Month: June 2020

On June 15, I wrote about President Trump’s self-defeating war on vote-by-mail, using Florida as my prime example. As I noted, the Republican Party has traditionally enjoyed a big advantage in the Sunshine State among voters who use the mail option for casting their ballots, and this helped offset the Democrats’ edge among those who use early voting centers. This pattern held true even in 2016 when the Democrats put a major effort into closing the vote-by-mail gap.

According to the Florida Department of State’s Division of Elections, 1,080,808 Republicans cast their votes by mail compared to 1,053,254 Democrats– a net advantage of 27,554. That was important because 1,139,103 Democrats utilized the early voting stations while only 1,026,600 Republicans did so, giving Hillary Clinton a 112,503 vote edge. This meant that Clinton had about an 85,000 vote advantage when Election Day started, but it would have been over 100,000 if not for vote-by-mail. Trump ultimately won Florida by about 113,000 votes, meaning that he got about 200,000 more in-person votes on Election Day.

As you can see, Trump’s victory wasn’t dependent on his vote-by-mail advantage, but it definitely gave him a much needed cushion.

Florida is the largest of the swing states and presidential elections have been consistently close there since 2000, when the outcome was too close to decide without court intervention. This is why the battle over fundamentals, the blocking and tackling of the campaigns, is probably more critical in Florida than anywhere else. Hillary Clinton did a good job in 2016 building a substantial early lead, but it wasn’t quite enough.

This time around, it’s too early to give the Biden campaign a report card. There are four months of work left to do, and they’re probably still setting up their early voting teams. But, because Trump has been waging a political jihad against voting by mail, he’s already sabotaged one of the GOP’s key advantages:

Democrats have opened up a 302,000-voter advantage over Republicans in vote-by-mail enrollment, an edge that could pay big dividends in President Donald Trump’s newly adopted must-win state.

Five months before Election Day, more than 1.46 million Democrats have signed up to vote by mail compared to 1.16 million Republicans, according to state Division of Election data released Friday. By comparison, in 2016, Democrats held an advantage of about 8,800 in vote-by-mail enrollment.

As noted above, ultimately the GOP got 27,554 more of their registered voters to use mail ballots in 2016. They accomplished this despite being slightly behind in applications at this point in the campaign. But an 8,800 voter disadvantage in June is quite different from a 302,000 voter disadvantage. It will take a herculean effort by Trump’s ground team to make up this deficit, and it’s probably not possible unless the president quickly and emphatically changes his opposition to vote-by-mail.

In my earlier piece, I suggested that Trump’s rhetoric on mail voting might have less impact in Florida than in states like Pennsylvania in Michigan because Floridians have been using the option for years and are used to it. But I also said, that his fear mongering about the practice was “like a mental contagion that is ripping through conservative circles” and that “Trump shouldn’t think his numbers won’t suffer in Florida to some degree, as well as in every state where mail is an option.”

The evidence on that is already in, thanks to the latest release from the Florida Department of State’s Division of Elections.

The New York Times/Siena College survey released on Wednesday has Biden leading nationally by a commanding 50-36 advantage. Given the present state of the campaign, Trump can hardly afford to commit massive errors that will impact early voting. But that is exactly what he has done.

Hi. Let’s start out with John Oliver on COVID-19 in prisons and jails:

Seth Myers has a few things to say about Herr Combover’s Tulsa rally:

And I can’t close without Sarah Cooper:

Cheers! The bar’s open. We’ll pour you a virtual drink.

Given how badly President Trump is flailing, you could be forgiven for asking if it’s possible that he, like Walter Mondale and George McGovern before him, could lose 49 states. It’s highly unlikely, but not entirely outside the realm of possibility. What he almost certainly cannot do is lose all fifty. This is because Alabama is stubborn.

There hasn’t been much polling out of Alabama because everyone assumes that Trump will carry it, but we can look at the polling that was done back during the primaries and compare it to a survey that was taken in mid-May and just added to 538’s list of polls.

As you can see, back in February, no Democrat was able to crack 40 percent in head-to-head matchups with Trump. Bloomberg did reach forty, probably because he’s best known as a Republican. Even with three-to-six percent undecided, Trump was able to near or surpass 60 percent support against everyone but Bloomberg.

This wasn’t a surprise. The Republican presidential candidate has topped 60 percent in Alabama in every election since 2000, when George W. Bush only carried 57 percent there.

