Month: November 2020

Washington Monthly readers are, on average, highly educated consumers of political and policy information. They read multiple mainstream national newspapers, listen to public radio, and often watch cable shows. Yet they come here because they feel we can offer something more.

One example from this year had an odd assist from the COVID-19 pandemic. For years, we’ve been arguing that the single best way to ensure that more citizens cast ballots is to expand universal vote by mail. With states compelled by the health crisis to relax restrictions on absentee and mail voting, the 2020 presidential election broke the record for ballots cast and saw the highest voter turnout rate among eligible citizens since 1900. This was great for American democracy and, from a partisan perspective, it helped Joe Biden tally the highest vote total for a presidential candidate. This was the result we envisioned, even if it was far from how we hoped it would play out.

Of course, voter participation is only one measure of a healthy representative democracy. We also need an informed citizenry, and with many thanks to Donald Trump and his right-wing media enablers, 2020 has not excelled in this area. A new survey from Vox and Data for Progress finds that 75 percent of Republican voters and 44 percent of all voters believe that the election results were tainted. There is no evidence for this, but raising doubts about mail-voting is part of the Republicans’ strategy to prevent high turnouts in the future. Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham of South Carolina made this clear when he told Fox News on Monday, “[Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell and I need to come up with an oversight of mail-in balloting. If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we are going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.”

Ironically, high turnout helped the Republicans regain seats in the House that they’d lost in the 2018 midterms and has so far limited their losses in the Senate to two seats which, provided they don’t lose both January runoff elections in Georgia, will allow them to retain their majority. Yet, Sen. Graham thinks the Republicans will be locked out of the White House in perpetuity unless they eliminate mail-voting as an option. We can expect the GOP to pursue a relentless campaign of misinformation in furtherance of this goal.

This is why the Washington Monthly’s policy-focused journalism is so important. By ourselves, we can’t defeat the torrent of lies that flow through voters’ Facebook feeds, but as we explain in the latest issue, local and niche journalism is vital. Yet, with the media as a whole at risk of total financial collapse, we need innovative solutions to keep the industry afloat. In the meantime, we’re reliant on the generous support of readers like you. This is why I urge you to make a donation during our year-end fundraising drive. In fact, do it right now. Give whatever you can—$10, $50, $1,000—before December 31, and your contribution will be matched, dollar for dollar, thanks to a generous challenge grant we’ve received from NewsMatch, a campaign dedicated to helping nonprofit news organizations like the Monthly. As a nonprofit, we can’t do the work we do without your support. (It also means your donation is tax-deductible.) As a token of our gratitude, if you give $50 or more, you’ll receive a free one-year subscription to the print edition of the Washington Monthly.

Your donation will help us, but it will help you too, and it will help us have the informed citizenry we need for a healthy democracy.

Earlier this month, I wrote about Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration who was refusing to sign an “ascertainment” acknowledging that Joe Biden and Kalama Harris had won the election. As I explained, this simple administrative act is required before the Biden transition team can gain access to intelligence briefings, appropriated funds, office space, the government email system, and ready access to various federal departments. In 2016, the ascertainment was signed by Barack Obama’s GSA administrator on November 9, the day after that year’s election, even as Democrat Hillary Clinton and Green Party candidate Jill Stein were weighing recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

In that initial piece, I argued that it was “unfair” to expect Murphy to recognize Biden’s victory before Donald Trump and Mike Pence were willing to do so. Twelve days later, with Trump’s lawyers going 1-for-31 in court challenges to the election results, Murphy can no longer use this excuse, and as Kyle Cheney reports for Politico, House Democrats are out of patience:

Four senior House Democrats are demanding that GSA Administrator Emily Murphy brief them Monday on the reason she has yet to ascertain Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election, warning that her answers will determine whether they intend to haul her to Capitol Hill for a public hearing, along with other senior General Services Administration officials.

“We have been extremely patient, but we can wait no longer,” said House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney and House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita Lowey, in a four-page letter joined by Reps. Gerry Connolly and Mike Quigley.

