Month: August 2019

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of FDR’s house. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since last time I have continued to work on the painting.

The painting now appears with further refinements in most aspects. The windows, siding and large shadow are now revised with the railing receiving a first layer of paint. Note the adornments atop the roof.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar granted an interview with reporters in Politico’s European division on Friday and he has some interesting things to say. Regarding President Trump, he expressed optimism that any disputes over trade and tariffs could be settled amicably through compromise, but he was much less optimistic about resolving the current argument over buying oil from Iran.

By contrast, he admitted that energy-hungry India’s desire to purchase Iranian oil was “rather complicated” and that he hoped for “greater clarity.” When asked whether there were really no grounds to negotiate because Washington simply had zero tolerance for Iranian oil purchases, he chose not to commit himself. “One of the nice things about an interview is that when you reach a level where you don’t want to say what you don’t want to, you don’t say it.”

As for the current kerfuffle over receiving S-400 missile systems from Russia, Mr. Jaishankar was outright combative. He stated that India has a “solid, time-tested” relationship with Moscow and that “We would not accept any country telling us who to buy weapons from and who not to buy from.”

Overall, I’d say that the current relationship between the Trump and Modi administration is much less congruent that we might expect from two like-minded nationalist parties.

Where they seem to be having fewer disagreements is precisely in the area where we would traditionally expect the United States to get upset, and that’s in the heavy-handed tactics Modi is taking in Jammu and Kashmir which is risking a nuclear war with Pakistan.

Mr. Jaishankar towed the Modi line in the interview with Politico, especially in refusing to negotiate with Pakistan at all.

India’s foreign minister on Friday predicted that security restrictions across Kashmir would be eased in the “coming days,” but rejected Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s call for talks over the divided Himalayan region.

In an interview with POLITICO in Brussels, India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said he hadn’t had time to read Friday’s New York Times op-ed by Khan, which sought the opening of a dialogue between Islamabad and New Delhi, but argued the idea was a non-starter while Pakistan “openly practices terrorism.”

Khan argued that it was urgent to begin discussions while a “nuclear shadow” hovered over South Asia, but the Indian minister said there was no hope of negotiations until Pakistan reined in its financing and recruitment of militant groups. “Terrorism is not something that is being conducted in dark corners of Pakistan. It’s done in broad daylight,” he complained.

No doubt, it’s accurate that Pakistan’s government promotes terrorism in broad daylight, and it’s also indisputable that India has suffered greatly as a result. But it would be nice if the government in New Dehli would at least be willing to have a dialogue over an issue that is driving hostilities to a boil between two nuclear-armed countries.

Additionally, many of Pakistan’s complaints are shared by many other more disinterested observers around the world who agree that the move into Jammu and Kashmir is best explained not as a matter of national security but as the fulfillment of a long-standing Hindu nationalist priority. I was particularly strike by the way Mr. Jaishankar went about denying this accusation:

The former ambassador to Washington and Beijing also adamantly denied that there was a Hindu nationalist agenda in removing Kashmir’s special status in order to allow more non-Muslims to buy property there and muscle aside the Muslim majority.

“The kind of people who say this are people who don’t know India,” he said. “Does this sound like the culture of India?”

When I wrote about this situation a couple of weeks ago, I noted that the culture of India was very unlike the culture of Pakistan but that under the Hindu nationalist leadership of Modi the two countries were beginning to resemble each other. Unfortunately, this not because Pakistan is becoming more like India but because India is becoming more like Pakistan. So, no, what’s going on in New Dehli and in Kashmir does not sound like the culture of India. I think that’s what is most worrying about the fiasco.

Actually, the most worrying part is that a nuclear war might break out, but losing the traditional Indian culture with its reputation as the largest democracy in the world is definitely a close second.

The Trump administration seems totally disinterested in any of this, which shouldn’t surprise us. We’d be safer being led by the kind of mold culture you normally find at the back of your refrigerator.

I’m still recuperating from my misadventures in New England and Montreal—featuring a dead engine in the middle of Nowhere, New Hampshire and a back injury—so I’ve been blogging less. I’m also searching for work, so I’ve been preoccupied.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t share Expert Summaries of Mueller Report: A Collection, put out by Just Security. It’s got quite a masthead, including Barbara McQuade, Elie Honig, Harry Litman, Joyce Vance, and many more. Co-editor Ryan Goodman spells out their motivation in the introduction.

