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theliberaltony · 4 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Monday marks the first night of the Republican National Convention, and things could certainly be going better for President Trump.

He is trailing Joe Biden in the national polls as well as in several key swing states. And FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast currently says Biden — not Trump — is favored to win the election. In fact, circumstances seem so dire for the GOP that election handicappers like the Cook Political Report think the Democrats — once underdogs — are slightly favored to take back the GOP-controlled Senate, too.

So if Republicans were to lose on that scale — the House, the Senate and the presidency — that raises the question: Would the GOP change course?

This is a question I’ve thought about a lot, and it’s one of the reasons why I argue in my book, “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” that America’s two-party system is failing us. With the two parties now fully nationalized, deeply sorted by geography and culture, and locked in a tightly contested, zero-sum battle over “the soul of the nation” and the “American way of life,” it’s nearly impossible to break that cycle. And so I think it’s unlikely that Republicans will become more moderate even if they were to take the shellacking I’ve outlined above.

The problem is that political parties are not singular entities capable of easily changing course. They are, instead, a loose coalition of office-holders, interest groups, donors, activists, media personalities and many others, all jockeying and competing for power. Think of a giant tug of war in which all the tugs have been toward more extreme and more confrontational versions of the party.

In the GOP’s internal rope pull, this has meant that over the past few decades, and particularly since 2010, almost all the would-be moderates have either gravitated toward Trump to stay relevant or simply broken away altogether. And all that momentum in the Republican party is pulling toward a more confrontational, Trumpian direction — even if he is no longer at the helm.

Moderate Republicans are few and far between

Back in March 2019, FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon Jr. described five wings of the Republican Party from most to least Trumpian. The takeaway was clear. The fortunes of those who were the most solidly aligned with Trump (Bacon listed Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina as prominent examples; I’d add Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley) were rising within the party, while the fortunes of the so-called Trump skeptics were falling. Some, like Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, have left the party. Others, like Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, are retiring. And then there are the anti-Trumpers, like former Ohio Gov. and 2016 presidential contender John Kasich, who are now endorsing Biden.

Anybody with any ambitions within the party has, in other words, embraced Trump and Trumpism.

These recent shifts aren’t entirely new, either. They are the latest iteration of a decades-long transformation of the GOP. In short, moderates have been bowing out. And more conservative, more combative, more evangelical, and now more Trumpian Republicans have been stepping up.

In the 2018 midterms, for example, congressional Republicans’ biggest losses came among their most moderate members. The same could happen again in 2020. Not to mention, a good chunk of this cycle’s retiring Republicans are leaving because they not only are tired of Trump and Trumpism but also anticipate being in the House minority again, where they would be powerless.

As political scientist Danielle Thomsen has shown, more and more would-be moderates are opting out of Congress altogether, choosing not to run because they no longer see a place for themselves. This is true in both parties, Thomsen found — but especially among Republicans. Moderates increasingly feel as if they just don’t “fit.”

And that feeling of not belonging may stem in part from party leaders and party activists who want more extreme candidates to run. (It also helps that more partisan candidates are the ones who are naturally drawn to politics.) In a survey of party chairs at the county-level (or equivalent) branch of government in 2013 — well before Trump became president — local party leaders said they preferred more extreme candidates to more centrist candidates. This finding was true especially among Republicans, who preferred extreme candidates by a 10-to-1 margin. (Democrats preferred more extreme candidates just 2 to 1.) If anything, this ratio may be even more lopsided among Republicans. One of the underappreciated changes in the past few years is the extent to which Trump-styled Republicans have taken over the machinery of state and local parties, which means they’ll be able to shape the GOP well beyond 2020, too.

This swing toward more radical candidates may sound surprising — after all, shouldn’t party leaders want to nominate moderates to win? But considering that the overwhelming majority of legislative elections are now safe for one party, most parties can win regardless of who they nominate. In fact, there’s even evidence that the long-standing electoral price of extremism has all but vanished.

These patterns are all part of a vicious cycle that has been feeding on itself for decades. The more extreme the Republican Party has become, the more moderates have opted out or just been passed over. The more moderates have opted out or been passed over, the more extreme the party has become. And the more the Republican Party recedes to just elected officials in solidly conservative states and districts, the more they define the party.

Extreme right-wing media, activists and donors are increasingly influential

Of course, it’s not just elected officials in the Republican Party who are becoming more extreme. Conservative media is part of this trend as well, as it has long played a central role in shaping the GOP. On some days, it’s hard to tell who’s running the country — Trump, or the Fox News hosts who give him many of his ideas (not to mention the rotating cast of characters who have jumped between the administration and the network).

But, at its core, right-wing media is opposition media, built around rejecting liberalism. It is a business driven by outrage and anger. And in its increasingly prominent role in the GOP, it has helped set the tone for the GOP’s existential struggle against liberals’ so-called plans to control everything — media, culture, college campuses. So if Republicans were to go back to being the opposition party because of massive losses in November, right-wing media in its current form would also make it difficult for any would-be moderate Republicans to break through.

As for the rest of the power players in the GOP coalition? They do not offer a moderating influence, either. Key GOP activist groups, including evangelical groups, anti-immigration groups, gun-rights groups, and billionaire donors are far more extreme than the rest of the party. For instance, the Koch brothers have organized something akin to a party within a party at the state level, where they have influenced Republicans to take unpopular positions on taxes, social benefits and climate policy. Libertarian megadonor Robert Mercer has also played an outsize role, funding a variety of conservative organizations that propelled Trump to power, including media outlets like Breitbart.

As a result of these groups’ efforts, elected Republicans are confronted with messaging and advocacy that paint the electorate as more conservative than it really is. This, too, has had the effect of moving the party further to the right. To be sure, the more libertarian business conservatives and more populist social conservatives maintain an uneasy partnership in forming this coalition, but the more they both occupy unpopular positions, the more they must stick together around the shared proposition that the biggest threat to their joint interests is the Democratic Party.

Voters are becoming more extreme

Finally, there are the Republican voters. The GOP is more and more a party of disaffected non-college-educated white people — especially men and those over age 50. And as the Republican Party has traded its younger, college-educated white people — especially women — for the Democrats’ non-college-educated, older white people — especially men — the Republican party’s primary electorate has shifted in ways that make anti-establishment, pro-Trump candidates more prevalent than they were even four years ago, and certainly eight years ago.

Consider, for example, fervently pro-Trump House candidates like Lauren Boebert, who won a surpising primary victory over five-term Republican Rep. Scott Tipton in Colorado; Laura Loomer, whose anti-Muslim remarks got her banned from social media, running in Florida; or Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon enthusiast running in Georgia. These candidates are very much products of the 2020 Republican Party.

It has also meant that Republican voters are more anti-establishment and pro-Trump. Political science shows us that voters follow cues from their parties, and are more likely to change their opinions on issues to align with their partisan identity than they are to change their partisan identity to fit with preexisting opinions. So by redefining what it means to be a Republican, Trump has moved opinions of many GOP voters over the past four years.

It is possible that another leader could emerge and reorient the Republican Party again, as Trump did. But many of these trends predate Trump. So it’s far more likely that ambitious politicians will try to work with, rather than against, the sentiments that Trump has kicked up. Case in point: Republican senators facing reelection this November continue to stick with Trump, and almost all 2024 presidential hopefuls are tacking in a very Trumpian direction.

Some may point to Maryland’s Larry Hogan, the popular moderate Republican governor who has also been rumored to have 2024 aspirations, as a potential future for the Republican Party (noting in the same breath, perhaps, two other popular Republican governors, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Phil Scott of Vermont). These three governors, however, don’t fit with the national Republican Party. They represent three of the four most highly educated states, where the last vestiges of socially liberal Yankee Republicanism still thrive, and state legislatures are so Democratic that voters like having a check on runaway spending. It’s hard to see Hogan, or a similar candidate, having much appeal to Republican voters outside the Northeast. And even as popular as Baker might be in liberal Massachusetts, he is more beloved by Democrats than Republicans.

Public opinion flips between two extremes

But wait, you say: Isn’t America moving in a much more liberal direction? And, if nothing else, won’t that put pressure on the GOP to moderate? It’s certainly easy to think America is moving in a much more liberal direction if you look at trends in public opinion over the past few years. Historically, though, public opinion is most liberal precisely when liberal policies are least likely to be enacted (like now, and especially in 2017 and 2018, when Republicans had unified control in Washington).

Once Democrats regain control, however, and then try to enact more liberal policies, public opinion will likely shift against them, in a more conservative direction — or at least this is how it has worked historically. Americans favor government until they get it. (Remember in 2009 when it was fashionable to proclaim a permanent Democratic majority?) This is the great irony of American public opinion: It mitigates against moderation because it tells the out-party that they don’t need to move to the middle — that public opinion is moving in their direction. That is, right until they win and start governing based on it.

To be sure, Democrats’ electoral fortunes have risen considerably since 2016, enough to take control of the U.S. House in 2018 and pick up seats across multiple state legislatures. The political “mood” of the country (based on aggregated polling) has moved left, to levels not seen since the early 1960s. But it’s a good bet that this shift, particularly on social issues, is partly anti-Trump backlash, which will dampen when Trump is no longer president.

Few forces of moderation remain

Political analysts will sometimes recount how the Democrats, after losing three consecutive presidential elections, nominated Bill Clinton in 1992 and moved in a more centrist direction. This might feel like a tempting comparison to make with the GOP now, but the key difference is that the Democrats of the early 1990s had a more diverse coalition to draw on that made that kind of pivot possible (even as late as the 1990s, the Democratic Party had plenty of rural and Southern supporters). By contrast, the Republican coalition of today lacks any significant liberal or moderate factions who might pull it back to a more centrist position.

The bottom line: American political parties are not top-down entities, capable of turning on a dime. They are loose networks and coalitions of many actors and groups. And because the Republican Party has been pulling in a more extreme direction for decades now, most Republican moderates have either quit the team or reoriented themselves in a more combative, Trumpian direction to stay alive. And these forces will most likely continue to tug at the party, leaving would-be moderates with the same choice they’ve faced for decades: Quit, or get on board.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Lee Drutman

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i-am-very-very-tired · 3 years

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Do you consider yourself a feminist?” A seminary professor once asked my class.

“No. Not me. No feminist here.” The words floated through my brain with a tangle of messages I had received growing up. I couldn’t pinpoint one event or message that had determined my early understanding of feminism. No doubt an amalgam of media, entertainment and messages in church had conveyed feminists as angry, bra burning fanatics who despised men, worshipped women, and opposed families. It honestly never occurred to me that an evangelical could be feminist.

“Raise your hand if you believe women and men deserve equal pay for equal work,” the professor continued.

I raised my hand.

“Nod yes if you believe women and men should have equal rights socially and politically.”

I nodded yes.

A PowerPoint slide flashed onto a screen. “According to the Oxford English Dictionary,” the professor went on, “you are a feminist.”