This isn’t the first time that Murphy has found herself in the crosshairs of congressional Democrats. She’s been severely criticized for her handling of the lease on the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., which the GSA’s own Inspector General found should have been terminated when Trump became president because of a proviso that no one in the federal government could be awarded the lease. She was also strongly questioned about her decision to cancel the planned relocation of FBI headquarters to Maryland, a move widely seen as an effort to prevent a competing hotel from being constructed on the site of the current headquarters just blocks from Trump’s.

She now faces a difficult decision. If she refuses to brief the House Democrats or if she doesn’t satisfactorily answer their questions, she will likely to be subpoenaed to testify on national television. She could, like many Trump officials before her, refuse to comply with the subpoena, but she lacks the executive privilege protections generally granted to White House officials like former White House counsel Don McGahn who is still fighting a Russia investigation-related congressional subpoena in court, or John Bolton who famously altogether avoided a subpoena to testify in Trump’s impeachment inquiry.

There are two ways that Congress can enforce a subpoena. They can ask the Justice Department to bring charges if there is non-compliance, which sounds like a less than fruitful path while William Barr is attorney general. The alternative is for it to ask a federal judge to step in and compel Murphy to testify. Trump’s Justice Department refused to help Congress, forcing them into court in McGahn’s case and dissuading them from even issuing a subpoena to Bolton, lest they lose the case and establish a dangerous precedent. Murphy can anticipate no such protection from a Biden-run Justice Department and could  be charged with contempt next year if she refuses to comply and Democrats are in a mood to pursue an investigation into this chaotic interregnum.

Yet, she no doubt is feeling tremendous pressure not to avoid this risk by issuing the ascertainment. It’s not just Trump’s fire and fury menacing her. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his wife have received death threats for the simple offense of Raffensperger contradicting Trump about the existence of fraud in his state’s elections. There’s no reason to think that Murphy would be spared that kind of intimidation.

The Republican base is convinced that Biden’s win is illegitimate, despite the lack of evidence of any widespread fraud. A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted between November 13 and November 17 found that only 29 percent of Republican voters recognize Biden’s victory. They found unanimity on this point when conducting interviews with Trump supporters:

In Reuters interviews with 50 Trump voters, all said they believed the election was rigged or in some way illegitimate. Of those, 20 said they would consider accepting Biden as their president, but only in light of proof that the election was conducted fairly. Most repeated debunked conspiracy theories espoused by Trump, Republican officials and conservative media claiming that millions of votes were dishonestly switched to Biden in key states by biased poll workers and hacked voting machines.

Many voters interviewed by Reuters said they formed their opinions by watching emergent right-wing media outlets such as Newsmax and One American News Network that have amplified Trump’s fraud claims. Some have boycotted Fox News out of anger that the network called Biden the election winner and that some of its news anchors – in contrast to its opinion show stars – have been skeptical of Trump’s fraud allegations.

This puts Murphy in the position of prioritizing her legal situation against her physical safety, future employment opportunities and standing in Republican politics.

Of course, she has two options that can skirt or mitigate the worst of these problems. She can comply with the subpoena and take the heat for refusal to issue the ascertainment. She’d be blistered by Democrats and the media for endangering our national security and worsening our COVID-19 pandemic response, but she’d become an Oliver North-style hero to the right and most likely avoid criminal liability.

Alternatively, she could ask the House Democrats to subpoena her and use it as an excuse to go ahead with the ascertainment. Basically, she could argue that she held out as long as she reasonably could, but she wasn’t willing to deny Biden’s win under oath or adopt Trump’s dubious legal arguments in a congressional hearing. It wouldn’t satisfy everyone, but it’s a middle ground.  Her employment opportunites with corporations and DC lobbies and trade associations might be enhanced by a reversal of her position.

If I were her, I’d adopt this last option because it has the advantage of being the right thing for the country and it also provides legal protection along with, hopefully, some physical protection, too.

It’s a shame that the House Democrats must put her in this position, but they can’t just do nothing while Trump attempts  a naked coup, nor can they be silent when Biden’s presidency is being sabotaged before it has even begun and the nation’s health and security are put at needless risk.