We at Just Security believe that it is accordingly more important than ever for Americans to be familiar with the contents of the Special Counsel’s Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. To that end, we have created a digestible summary of the Report, broken down into 30 sections, which can be read in five to 10 minutes each. Each summary aims to present, in clear and straightforward language and without additional analysis or commentary, the findings of the Special Counsel as he presented them to the Attorney General.

These summaries are relevant not only to current congressional processes, but also for the historical record. The Special Counsel’s investigation is significant for understanding the events of 2016 and the conduct of the President toward the investigation. There will surely be many lessons drawn from the Special Counsel’s Report in the years ahead. We have thus undertaken this project with the goal of providing an easily accessible resource for the present moment and far beyond it.

Think of it as the Readers Digest version. Helpful for a lot of people, including me.

It’s Labor Day Weekend, so if you feel like supporting this hard-working blog, please consider a one-time donation or a subscription. We have several tiers, and there’s nothing like not seeing ads.

As Jonathan Easley of The Hill reports, there is mounting evidence that President Trump is going to get slaughtered in the competition of women’s votes.

A Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday found Trump trailing the top five Democratic contenders by between 9 points and 16 points overall, with each leading the president by 23 points or more among all women.

He no longer has much hope of winning among white women either, unless he can turn things around somehow. Yet, of all the implausible makeovers I can envision for Trump, becoming more appealing to women isn’t one of them. In truth, the shock of his election seems to have opened a pent-up national wound with the #MeToo movement which gained accountability for dozens of men, including many whose documented sins didn’t come close to approaching what’s in the public record with respect to the president’s treatment of women.

In this national political environment, it seemed that Kirsten Gillibrand might be especially well-positioned. Yet, despite making an aggressive and unapologetically feminist pitch to Democrats reeling over Trump and the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she ended her campaign on Wednesday because she couldn’t attract enough donors or raise enough money to qualify for the September debate.

I’ll admit that I found her lack of traction in the campaign somewhat perplexing. She’s smart, charismatic, relatively youthful and energetic, experienced, physically attractive, and from a big state with lots of wealthy donors. On paper, she looks terrific as a national candidate. But she could only crack two percent support in a single poll over the summer, and now she’s out of the running.

I believe the most logical explanation is that the Democrats just ran a candidate against Donald Trump who unimaginably lost despite being better on paper in every way. And that candidate served in the exact same Senate seat that Gillibrand currently holds. Hillary Clinton had some advantages over Gillibrand, particularly in her level of experience. But the similarities between them, white women representing New York in the Senate, were probably great enough that most Democratic voters just kind of instinctively thought that Gillibrand’s “identity” had been attempted already and come up short.

I think Clinton’s defeat is acting as a kind of counter-wind against the sails of all the women competing for the Democratic nomination, just as I think the fierce racial reaction against Barack Obama’s presidency is hurting the candidates of color. Despite a real appetite for change, Joe Biden remains stubbornly ahead in the polls. Despite a thirst for new youthful leadership, the oldest candidates (Biden, Sanders and Warren) are forming the top tier in the race. Notably, all of them are white.

It’s been frequently noted that the American public tends to whipsaw back and forth when picking a president, often choosing the near opposite of the last president in personality and character. After the trauma of Watergate, the voters chose the rectitude of Carter. The cool and intellectual Obama is sandwiched by the incurious George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

But I think the Democratic voters are following a different pattern, which is to avoid repeating the last mistake. For that reason, I think Gillibrand’s campaign was doomed from the start. I also think a kind of unacknowledged thirst to tamp down the racial divisions in the country is hurting the campaigns of otherwise attractive candidates like Cory Booker, Julian Castro and Kamala Harris. Basic risk aversion is probably hurting less qualified candidates like Pete Buttigieg.

The Democrats want to win, and that is making them gravitate to Biden. I don’t think this is so much because of anything Biden is doing as it about who the Democrats are fearful of running in his stead.

I hear voters say that they don’t want to vote for another old white man all the time. But the less vocalized opinion is that they seem terrified of doing anything else.