Well. The writers of the Oxford Dictionary are not necessarily known for being experts when it comes to gender studies. While I believed the Bible opposes inequitable pay (a form of stealing) and social and political injustice, I tended to associate feminism with irreverent, unkind pursuit of its objectives. I couldn’t square that with Christian faith that incites loving one’s neighbor as much as oneself.

Then again, in a world brimming with very real and ugly injustices against women and girls, I wondered if writing off feminism was Christ-like either. The dilemma spurred me to study the history of feminism in light of Scripture.

What I found surprised me.

THE ROOTS OF FEMINISM

Scripture-minded women founded the first feminist movement in response to 18th-century social problems. Women of that era called for laws against child labor in filthy and unhealthy factories and mills. Deep concerns for family preservation led them to found temperance societies that called for men not to spend their wages at brothels and saloons erected by factory and mill owners (to recuperate wages).

Although women had no legal vote, Christian feminists agitated for laws to protect women and children living in squalor. They founded social service agencies and promoted education and training—so women could support themselves and their children during the period of social and economic upheaval following the Industrial Revolution.

Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, among others, spoke out in public forums against slavery. Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth aided the rescue of slaves via the Underground Railroad. The work of first wave feminists—in partnership with men—culminated in women gaining a voice in society: a legal vote. Their motivations stemmed from a belief that all humans deserve equal dignity and opportunity because they bear the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). Their accomplishments reflected passionate pursuit of a God-glorifying culture (Genesis 1:28) during a turbulent period of history.

I came to believe that first wave feminism provides a framework for responding to present day issues of inequality: sexism, racism, systemic poverty, human trafficking, domestic violence, among other social injustices. Still, I hesitated to call myself a feminist. Truth be told, I was scared. Media, entertainment and religious communities do not always have positive things to say about some who are legitimately angry or who pursue reforms in unpopular ways.

THE NEW LANDSCAPE OF CHRISTIAN FEMINISM

In her book Feminist Thought, Rosemary Tong surveys a variety of second wave feminist thinking that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century: radical, Marxist-socialist, psychoanalytic, existentialist, postmodern, multicultural and global, ecological. Their theories are diverse, conflicting and sometimes bizarre. The scope of this article cannot address the nuances of each group. Surveying the landscape reveals the plight of many hurting souls longing for freedom from oppression and a more just world.

In response to second wave feminism, well-known evangelical scholars wrote books promoting “evangelical feminism” or “biblical feminism.” They based their theses on detailed examinations of Scripture (see recommended reading).

Similar to first wave feminists, egalitarians maintain that all humans—male and female—bear the image of God with equal rights and responsibilities. While men and women differ physiologically, they are made for the purpose of completing each other in a unity (Genesis 2:24); domination has no place in God’s created order. Justice entails interdependent partnering between men and women who have equal access to gifts of the Spirit (as Providence determines).

FAITH

Why Is the God of the Old Testament So Angry?

Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) formed a nonprofit organization of Christian men and women who believe that the Bible, properly interpreted, teaches the fundamental equality of men and women of all ethnic groups, all economic classes, and all age groups, based on the teachings of Scriptures such as Galatians 3:28:

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Today, I call myself an evangelical feminist. And, yes, the Oxford English Dictionary played a small part in that. First wave feminists provided role models and a framework for responding to present-day issues of inequality. Second wave feminists led me to realize the necessity of a compassionate response to hurting souls longing for freedom from oppression. Scripture has compelled me to grapple with what it takes to build a more just world for all people—regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or any other human labels.

Above all, Jesus’ voice calls me—and you—to work out our salvation with fear and trembling while learning to love our neighbors—all neighbors—as much as ourselves.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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WHY I'M SMARTER THAN SOMETHING

A can-opener must seem miraculous to a dog. I say in theory because in early stage investing, valuations are voodoo.1 That's what Stripe did. He thought perhaps he needed a little dose of sociopath-ness. And there is another possible approach. A big-name VC. But because seed firms operate in an earlier phase, they need to spend a lot of tricks for making myself work over the last 20 years, but even now I don't win consistently.2 I know, the first step. There hasn't been a lot of time. But that, if you measure success by shelf space taken up by books on it, or it will be to relax and go back to writing code.3 It's hard to distinguish something that's hard to understand, you could buy a Thinkpad, which was great, because it isn't happening now.

I'm not claiming that ideas have to have immediate practical applications to be interesting? And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know exactly what to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself. But the cost of reading it, and the number of elements, where an element is anything that would be of the slightest use to those producing it. As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is what life is made of. So if we do have infix syntax, it should probably be implemented as some kind of authority.4 Not to everyone, but to change the problem you're solving. Intellectually they were as capable as the successful founders of following all the implications of what one said to them. They want that money to go to work. And I think that's precisely why people put it off. The source code of all the libraries is readily available.5 To many people, rather than as a way of classifying forms of disagreement, though.

Afterward I put my talk online like I usually do. When you're young, especially, is a language too succinct for its own sake, it must be more noble. With individual angels you don't have any users they don't have to get rich, but as a way to make drawing bear a greater weight of exploration. Maxim magazine publishes an annual volume of photographs, containing a mix of pin-ups and grisly accidents. Part of the reason is that investors need to get their capital back. It doesn't mean that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't just use your software on users's behalf, you'll learn things you couldn't have learned otherwise. When del. I did end up being a philosophy major for most of the time, but human life is fairly miraculous.

What about using it to write software, whether for a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent that covers what you're doing; the kind of parallelism we have in common, it's that something is always going wrong.6 My own feeling is that object-oriented programming, by the way.7 I didn't need it. It's almost like writing applications! Both of which are false.8 They have no idea. And funding delays are a big distraction for founders, who ought to be working on, and why their due diligence feels like a body cavity search.9 In fact, they rarely seemed to arrive at answers at all. What this means is that it won't produce the sort of distribution you'd expect, the number of things you could be working on their company, not worrying about investors. He might also want preferred stock, meaning a special class of stock that has some additional rights over the common stock everyone else has. How much runway do you have left?10 But you should realize you're stepping into dangerous territory.

So as of this writing few startups spend too much. To start with, it's a sign the terms are reasonable. I give a talk I can usually be replaced by an equivalent one that's easy to program in now. Nothing is more likely to get money.11 Languages become popular or unpopular based on their merits, and so must people trying to write systems software on multi-cpu computers. Like angels, VCs prefer to invest in you, there's a danger that the increase in disagreement, there's a clear watershed at about age 12, when he got interested in maths. Fear of failure is an extraordinarily powerful force.

I think the way to get one loaded into your head. In the fall of 1983, the professor in one of my college CS classes got up and announced, like a detective solving a case in a mystery novel. Off the top of my head, I'd say that yes, surprisingly often it can. Problems can be improved as well as money, there's power.12 You can't build things users like without understanding them.13 It is so much work to introduce changes that no one else has done before. There are more shocking prospects even than that. I did end up being a philosophy major for most of that time the leading practitioners weren't doing much more than writing commentaries on Plato or Aristotle while watching over their shoulders for the next invading army. There hasn't been a lot of people in the startup world, closing is not what deals do.14 They want to get downfield, but they are much hungrier for deals.

Why wait for further funding rounds to jack up a startup's price?15 As well as failing to chase down funding, and users, and that it is unfamiliar to programmers, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts.16 The startups we've funded have. Arguably it's an interesting failed experiment. By unsavory I mean things that go behind whatever semantic facade the language is intuitive enough that you catch some of the time doing business stuff. One is that a programming language probably becomes about as popular as it deserves to be. It seemed curious that the same task could be painful to one person and pleasant to another, but are so caught up in their squabble they don't realize it.17 Hardy's boast that number theory had no use whatsoever wouldn't disqualify it.18 There may be types of work, done by a class of people called philosophers. No one thought to go back and debug Aristotle's motivating argument. So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. They find the VCs intimidating and inscrutable.

Notes

One implication of this model was that it sounds like something cooked up, but the returns come from meditating in an industrialized country encounters the idea that was killed partly by its overdone launch. And then of course, or much energy would be to say now. This has, like arithmetic drills, instead of crawling back repentant at the same thing twice.

In a typical fund, half the companies that tried that. I also skipped San Jose is a well-known byproduct of oligopoly. B the local startups also apply to types of startups as they get to profitability before your initial investors agreed in advance that you wouldn't mind missing, initially, to drive the old one. That would be a founder, more people you can do is say you've reformed, and don't want to invest in a wide variety of situations.

If the next year they worked. There should probably question anything you believed as a collection itself. Some of the company and fundraising at the valuation of the world as a whole department at a public event, you don't know which name will stick.

Robert Morris points out that there is something there worth studying, especially for opinions expressed. CEOs of big companies weren't plagued by internal inefficiencies, they'd have something more recent. Eighteen months later Google paid 1.

There is usually a stupid move, and FreeBSD 1. This law does not appear to be clear. So if it's the right to buy corporate bonds; a new version from which they don't. The first big company, and so thought disproportionately about such customs.

Add water as specified on rice package. Bill Yerazunis had solved the problem is poverty, not more. In fact most of their peers.

Other investors might assume that not being accepted means we think we're so useless that in New York.

0001. Sam Altman points out, it's shocking how much time.

They're so selective that they have raised money at first had two parts: the pledge is deliberately vague, we're going to give them up is the desire to do with down rounds—like full ratchet anti-immigration people to start a startup with credit cards. Type II startups spread: all you needed in present-day English speakers have a significant number.

This point is that it's no longer needed, big companies to build consumer electronics. Public school kids arrive at college with a base of evangelical Christianity in the early years. And it's just as it's easier to sell, or liars. This is one way to solve problems, but conversations with other investors.

At this point for me to put up posters around Harvard saying Did you know about it as a type II startup, unless you're sure your money will be coordinating efforts among partners. The philistines have now missed the video boat entirely. Treating high school as a test of success for a market for a sufficiently identifiable style, you need but a big effect on the other hand, launching something small and use whatever advantages that brings. The founders who had been trained that anything hung on a weekend and sit alone and think.

It's hard to say they bear no blame for opinions expressed.

Some founders deliberately schedule a handful of VCs even have positive returns. Don't even take a small amount, or at such a large company?

Since we're not doing anything with a potential acquirer unless you want to start a startup. August 2002. But there are those that will be coordinating efforts among partners.

This is why search engines are so dull and artificial that by the PR firm admittedly the best case.

Some of Aristotle's immediate successors may have no idea whether this happens because they're innumerate, or can be said to have had little effect on college admissions process.

Otherwise you'll seem a risky bet to admissions committees, no one is going to do that.

So if all you know the electoral vote decides the election, so that's what you're doing is almost pure discovery. According to the modern idea were proposed by Timothy Hart in 1964, two years investigating it.

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canadianabroadvery · 4 years

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Canada's Conservatives are “completely clued out” about the unpopularity of hard-right social policies and are essentially “campaigning against themselves,” two leading political commentators argued in an online panel discussion last Monday.

