Month: May 2020

I don’t study the Canadian form of government as much as I should, and their announced assault weapons ban is a good demonstration of why I tend to neglect this area of political science. Our two systems are simply so different that I often feel that I can’t find much in Canada that can be applied here in the United States.

The Liberal government is prohibiting hundreds of “military-grade assault rifles“ – including two of the firearms used in last month’s mass shooting in Nova Scotia – partly fulfilling a long-standing pledge to ban a style of gun that has become associated with mass shootings worldwide…

…Prime Minister Justin Trudeau evoked several Canadian mass shootings – including last month’s tragedy in Nova Scotia – as he announced the measures on Friday morning…

…Senior officials who spoke on background at a technical briefing said at least 105,000 restricted firearms held by 72,000 owners will come under the ban. The total number is likely much higher…

…“It’s much more sweeping than we expected,” said Alison De Groot, managing director of the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association. “Based on the list, we estimate there is about $200-million to $300-million in inventory in the supply chain right now that cannot be sold.”

Just like that, it’s done. The prime minister made a decision, made an announcement, and the policy is decided. There is now a ban on purchasing AR-15 style rifles. There are eight other broad model types that are prohibited.

The bans will be accomplished through regulations, with no legislative changes needed until the government introduces the buyback program.

The Opposition said the program should have been put to Parliament. Mr. Trudeau is using “the immediate emotion of the horrific attack in Nova Scotia to push the Liberals’ ideological agenda and make major firearms policy,” Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer said in a statement. “That is wrong.”

The conservative opposition is reduced to impotent complaints about the fairness of the process, but they have no real recourse outside of the hope of using the issue in future political campaigns. There’s some talk of taking the issue to court, but there’s no 2nd Amendment to back them up.

Obviously, we can’t expect a Democratic president to bypass Congress and create a national policy by administrative fiat. It wouldn’t be enforceable and it wouldn’t pass constitutional muster.

Maybe, however, America will learn something from Canada for once. We might learn that these restrictions can be put in place without it being a political liability. We might learn that it reduces mass shootings, gun accidents, and gun violence generally. He might discover that the police really like the policy since it makes their jobs safer and easier.

In other words, perhaps Canada’s ban will create some momentum for a similar set of regulations here. We can examine their buyback program and take what works while leaving what does not. In the end, we’ll need to convince Congress, not just the president. And we’ll need to convince the Supreme Court, too, which may not be possible in the next two or three decades unless we expand the Court. Maybe expanding the Court will become more politically viable.

I get frustrated with the limitations of our system, but I’m not certain I want the Canadian system either. Trudeau has too much power here for my taste, even if I happen to sympathize with his goals in this instance. But I hope we can still find ways to learn from this and to emulate it.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Grand Canyon. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit just a few weeks ago.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas.

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

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

I have further defined all the various lit and shadowed surfaces. Buttes and valleys flow together in a continuous fascinating landscape that is the Grand Canyon.

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

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

To some degree, fate conspired against Bernie Sanders’ second run at the presidency, but it was always going to be difficult for him to win the nomination. From the very beginning of the contest, I played up his chances precisely because the field was so crowded that it put him in a commanding position. He was likely to hit the 15 percent minimum threshold for delegates in almost every congressional district in the country, and the only other candidate who was similarly positioned was Joe Biden. For this reason, I said they were likely to be the finalists, and they were.

Joshua Holland correctly identifies a fatal flaw in the Sanders strategy when he points to his reliance on winning a plurality (perhaps as small as 30 percent) of the delegates. His team actually thought the likeliest course to victory was to win a contested convention, and they planned accordingly. This plan could only work if the field remained large for the majority of the contest, with several candidates consistently earning delegates.

Biden’s plan was far more plausible. He’d do better as a second choice than Sanders and grow in comparative strength as the field winnowed. Part of that plan included maintaining good relations with the other candidates so that they would be more willing to step aside from him, more likely to endorse him, and their supporters were less likely to be alienated.

Sanders didn’t really consider a plan for winning the majority of the delegates, and he certainly never implemented such a plan. Holland mentions a variety of mistakes and missteps that Sanders made along the way, but they broadly fall into the same category. He was banking on being a plurality nominee, and he thought his preexisting 2016 vote was a floor on which he could build. Neither assumption was safe.

Much of his 2016 vote was basically a protest vote against Hillary Clinton. Only some of that transferred to a protest against Joe Biden, and what remained was divvied up among many alternatives. Thus, Sanders was operating at a floor in the high teens, which wasn’t even at the 30 percent level he thought he needed. Then, because he didn’t court the other candidates or their supporters, and he did not do much to win over even progressive endorsements in Congress, he discovered that he gained almost nothing when his challengers began dropping out.

Ultimately, none of those challengers endorsed him or instructed their followers to support him, and that was what killed his chances.

To be more precise, pretty much everything Sanders did was in some way a failure to prevent that outcome, so the refusal to broaden his appeal or work on personal relationships is the real culprit.