In February, Biden tested slightly better than Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg, but the difference was well within the margin of error. When Biden was tested again in mid-May, his numbers looked close to Bloomberg’s old numbers. But Biden had only gone up by a single point. The change was all coming out of Trump’s hide, as he tested five points lower. It was a worse result for him than in any of the February head-to-heads, yet not shocking considering all of the chaos that had engulfed the country in the interim.

What stood out was not so much that Trump went from a net advantage of 20-27 points against an array of Democrats to an advantage of only 14 percent against just Biden, but that Biden was still stuck under 40 percent. Watching Trump fuck every single thing up did increase the number of Alabamans who were disinclined to commit to his reelection, but didn’t add anything perceptible to his opponent’s level of support. Perhaps if, like Roy Moore, Trump were credibly accused of child molestation this would change, but short of that it is hard to envision anything that could get Biden to a plurality in Alabama.

It’s been more than a month since the survey showing Trump up over Biden 53-39, and it is possible that Trump is now below 50 percent there. But it’s doubtful that Biden’s level of support has moved up more than a point or two. This is because Alabama is the least elastic state in the Union. According to analysis done by 538 in 2018, only Washington DC shows less movement between the two major parties.

Alabama takes the prize among states because it combines a high level of the two least persuadable voting blocs in the country: white evangelicals and blacks. It’s also probably the state where those two blocs are most rigidly locked into their partisan preferences.  Simply put, whites in Alabama see the Democratic Party as a party for blacks, and blacks see the GOP as the party for whites. As issues of racial justice have risen to the forefront of the national political conversation in the wake of George Floyd’s death, it’s doubtful that this has diminished Biden’s challenge in attracting the support of white Alabamans and it certainly hasn’t improved Trump’s standing with the state’s black population.

There are other states that are not likely to abandon Trump, including Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia in Appalachia, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska in the Plains States, and Idaho and Wyoming in the Mountain West. But you never know. The most recent survey out of Arkansas only has Biden down two points. For my money, Alabama is still Trump’s safest state, and his best assurance that he won’t surpass McGovern and Mondale in his futility.

Long-term polling by Gallup shows a slow and steady decline in American national pride and confidence in our institutions that predates the Covid-19 crisis, but as Catherine Rampell notes in the Washington Post, the slide has accelerated in the last several months.

Recent crises — involving health, the economy and police brutality — seem to have caused more Americans to question their country’s track record.

So suggests the COVID-19 Social Change Survey, a daily, nationally representative survey about the pandemic run by Northwestern University social scientists since mid-March. Some survey questions asked whether the United States is better, worse or about the same as other nations across about a dozen topics (economy, health care, criminal justice system, military, education, etc.).

On nearly every metric, the share of Americans rating the United States as “better” than other countries has declined since the pandemic began.

Given Americans’ penchant for hubris, we can probably use a self-correcting dose of humility, although it would have been preferable if didn’t involve over 120,000 casualties and widespread property damage.

More importantly, Rampell is correct when she writes, “Normally, of course, reduced patriotism or institutional trust would not be positive developments. These declines can be constructive only if they spur the public — and elected officials — to create conditions that would inspire more patriotism and trust.”

For some patriotism is always suspect, but love of country doesn’t have to be synonymous with arrogance and false pride. It’s usually a sign of health rather than dangerous overconfidence. The same is true of how people feel about their representatives, their police, their courts, and their overall safety and well-being.

Rampell is optimistic that we may be reaching a point where we’re actually going to do something to address areas like climate and health coverage and gun violence where we lag badly behind our peers. But I think the lack of confidence in our institutions is deeper and in part demographic, which is why we seem to be entering an era of iconoclasm where symbols of America’s past greatness are torn down and history is rewritten with new heroes and new villains.

The European discovery of the New World, the expansion of our colonial borders, the settling of the West, the rapid industrialization of the country, and our emergence as a superpower were all previously sources of pride and celebration, but everyone of those achievements is being reevaluated by a younger generation that is more diverse and hasn’t been getting its fair share of the American Dream.

This would be happening to some degree in any circumstances, as the old story of America was told by European settlers rather than the people they enslaved, the indigenous people they replaced, or the more recent immigrants from other continents around the world. But it is more extreme right now because our institutions have been failing all Americans, leading to widespread doubt about our government from every group of citizens. Congress will not, and most often cannot find solutions to any of our most pressing issues, and that’s why we’re seeing people in the streets who seem more interested in tearing down symbols of our past than in working to elect new leadership in November.

The Covid-19 pandemic seems to have put people under enough stress that long-simmering and often unrelated injustices have reached a boiling point, and perhaps we will get enough fresh blood in government after this fall’s election to see more effective governance. But, whatever happens, we’re not going back to the way things were. The new generations’ demand is that we rethink not only how we do things in the future, but how we got here in the first place.