Answering questions from Canada's National Observer editor-in-chief Linda Solomon Wood, columnists Bruce Livesey and Sandy Garossino spent an hour tackling wide-ranging questions about why today's Canadian conservative movement has moved so far to the right, its hopes for retaking power in the face of an increasingly progressive populace, and how evangelical Christians and Big Oil got a stranglehold on the right.

“The social conservative base is enormously powerful,” Livesey told Solomon Wood and the audience of 100 participants on the Zoom webinar, part of Conversations, sponsored by Canada's National Observer. “The reason (leadership rivals) Peter MacKay and Erin O'Toole have taken the positions they're doing — which are ludicrous in terms of ever trying to get elected — is because the base has this enormous social conservative element. In order to win the leadership, you've got to pander to them.”

But that's precisely what has lost them repeated elections, and will only worsen their chances over time, he said.

Livesey — an award-winning investigative journalist with experience on CBC's flagship shows The Fifth Estate and The National, Global News' 16×9, and PBS's Frontline — most recently did an analysis on the state of the Conservatives for the National Observer entitled, How Stephen Harper is destroying the Conservative party.

He said he interviewed between 25 and 30 sources for his story, and other than a couple political scientists as experts, focused almost entirely on hearing from Conservative members past and present.

“I tried to basically interview just Conservatives … people within the party, both from when they used to be called the PC (Progressive Conservative) party all the way up to the current generation,” Livesey said. “There's a lot of people who wouldn't talk to me … It was a big challenge; given that I was going to talk to them about Stephen Harper, there seemed to be a bit of a concern.”

But some did want to talk, and could be broadly lumped into two camps: the long-ousted progressive wing of the party, once nicknamed “Red Tories”; and the more recent alumni and strategists of the Harper era.

“If you talked to the sort of Red Tories — the 'liberal' wing of the party — there was no surprise there that they think the party's stuck in a ditch,” Livesey said. “The more interesting thing was finding the younger generation who were around Harper in some capacity, who are beginning to realize — having lost two back-to-back elections — that something was wrong.”

What exactly is wrong, however, he found divisive amongst loyalists. Some expressed hope to find a better leader than Andrew Scheer to save their flagging fortunes. But others, Livesey said, had started to see problems in the party's offerings to voters altogether.

“That's the contradiction the party's in at the moment,” Livesey, author of the book Thieves of Bay Street, said. “The base just thinks, 'We just need the next Stephen Harper to lead us back into power.'

“Abortion and gay marriage — those are the two issues that get social conservatives all agitated, and they want to have something done about them. Harper was brilliant at keeping that element under a lock and key. Scheer was not … nobody trusted him on those issues. The social conservative base is an enormous problem for that party.”

Whoever wins the leadership of the party, Livesey predicted, must “basically ignore what the base is” if they want to win enough seats outside Alberta, the Prairies and rural Ontario.

Hard Right

Garossino, meanwhile, agreed that infighting over who can be the most hardline on divisive issues such as LGBTQ rights and abortion is only hurting the party more with each utterance and campaign plank.

The popular longtime columnist with Canada's National Observer spent years previously as a Crown prosecutor and trial lawyer and Vancouver community advocate. She is also a keen observer of Canadian and American political trends, admitting Monday she's a big nerd for electoral data and crunching riding numbers. While she and Livesey admitted few Tories are likely paying heed to this publication, they ought to at least pay attention to the dismal electoral data.

When it comes to hard-right social issues, the numbers don't lie.

“They're actually campaigning against themselves the more they play to that,” Garossino said. “It doesn't play in any of the areas that the federal Conservatives need to take power. They have got to get into the 905 — the (Greater Toronto Area) — and they've got to get into Quebec.”

According to the most recent polls, the Conservatives are indeed trailing behind the Liberals — despite Scheer's repeated attempts to portray Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a reckless spendthrift, contemptuous of accountability and the rule of law.

A new poll released June 28 by respected pollster Léger Marketing placed Liberals at 40 per cent support, double-digits ahead of Conservatives in voter intentions compared to the Tories' 28 per cent. (The survey of 1,524 Canadians gave the NDP 17 per cent support, the Bloc Québecois seven per cent, and Greens one point behind; the online poll's margin of error could be considered equivalent to 2.5 per cent.) The results mirrored another opinion survey last week.

But yet another poll by Ekos Research found an even starker divide when it comes to gender last week, with Liberals leading among women with a staggering 24 per cent lead over the Tories, which held a slight lead over the Grits among men.

Multi-poll aggregator 338Canada, meanwhile, ran 250,000 statistical election simulations using recent polls and predicted a 189-seat Liberal seat majority if an election were held now, with the Tories trailing at 94 seats (a party needs a minimum 170 seats to win a majority government).

But both Livesey and Garossino reminded participants in the Zoom event that key to electoral victory in Canada is commanding broad support across the most vote-rich, densely populated urban centres — particularly the Greater Toronto Area suburbs, Montreal, and B.C.'s Lower Mainland. It was a lesson former Prime Minister Stephen Harper understood despite his past social-conservative, Reform Party roots.

That's something Livesey believes the Conservatives have lost sight of completely. He has little hope the once-moderate stalwarts of the party will regain control any time soon because of the need to survive the hard-right base that serves as a gauntlet for would-be leaders.

“They're not taking into consideration the electoral math that plays into this,” he explained. “The Tories' base gets them about 30 per cent of the vote, but to win a minority, you need around 35, a majority around 40.

“That means you've got to convince ... the very seat-rich urban hubs like Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal … that you represent their interests. That is the programmatic problem with the party now. They have completely clued out to the fact that those voters don't want to vote for that particular platform.”

Stuck on Harper

In his June 25 analysis, Livesey argued former prime minister Stephen Harper remains the most powerful force in today's party, but may be, in fact, undermining “the very thing he created” as his successor Scheer steers the party sharply towards the far right on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights.

It's something Tory supporters should be extremely wary of, particularly as the far-right administration in the pandemic-gutted United States faces “potential devastation of unbelievable proportions because of the failure of this one man,” Garossino said. But the roots of the crisis go back decades to Reagan-era right-wing neoliberal movements, she and Livesey agreed, as billionaires and corporations were effectively handed the keys to power in the U.S.

Today, with tens of millions of unemployed losing their private health benefits, the chickens are now coming home to roost in that country.

“If you look at the trajectory, this is the sum result of a program that began in the '70s and '80s to, in effect, ensure the state did nothing for the average American citizen,” Livesey said. “(It marked) the end of the so-called welfare state — the New Deal type of government — and the capture of the state by largely the billionaire class.”

But although the Tea Party hasn't taken hold to the same extent north of the 49th parallel, similar hardline right movements have found sympathy in many parts of Canada.

Canadians, and particularly those loyal to the Conservative party, ought to worry about similar political movements here gaining any more foothold than they have. But it was actually Canada's Reagan-era Conservative leader who garnered some positive attention in Monday's online discussion.

Faced with a stark ideological choice today, Tories might look for inspiration — and success — to former PM Brian Mulroney.

“The PCs recognized they had to be a centre party to win power. The person most genius at figuring that out was Mulroney, he won two solid majorities … and destroyed the Liberals in Quebec. They had the 'big tent' approach, that social conservatives, Red Tories, environmentalists, people from all walks of life, fiscal conservatives, could all be under the same umbrella." Livesey said.

“It worked until it didn't work.”

Mulroney was also considered a leader on environmental issues, and even stalwart Conservative architect Tom Flanagan told Livesey he hoped for some critical Tory reflection on their climate change and carbon pricing policies.

“There is increasing awareness they have to be better on that front,” Livesey said, “even if it is in a very cynical way.”

But it's not just the evangelicals trying to steer the Tory ship. Another powerful force in the country has leveraged influence extremely effectively. Livesey and Garossino said other than the Tories' social conservative base, the party also has been held “hostage” by the oil industry lobby and some of Harper's former entourage, such as Jason Kenney, now Alberta premier.

Garossino has frequently commented on the state of Canada's Conservatives, most recently in her May 27 column, Stephen Harper's power dissolves, in which she argued that Harper continues to “control his chastened party” from the sidelines, but as “the right’s energy and narrative has been seized by Trumpian ideologues,” the Canadian electoral as moved on and is no longer interested.

Canada's Conservatives ought to ponder those trends carefully before selecting their next leader, Garossino said, but she's not hopeful.

“To get to be a contender nationally, you have to get past the base, which is far more conservative than the Canadian public,” she said. “They're almost fighting against themselves.”

Could the Red Tories stage a Mulroney-inspired comeback — and retake the reins from today's increasingly unpalatable oil and religious party wings? That remains to be seen.

#canpoli #consernative party of canada

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baoanhwin · 4 years

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Trumpity Trump: Why Betting on Biden is the right strategy

The more I think about the US election, the more I think we’re underweighting the edge scenarios. And of the edge scenarios, I think the one we’re underweighting most is the one where the Democrats have a really good night.

Why?

Well, let’s start with the obvious. President Trump won by the narrowest of margins in 2016. To demonstrate this, let’s play “spin the wheel”. What we’re going to do is run a little simulation with every state in 2016. We’re going to end up with the same final vote shares – 48.2% vs 46.1% – but we’re going to shake things up very slightly in every state. We’re going to apply a random number between -2.5% and +2.5% to the Democrat, and then do the inverse to the Republicans. Our end vote total – for the country as a whole – will remain the same, but we’re just going to randomly change the votes (just a little) in each state. And we’ll run that, say, 10,000 times.

What happens?

Well, the chart shows the frequency of various outcomes in terms of Republican electoral votes (remember kids, 269 to win!).

What’s amazing is that Trump’s 2016 result (304 electoral votes) is on the far right hand side of this probability distribution. Do a little random shaking of the tin, and he loses EVs.

Now, you might think that President Trump’s victory was the result of electoral genius and Brad Parscale. Yeah, that played a role. But so did dumb luck. The votes could hardly have been any more optimally distributed.

The point I’m making is that in 2020, President Trump doesn’t have a lot to play with. Obama could go backwards a bit in 2012, and still be President. Trump doesn’t have that luxury.

His path was narrow before, and is probably narrower now.

So, here’s my three pointer on why I think President Trump might get hammered in 2020.

1. Trump is (significantly) less popular now than in 2016. And one group in particular has really deserted him – white women. According to Pew, Trump won this group by two points in 2016. The opinion polls now show him trailing here by ten points.

Now, some will say “hey, Trump’s unpopular, but so’s Biden”. Well, that’s partly true. But on forced choice between those people who say they dislike both candidates, 49% to 17% say they’ll chose Biden. Ouch.

2. Many Democrats didn’t come out to vote in 2016. There was a general sense of inevitability about Trump losing, and a lot of people didn’t particularly like Ms Clinton. That depressed Democratic turnout. And this feeds through into the 2020 polls: there is strict turnout weighting in the US, and this means lots of 2012 Obama backers, who didn’t vote in 2016, are not being counted.