Sometimes words or phrases have two equally plausible meanings but everyone sort of agrees to adopt just one of them. This is the case for comments President Trump made in a Tweet about Fox News on Wednesday.

“The New @FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!”

Everyone seems to have interpreted that to mean that Fox News is basically an employee of the White House, or at least that the president expects them to serve in that capacity. But just as likely, Trump meant that he was serious about relying more on some alternative cable network, like One America News.

In this case, Trump is using the term “isn’t working for us” to mean that the arrangement or relationship with Fox News isn’t getting the job done. It’s like saying that your marriage isn’t working for you anymore. That doesn’t mean you think your spouse should be working for you.

If I’m right about what Trump meant, his phrasing was unfortunate because it was received like a slap against the independence of Fox News’s news division. Here’s a typical response, from Brit Hume: “Fox News isn’t supposed to work for you.”

Perhaps Hume’s defensiveness was somewhat misplaced. Yet, either way you interpret the president’s remarks, it’s clear that he expects the conservative news network to benefit him politically, and it’s hard to see how Fox can maximize its rating and revenues without aligning itself with a Republican president.

Yet, I don’t know. If they really hyped the candidacy of Joe Walsh, for example, would that really hurt their ratings? Wouldn’t people tune in just to engage in the debate?

In the end, I don’t think Fox News can afford to chase short-term internecine controversy because they’ll have to pivot to Trump once he secures the nomination. So, they’ll whimper a bit about this scolding, but they’ll be 100% pro-Trump throughout the primaries and campaign. That’s what their audience wants, and that’s their business model.

Methane levels in the environment have been rising sharply since 2008, and there is probably more than one contributing factor. A lot of methane is trapped under ice sheets which are melting at a rapid pace. But some researchers see the new popularity of fracking as a prime culprit.

The boom in the US shale gas and oil may have ignited a significant global spike in methane emissions blamed for accelerating the pace of the climate crisis, according to research.

Scientists at Cornell University have found the “chemical fingerprints” of the rising global methane levels point to shale oil and shale gas as the probable source…

…Robert Howarth, the author of the paper published in the journal Biogeosciences, said the proportion of methane with a “carbon signature” linked to traditional fossil fuels was falling relative to the rise of methane with a slightly different carbon make-up…

…“This recent increase in methane is massive,” Howarth said. “It’s globally significant. It’s contributed to some of the increase in global warming we’ve seen and shale gas is a major player.”

Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it exists in smaller quantities and dissipates more quickly in the atmosphere. It’s actually easier to make headway against climate change by reducing methane rather than carbon dioxide emissions, but that requires strict regulation of the shale gas fields where methane is released both intentionally and unintentionally during the hydraulic fracturing process. In 2016, the Obama administration sought to do this by announcing new rules.

The new rules are part of the Obama administration’s goal to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by up to 45 percent by 2025. They affect newly-drilled hydraulically fractured oil wells, which studies show are significant sources of leaking methane. At least one-third of human-caused methane emissions in the U.S. come from the oil and gas industry.

The regulations require companies to find and contain leaks with the goal of reducing methane pollution by the equivalent of 11 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2025, or roughly the same as the emissions from 2.34 million passenger cars.

The EPA is beginning work on regulating methane leaks from existing oil and gas wells by requiring energy companies to provide data to the agency under an “information collection request.” The request will require the companies to inform the EPA about their emissions and technology they could use to stop methane leaks.

Since 2016, climate scientists have been revising their estimates of the pace and severity of climate change, and the problem today looks more severe than their worst-case scenarios from three years ago. This would support revisiting the Obama administration’s rules on methane and fracking to see if they should be strengthened. But that’s not what the Trump administration is doing:

Oil and gas companies would face looser controls on emissions of potent climate-changing methane gas under a proposal expected from the Trump administration as soon as Thursday, oil industry and environmental groups say.

The government’s plan would ease requirements on oil and gas sites to monitor for methane leaks and plug them.

This plan is actually even more evil than it might first appear, as the Washington Post reports:

Just as important, according to an EPA document obtained by The Washington Post, the proposal will challenge the agency’s earlier position that the federal government has the authority to regulate methane without first making a determination that it qualifies as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Trump administration has taken several steps to limit the government’s ability to regulate climate pollutants in the future, including in a recently-finalized rule curbing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

They want to free up frackers to release as much methane into the environment as they want, but they also want to make it harder for any future administration to reverse their decision. To get an idea of how truly egregious this step is, consider that the oil and gas industry isn’t uniformly behind it.