I’ve now reached the white-hot rage point of the political transition:

After failing repeatedly in court to overturn election results, President Trump is taking the extraordinary step of reaching out directly to Republican state legislators as he tries to subvert the Electoral College process, inviting Michigan lawmakers to meet with him at the White House on Friday.

Mr. Trump contacted the Republican majority leader in the Michigan State Senate to issue the invitation, according to a person briefed on the invitation. It is not clear how many Michigan lawmakers will be making the trip to Washington, nor precisely what Mr. Trump plans to say to the lawmakers.

Trump is clearly going to request that the Republican leaders from the Michigan legislature take some extralegal action to prevent the certification of the state’s election results. Even if he is persuasive, this effort will fail. The legislators do not have the power to prevent the certification, and even if they did it wouldn’t prevent Biden from having won a majority of the Electoral College’s votes.

But the degree to which the current president is willing to go to divide this country, undermine our faith in our elections, and sandbag the incoming president is so extreme that I now want the severest penalties meted out against him and anyone who has committed crimes in his name.

Furious doesn’t even begin to describe my mood.

Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics doesn’t understand why the media believe the Republicans are favored to win the January 5th runoff Senate elections in Georgia, and I don’t understand it either. I think the races should be considered pure toss-ups.

Trende identifies six reasons to doubt that David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are in a clear winning position against their respective opponents, filmmaker Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock. It begins with that fact that the Republicans candidates are garbage. Both are implicated in using early insider knowledge about the COVID-19 pandemic to make stock trades while neglecting to warn their constituents about the coming dangers, which have now resulted in a quarter million American deaths. Perdue has only won one political campaign in his life, and he severely underperformed. Loeffler was appointed to her Senate seat and has never run a successful campaign. At least she’s agreed to debate Warnock on December 6th. After Perdue was humiliated in his last debate against Ossoff, he didn’t show up for a scheduled November 1 debate and now refuses to do any more.

The Republicans comfort themselves that their garbage candidates have a big advantage, in that Democrats are traditionally less inclined to vote in runoffs than in general elections, and this is true. But, as Trende points out, the Democratic base is different now than in the past. When Democratic Sen. Wyche Fowler lost a runoff election to Republican Paul Coverdell in 1992, Georgia was not yet a technology hub filled with northern transplants, and when Democrat Jim Martin badly lost a runoff against Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss in 2008, the Atlanta suburbs were a source of GOP strength rather than weakness. The Democrats’ urban base remains the same and may be difficult to mobilize, but white low-propensity voters now make up a big chunk of the Republican base, while reliable suburban voters are key to the Democrats’ success. There’s no convincing reason to believe the GOP still has an inherent turnout advantage, and even if they do it is probably less pronounced than in the past.

As Trende notes, in these particular elections, the Democrats benefit from the fact that Ossoff has natural strength in the suburbs and Warnock, who is the pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, will mobilize the black vote. They complement each other in a way that Loeffler and Perdue do not, particularly after Loeffler abandoned her suburban-focused appeal to fend off a primary challenge from Doug Collins on her right.

Then there is the Trump factor, which can really be broken into two parts. A lot will depend on what Trump does between now and the January 5 elections, and a lot will depend on how the electorate responds when the president is not on the ballot. Before we get into that, though, it’s important to remember that Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden while Perdue won a plurality against Ossoff and Loeffler and Collins combined got more votes than Warnock and the other Democratic candidates in that contest. Trump may not be much of an asset.

Still, as Byron York points out in the Washington Examiner, the working theory of the GOP is that Trump needs to aggressively campaign for Perdue and Loeffler or they’ll lose. The basic idea is that most Republicans are now taking their cues from the president, and they won’t be nearly as motivated to turn out without him on the ticket. They also have reason to be dispirited about Trump’s loss and are inclined to believe it when he says that the election was rigged against him. If Trump doesn’t make an urgent and sustained case for Perdue and Loeffler, his base may decide not to participate in a vote that may not be winnable because of Democratic cheating.