3. President Trump is now suffering from a bit of an enthusiasm gap himself. Evangelicals used to give Mr Trump 81% favourability ratings, that’s now 61%, a 20 point drop. His drop among religious Catholics is even larger: a 27 point fall between March and May of this year. Now, I’m not suggesting that the deeply conservative and religious suddenly come out and vote Biden. I’m suggesting some of them (and it only takes a few) stay at home on election day.

Put these all together, and what do you have? I think you have the potential for Biden to win by eight to ten points this time around. Yes, yes, I know the last five or six Presidential contests have been really close. But I’m wondering if this time we could see a blow out result.

Nothing is certain, of course. Trump could pull this out the bag. But my gut says he had a winning coalition in 2016 because he managed to combine economic nationalism, a terrible opponent, and a bit of good fortune (the FBI discvovering a bunch of emails – which turned out to be nothing – a week before voting). The ultimate issue here is that Trump – to win – cannot allow his voter base to shrink. And he has done nothing to appeal to people beyond his base to win. The same people, all of them, need to come out in 2020 for him to win – and even that may not be enough, if the Democrats are more motivated.

Let me leave you with one statistic. Right track / wrong track questions tend to have pretty good predictive power. When people think the country is on the right track, they tend to re-elect incumbents. When they think it is on the wrong track, they are more likely to roll the dice.

Right track / wrong track is now at -38%. That is the lowest number of Trump’s Presidency. Now, it may be that he is able to feed off that. He’s the man who can put the country on the right track… But I think it more likely that the voters choose to say “Adieu Mr President”.

Robert Smithson

from politicalbetting.com https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/06/17/trumpity-trump-why-betting-on-biden-is-the-right-strategy/ https://dangky.ric.win/

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newsfundastuff · 5 years

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The rhetoric between candidates has gotten heated as the Iowa caucuses approach. But there’s no need for aggressionA weekend blizzard and a sub-zero deep freeze helped cool tempers that were reaching boiling point among Democrats. Chill, everyone. Whoever wins the nomination will beat Trump across the struggling midwest.The Sanders crowd suggested Warren was an elitist. Warren elbowed back with a gender argument. Sanders attacked Biden over social security; Biden countered that he was lying. The snake emojis are out. Old resentments over issues that can’t even be recalled are fed.The result of it all? Nobody knows.JD Scholten, running for US congress in Iowa, was in Ames on Saturday when the temperature was -4F. Hundreds came out for the Story County Democrats’ soup supper in the hometown of Iowa State University, a key territory. He asked how many were undecided. Half raised their hands.A poll one week shows Sanders on top in Iowa. A week later, another poll finds Biden leading, with Amy Klobuchar in the double digits.Warren, Sanders and Klobuchar are confined to the Senate with two weekends left to campaign ahead of the 3 February caucuses. In their absence, Pete Buttigieg is everywhere all at once, working like a beaver.Any one of them can beat Trump. The president knows it. That’s why he sent his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to Iowa to make fun of Biden’s stuttering, which endeared him even more to Iowans. Vice-President Mike Pence was dispatched to Iowa this week to shore up the evangelical vote for this philanderer of a president. The Donald himself is expected to invade Iowa just days before the caucus in hopes of changing the subject from his dismal performance. It will only serve to remind us that he was impeached for being a liar. Midwesterners cling to quaint notions of honesty.The president’s approval rating is underwater in Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan. Senator Joni Ernst, the Republican senator, has gone from being very popular to being the third most unpopular senator in the country, with an approval rating of just 37%, behind only Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, according to Morning Consult. All because of Trump.Since Trump was inaugurated, corn and soybean markets have tanked. Ethanol production is stunted by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. Trade wars with the world, especially China, caused layoffs at John Deere in Iowa and slack sales of Harley Davidsons from Wisconsin. It will take years for export markets to recover. Some won’t. New research from the Iowa State University economist Dave Swenson reports that Iowa trailed the nation in new job creation, and that non-metro areas have lost jobs over the past decade.There is a palpable economic anxiety across the midwest that explains why Bernie Sanders surged to first place in the latest Iowa Poll, considered one of the best. Most of us recognize that 50 years of trickle-down economics is, as Tom Steyer might say, a fraud and a failure.> The voters I talk to are not paying that much attention to the intramural elbowsThat poll showing Sanders with a lead was over a week ago, a lifetime in primary politics. The voters I talk to are not paying that much attention to the intramural elbows. They expected that Sanders and Warren had to have some sort of reckoning. The spat died down as quickly as it blew up. It does not appear that Sanders has landed any real body blows on Biden. Klobuchar keeps plugging along and gaining support.Anybody who thinks they know who will win the Iowa caucuses is full of themselves. The nominee is unlikely to be identified until spring, if then, after New Hampshire and South Carolina and Nevada and the SEC Super Tuesday primaries, and California.Unless, of course, these good shooters form a circular firing squad that leaves them all walking wounded.African American voters will flood the polls in Flint, Michigan, to vote for Pete Buttigieg if he somehow can run the gauntlet. Bernie Sanders will do fine in Wisconsin, the land of famed progressive LaFollette. Elizabeth Warren has shown that she can take a punch and land a roundhouse on any man, especially a lunkhead like Trump. Amy Klobuchar will thump Trump in Iowa, and knows how to speak to a union member in Ohio wondering where the auto plant went. Pennsylvania voters will warm right up to Joe Biden. Even Michael Bloomberg could beat Trump in Colorado.So chill. Iowa has thinned a huge field and will vault four or five campaigns down the trail. The process has exposed weaknesses and identified strengths. The point is to beat the worst president in history, and the conditions are ripe to do so. Just don’t blow it. That is the main sentiment in Iowa. * Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland, just released in paperback

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morningusa · 5 years

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from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

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sufredux · 5 years

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False Flags

There appears to be one indisputable global trend today: the rise of nationalism. Self-described nationalists now lead not only the world’s largest autocracies but also some of its most populous democracies, including Brazil, India, and the United States. A deepening fault line seems to divide cosmopolitans and nationalists, advocates of “drawbridge down” and “drawbridge up.” And it seems that more and more people are opting for the latter—for “closed” over “open.”

They do so, many commentators claim, because they feel threatened by something called “globalism” and crave to have their particular national identities recognized and affirmed. According to this now conventional narrative, today’s surge of nationalist passions represents a return to normal: the attempts to create a more integrated world after the Cold War were a mere historical blip, and humanity’s tribal passions have now been reawakened.

This, however, is a deeply flawed interpretation of the current moment. In reality, the leaders described as “nationalists” are better understood as populist poseurs who have won support by drawing on the rhetoric and imagery of nationalism. Unfortunately, they have managed to convince not only their supporters but also their opponents that they are responding to deep nationalist yearnings among ordinary people. The more that defenders of liberalism and the liberal order buy the stories these leaders (and associated movements) are selling and adopt the framing and rhetoric of populism, the more they allow their opponents’ ideas to shape political debates. In doing so, parties and institutions of the center-left and the center-right are helping bring about the very thing they hope to avoid: more closed societies and less global cooperation to address common problems.

THE PEOPLE AND THE NATION

What the past few years have witnessed is not the rise of nationalism per se but the rise of one variant of it: nationalist populism. “Nationalism” and “populism” are often conflated, but they refer to different phenomena. The most charitable definition of “nationalism” is the idea that cultural communities should ideally possess their own states and that loyalty to fellow nationals ought to trump other obligations. “Populism,” meanwhile, is sometimes taken to be a shorthand for “criticism of elites,” and it is true that populists, when in opposition, criticize sitting governments and other parties. More important, however, is their claim that they and they alone represent what they usually call “the real people” or “the silent majority.” Populists thus declare all other contenders for power to be illegitimate. In this way, populists’ complaints are always fundamentally personal and moral: the problem, invariably, is that their adversaries are corrupt. In this sense, populists are indeed antiestablishment. But populists also deem citizens who do not take their side to be inauthentic, not part of “the real people”: they are un-American, un-Polish, un-Turkish, and so on. Populism attacks not merely elites and establishments but also the very idea of political pluralism—with vulnerable minorities usually becoming the first victims.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Budapest, Hungary, October 2018

This antipluralism explains why populist leaders tend to take their countries in an authoritarian direction if they have sufficient power and if countervailing forces, such as an independent judiciary or free media, are not strong enough to resist them. Such leaders reject all criticisms with the claim that they are merely executing the people’s will. They seek out and thrive on conflict; their political business model is permanent culture war. In a way, they reduce all political questions to questions of belonging: whoever disagrees with them is labeled an “enemy of the people.”

Populism is not a doctrine; it is more like a frame. And all populists have to fill the frame with content that will explain who ��the real people” are and what they want. That content can take many different forms and can draw on ideas from the left or the right. From the late 1990s until his death in 2013, the Venezuelan populist leader Hugo Chávez created a disastrous “socialism for the twenty-first century” in his country, wrecking its economy and demonizing all of his opponents in the process. Today’s right-wing populists mostly draw on nationalist ideas, such as distrust of international institutions (even if a nation joined such organizations voluntarily), economic protectionism, and hostility to the idea of providing development aid to other countries. These beliefs often cross over into nativism or racism, as when nationalist populists promote the idea that only native-born citizens are entitled to jobs and benefits or insinuate that some immigrants can never be loyal citizens. To be sure, one can be a nationalist without being a populist; a leader can maintain that national loyalties come first without saying that he or she alone can represent the nation. But today, all right-wing populists are nationalists. They promise to take back control on behalf of “the real people,” which in their definition is never the population as a whole. Nigel Farage, the leader of the far-right UK Independence Party at the time of the Brexit vote, celebrated the outcome as a “victory for real people,” implying that the 48 percent of British voters who preferred that their country stay in the EU were not properly part of the nation.

DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE

The potent combination of nationalism and populism has spread in recent years. A populist playbook—perhaps even a populist art of governance—has emerged as politicians in disparate countries have studied and learned from one another’s experiences. In 2011, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who leads Poland’s populist ruling Law and Justice party, announced that he wanted to create “Budapest in Warsaw,” and he has systematically copied the strategies pioneered by Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary. On the other side of the world, Jair Bolsonaro got elected president by following the playbook, railing against immigration (even though more people leave Brazil than enter) and declaring, “Brazil above all, God above everyone.”

To some observers, it appears that nationalist populists have profited from a bitter backlash against globalization and increasing cultural diversity. This has, in fact, become the conventional wisdom not only among populists themselves but also among academics and liberal opponents of populism. The irony, however, is that although critics often charge populists with peddling reductive messages, it is these same critics who now grasp at simple explanations for populism’s rise. In doing so, many liberal observers play right into their opponents’ hands by taking at face value and even amplifying the dubious stories that nationalist populists tell about their own success.

