' His determination to harness federal power to his personal advantage links his choices throughout his presidency, including funneling federal dollars into businesses he owns and withholding military aid for Ukraine in exchange for an election favor, the actions that led to his impeachment in the House last year."

Experts I spoke with said that Trump has dramatically accelerated the pace of his efforts to weaponize federal actions since his Senate acquittal, when every Republican, except Utah’s Mitt Romney, voted to dismiss the charges against him with no sanction and not even a full-scale trial to explore the evidence.

Beyond his recent efforts to impede mail delivery, Trump has:

• rapidly purged inspectors general across the federal government, replacing five of them within a short period, including the intelligence-community IG who forwarded to Congress the whistleblower complaint that triggered Trump’s impeachment.
• openly pressured the Justice Department to back off the prosecution of his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and to request more lenient sentencing for his ally Roger Stone. Trump later commuted Stone’s sentence outright.
• deployed federal law-enforcement officials from the Department of Homeland Security to confront protesters in Portland, Oregon, and other cities over the explicit objection of governors and mayors.
• enlisted the military into his campaign against protesters, drafting Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to accompany him during his walk to St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C., after armed personnel forcibly cleared out peaceful protesters. The decision prompted so much concern in the military that Milley later apologized.
• taken repeated steps to manipulate the results of the decennial census in a manner that could undercount people of color and benefit the Republican Party. The Supreme Court stopped Trump from adding a citizenship question to the census, but the administration now says it intends to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population counts used to apportion congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states. It also announced it will cut off efforts to contact households that haven’t responded to the census on September 30, despite the disruption caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Census experts and former Census Bureau directors have said that such a truncated schedule is guaranteed to undercount minorities.

The deployment of federal agents this summer may represent the most tangible manifestation of Trump’s determination to wield the federal government as a weapon against his political enemies. Light, who has studied the federal government’s operations for decades and is usually no alarmist, describes it as “shocking.” Sending those assets into cities over the objection of their mayors, he told me, “does resemble the early days of a police state, I’m sorry to say it.”

But if those deployments comprise the most visceral example, Trump’s attempts to manipulate the census may provide the most revealing measure of just how much he’s willing to distort federal operations to benefit himself and his party-- and how far congressional Republicans will go in abetting him.

In the past, the census has occasionally faced questions about its accuracy. But never before has there been evidence of a president deliberately trying to skew the results in a manner that helps one party. “I don’t think there’s ever been a charge that the census was systematically unfair,” says Donald Kettl, a longtime scholar of federal administration, now at the University of Texas at Austin.

Until now, the reason for avoiding census tampering has seemed obvious: It was thought that everyone benefits from an accurate count (just as everyone was thought to benefit from an apolitical military, among other institutions Trump has tried to manipulate). Billions of dollars in federal aid are tied to population, so presumably every state would want as many of its people counted as possible. “A complete count is important no matter what state you are in, because so many federal and state programs are tied to the numbers of people,” Steve Murdock, who served as the Census Bureau’s director under President George W. Bush, told me. “You don’t gain much by not counting the people you have to provide services for.”

But in a political environment defined by widening polarization along racial and geographic lines, that traditional restraint has apparently broken down. Hardly any congressional Republicans have raised concerns about Trump’s determination to curtail the census count. That includes Republicans from highly diverse states across the Sun Belt, which are likely to be among the biggest losers if minority populations are systematically undercounted, both in terms of federal aid and the apportionment of congressional seats and Electoral College votes. This week, I asked the offices of GOP senators from Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia if they had any objection to Trump short-circuiting the census count. All refused to respond, except Florida’s Marco Rubio, whose staff referred me only to a comment he’d made on a related issue, Trump’s effort to exclude the undocumented from apportionment. (And even on that question, Rubio avoided taking a definitive position.) Republican governors in those states have not raised concerns publicly either.

“I am just dumbfounded,” said Murdock, who also served for many years as Texas’s state demographer. “I don’t know why Texas would let this happen. The elected officials should be screaming: ‘Count those people; we are providing services for them.’”

Although the House has approved legislation extending the deadline for reporting census results until next April, giving the bureau more time to reach unresponsive Americans, the Senate has refused to consider the measure. Instead, just as with Postal Service slowdowns that may disproportionately hurt rural communities, many Republicans appear to have concluded that they are willing to accept collateral damage to their own constituencies for the partisan gain Trump’s actions could provide. Counting fewer people of color in Texas or Florida might mean fewer federal dollars, and even less representation in Congress. But it also could benefit Republicans in next year’s redistricting, making it tougher for civil-rights groups to legally challenge gerrymandered lines for providing insufficient representation to minorities.

“Republicans are in on the deal,” says Simon Rosenberg, the founder of the Democratic research-and-advocacy group NDN, referring to the GOP’s effective approval of Trump’s actions concerning both the census and the Postal Service. “They want Trump to blunt the size of the Democratic victory this year at all costs... They want Trump to stick his finger in the demographic dam that could make them the minority party for a generation.”