On the flip side, however, more Democrats express joy about Trump losing than Biden winning, and they too may be less inclined to turn out when the president is not on the ballot. The more Trump takes a personal interest in the two races, the more motivated the Democratic base will be to stick it to him. More importantly, a lot of suburban Georgians voted against Trump but for the Republican Senate candidates. The more they associate Perdue and Loeffler with Trump, the more inclined they’ll be to change their votes in the runoff. Also, the more they realize that Biden’s presidency will be handicapped by a Mitch McConnell-led Senate, the less they may be disposed to want that outcome.

The final wildcard is Trump’s posture as his presidency comes to an end. Will he ever concede? Will he continue to attack Georgia’s Republican governor and Republican Secretary of State? Will his inattention to the COVID-19 outbreak, which is currently surging everywhere, suppress in the in-person (only) vote and further advantage the Democrats’ vote-by-mail advantage?

It seem’s a very unsafe bet to rely on Trump to bring the Georgia Republicans victory.

The most recent poll confirms my suspicion that these contests should be regarded as toss-ups:

In the regular Senate race, Sen. David Perdue (R) and Democrat Jon Ossoff are tied with 49 percent support, with just 2 percent of voters still undecided. And in the special race to fill retired Sen. Johnny Isakson’s seat, Democrat Raphael Warnock narrowly beats Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R), 49-48. Just 3 percent of voters are undecided in that race.

Considering the Republicans over-performance against the polls in the November 3 elections, the Democrats should assume they’ll doing three or four points worse than this, probably from differential response rates from the two respective political bases. Still, the runoff turnout model will be quite different, and anyone who thinks they can make a confident prediction about that is overconfident in their own clairvoyance.

 

Well, it’s another day in paradise. That can only mean that an out-going White House Occupant is throwing a tantrum on the way out. And the comedians are here to cover it.

Seth Meyers captures the absurdity of Trump’s incessant tweeting that he somehow won the election:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn564RrfXkE

And John Oliver has his take:

Colbert takes on the leadership vacuum in the White House:

Oh yeah, I seriously doubt New Yorkers want the Trumps back any time too soon. Just a wild guess:

Okay. That’s it for now. The bar is open and the jukebox is fully operational.

Be careful out there.

Cheers!

Despite Donald Trump’s efforts to reprise Richard Nixon’s 1968 law-and-order message, Joe Biden defeated him by rolling up big margins in the suburbs of cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. It’s true that Biden overwhelmingly carried those cities, but analyses by Harry Enten of CNN and Nate Cohn at the New York Times show that his net gain of urban votes was lower than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. The suburbs elected Biden. But before Democrats celebrate, there are areas of concern for them as well as Republicans when it comes to the lawns and leafy streets surrounding American cities.

First, despite the Trump campaign’s hapless effort to proclaim that scary big city machines stole the election, a dive into urban returns shows why that can’t possibly be so. In Georgia, black turnout increased relative to 2016, but less so than other groups, and the black share of the electorate fell from 27.6 percent to 27.0 percent. This was much lower than the 30 percent who showed up for Obama’s 2012 campaign. Precinct-level data show Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s performance by 7 percent in high-income areas, by 6 percent where college-graduates are a majority, and by 5 percent in Obama-Trump polling places. Biden actually did worse than Clinton in only two kinds of precincts: ones that are at least 80 percent black or majority Latino.

This pattern held true in the Northern cities, too. In Detroit, Biden actually got 1,000 fewer votes than Clinton, while Trump added five thousand. Only in Milwaukee did the Democrats walk away with a bigger net-vote advantage than in 2016, but it was only an improvement of 3,000 and Trump actually saw the higher percentage improvement.

The suburbs were where Democrats cleaned up and won important states. The 80,000-vote net gain Biden pulled out of the Philly burbs easily eclipsed Trump’s 45,000 margin of victory in Pennsylvania in 2016. In the Detroit suburbs and non-urban parts of Wayne County (where Detroit is located), Biden netted 120,000 more votes than Clinton, which dwarfed Trump’s 10,000 statewide victory in 2016. In the suburban parts of Milwaukee and surrounding counties, Biden’s vote total was 25 percent above Hillary’s while Trump’s only added 12 percent to his 2016 performance. That alone was sufficient to erase Trump’s previous 23,000-vote statewide margin of victory. And, as Nate Cohn’s notes, in Georgia “Mr. Biden ran well ahead of Hillary Clinton in well-educated, wealthy and increasingly diverse precincts around Atlanta, while making relatively few gains elsewhere in the state.”