For example, Orban has claimed that the 2010 parliamentary elections in Hungary constituted a “revolution at the voting booths” and that Hungarians had endorsed what he has described as his “Christian and national” vision of an “illiberal democracy.” In reality, all that happened was that a majority of Hungarians were deeply disappointed by the country’s left-wing government and did what standard democratic theory recommended they do: they voted for the main opposition party, Orban’s Fidesz. By the next time Hungarians went to the polls, in 2014, Orban had gerrymandered the electoral map in Fidesz’s favor; erected the Orwellian-sounding System of National Cooperation, which included drastic restrictions on media pluralism and civil society; and weakened the independence of the judiciary and other sources of checks and balances.

A carnival float depicting the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Düsseldorf, Germany, February 2018

Similarly, in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “the people” did not comprehensively endorse a nationalist “America first” agenda. Rather, in more mundane fashion, citizens who identified as Republicans came out to vote for their party’s candidate, who was not a typical politician but also hardly the leader of a spontaneous grass-roots antiglobalization movement. Donald Trump ultimately won the backing of the party machinery; the enthusiastic support of establishment Republican figures such as Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Giuliani; and near-constant cheerleading on Fox News. As the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels have argued, it turned out to be a fairly normal election, albeit with an abnormal Republican candidate who faced a deeply unpopular Democratic contender.

Likewise, Bolsonaro did not win last year’s presidential election in Brazil because a majority of Brazilians wanted a nationalist military dictatorship. The bulk of Bolsonaro’s support came from citizens fed up with the corruption of traditional political elites from across the political spectrum and unwilling to return the left-wing Workers’ Party to power. It also helped that the country’s powerful agricultural sector and, eventually, its financial and industrial elites threw their weight behind the far-right candidate—as did influential evangelical Christian leaders.

As the political scientist Cas Mudde has pointed out, nationalist populists often represent not a silent majority but a very loud minority. They do not come to power because their ideology is an unstoppable world-historical force. Rather, they depend on the center-right’s willingness to collaborate with them—as was the case for Trump, Bolsonaro, and the pro-Brexit campaigners—or they win by at least partly hiding their intentions, as was the case with Orban.

Once in power, most nationalist populists don’t actually work to take back control on the people’s behalf, as they promised to do. Instead, they perform a sort of nationalist pantomime of largely symbolic gestures: for example, promising to build walls (which achieve nothing concrete other than inciting hatred against minorities) or occasionally having the state seize a multinational company. Behind the scenes, such leaders are generally quite accommodating of international institutions and multinational corporations. They are concerned less with genuinely reasserting their countries’ autonomy than with appearing to do so.

Take Trump, for instance. He has threatened individual companies that planned to close facilities in the United States. But he has also stripped away labor regulations at a breakneck pace, making it hard to claim that he cares about protecting workers. Likewise, after deriding the North American Free Trade Agreement during his campaign, Trump wound up negotiating a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico whose terms are substantially similar to those of NAFTA. In Hungary, Orban has nationalized some industries and railed against foreign corporations that he claimed exploited the Hungarian people. Yet his government recently passed a law that allows employers to demand that workers put in 400 hours of overtime each year, up from the prior limit of 250 hours—and to withhold payment for that extra labor for up to three years. The main beneficiaries of this measure (dubbed “the slave law” by its critics) are the German car companies that employ thousands of Hungarian factory workers.

NOT EVERY FIGHT IS CULTURAL

Many politicians, especially those from mainstream center-right parties, have been at a loss when it comes to countering nationalist populism. Increasingly, though, they are betting on a seemingly paradoxical strategy of what one might call “destruction through imitation.” Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, for example, have tried to outflank their far-right competitors with tough talk on refugees, Islam, and immigration.

This strategy is unlikely to succeed in the long run, but it is bound to do serious damage to European democracy. No matter how fast one chases populists to the fringes, it’s almost impossible to catch them. Extremist outfits such as the Danish People’s Party or the Party for Freedom of the far-right Dutch provocateur Geert Wilders will never be satisfied with the immigration proposals of more established parties, no matter how restrictive they are. And their supporters are unlikely to switch their allegiances: they’ll continue to prefer the originals over the imitators.

A deeper concern is the effect that established parties making opportunistic shifts in response to the populist threat will have. First, they denounce populists as demagogues peddling lies. Then, when support for populists grows, mainstream politicians begin to suggest that the populists have intuited, or even firmly know, something about people’s concerns and anxieties that others haven’t, or don’t. This reflects an understanding of democratic representation as an almost mechanical system for reproducing existing interests, ideas, and even identities. In this view, savvy populist political entrepreneurs discover trends within the polity and then import them into the political system.

Supporters of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in Brasília, Brazil, October 2018

But that is not how democracy really works. Representation is a dynamic process, in which citizens’ self-perceptions and identities are heavily influenced by what they see, hear, and read: images, words, and ideas produced and circulated by politicians, the media, civil society, and even friends and family members. Modern democracy is a two-way street, in which representative systems do not merely reflect interests and political identities; they shape them, as well.

Nationalist populists have benefited greatly from this process, as media organizations and scholars have adopted their framing and rhetoric, with the effect of ratifying and amplifying their messages. Casual, seemingly self-evident accounts of “ordinary people” who have been “left behind” or “disrespected” and who fear “the destruction of their culture” need to be treated with extreme caution: they are not necessarily accurate descriptions of people’s lived experience. One can frame, say, the French government’s recent decision to raise taxes on gasoline and to introduce tighter speed limits in the countryside—steps that spurred the “yellow vest” protest movement—as demonstrating disrespect for a “way of life” in rural and exurban areas. But a more mundane interpretation is that the French government simply failed to see how particular policies would have different effects on different parts of the population. The government failed at distributive justice, not at cultural recognition.

Across Europe and the United States, journalists and analysts have posited that many people—especially older white people—feel disrespected by elites. It’s hard to ascertain how many people have directly encountered disrespect. But virtually day and night—on talk radio, on TV news programs, and on social media—millions of people are told that they feel disrespected. What is routinely presented as a cultural conflict between supposedly authentic rural heartlands and cosmopolitan cities usually involves a much less dramatic fight over how opportunities are distributed through regulatory and infrastructure decisions: from the price of airline ticket for flights to more remote areas, to the status of community banks, to policies that determine the cost of housing in big cities.

By casting all issues in cultural terms and by embracing the idea that populists have developed a unique purchase on people’s concerns and anxieties, established parties and media organizations have created something akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once the entire political spectrum adopts populist language about voters’ interests and identities, more and more people will begin to understand themselves and their interests in those terms. For example, voters fed up with established center-right parties might initially cast protest votes for populist parties such as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) or outsider political candidates such as Trump. But if those voters are then continuously portrayed as “AfD people” or as members of “Trump’s base,” they may well come to adopt those identities and develop a more permanent sense of allegiance to the party or politician who at first represented little more than a way to express dissatisfaction with the status quo. Eventually, as mainstream parties opportunistically adapt their messages and media commentators lazily repeat populist talking points, the entire political spectrum can shift rightward.

BEAT THEM, DON’T JOIN THEM

This argument may sound like liberal wishful thinking: “People are not nearly as nationalist as populists claim! Conflicts are really all about material interests and not about culture!” But the point is not that fights over culture and identity are illusory or illegitimate just because populists always happen to promote them. Rather, the point is that establishment institutions are too quickly turning to culture and identity to explain politics. In this way, they are playing into populists’ hands—doing their jobs for them, in effect.

Consider, for example, populist attacks on “globalists” who favor “open borders.” Even center-left parties are now ritually distancing themselves from that idea, even though, in reality, no politician of any consequence anywhere wants to open all borders. Even among political philosophers not constrained by political concerns, only a very small minority calls for the abolition of frontiers. It is true that advocates of global governance and economic globalization have made serious blunders: they often presented their vision of the world as an inevitable outcome, as when British Prime Minister Tony Blair asserted in 2005 that debating globalization was like “debating whether autumn should follow summer.” Some supporters of free trade falsely claimed that everyone would benefit from a more integrated world. But nationalist populists don’t truly want to address those errors. They seek, instead, to cynically exploit them in order to weaken democratic institutions and lump together advocates of globalization, transnational tax evaders, and high-flying private equity investors—along with human rights advocates and immigrants, refugees, and many other marginalized groups—into an undifferentiated “cosmopolitan, rootless elite”: a “them” to pit against an “us.”

There are deep and often legitimate conflicts about trade, immigration, and the shape of the international order. Liberals should not present their choices on these issues as self-evidently correct or as purely win-win; they must convincingly make the case for their ideas and justify their stance to the disadvantaged. But they should also not adopt the framing and rhetoric of populists, opportunistic center-right politicians, and academics who make careers out of explaining away xenophobic views as merely symptoms of economic anxiety. Doing so will lead liberals to make preemptive concessions that betray their ideals.

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Americans opposed to President Trump are constantly asking some version of this question: “Why won’t Republicans break with Trump?”

The personalities on Fox News are largely standing with the president amid the controversy over the Trump administration pushing Ukrainian officials to investigate the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son. So are Republicans in Congress. Vice President Mike Pence and others inside the Trump administration are also defending the president’s actions involving Ukraine (a shift from when one-time Trump advisers like Dan Coats would sometimes signal disagreement with the president’s stances).

But looking at Trump’s standing only among people currently inside of powerful Republican-controlled spaces — the party itself, Fox News, the White House, etc. — presents an incomplete picture and understates opposition to Trump among Republican politicians and activists. Almost by definition, that opposition can’t happen within the obvious GOP spaces — the president and his acolytes have accumulated enough power that it’s increasingly hard to be both be anti-Trump and a Republican in good standing at a major conservative institution.

So Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan left the GOP and became an independent. Former Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina lost in a primary last year to an opponent endorsed by Trump after speaking out against the president. And just last Friday, Fox News anchor and occasional Trump critic Sheppard Smith resigned,1 as did Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who had occasionally clashed with the president.

Indeed, widen your lens and you can find all kinds of anti-Trump sentiment in conservative and right-leaning circles. This anti-Trump bloc, in addition to Republicans still supporting the president, might have lots of sway as impeachment unfolds — if they can reach GOP voters.

The media

You could create your very own conservative, anti-Trump TV network if you hired all the Trump-skeptical Republicans who regularly appear as talking heads on CNN and MSNBC. CNN, for example, has Amanda Carpenter, Charlie Dent, John Kasich, and Mia Love. MSNBC boasts Carlos Curbelo, Susan Del Percio, Elise Jordan, Mike Murphy, Jennifer Rubin, Joe Scarborough, Michael Steele, Charlie Sykes, Nicole Wallace, George Will and Rick Tyler.2

Yes, most conservative pundits on Fox News are heartily pro-Trump, but not all conservative pundits are on Fox News.

Elected officials

There were 241 Republicans in the U.S. House in early 2017, at the start of Trump’s tenure. Since then, more than a quarter have either been defeated at the ballot box, in last November’s elections (29), or retired (36).3 Some of them, such as former Rep. Mia Love of Utah, blame Trump’s unpopularity for their defeats. Others, such as Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, hint that they are leaving Congress in part because they are uncomfortable with the direction Trump is taking the GOP, as the Washington Post recently reported in a story detailing the exodus of House Republicans.