Marco Rubio couldn’t execute a winning campaign against Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries, but he did identify the way to get under his skin. By talking about the diminutive size of Trump’s hands, he actually got the future president, during a globally-televised debate, to assure the world that he doesn’t have a small penis.

It wasn’t shocking that Trump did this; it was shocking that he won the presidency despite doing it.

This history shows that making Trump act like a fool is not any guarantee of beating him. But perhaps the real problem is that Rubio’s stunt was a one-off event. Trump’s opponents were almost always on the receiving side of mockery rather than the ones dishing it out.

Joe Biden isn’t making this mistake. There are some legitimate concerns about whether Biden is slipping a little mentally as nears his eightieth birthday, and this was supposed to be central to Trump’s plan of attack. But Biden and his allies are destroying the president almost every single day by attacking his physical and mental health, as well as his moral courage. And this seems perfectly suited to making Trump defensive and ridiculous.

He hates nothing more than people thinking he’s not physically strong, virile, and courageous, which is why can never seem to let these attacks go. When I was a taking political science classes in college, I learned that Richard Nixon made a big mistake when he said he was “not a crook” because he amplified the charge that he was a crook. That’s what Trump did when he spent 14 minutes on stage in Tulsa explaining why he can’t drink water with one hand or walk normally down a mild incline. Sure, a lot of people had seen some viral videos mocking his appearance at West Point, but he jacked up how many people knew about it by several million.

He’s getting the worse end of the fitness argument, which has the doubly brutal effect of neutralizing his attacks on Biden. He winds up sounding like the kid who says “I know I am, but what are you?”

Ordinarily, I might have some qualms about ageist attacks on Trump, but he’s been making attacks on anyone who is weak or disempowered since he began his first campaign in 2016: accusing immigrants of carrying disease, saying Jeb Bush has no energy, mocking disabled reporters, suggesting that Hillary Clinton is at death’s door, and now claiming that Biden is senile.

This is a guy who got out of Vietnam because he had sore feet. He’s completely out of his tree half the time, and now it looks like he’s got some significant physiological problems. He lives in a glass house on the issue of physical and mental fitness, and I suggest that people throw every rock they can find at him.

When the president returned to the White House early Sunday morning after his MAGA rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he had the appearance of a soldier returning from a disastrous battle. The New York Times painted the picture: “his tie hung untied around his neck…he waved to reporters, with a defeated expression on his face, holding a crumpled red campaign hat in one hand.”

The kids are calling it the “Walk of Shame.”

He was like the child prodigy who blows the state finals Spelling Bee because he can’t spell M-O-R-A-L-S.

That’s what happens when you go on national television and admit committing a crime against humanity. But it probably wasn’t his admission that he deliberately ordered the government to slow down testing for Covid-19 that had him feeling C-R-U-S-H-E-D.

He had been in a mood of giddy anticipation for days, thinking that all his problems would begin to melt away once he got back in front of his adoring fans. But his fans didn’t show up. He and Mike Pence were expecting to make two appearances in Tulsa. One would be inside the arena, and the other would be an overflow parking lot outside. But the arena was half full and there was no one in the overflow area so that portion of the festivities had to be cancelled.

This was a classic example of overpromising and underdelivering. In the lead-up to Tulsa, both Trump and his campaign manager Brad Parscale suggested that 300,000 or 800,000 or even a million people had requested tickets to the event. Yet, fewer than 9,000 people actually attended. Every one had a theory or an excuse for why this happened. Some Korean pop music fans had ordered all the tickets with no intention of showing up, or the media scared people away with their health threats, or MAGA fans were scared of all the violence and looting they’d seen on their teevees. Maybe the Chinese were behind it.

But whatever the explanation, no one forced Trump to spend fifteen minutes explaining why he has difficulty walking down slight inclines or drinking water with one hand.

After the rally, there’s no doubt that Trump spent his time on Air Force One looking at the social media response, and he immediately realized that he’d spawned a couple dozen humiliating memes.

As bad as all of that was, however, it was his realization that he couldn’t get his mojo back with MAGA rallies that must have left him most deflated. The magic is gone. There is no silver bullet. Wishing otherwise won’t make it so.

Most likely, the first casualty of the fiasco with be campaign manager Brad Parscale. But it’s Trump who wanted to do a rally in the middle of a pandemic when health officials said it was an unacceptable risk. He has no one to blame for the result but himself.