The good news for the Democrats is that these numbers were good enough to help Biden win 306 electoral votes and the election, while defending Gary Peters’s U.S. Senate seat in Michigan and forcing the two Senate contests in Georgia into January runoffs. The bad news is that suburban ticket splitting had real consequences for Democrats. They were unable to pick up a U.S. House seat in the Philly suburbs they were targeting, and a plurality of voters supported Georgia’s Republican Senate candidates even as Trump lost the state. Suburban voters turned on Trump but unlike 2018 they warmed up to Republicans down ballot. Freshman Democrats from the Des Moines and Oklahoma City suburbs lost their first reelection bid. Races in the New Jersey and Los Angeles suburbs are too close to call.

This gives hope to the GOP because their suburban troubles may dissipate without Trump on the ballot. It won’t take much Democratic slippage to flip the House in 2022. Yet, if their suburban slide continues, they’ll be even more reliant on pulling Trump-like numbers out of rural areas and, as my previous examination of the Pennsylvania results indicated, it’s not at all clear they can accomplish this. Their performance in the 2018 gubernatorial election, in which incumbent Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf was reelected, suggested that Trump’s rural margins are particular to him, and not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump leading a 2024 ticket would be a mixed blessing for Republicans.

The Democrats’ main problem is that that their urban/suburban coalition is fundamentally unstable. Typically, suburbanites choose to live outside of cities for carefully considered reasons—lower crime, better education–and they resist spending their tax dollars on urban priorities. Historically, the Republicans have had tremendous success in exploiting this wedge, and it’s not hard to foresee them making inroads in the suburbs again using messaging that’s less blunderbuss than Trump’s cries that low-income housing projects will be built next door and your life is in danger. What’s driving the cities and suburbs together is growing demographic and cultural similarities, but common economic interests are lacking.

The Republicans’ main problem, and perhaps the country’s main problem, is that these demographic and cultural changes are making the GOP reliant on rolling up huge margins in rural, white communities. The way Trump has done this is to get whites to vote with racial consciousness. This has been a boon to racists and white nationalists who have seen their once marginal views mainstreamed in the Trump Era. If the Republicans can’t reverse their suburban losses, they’ll feel compelled to continue along Trump’s well-trodden path in search of ever-greater margins with white voters–and their numbers are declining.

In July 2013, I predicted the Republicans would feel pressure to take this approach:

It appears that most Republicans are dropping the idea that they need to do better with Latinos and adopting the idea that they need to do even better with white voters…The most obvious way is to pursue an us vs. them approach that alternatively praises whites as the true, patriotic Americans, and that demonizes non-whites as a drain on the nation’s resources. This is basically the exact strategy pursued by McCain and especially Romney. It’s what Palin was all about, and it’s what that 47% speech was all about…

The problem is that these attacks have already been made, and they failed in even near-optimal circumstances. Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.

That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.

The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.

I revisited these ideas in November 2016 in my post-election autopsy, Avoiding the Southification of the North, in which I warned “if the Democrats let this become a racial fight between their multicultural base and the white rural counties of the North, that’s a recipe for the political Southification of the entire country. That’s what the GOP has been doing in a gradual way for 36 years, and it’s the basis for Trump’s coalition and for his reelection in 2020.”

Trump came up short in 2020, barely, because a lot of formerly Republican suburbanites, in the North and also in Sun Belt, were not comfortable with his overtly racist politics or his incompetance. They chose Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for a breath of normalcy, but these GOP suburbanites were less dependable in other races and should not be seen as reliable Democrats in future elections.