There is also a group of Trump-skeptical governors and senators — most notably former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona and former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio — who left their posts after 2018. And then you have figures like former Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois , ex-Gov. William Weld of Massachusetts and Sanford, all of whom are running long-shot primary challenges to Trump. Former Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who has publicly come out against Trump, is suing his state’s Republican Party in an effort to overturn its decision to cancel next year’s Republican primary, a move designed in part to boost the president.

So, in addition to that conservative, anti-Trump cable channel, you could also piece together a Senate majority (51 people) from Republicans who have previously served in either the House or the Senate but who have been publicly wary of Trump.

Senior Republican staffers

OK, if you’re going to have a shadow, anti-Trump GOP Senate, you need some experienced Republican operatives to staff it. You won’t have to look too hard.

In a clear and public rebuke to Trump, chiefs of staff for Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush recently told the New York Times that the presidents they served would never have asked for help winning an election from a foreign government. A group of conservative lawyers, many of whom served in top positions in the Department of Justice under Reagan or one of the Bushes, are supporting the impeachment inquiry.

Moreover, plenty of people who served in senior roles in the Trump administration itself, including H.R. McMaster (national security adviser), Anthony Scaramucci (communications director) and Rex Tillerson (secretary of state) have distanced themselves from the president.

Again, the Republican staffers currently in the White House are defending the president, but that might mask some broader disagreement among senior-level Republican staffers.

Conservative institutions

Many organizations on the right, such as the Heritage Foundation, are in lockstep with the president. But others — the Cato Institute, the Niskanen Center — are fairly critical of him

Or, take the white evangelical conservative movement as a whole. It is often portrayed as totally behind the president, and news stories often cite people like Jerry Falwell Jr. who are closely allied with the president to show that. But white evangelicals aren’t completely aligned with Trump — a generational gap has begun to open up. And really, people like Falwell, who runs a small Christian college (Liberty University), are more accurately described as evangelical leaders who support Trump, rather than evangelical leaders. overall. J.D. Greear, head of the Southern Baptist Convention, is more clearly a “leader” of America’s evangelicals — and he is kind of lukewarm about Trump.

So it’s important to understand that many conservative organizations and power centers on the right are strongly behind Trump, but also that increasingly “conservative” has come to mean “pro-Trump,” a narrative that writes out of the story organizations and people who had what were considered fairly rightly-leaning views pre-Trump.

OK, I admit this is an imprecise exercise. What overall percentage of elite Republicans — conservative media figures, current and former members of Congress, current and former administration officials, etc. — oppose Trump? That’s basically impossible to quantify.

But I think it’s higher than often portrayed — because some opposition lives in non-GOP spaces where people aren’t looking, and because much of it is also hidden from view, as elected Republicans face strong incentives to stand by Trump publicly.

All of this helps explain why Republican voters are among the most loyal-to-Trump constituencies in the Republican Party. Surveys have long suggested that between 85 and 90 percent of Republican voters approve of the president. Only about 13 percent of people who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 said that they disapproved of Trump in a poll conducted in late 2018 and early 2019 by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of impeachment polls, about 14 percent of Republicans support impeachment.

I wrote recently about how rank-and-file voters often follow cues from elites, noting that impeachment support increased among Democrats after the party unified around the idea. So maybe if we had full data on the views of all Republican elites, we’d find that about 10 to 15 percent oppose Trump, perfectly in line with voters.

But I think that the safer assumption is this: Trump has in many ways successfully purged his critics from the power centers of the GOP. So a potential resistance to him among Republican elites doesn’t just face the obvious challenge that he’s the president and popular among GOP voters. Republican elites who are wary of Trump are also not well situated to make their case to rank-and-file Republican voters. They are working in lobbying shops or boardrooms instead of on Capitol Hill, speaking to audiences on CNN and MSNBC instead of Fox News, and outside of the administration instead of inside it.

The facts of the Ukraine case, or its politics, could open more doors for those anti-Trump voices in those pro-Trump spaces. That would likely have profound effects on the views of GOP voters.

For now, though, the Trump-skeptical bloc in Congress remains a small part of the overall Trump-skeptical conservative coalition.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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It wasn’t just Ilhan Omar — Trump disparaged 8 women during his speech in North Carolina

By contrast, he said nice things about zero.

By Aaron Ruper | Published July 18, 2019 2:00 pm | Vox | Posted July 18, 2019 | VIDEO on Website

President Donald Trump, amid a rant about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a Somali refugee turned Congress member, promoted his fans to break out into chants of “send her back!”

He also went after each of the four members of the so-called “Squad” — which in addition to Omar includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — with whom he’s been embroiled in a public feud since he posted racist tweets last Sunday asking them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

Trump’s naming of these women in particular is no accident. They symbolize the rising power of progressive women of color in America. Though they are all from very liberal districts, something even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi likes to point out, they represent a deep fear among the conservative base: that their grip on power is slipping to the AOCs and Ilhan Omars of the world.

Trump also went on to speak negatively about four other women. In fact, he didn’t have a single positive thing to say about any of the eight women he brought up on Wednesday.

He’s making what some would say is a risky bet. Though polling shows that a large majority of public disapproves of his racist statements about the Democratic congresswomen and that he’s more unpopular with women than with men, he knows that it could also fire up his base to turn out. Trump seems to believe that stoking the grievances of white voters is what got him victory in 2016, and he’s hoping to do it again in 2020. His speech in North Carolina indicates just how key white men are to his strategy.

The proof is in Trump’s words: “So these congresswomen, their comments are helping to fuel the rise of a dangerous, militant hard left. But that’s okay because we’re going to win this election like nobody has ever seen before,” he said Wednesday night.

Trump attacked each member of the Squad

After bashing Omar with remarks that were reportedly read off a teleprompter, Trump took aim at Tlaib for using the f-word during a MoveOn event in January in which she was recorded saying about him, “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!” Trump characterized her comments as evidence that Tlaib doesn’t love America. Omar and Tlaib are America’s first two Muslim congresswomen.

“That’s not nice, even for me,” Trump said, alluding to Tlaib’s comments. “She was describing the president of the United States and the president with the big, fat, vicious — the way she said it, vicious — f-word. That’s not somebody who loves our country.”

Trump then accused Ocasio-Cortez of conducting “outrageous attacks against the men and women of law enforcement ... she said essentially Nazis are running concentration camps” at the border. But Trump’s characterization of AOC’s comments was misleading — she did describe migrant detention centers as “concentration camps” but never compared border agents to Nazis.

Trump went on to accuse AOC of describing “contemporary America ... as garbage.”

“Garbage. We’re garbage. Remember ‘deplorables’? I think that’s worse,” Trump added. This too was misleading — AOC never compared Trump or his supporters with garbage, though she did say during an appearance at South by Southwestearlier this year that “this idea of like 10 percent better from garbage, is, shouldn’t be what we settle for.”

Trump even went as far as to mock AOC’s name: VIDEOS ON WEBSITE

AOC is a popular figure in conservative media, often mentioned far more on Fox News than the actual House speaker.

Trump also went after the fourth Squad member, Pressley, saying she “thinks that people with the same skin color need to think the same.” He suggested that she sympathizes with antifa, alluding to a recent incident where Pressley refused to answer a question from a right-wing reporter who demanded she denounce antifa in a hallway near the Capitol.

After attacking each congresswoman individually, Trump wrapped up that portion of his speech by taking shots at them collectively and reiterating his admonition that they should consider leaving the country: VIDEO ON WEBSITE

So these congresswomen, their comments are helping to fuel the rise of a dangerous, militant hard left. But that’s okay because we’re going to win this election like nobody has ever seen before. And tonight, I have a suggestion for the hate-filled extremists who are constantly trying to tear our country down — they never have anything good to say — that’s why I say, “Hey, if they don’t like it, they can leave.” Let them leave. Let them leave! They’re always telling us how to run it, how to do this — you know what? If they don’t love it, tell them to leave it. I don’t know. And now watch, I’ll go back tonight — “Oh, sir, that was so controversial. Sir.” No, I’m just saying it’s their choice. They can come back when they want. But you know, they don’t love our country. I think in some cases they hate our country. And they’re so angry.

But Trump’s attacks on women on Wednesday night weren’t limited to Democratic congresswomen of color.

Elizabeth Warren was a major target too. Hillary Clinton, in an unusual twist, was not.

Trump attacked a number of the front-running contenders for the Democratic nomination for president, including Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, but his most vicious attacks were reserved for Elizabeth Warren, whom he repeatedly referred to with his now-familiar “Pocahontas” slur.

“Pocahontas is gaining a little bit because we probably used the ‘Pocahontas’ a little bit too early, but that’s okay, we will bring it out of retirement very soon,” Trump said, alluding to Warren’s rising standing in the polls.

Later, he added: “I was driving her crazy. So she went out and hired a guy to check the blood. I’m sure he had a lot of fun doing that. He checked her blood and found out that many, many, many, many, many, many years ago, there could’ve been somebody. And he could’ve been Indian. And then the Indians got together and they said, ‘We don’t want her! We don’t want her.’”

Trump was referring to Warren releasing her DNA test last year, which indeed drew some criticism; many are justifiably uncomfortable with tracing one’s race to DNA. Nevertheless, Native Americans are not a monolithic group, and while many did criticize Warren’s effort to claim Native American heritage, others support her.

In a departure from his typical speeches, Trump only mentioned Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi in passing. But he didn’t have good things to say about them. He mocked Clinton for falsely believing she would win North Carolina in 2016, and criticized Pelosi for objecting to his characterization of MS-13 members as “animals.”

Trump also mentioned German Chancellor Angela Merkel in an unflattering context, suggesting he needs to hector her to pay her country’s bills.

“There was a recent poll — Germany likes Obama better than Trump. A lot better. I said of course, because I’m making them pay their bills,” Trump said. “I’m saying you got to pay. I say, ‘Angela, Angela, you’ve got to pay, Angela!’ Obama would go in, make a speech, leave. I go in, make a speech, I say, ‘Let me speak to Angela. Angela you’ve got to pay your bills, you’ve way behind.’”

There’s a method behind the ugliness

It’s worth remembering that Trump went out of his way to insert himself into a feud between House Democratic leadership and the Squad. His Sunday tweets admonishing them to leave the country weren’t in response to anything in particular, other than his desire to make himself part of the story.

Trump clearly views racist attacks as a winning strategy. On Wednesday, Axios, citing sources close to Trump, reported that Trump views his attacks on Omar and company as a way to motivate white grievance voters to go to the polls next year.

“He hopes he can crank their turnout even higher, especially among older, white evangelicals. He knows most of those voters are unlikely to ditch him, no matter how offensive his comments,” wrote Axios’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen. “He watches Fox News and knows AOC, in particular, is catnip to old, white voters, especially men.”