If you had told me in 2016 that John Bolton would declare himself for Joe Biden for president in 2020, I would have had to sit don’t and think for a good long while. My imagination would have gone wild trying to conjure up a set of circumstances so fucked up that it would turn Bolton into a Democrat. Most likely, I would have guessed that something major had happened internationally, perhaps the onset of a hugely mass casualty war. Short of that, I might have envisioned a failure by Trump to protect the country or maintain our alliances that was so grievous that all the country’s foreign policy hands had to agree that the president needed to go.

While we have experienced the totally unexpected Covid-19 catastrophe, that doesn’t seem to have much to do with Bolton’s thinking. He just came to the conclusion that Trump is too stupid, too corrupt, too self-centered, and too incompetent to be entrusted with running the country. He had the benefit of working with Trump closely, so that helped him realize this.

I don’t think Bolton’s endorsement is going to carry a lot of weight. I’m not sure how Biden intends to utilize it, because for a lot of the left, getting approval from Bolton is a mark against him. Some people might even see it as a point if favor of Trump that Neo-cons like Bolton and Bill Kristol and David Frum, are all supporting Biden this time around.

I don’t really see it that way. In my mind, it shows just how bad Trump is that even people who are conservative on almost every issue are willing and eager to see a Democratic president replace him.

These folks can be somewhat valuable during the campaign, but Biden doesn’t want to depend on them going forward or worry about keeping them on board for his reelection bid. They’re not reliable allies, and they’re often catastrophically wrong on foreign policy. Most of them will become harsh critics of Biden’s presidency even before he can be inaugurated.

There are some Republicans though, even if their number is not large, who can be convinced to vote for Biden precisely because someone like Bolton is warning them about Trump. Biden as a safe harbor for Republicans is an asset he brought to the table in a way that his opponents could not match. It should help him pad his numbers somewhat, and that’s fine as long as he doesn’t reward them with positions of responsibility.

 

My insomnia has gotten to be a serious problem at this point. I know a big part of the problem is that I have a torn left rotator cuff that makes it painful to lie on one side or to move about, but whatever the reasons, my lack of sleep is affecting my productivity. Ordinarily, I would already have written a lengthy piece about the whole thing in the Southern District of Manhattan, but it’s 4:30pm and I still don’t have the concentration or energy to give you my take.

It’s not a simple story to tell or analyze, mainly because it’s both unprecedented and monumental in its reach and implications. I’m going to celebrate my mother-in-laws birthday and get ready for a Father’s Day celebration tomorrow, and I’ll also be keeping up on the MAGA rally in Tulsa.

While I do these things, however, my mind will be working in the background to figure out how to tell the story of Trump’s decision to fire Geoffrey S. Berman and Berman’s refusal to leave his post. It’s one of the biggest constitutional clashes I’ve ever seen, and there are reasons that it’s happening now.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Crumwold Hall, in the Hudson Valley, New York. I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on an 8×10 inch canvas board.The photo that I am using is seen directly below.

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

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

Changes for this week’s cycle include the figures standing on the lawn. I started painting those 1% figures. After having completed the couple standing front and center, I stopped. I realized that the house would seem an even greater contrast to the small figures if there were only two of them. And so that’s what you see below. I call this piece “The One Percent”.

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.

You don’t have to live outside of America to feel heartbroken about how our country is being governed, but it probably helps to have some distance to get a truly objective opinion.

As coronavirus cases surge in the U.S. South and West, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored.

“It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” said Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — a country that has confirmed only three new cases over the last three weeks and where citizens have now largely returned to their pre-coronavirus routines.

“I can’t imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it’s unsafe,” Wiles said of the U.S.-wide economic reopening. “It’s hard to see how this ends. There are just going to be more and more people infected, and more and more deaths. It’s heartbreaking.”

This is hardly the first time in our history that our southern conservative culture has made things unbearable for the rest of us, but this is definitely the worst example since the end of Jim Crow. It’s almost funny to see foreigners ask why these Republican-led states aren’t listening to the advice of scientists. It’s like they didn’t read the early chapters about the Scopes Trial or keep up with how biblical literalism has been used to do everything from justifying slavery and homophobia to disputing the core findings of biology, geology, and climate science.

These people are in charge here. The rest of us are helpless until this conservative revolution burns itself out. Thousands and thousands of are currently paying the price with their lives. And many of us have been warning about this for years and years. I’ve been at this for fifteen, and things have generally gotten much worse, there are signs that things are coming to a head.

With any luck, this will be the last spasm of lethal stupidity we get from southern conservatives, and we can begin to join the rest of the developed world in modernity.