If the Democrats want to create a stable majority, they’ll have to become less reliant on the affluent professionals that ring our cities, and that means winning back some white working class voters. As a moderate, older, Irish Catholic politician Biden was the Democratic nominee best able to pick up some of these votes and he did that a little bit here and there such as northeastern Pennsylvania. But in many rural counties his numbers were worse than Hillary’s. With Trump doing better with Latinos and black men, Biden needed every professional suburbanite vote he could get. Luckily for him, he got them.

If the Republicans want to avoid being a white nationalist party, they have to find a way to win those affluent professionals back and keep making gains with urban voters. Susan Collins was the only Republican Senate candidate to run well ahead of Trump, putting together a broader coalition that was a little less dependent on working-class white men especially in rural areas. The problem for the other 49 GOP senators is that their base is essentially Trump’s base—white, narrow, and not growing.

By the time he leaves office, due to his horrendous leadership on the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump may have close to a half a million dead Americans on what passes for his conscience. But he’ll also have a lasting effect on our environment.

The Trump administration is asking oil and gas firms to pick spots where they want to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as it races to open the pristine wilderness to development and lock in drilling rights before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

The “call for nominations” to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register allows companies to identify tracts on which to bid during an upcoming lease sale on the refuge’s nearly 1.6 million acre coastal plain, a sale that the Interior Department aims to hold before Biden takes the oath of office in January. The move would be a capstone of President Trump’s efforts to open up public lands to logging, mining and grazing — something Biden strongly opposes.

A GOP-controlled Congress in 2017 authorized drilling in the refuge, a vast wilderness that is home to tens of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl, along with polar bears and Arctic foxes.

We can hope that most drilling operations aren’t actually interested in the bad public relations that will follow any bid to despoil this pristine wilderness, and also that perhaps President Biden will be able to undo some of the damage. This same article says we should expect the Department of Energy to roll back regulations on shower heads, so we have that to look forward to.

All Republicans are terrible on the environment, but Trump seems to take a malicious pleasure in the enterprise.

The Texas Tribune reports that deaths from  COVID-19 are piling up in El Paso so fast that the morgue is calling in the National Guard to help tend to the corpses. In the meantime, minimum security prisoners are being paid $2/hour to move the dead bodies to the county’s eight (soon to be ten) makeshift mobile morgues. Nationwide, the New York Times finds COVID cases are up 81 percent in the last 14 days, hospitalizations are up 44 percent, and deaths are up 38 percent. Slowly but surely, the country’s governors are moving us back into the lockdown mode we experienced in the Spring as they try to ward off a collapse of their states’ health care systems. But Donald Trump has so poisoned the national discourse, that Republicans are openly defying public health restrictions.

In Oregon, Tootie Smith, the incoming chairwoman of the Clackamas Board of County Commissioners, announced on Facebook that “My family will celebrate Thanksgiving dinner with as many family and friends as I can find. Gov. [Kate] Brown is WRONG to order otherwise.” The governor’s order limits social gatherings to six people and  “violations are misdemeanors punishable by citation or arrest.” Commissioner Smith doesn’t care, “Well, I don’t know if there’s going to be a knock at the door, but I’m going to, in my very private home with my family, continue to celebrate this holiday and Christmas as well.”

In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration banned indoor dining, stopped in-person classes at high schools and colleges, and suspended non-professional organized sports. White House coronavirus task force member, Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist whose COVID-19 views are embraced by the president but rejected by the overwhelming majority of public health officials, responded with a Tweet: “The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept. #FreedomMatters #StepUp.”

Atlas’s comment was reminiscent of Trump’s call, back in May, for people to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” from Whitmer’s previous COVID-19 lockdown. In October, a federal criminal complaint was filed against 13 militia members who were plotting to follow that advice by kidnapping Whitmer and trying her for treason. When Atlas received criticism for inciting violence, he followed up with a disingenuous Tweet: “Hey. I NEVER was talking at all about violence. People vote, people peacefully protest. NEVER would I endorse or incite violence. NEVER!!”

It’s not normal for elected officials and Executive Branch employees to encourage lawlessness. Such incitement is particularly alarming when it’s aimed at undercutting efforts to protect the public’s health. But a fish rots from the head, and Trump has convinced millions that it’s their patriotic duty to ignore expert medical advice.