The [EPA] estimates the proposed changes, which will be subject to public comment for 60 days after they are published, would save the oil and natural gas industry between $17 million and $19 million a year.

But several of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, Shell and BP, have opposed the rollback and urged the Trump administration to keep the current standards in place. Collectively, these firms account for 11 percent of America’s natural gas output.

Since the industry has already adapted to the Obama Era rules, there’s really no reason to eviscerate them. But it seems that this administration will pursue almost anything if it’s a bad enough idea.

Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia has announced that he’ll be stepping down at the end of the year due to an accumulation of health problems. I don’t have positive things to say about any currently serving Republican senators, but Isakson is pretty close to the least objectionable of the bunch. He at least takes his job as a legislator seriously, not that this matters so long as Mitch McConnell is running the show.

He is the chairman of the Veteran’s Affairs Committee and co-chair of the Ethics Committee, and he also serves on the HELP committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the prestigious Finance Committee. That’s a pretty heavy workload, and his presence will be missed next year when he’s replaced by some Republican interim appointment.

A permanent replacement will be elected in November 2020, making Georgia ground zero for control of the Senate. That’s because Georgia’s other senator, freshman David Perdue, will be up for his regularly scheduled reelection.

Naturally, everyone’s first reaction to this news is to ask whether Stacey Abrams will be willing to run for either of the two Senate seats. She says she is not interested and is going to continue with her commitment to lead a national voter protection effort. It’s not hard to see why. She still feels like she was robbed of the governorship of the Peach State by shenanigans orchestrated by her opponent and now governor Brian Kemp.  And she has plenty of reason to hold firm to that conviction:

To find a clue about what might have gone wrong with Georgia’s election last fall, look no further than voting machine No. 3 at the Winterville Train Depot outside Athens.

On machine No. 3, Republicans won every race. On each of the other six machines in that precinct, Democrats won every race.

The odds of an anomaly that large are less than 1 in 1 million, according to a statistician’s analysis in court documents. The strange results would disappear if votes for Democratic and Republican candidates were flipped on machine No. 3.

It just so happens that this occurred in Republican Brian Kemp’s home precinct, where he initially had a problem voting when his yellow voter access card didn’t work because a poll worker forgot to activate it. At the time, Kemp was secretary of state — Georgia’s top election official — and running for governor in a tight contest with Democrat Stacey Abrams.

It’s never an easy thing to win an election when your opponent is the Secretary of State and in charge of the voting process in your state. There are plenty of perfectly legal ways for such an opponent to give themselves an unfair advantage, and little to stop them from crossing the line into illegal behavior.

Hopefully, we’ll get to the bottom of what happened in Georgia so there won’t be any repeats next year. The Democrats could easily win both of these Senate seats and that would vastly improve their chances of taking control of the Senate. Perhaps Abrams can do more to assure that outcome in the role she’s adopted than as a candidate. Yet, she’s the strongest candidate the Democrats have.

There will be plenty for people to keep their eyes on here, including the Democrats’ recruiting efforts. I’d like to see a Democrat take Isakson’s seat in January 2021, but I also see his departure as another small blow to the quality of the Republican senatorial caucus. They are almost down to zero on people who are in Washington to legislate, and it’s a big problem.

In April 2011, Whet Moser of Chicago Magazine, wrote a piece with an intriguing subtitle: “How Alan Keyes’s substantial–but not 100 percent total–loss to Barack Obama–explains the world, or at least birthers and the sudden political popularity of Donald Trump.” It was a retrospective article that looked at the 2004 Illinois senate race that launched Barack Hussein Obama to national prominence.  But it was also forward-looking, as Moser was already noting something stirring with the Republican base toward Donald Trump and his Birther movement.

The contest between Obama and Keyes had already become a kind of measure of what percentage of the electorate is so blinded by either stupidity, insanity or raw partisanship that it will never under any circumstances vote for the Democrats. This was spawned by a hilarious piece screenwriter John Rodgers wrote in 2005 at his blog Kung Fu Monkey. In that post, Rodgers created a pretend conversation with his black friend Tyrone as they mused on how low President Bush’s approval numbers could go. They currently stood at 37 percent, and Tyrone insisted that they could go no lower than 27 percent.