But even if he’s counting on white men, he still pays lip service to women.

“You know, it’s interesting with women. So women want to have strong military protection. They want to have strong borders. They want to have strong law enforcement. They want to have great education. They want to have low taxes for their family, not high taxes,” Trump said during his speech on Wednesday. “They want to have all the thing that we talk about — why wouldn’t they want Trump more than anybody else? The other side is going to go the opposite way. And they did in the last election and we’re doing a lot better.”

What Trump didn’t mention is that women voters favored Democrats by an estimated 7 points and turned out at historic rates in 2018.

#u.s. news #politics #donald trump #trump administration #politics and government #president donald trump #white house #republican politics #trump #us: news #republican party #must reads #racism #hate speech #hate crimes

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Brazil elected far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro in its presidential runoff on Sunday, breaking a nearly two-decade-old tradition of almost exclusively electing leftist presidents.

Bolsonaro, a Congress member and ex-military officer, started off his campaign as a fringe candidate from a fringe party who was mostly known for his streak of racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBT remarks and for his professed fondness for the country’s brutal military dictatorship.

But his promises to restore security amid endemic violent crime and to stamp out the country’s rampant political corruption won him support among voters looking for a change.

Many in Brazil have grown frustrated with the status quo due to a slew of political and economic crises that have gripped the country in recent years. The current center-right president, Michel Temer, is deeply unpopular in the wake of a struggling economy and a massive corruption scandal that has engulfed all levels of government.

Temer took over for former leftist President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached in 2016. Her leftist predecessor, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, is serving a 12-year sentence for corruption charges. But while Lula himself is still very popular in Brazil, his handpicked successor Fernando Haddad was soundly defeated by Bolsonaro.

On the eve of the Brazilian elections, I called up Benjamin Junge to get a deeper understanding of voters in Brazil supported the far-right candidate. Junge is an anthropology professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz and a Fulbright fellow at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil who studies working-class and middle-class families in Brazil.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Jen Kirby

Are the Brazilian voters you talk to mostly rejecting the leftist Workers’ Party — or are they actively choosing Bolsonaro?

Benjamin Junge

My observation is that actual ideological, hard-right voters within working class communities — which is to say people who are voting for Bolsonaro because they love him, and they’ve analyzed his plans, and they think they’re great — are a small minority.

I would say the same about the old-school Workers’ Party supporters, too. They’re still there. I see them marching around with T-shirts that have images of Lula from four years ago.

The issue is the mass of working-class voters in between those two poles. The question is why is it that so many of them seem to be open to a guy who has expressed a disregard for democracy and said such foul things.

People are definitely talking a lot about security and violence in their neighborhoods, and they’re genuinely fed up with that they perceive as a failure of the state to take care of security issues. And that’s a real thing.

Jen Kirby

But doesn’t Lula still have a lot of popular support?

Benjamin Junge

Let me give you a quick little anecdote: Right before Lula was found guilty and went to prison last January, the matriarch of a family that I’ve been following very closely, who is a widow and is 66 years old, she’s was watching TV. At one moment she said, “Oh my god, is there any way I can still love this man [Lula]?”

When he went to prison, she posted something on Facebook, saying she was indignada — fed up. She alternates between a deep love for Lula and a kind of hate for him because he seems to have screwed everything up. The guy who did a lot of good and could have done much more but didn’t.

Jen Kirby

So they love Lula the man, but don’t love the system around him.

Benjamin Junge

Yes, very strongly. This is what political scientists are all scratching their heads about, and anthropologists maybe not quite so much. Political scientists say, “Wait, that’s very irrational, if they love Lula so much, why don’t they just vote for the other guy whom Lula anointed, Fernando Haddad?” But that’s not happening.

Jen Kirby

Can you explain exactly why that disconnect is happening?

Benjamin Junge

This woman I mentioned is typical in another respect, which is she has never really taken politics seriously. So she came to love Lula. She would definitely be voting for him if he were on the ballot, but it wasn’t for what he represented — it was just for the kind of man he presented himself to be.

She’s in her mid-60s and she has five grown children who are all in their 30s and 40s, most of whom have children of their own. They all live in the same building in different households, and what is creating stress in this family — and it’s playing out in the family’s WhatsApp group, which is the way that it’s happening across Brazil.

This family’s WhatsApp group was set up for social events and to send memes. But the oldest son is a Bolsonaro supporter. He’s that rare, and somewhat uncommon variety of very ideological serious supporter. He posts stuff about Bolsonaro in the family WhatsApp group. There’s a grandson who’s 18 years old, in his first year of college, and he responds with, “What what are you talking about? That doesn’t make any sense.”

The matriarch has become infuriated — not because she agrees more with her oldest son versus her grandson or vice versa — but because politics has contaminated her family and that’s almost unendurable for her. She doesn’t lose sleep about corruption because she hasn’t had high expectations of the state in a long, long time.

She’s just upset that her family, which is the most important thing in her life, is now this base of disputes and intergenerational tensions. I think that sets her up for an inclination to vote for Bolsonaro. Because his weird discourse is that he will restore order to society.

Jen Kirby

How does Bolsonaro’s image as a strongman factor in here? He has praised the military, and expressed some nostalgia for the military dictatorship. Is that the kind of order people are yearning for, or is it more nuanced than that?

Benjamin Junge

Among people who study cultural memory in Latin America — so places like Brazil that had some kind of authoritarian regime in the 1970s and 1980s, like Argentina, Chile, Uruguay — there is a broad consensus that Brazil did not really do a very good job in the first 20 years after the dictatorship ended in 1985 in promoting cultural dialogue about what that meant, and how it could be avoided, in contrast with places like Chile and Argentina.

Brazil didn’t really get on that bandwagon until later. These days, public high schools typically have modules about the military dictatorship. So in this family that I was mentioning to you, the person who knows the most about the dictatorship is the grandson because he did a whole year-long module on remembering the dictatorship in school.

Whereas his father and his mother, they’re in their 40s, and they were alive during the very tail end of the dictatorship, but they don’t have any real living memories of it, they have a much more idealistic — and from my perspective, problematic — way of remembering that period.

Jen Kirby

When it comes to Bolsonaro, how strong is his support among working-class people?

Benjamin Junge

One of the hypotheses is that the Workers’ Party prioritized social assistance programs but failed to link those incredible welfare benefits to any kind of political position or policy position among the beneficiaries; that the Workers’ Party failed to bring into being a kind of new citizen consciousness — they just created this new middle class of consumers.

I hope that by the time we’ve analyzed all of our data, we’ll be able to chime in on that hypothesis and see if our data supports it or not.

It’s too early for me to do that, but I think there’s something there. That certainly bodes well for Bolsonaro. He’s trying to make his appeal to voters who, when they reflect on having risen above the poverty line during the years the Workers’ Party was in power, they don’t connect it to that policy paradigm, they connect it to their own individual discipline and efforts — it’s more of a meritocracy.

Or if they’re evangelicals, which is a whole another set of issues, they explain it in terms of their religious beliefs.

Jen Kirby

But what about the actual economic situation? Are the working-class and middle-class families you’re studying significantly worse off economically than they were even a few years ago, or it more a perception because of everything that’s happening around them?

Benjamin Junge

We know that around 2014, unemployment rates started to go up and household family income started to go down, after having gone up for several years. We know that the number of people who have private health insurance policies, which is considered a class marker of middle class, started going down. We know that experiences with crime started going up.

So there are certainly objective markers that people who had experienced some kind of upward socioeconomic mobility during the Workers’ Party years have seen those patterns either stall or actually reverse.

Jen Kirby

How does Bolsonaro’s controversial rhetoric fit in? I know race is a complicated issue in Brazil, but his racially charged comments, his sexism, his anti-LGBT statements — how do voters ignore or justify those? I hate to make the comparison, but is it similar to Trump where some of his supporters say, “I don’t love all the things he says, but I’m willing to give him a chance”?

Benjamin Junge

There is something similar to the US, but there’s also something distinctively Brazilian. Brazilians have a kind of cultural image of themselves as playful, lovable troublemakers. It’s a recognized kind of cultural trait that people reflect on and talk about, and sometimes they talk about it in a loving way: “We’re romantic but you can’t really count on us to show up on time, oh well, that’s Brazil.”

When Brazilians — the people that I’m hanging out with in this working-class neighborhood — when they see in Facebook clips or WhatsApp clips that are circulating or on the television news, when they see these of Bolsonaro saying just saying horribly nasty, problematic things about blacks, gays, Indians, and plenty of other groups down the list, one way of interpreting that is to say, “You know all Brazilians are like that, he’s just being honest.”

And that sounds a little bit like the way people were talking about Trump, but I don’t think in the US we have a sense of “Well, we’re all actually playful like Trump, he’s just being a little more extreme and more honest.” Whereas Brazilians have this idea that it’s all playful.

Having said this, I know some people who can’t get beyond it, who will not vote for Bolsonaro. I’m thinking of someone who has a gay father, specifically because of that one statement that Bolsonaro said about how if he had a gay son, he’d rather die in a car accident. That alone they cannot get beyond. There are Brazilians who are reacting to a specific statement that they view as irredeemably problematic, and that includes plenty of Afro-Brazilians.

And here enters the thorny topic of fake news. Because if you were a Bolsonaro supporter you might respond to me by saying, “Wait a minute, let me show you a clip of some black Brazilians telling us how much they like Bolsonaro,” which are circulating. I would immediately say it’s maybe not fake, but it sure is a minority because most Afro-Brazilians in the popular class — lower-middle class or working-class — I think are quite offended by the way he talks about race.

Jen Kirby

You mentioned fake news. It seems that’s played a huge role in the election. How have you seen that play out?

Benjamin Junge

Facebook and WhatsApp are [where we see] the fake news issue. A couple of weeks ago this matriarch who I’ve been talking about, we bumped into each other, and I’m always bugging them with questions about the election. This was before the first round of elections. She showed me a picture of this clip that was circulating of some woman in some public space who took her shirt off and bared her breasts.

She shows this to me and says, “I don’t want this kind of a society, is this what we want?” And I said, “Wait a minute, who is this person?” And she says, “This is what we would get if we support the [Workers’ Party], or at least this is what will be fixed if Bolsonaro gets elected.” And it was just some ridiculous fake news thing, who knows if it was actually the Bolsonaro people who put it into circulation, but it was circulated by Bolsonaro supporters.

Jen Kirby

You’ve mentioned WhatsApp a lot — as something used by the family to communicate, but also to get information about the election. How important is it in influencing the vote?

Benjamin Junge

I don’t even fully appreciate just how pervasive WhatsApp groups are — I think that every family in Brazil has a WhatsApp group that has more than one cellphone user in it. And I believe that that cuts across class in a big way. The way that it might be a little different is that working-class families tend to be bigger than elite families.