This corrosive synergy binds other elements of Trump’s campaign to weaponize more federal functions. Payne says Trump’s offensive has proceeded in two stages. First, he systematically defied congressional oversight-- ignoring subpoenas and demands for testimony-- and fired inspectors general who were in his path. Congressional Republicans helped by supporting his defiance of oversight and voting almost unanimously not to punish his actions in Ukraine. With those potential sources of resistance blunted, Payne says, Trump has moved more openly than before to manipulate federal operations that will directly influence the outcome of this election (the Postal Service) and the distribution of political power for years to come (the census).

“Where now that you have no recourse that Congress can take to impeach or investigate the administration, and you don’t have the IGs, that lays the groundwork to then go after these positions that could influence the election,” Payne says.

By politicizing agencies so overtly, Trump is creating a situation in which the right will accuse Joe Biden, if he wins, of engaging in political manipulation simply by reverting them to their more traditional roles. Conservatives, for instance, will surely scream if a President Biden removes loyalists whom Trump has installed in inspector-general positions.

An even more dramatic outcome of Biden winning in November: Some experts believe that his administration could reopen the census before transmitting the data for reapportioning congressional seats. Under current federal law, Trump must transmit the results to Congress for reapportionment purposes by year’s end. But some believe a President Biden could order the bureau to spend several more months pursuing the households it has not yet reached. “The next president can say, ‘I decertify it,’” says Robert Shapiro, who helped oversee the 2000 census as the Commerce Department’s undersecretary for economic affairs under Bill Clinton. “You can say, ‘I’m not going to redo it, [but] we are going to carry out the operation that was truncated.’” (There’s no apparent precedent for reopening the census during a change of administrations, which means that the Supreme Court would likely decide whether doing so is legal if Biden takes that route.)

And if Trump wins? The public-administration experts universally told me that the accelerating pace of Trump’s excesses-- without meaningful complaint from congressional Republicans-- signals that in a second term, he is likely to push much further in refashioning the federal government for his own ends.

Rosenberg framed Trump’s actions in dramatic terms. Trump, in his combative speeches around the July 4 holiday, claimed that “far-left fascism” is trying to “overthrow” and “destroy” American “civilization”-- allegations that could justify almost any level of “authoritarian crackdown by the government of the United States against the president’s domestic political opponents,” Rosenberg argues. “We are watching an authoritarian in action before our eyes. And we haven’t woken up to the significance of what we are seeing, frankly.”

Those are accusations that have rarely been directed at an American president. But as students of democracy point out, the pattern of subordinating all government operations to the interests of one party, and even one individual, is a core characteristic of illiberal and authoritarian countries. Shaub, like Rosenberg, sees exactly that end point. “I think if he’s reelected, the republic may die-- and I’m having to force myself to say ‘may’ so I don’t sound like a complete alarmist,” Shaub, now a senior adviser to the government-watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said starkly. “But I don’t see how the government can survive four more years of this … Whatever your worst fears are for whatever comes next aren’t as bad as it will be, by a long shot.”

Traitor In The White House? Or Just A Doofus?

A new Ipsos poll released by Reuters shows Trump losing badly, with just 38% of registered voters saying they intend to back him in November. Not exactly newsworthy. But what is is how undecideds and third-party backers split.

Reuters/Ipsos polling in 2016 found that support was evenly split that summer between Trump and then Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton among registered voters who had not backed a major party candidate. On Election Day, Trump won a majority of voters who said they decided in the final week.

This year, the poll found that 61% of undecided or third-party registered voters said they would support Biden if they had to choose, while 39% would vote for Trump.

Seventy percent of undecided or third-party registered voters say they disapprove of Trump’s performance in office and the same number said they think the country is headed on the wrong track. And 62% said they thought the U.S. economy was headed in the wrong direction.

Trump's response has been desperate, all about deceitful fear-mongering-- and dangerous for national unity, willing to rip apart the fabric of the country to try to persuade a few voters that Biden is an anarchist-backing socialist.




Yesterday, on Joe Madison's Sirius XM morning show, Bobby Rush (D-IL) responded to a question about Department iff Homeland Security thugs occupying Portland by telling Madison he believes Trump's reelection gameplay is "to instigate a race war. He wants to have black folks fighting white folks. So he can rise up and say, 'I'm the real Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan and I'm the President. Re-elect me. That's what he's trying to do. He's trying to play to the fears, to the racial animus that exists among certain white people, and he will do everything and anything to do that, because he wants to be re-elected at all costs."

A day earlier Peter Wehner penned an essay for The Atlantic, Donald Trump is a Broken Man that everyone should read, especially people who missed the disastrous Fox News interview Trump did with Chris Wallace last Sunday. "At the conclusion of the interview," Wehner wrote, "Wallace asked Trump how he will regard his years as president. 'I think I was very unfairly treated,' Trump responded. 'From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.' When Wallace interrupted, trying to get Trump to focus on the positive achievements of his presidency-- 'What about the good parts, sir?'-- Trump brushed the question aside, responding, 'Russia, Russia, Russia.' The president then complained about the Flynn investigation, the 'Russia hoax,' the 'Mueller scam' and the recusal by his then–attorney general, Jeff Sessions. ('Now I feel good because he lost overwhelmingly in the great state of Alabama,' Trump said about the first senator to endorse him in the 2016 Republican primary.)" What a small, sick, ugly man!

Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man. He is so gripped by his grievances, such a prisoner of his resentments, that even the most benevolent question from an interviewer-- what good parts of your presidency would you like to be remembered for?-- triggered a gusher of discontent.

But the president still wasn’t done. “Here’s the bottom line,” he said. “I’ve been very unfairly treated, and I don’t say that as paranoid. I’ve been very-- everybody says it. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. But there was tremendous evidence right now as to how unfairly treated I was. President Obama and Biden spied on my campaign. It’s never happened in history. If it were the other way around, the people would be in jail for 50 years right now.”

Just in case his bitterness wasn’t coming through clearly enough, the president added this: “That would be Comey, that would be Brennan, that would be all of this-- the two lovers, Strzok and Page, they would be in jail now for many, many years. They would be in jail; it would’ve started two years ago, and they’d be there for 50 years. The fact is, they illegally spied on my campaign. Let’s see what happens. Despite that, I did more than any president in history in the first three and a half years.”

With that, the interview ended.

...The fact that he is devoid of any moral sensibilities or admirable human qualities-- self-discipline, compassion, empathy, responsibility, courage, honesty, loyalty, prudence, temperance, a desire for justice-- means he has no internal moral check; the question Is this the right thing to do? never enters his mind. As a result, he not only nurses his grievances; he acts on them. He lives to exact revenge, to watch his opponents suffer, to inflict pain against those who don’t bend before him. Even former war heroes who have died can’t escape his wrath.

So Donald Trump is a vindictive man who also happens to be commander in chief and head of the executive branch, which includes the Justice Department, and there is no one around the president who will stand up to him. He has surrounded himself with lapdogs.

But the problem doesn’t end there. In a single term, Trump has reshaped the Republican Party through and through, and his dispositional imprint on the GOP is as great as any in modern history, including Ronald Reagan’s.

...There were certainly ugly elements on the American right during the Reagan presidency, and Reagan himself was not without flaws. But as president, he set the tone, and the tone was optimism, courtliness and elegance, joie de vivre.

He has since been replaced by the crudest and cruelest man ever to be president. But not just that. One senses in Donald Trump no joy, no delight, no laughter. All the emotions that drive him are negative. There is something repugnant about Trump, yes, but there is also something quite sad about the man. He is a damaged soul.

In another time, in a different circumstance, there would perhaps be room to pity such a person. But for now, it is best for the pity to wait. There are other things to which to attend. The American public faces one great and morally urgent task above all others between now and November: to do everything in its power to remove from the presidency a self-pitying man who is shattering the nation and doesn’t even care.

Hardball by Nancy Ohanian

Another new poll just released, this one of likely Georgia voters, shows both Trump and enabler David Perdue both losing to utterly worthless Democratic candidates. Another one, by Quinnipiac of Texas voters, shows Trump losing there too! And, again, Trump's response: hideous and profoundly unpatriotic divisiveness. Ron Brownstein: "On one front, Trump is taking his confrontational approach toward big cities to an ominous new level by deploying federal law-enforcement officials to Portland and potentially other locales over the objection of local officials… On the other, Republican governors, especially but not exclusively across the Sun Belt, have repeatedly blocked mostly Democratic local leaders from locking down their communities, despite exploding caseloads in cities from Atlanta to Phoenix. The common thread in these twin confrontations is that they pit Republican officials who rely on support primarily from exurban, small-town, and rural voters against major metropolitan areas that favor Democrats. In the process, these Republicans-- Trump in particular-- may be hoping to rally their non-urban voter base by defining themselves explicitly in opposition to the cities." Trump is trying to split America while painting himself as a hero combating violent crime in fetid American cities filled with disloyal, threatening minorities.





In his new book, Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump, set for publication in late October, days before the election, historian David Rothkopf wrote how "Trump is unfit in almost every respect for the high office he holds. But what distinguishes him from every other bad leader the U.S. has had is that he has repeatedly, egregiously, betrayed his country. Regardless of how Senate Republicans have let him off the hook, the facts available to the public show that Trump has met every necessary standard to define his behavior as traitorous. He has clearly broken faith with the people of the country he was chosen to lead, starting long before he took office, then throughout his time in the White House. And we may not yet have seen the last of his crimes. But the story we know so far is so outrageous and disturbing that it raises a question that has never before been presented in American history: is the president of the United States the greatest threat this country faces in the world?"

Rothkopf concludes that Trump and his many abettors have committed the highest-level, greatest, most damaging betrayal in the history of the country-- worse than Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr and leaders of the Confederacy!

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.