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is —

Tyrone: 27%.

John: … you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

 

Once this post went viral, the 27 percent floor became known as either the “Crazification Factor” or the “Alan Keyes Constant.” Over time, it’s been remarkable to see how many different unpopular opinions bottom out at approximately 27 percent in surveys. Whenever that happens, people inevitably shrug and make reference to the Alan Keyes Constant.

But I don’t think the number is correct for presidential campaigns. With the stakes so much higher than a mere Senate race, I think raw partisanship has more influence. So, if we ask how low Donald Trump’s approval number can go or how badly he might do in the popular vote in 2020, I think we need to project something closer to 37 percent.

Right now, people are beginning to lose confidence in Trump’s shepherding of the economy and his poll numbers are slipping as a result. But he’s still stubbornly holding on at around 40 percent. In the just-released Quinnipiac poll, he’s losing badly to all the top-tier Democratic candidates:

If the 2020 presidential election were held today, 54 percent of registered voters say that they would vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, while only 38 percent would vote for President Trump. Matchups against other top Democrats show:

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders topping Trump 53 – 39 percent;
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren ahead of Trump 52 – 40 percent;
California Sen. Kamala Harris beating Trump 51 – 40 percent;
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg leading with 49 percent to Trump’s 40 percent.

Looking at all of the matchups, President Trump is stuck between 38 and 40 percent of the vote. These low numbers may partly be explained by a lack of support among white women, a key voting bloc that voted for Trump in the 2016 election. Today, white women go for the Democratic candidate by double digits in every scenario. Though it is a long 14 months until Election Day, Trump’s vulnerability among this important voting group does not bode well for him.

“In hypothetical matchups between President Trump and the top five Democratic presidential candidates, one key number is 40,” said Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Mary Snow. “It’s the ceiling of support for Trump, no matter the candidate. It hovers close to his job approval rating, which has stayed in a tight range since being elected.”

Voters say 56 – 38 percent that they disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president, compared to the 54 – 40 percent disapproval he received a month ago.

Now, if I’m right that the presidential Crazification Factor is actually 37 percent rather than 27 percent, then Trump is already nearing his absolute bottom. But I think this is deceptive.

One important element is that people are more willing to vote for people like Alan Keyes or Donald Trump than they are to admit they voted or intend to vote for them. These self-consciously crazy people probably make up a good ten percent of the Republican base. Collectively, they’re good for a few extra points above whatever the polls predict.

So, for example, if only 38 percent of the people say they approve of Trump’s job performance, you can still count on a few points for people who secretly approve but are lying about that to the pollsters. You can add another few points for partisans who hate Trump but are so committed to conservative issues (abortion, for example) that they’d vote for a rabid muppet over any conceivable Democratic nominee.

This kind of hyper-partisan behavior usually shows up as a late narrowing in the polls as Election Day approaches. Some people blame former FBI director James Comey for this happening in 2016, but that may be overstated.

To be safe, I’d add at least six points to Trump’s total above and beyond whatever the polls are giving him. If we anticipate vote suppression shenanigans, we probably have to jack it up to seven or eight points.

In other words, if Trump’s true floor is 37 percent, that means he can probably sink to about 29 or 30 percent in approval numbers and still meet that mark. It also means that if he’s at 42 percent or above, he has a real chance of being reelected in another nail-biter, perhaps with the assistance of the Electoral College.

In either case, I do not believe he has come close to reaching his floor. If the economy struggles and people are thrown out of work, he may crater down to his lower limit.

It’s hard to judge where this would put him historically because we’ve had so many multi-candidate presidential campaigns. In 1936, Alf Landon only won 36.5 percent of the popular vote. That’s the low mark of the modern era for an essentially two-way campaign. But, of course, Landon was the challenger rather than the incumbent. To find a better equivalent, we might look at George H.W. Bush who only got 37.5% in his 1992 reelection bid. But that was a three-way race including H. Ross Perot. In 1980, Jimmy Carter was voted out of office while garnering only 41% of the vote. Trump has the potential to lose in even more humiliating fashion.