Holland’s point is that none of this is necessarily transferrable to some other left-wing progressive candidate, and that’s true. There’s no reason a progressive can’t be good at making friends in the Democratic caucus, nor any reason they can’t craft a strategy based on winning over other people’s followers when they drop out. No one forced Sanders to adopt an overly optimistic assessment of his own standing in the Democratic electorate, nor to pursue a strategy based on the presumption that the field would remain crowded.

Any candidate who insists on running a hard anti-corporate campaign that threatens powerful industries will face many of the same challenges no matter what approach they choose, but that is not what doomed Sanders. It was a flawed campaign based on a bad reading of the electorate. Its inflexibility was seen as a virtue by some, but was inexcusable as plan for victory.

With Democrats saying emphatically that electability was key for them in this cycle, the idea that you’d be convincing when you’re not even hoping to win a majority of Democrats was laughable. Everything had to be about demonstrating your ability to reach voters outside of your base, and at the very least you had to create the perception that this was possible. Sanders did not seriously try.

In the future, we will find a cycle more interested in taking chances, and we may find a progressive who is more savvy about what victory is going to take. Nothing about Sanders’ failed campaign should really discourage progressives from thinking it’s possible to have a winning candidate.

According to a just-released national poll, an astonishing 51 percent of Americans approve of the job Donald Trump is doing on the Covid-19 pandemic. But the survey also found the Trump is perceived as doing a worse job than every single governor in the country. On top of that, the president’s modestly positive results are fueled by areas that aren’t expected to be competitive in November. For example, he has 59 percent approval in Wyoming, 57 percent approval in West Virginia, and 55 percent approval in Nebraska.

When we go into the swing states, the story is much different. The three most critical states for Trump’s victory in 2016 are not looking so hot: Pennsylvania (40 percent), Wisconsin (39 percent) and Michigan (36 percent).

In the next tier, there is little encouragement for Trump: Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia are all at 47 percent, and Arizona and Iowa are at 45 percent. These are all better than Texas, however, where he’s at 44 percent approval. It’s consistent, however, with the most recent Public Policy Polling survey out of Texas, which shows Biden leading Trump there by one point.

Thing looks difficult both in states Trump is defending and in one’s he’d like to pick up. He’s at 39 percent approval on the pandemic in New Hampshire, at 41 percent in Nevada and 42 percent in Colorado and Minnesota.

He’s even showing some weakness is supposedly safe states. Both South Dakota and South Carolina give him 45 percent approval, and he’s negative in Utah, Kansas, Mississippi and Missouri as well.

In addition to Texas, the number that really sticks out is Ohio, where he has 51 percent approval. It just so happens that the Republican governor there, Mike DeWine, leads all the nation’s governors with an 83 percent approval rating of his handling of the virus. That 32 percent gap is bigger than the distinction in most blue states, and if it might still look like Ohio has become a solidly red state there’s a Marist poll out showing Biden up there by four points and Trump with net-negative approval numbers.

Only 11 percent of Republican want an immediate reopening of the economy and bipartisan majorities strongly disagree (88 percent) with opening it up prematurely. They are also leaning more toward experts to get their advice. For example, 88 percent of the people trust the Centers for Disease Control to do the right thing, compared to just 54 percent who say that about Congress.

Based on presidential polling in prior crises, Trump’s numbers are almost certainly inflated, as people generally become less willing to express dissent when the country is in trouble. Objectively, it’s hard to see why anyone would genuinely be satisfied with the job Trump has done on Covid-19, and that applies to both the past and the present.

Reports that Trump lost his temper with Brad Parscale last week after seeing the internal polling numbers are not surprising.

As he huddled with advisers on Friday evening, President Donald Trump was still fuming over his sliding poll numbers and the onslaught of criticism he was facing for suggesting a day earlier that ingesting disinfectant might prove effective against coronavirus.

Within moments, the President was shouting — not at the aides in the room, but into the phone — at his campaign manager Brad Parscale, three people familiar with the matter told CNN. Shifting the blame away from himself, Trump berated Parscale for a recent spate of damaging poll numbers, even at one point threatening to sue Parscale.

Those internal polling numbers must be atrocious. The public polls are certainly bad. In addition to the already mentioned Ohio and Texas, recent surveys have shown Trump trailing in North Carolina, Arizona and Florida, tied in Georgia, and up by only five points in Utah.

Aaron Blake describes the current state of play this way:

Even if we allow that Arizona, Georgia and Texas aren’t about to go blue just yet and maybe Biden’s slight edge in Ohio won’t hold up — which seem to be legitimate assumptions — Biden is still winning in states accounting for 323 electoral votes, compared with 215 for Trump.

All of this is also bolstered by new data from the Public Religion Research Institute, which has been surveying a series of swing states and showed Trump’s favorability rating in them dropping from 53 percent in March to 38 percent today.

Again, Trump is strong in areas with few Electoral College votes, like Wyoming, West Virginia, and Nebraska, but this is really doing little to boost his chances. What’s it’s really doing is boosting his overall approval numbers on a national level without making it any more likely that he’ll win.