Even worse, the president is insisting that the presidential election was rigged. On Sunday night, he tweeted: “I WON THE ELECTION!” despite having lost 306-232 in the Electoral College, His legal challenges have gone nowhere and his lawyers just abandoned their effort to undercut the results in Pennsylvania based on the lie that Republican observers were denied access to the count.

Irresponsible rhetoric about COVID-19 will result in untold unnecessary deaths which could prove doubly tragic because it appears good progress in being made on vaccines, and we may be able to get beyond this crisis next year. Why not make some sacrifices in the short-term to save lives before we make it to that window?

But the damage to our faith in our elections could be harder to overcome. On January 20, Trump will vacate the White House. It appears he will do so grudgingly, without conceding the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency. If some of his followers were motivated to kidnap a governor over her public safety orders, what might they do in response to a “stolen” election?

Our system depends on “the consent of the governed” to maintain law and order. We need our citizens to accept the results of our elections. If Trump won’t do this, neither will many of his followers.

It didn’t strike me as particularly surprising four years ago when Donald Trump did well in areas where jobs have been fleeing the country for decades. His pox-on-both-their-houses message fit the mood of populations that have been left behind in the modern economy. There’s been a lot of skepticism that “economic anxiety” drove these voters to Trumpism, with racism most often cited as the more likely explanation. But the results of the 2020 election should make people reconsider.

It’s simply bizarre that voters who feel they’re better off than in 2016 strongly preferred Joe Biden, while those who think they’re worse off voted for Trump. This is a reversal of Ronald Reagan’s famous formula from the 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter. But the explanation is that Trump’s formula is to appeal to the left-behind, and they don’t care that he didn’t deliver for them. What they like is that he appears to be on their side.

Meanwhile, Trump got very little credit for a strong stock market and good pre-Covid jobs numbers from the people who benefited, precisely because he made it very clear that he’s not on their side in a cultural sense.

The lesson for Democrats isn’t to give up on winning over left-behind voters, but to realize that they don’t respond to policy pitches or even results as much as the perception that you’re making them a high priority. Racism is one way to say you’re fighting for them, but it’s far from the only way. Local Democrats have to organize people in these areas to make up for the declining influence of labor. They probably have to organize them around non- or semi-political issues at first. As long as the Democrats are very visibly organizing around issues of concern to their urban and professional base, without doing anything comparable in rural and small-town areas, they’ll get slaughtered in the which-side-are-you-on battle.

As I’ve said, over and over again, when the left abandons a struggling majority race population, the result is fascism. It makes them more racist. In fact, it makes racism an organizing principle for the right. And this is never more true than now, when traditional Republican constituencies have left the GOP and demographic changes require the right to win an ever-higher percentage of the white vote to compete.

I predicted Trumpism before Trump for exactly these reasons, and it won’t go away until the left makes representing the rural poor more of a priority. It’s got to start with actual work in the communities.

Rudy Giuliani is probably going to go to jail and he knows it. It’s perfectly fitting that President Trump has put him in charge of the post-election litigation efforts. Neither of them have any prospect of avoiding prosecution, so spoiling the jury pools is their real mission. They’re not interested in following some long shot legal strategy based on arguments you can actually present to a judge. They need to make it impossible to find 12 jurors who will convict them.

Spreading disinformation is their best bet in that fight, so that’s the strategy going forward. It actually makes perfect sense. Giuliani will expect a broad, blanket pardon for federal crimes, and Trump may very well pardon himself to prolong any effort to bring him to justice. This won’t shield either of them from state crimes, and it probably won’t hold for Trump on federal crimes either since no man can be the jury in their own case.

Yet, with nearly half the country voting for Trump’s reelection, the odds are not bad that any jury will contain at least one supporter, and Trump and Giuliani can hope that they’ll get a nullification vote against even an open-and-shut slam-dunk case.

This whole spectacle is disgraceful and degrading to the character of our country, but it’s not irrational from a criminal’s point of view.