Yet, because you can expect Trump to substantially outperform both his approval numbers and his polls, he can’t be counted out.  As long as he keeps his head above 40 percent, he’s probably in position to have a puncher’s chance of winning reelection.

Hey, music lovers, conversation starters, barflies, and fellow patrons of Ye Olde Frog Pond:

It’s been a couple weeks, but I am back. Still not quite 100% but improving. Thanks to those of you who keep the joint running when I am a bit incapacitated. Give it a couple weeks. Hopefully the headaches will be gone by then. In the meantime, here’s some music from near my neck of the woods.

I’ll try to post a bit more as life permits. Our trusty bartender does a great job in my absence. And of course everyone knows how to use YouTube these days. Amirite? So hoist a pint, wine glass, shot glass, or travel mug and let’s have a toast to community.

Cheers!

I think probably too much has already been made of the fact that Tea Party scoundrel Joe Walsh, a one-term congressman from Illinois, has announced that he’ll be challenging Donald Trump for the nomination of the Republican Party. More interesting is the president’s standing with the his party’s base. The truth is that Trump has been lying about his approval numbers with Republicans.

He says that he has 94 percent approval with them, and at one point he actually did poll that well. But recent surveys from Monmouth, Zogby Analytics, AP-NORC and Fox News all show him polling significantly lower than that. It appears that his support has been slipping and is now somewhere in the low-to-mid eighties. That might still sound impressive but his approval with Democrats is in the low single digits and he’s polling in the thirties-to-low forties with independents. He actually needs to be doing better with his base to compensate for this.

Michael Tomasky explains how important this factor will be in the 2020 election:

So let’s say 28 percent of registered voters are Republican. Twenty-eight percent of 175 million is basically 50 million. Okay, now let’s say by election time, Trump is at 80 percent among Republicans. Well, 20 percent of 50 million is 10 million. That means that 10 million Republicans can maybe be persuaded to vote against the man. Or to withhold their support from him and stay home.

Given how close the vote totals were in 2016 in a number of states, these 10 million could make an enormous difference. Florida, 110,000 out of 9 million cast; Pennsylvania, 44,000 out of nearly 6 million; Wisconsin, 22,000 out of 2.8 million; Michigan, 11,000 out of 4.5 million. If there are 10 million anti-Trump Republicans in November 2020, isn’t there a decent chance that 11,000 of them live in Michigan?

Tomasky also looked at exit polls from the last six elections to get some perspective on how much loyalty Republicans are showing to Trump compared to recent nominees:

Out of curiosity I went back and looked at the exit polls over the last 20-plus years’ worth of elections. Trump got 88 percent of Republicans in 2016. Mitt Romney got 93 percent in 2012. John McCain got 90 percent in 2008. George W. Bush got 93 percent in 2004 and 91 percent in 2000.

Then we go back to 1996, when Bob Dole ran against Bill Clinton. Dole got…80 percent of Republicans. Yes, party loyalties were less metastasized then, but whatever the explanation, the fact is the fact. Dole won just 80 percent of Republicans, and he lost—by 8.5 percent, 8 million popular votes, and a whopping 220 Electoral College votes.

If Trump were telling the truth about having 94 percent support from the GOP base, he’d be in reasonable shape, although Romney lost pretty badly at 93 percent. He’s actually in much worse shape than that because he’s not doing as well as he did last time when he got 88 percent and he’s getting hammered by independents without compensating for it with crossover Democratic votes.

What people like Joe Walsh can do is give some conservatives permission to voice some of their dissent and displeasure. He doesn’t have to have much influence at all to do some damage to the president. It doesn’t take a lot of slippage among the faithful for the numbers to start to add up.

It has also hits Trump where he’s vulnerable. His strategy has been to please the base and to blow off pleasing the center. I think that’s risky even if it works, but if it doesn’t even succeed in holding the base, then it’s a suicidal strategy.

Joe Walsh is not an ideal person to carry out this work but he doesn’t have to have a lot of impact in order to potentially make a decisive difference. The danger he represents is that there is actually quite a lot of dissent in the Republican Party against Trump and his policies, especially within the professional class and elected officials. They’re collectively much less popular with the base and with the general public than the president, so they tend to keep their heads down. But when someone comes along and articulates what they’re afraid to say, the cone of silence may not be as effective, and that could cause the dam to break.