Every kind of like religious community, every evangelical church, every individual kind of Catholic church has a WhatsApp group. Uber drivers in different neighborhoods and cities have WhatsApp groups, taxi drivers, students, groups of friends, teachers use WhatsApp,

I’m teaching two classes — one graduate and one undergraduate — at the university here this semester, and I have a WhatsApp group for both classes. I can’t even really imagine what this election would look like without WhatsApp.

And secondarily, Facebook. Facebook is also hugely important, but my intuitive sense is that WhatsApp is where the real frictions and kind of circulation of content is happening. And possibly where opinion formation, the actual congealing of voter sensibility, is concentrated.

Original Source -> Corruption, fake news, and WhatsApp: how Bolsonaro won Brazil

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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romancatholicreflections · 8 years

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15th January 2017 >> 'Being A Witness To Jesus The Light Of Humanity ~ Second Sunday, of Ordinary Week, Cycle A ~ Daily Reflection for Roman Catholics on Today's Mass Readings.

SCRIPTURE READINGS: [ Is 49:3.5-6; Ps 39:2,4,7-10; 1 Cor 1:1-3; Jn 1:29-34 ] In the second reading, St Paul was writing to the Christians in Corinth who were facing internal and external challenges. There was division not just among the Church leaders as some rallied around Peter, Paul or Apollos. At the same time, they had to face the challenges of immorality and worldly living. The city of Corinth was a center for trade and activities. The prosperity of the city, like in most urban cities, also bred corruption of all sorts. Idolatry, prostitution, sexual immorality and cheating were rife. We are living in very challenging times. Not only are we struggling against sin but we are confused over what is sin today! In a world of relativism, with so much information in the mass media, finding the truth is very complicated. We are not too sure what is right or wrong today. Living in this world is rather bewildering because we are swamped with so many opinions all claiming to speak the truth that we no longer know what is the truth and who is speaking the truth or who has the truth. Life in the olden days was easier as society was homogenous. With globalization, all traditional and time immemorial truths and practices are put in question. Even fundamental truths like the nature and identity of human beings, the institutions of sex, marriage, family, the dignity of the human person, the sacredness of life are being redefined. We are not too sure even of the meaning of love. Singles have told me that they would be ridiculed today if they were to tell anyone that they are virgin. On one hand, the Church and all faithful Catholics who seek to live the truth of the gospel are being accused of being rigid, heartless and lacking compassion. Understandably, the pastors are in a dilemma too. If they do not succumb to the relativistic trend of the current world based on contextual theology and situational ethics, they could be accused of being out of touch and even not hearing the voice of God speaking to us. The worst is to be accused of lacking compassion and understanding when pastors seek to be true to the deposit of the faith of the Church passed on in scripture and tradition. Some, out of fear of being unpopular, bend to the wishes of the majority. The day when we say that the Church has been wrong in her doctrines, it means that nothing taught should be held seriously as it might change over time. There is no longer a need to believe and hold common doctrines. When the dogma of infallibility is put in doubt, all other institutions of the Church no longer have any real foundation. When that happens, truth is left to the individual to decide “according to their conscience”. This simple principle is rather ambiguous in itself as there are different levels of conscience, some erroneous, some culpably erroneous. Even then, conscience must be based on objective truth, based on scripture and the teachings of the Church. But some are so paralyzed by the web of information that no decision is possible. When we can no longer say that no objective truth exists but everything is dependent on changing circumstances, then we can no longer say anything is right or wrong because at different times, what is supposedly the truth can turn out to be wrong and what was considered wrong is now acceptable. That is why relativism and subjectivism are the “absolute truths” promoted by the world today. It is within this context that St Paul reminds us that we are being sent. We are called to be apostles of Christ. He was conscious of his call when he wrote, “I, Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle.” By virtue of our baptism, we too are given a special calling from God to preach the gospel according to our charisms and the state of life. Every one of us, regardless of who we are, has a contribution to make in the proclamation of the gospel. Each one is given a role, a job, a ministry to partake in Christ’s mission to the world. This mission can take place within the Church or without. It can be direct or indirect witnessing. But in all that we do, we must be ready, like St Paul, to make available our gifts, resources, talents for His service so that God’s plan for His Church and the world can be realized. It does not matter what we do for God, but what matters is that we do everything for the glory of God and the service of the Church and of humanity. The Lord said to the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I shall be glorified.” More than ever in the world today, we need Christians who are courageous in living lives contrary to the rest of the world. We are called to live a life of chastity and fidelity to our state of life. We are called to love faithfully and authentically. The real tragedy among Catholics is that we all live a double life. We are Catholics only in Church but we live a secular life with worldly values in our daily life. The options and the choices we make are basically dictated by the world, whether it is sex, marriage, family, career, entertainment, education and other pursuits. We share the desire for the illusory pleasures and pursuits of the world. So, we are counter-witnesses of the gospel by the way we live our lives. In church, we behave like saints but outside the church we indulge and subscribe to the immoral activities and wisdom of the world. Indeed, like John the Baptist, we must not live double lives. He did not pretend to be the Messiah. Although he himself was a very popular preacher and prophet, attracting large crowds and disciples to himself, he knew when it was time for him to let go and take a back seat. He was always conscious that he was only a voice of the bridegroom. Christ is the Word. When He came, it was time for the voice to fade out. That is why, John the Baptist said, “He must increase and I must decrease.” (Jn 3:30) Such was the humility of John the Baptist, his sincerity and his clarity of his call. He was contented to do what God wanted him to do and let Christ be glorified. This is what true service is all about, the basis for effective ministry, never to bring others to us even if it is through us. Our task is to bring them to the Lord. We must never keep Jesus away from others or take away His limelight. John did not seek popularity but only the truth. This call to glorify God comes in two ways. The call to service in the gospel is both ad intra an ad extra. The Lord told the Suffering Servant, “It is not enough for you to be my servant, to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back the survivors of Israel: I will make you the light of the nations so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” In other words, we must be a witness within the Church and also to be a witness to Christ in the world. It is a call to re-evangelize the gospel within and to evangelize to the world. We are called to point others to the Lord. There are many people in the world seeking security, peace, love and joy. Our calling is to show them that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. He is their savior and He is the One whom they are seeking to give them fullness of life. We must not be misled into thinking that faith is a private matter. John the Baptist was ever ready to refer others to Jesus. He said, “Look, there is the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.” The call to mission however must begin from within. St Paul issued a personal invitation to all Christians to be holy. He sent “greetings to the church of God in Corinth, to the holy people of Jesus Christ, who are called to take their place among all the saints.” What a beautiful reminder to all of us that we are called to holiness. A Christian’s universal call is the call to holiness. To be holy is to be consecrated, to be set apart for the glory of God and for His service. We are called to manifest His love, light and presence in the way we live our lives. That is what it means to be called saints because a saint is one who reflects the presence of Christ in his or her life. For this reason, we must first form our Catholics in the right values of the gospel. If we are not evangelized ourselves and are not clear of what the gospel is teaching us, we will not be able to be convinced sufficiently to live them out, much less to share with the rest of the world. The work of re-evangelizing our Catholics, to renew their faith and their personal relationship with the Lord through worship, prayer, the Word of God and formation is of utmost importance. Until this is done, the work of evangelization cannot be properly carried out. Catholics must first be informed in their faith, reignite their relationship with the Lord and fall in love with the Word of God before they can be witnesses. But we cannot accept the teachings of Christ unless we fall in love with Jesus and recognize Him as the Son of God and the Word of God. This can only happen through the Holy Spirit because He is the One who leads us to Jesus. Catholics cannot be evangelizers and witnesses unless they are renewed in the power of the Spirit. This is what St John the Baptist reminds us. He could say, “Yes, I have seen and I am the witness that he is the Chosen One of God”, only because he had encountered the Lord personally. John also declared, “I saw the Spirit coming down on him from heaven like a dove and resting on him.” Only when we confess that Jesus is Lord can we then surrender our lives to Him even though we might not understand everything that the Word of God teaches us. In the final analysis, the power of witnessing lies not in what we say but what we do. If we wish to be true evangelizers in the world, we only need to do His holy will in our daily life. This is what will convince people. With the psalmist, we also must say, “Here I am, Lord! I come to do your will. You do not ask for sacrifice and offerings, but an open ear. You do not ask for holocaust and victim. Instead, here am I. In the scroll of the book it stands written that I should do your will. My God, I delight in your law in the depth of my heart.” Written by The Most Rev William Goh Roman Catholic Archbishop of Singapore © All Rights Reserved Best Practices for Using the Daily Scripture Reflections Encounter God through the spirit of prayer and the scripture by reflecting and praying the Word of God daily. The purpose is to bring you to prayer and to a deeper union with the Lord on the level of the heart. Daily reflections when archived will lead many to accumulate all the reflections of the week and pray in one sitting. This will compromise your capacity to enter deeply into the Word of God, as the tendency is to read for knowledge rather than a prayerful reading of the Word for the purpose of developing a personal and affective relationship with the Lord. It is more important to pray deeply, not read widely. The current reflections of the day would be more than sufficient for anyone who wants to pray deeply and be led into an intimacy with the Lord.

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll(s) of the week:

It has been a little over two weeks since special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election was released, and so far the majority of Americans seem to think the report was both fair and accurate. But, as we’ll see, there is still deep disagreement about what Mueller’s findings actually show.

According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in the week following the report’s release, 51 percent of Americans felt that the report was fair and even-handed while only 21 percent felt that it was not. What’s more, both Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to say the report was fair — 53 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans said so. And a YouGov/Huffpost poll that was conducted right after the report was released found that just over 70 percent of both Democrats and Republicans thought the report was accurate — in each case, about 40 percent thought it was “very” accurate and about 30 percent thought it was “somewhat” accurate.

This may be related to an uptick in the number of Republicans who said they had favorable views of Mueller after March 24, when Attorney General William Barr released a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings. Pollsters like AP-NORC and Marist have found sharp upticks in the number of Republicans who said they thought the investigation was fair after the summary was released. And as you can see in the chart below, Republicans are now more likely to view Mueller’s work favorably — his job approval ratings are now almost equally high among members of either party, though as Republican opinion has gone up, some polls found Democratic opinion dropped slightly.

Much of this change in opinion happened right after Barr’s summary was released — so far, making the full report public does not seem to have shifted opinions about the investigation nearly as much as the summary did.

Moreover, while both Democrats and Republicans generally believe the report was accurate and fair, they don’t seem to agree on its contents, and their perceptions of whether Trump obstructed justice remain largely unchanged. The majority of Republicans believe that Trump did not obstruct justice, while the majority of Democrats believe that he did, according to a series of Washington Post polls, including the most recent one, one conducted after Barr’s summary was released, and one conducted while Mueller’s investigation was still ongoing. Democrats and Republicans also don’t agree on whether the report exonerates Trump. According to the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, 61 percent of Republicans and only 6 percent of Democrats think the Mueller report cleared Trump of all wrongdoing.

Opinions on obstruction haven’t changed much

Responses by party to a question asking whether Americans believe Trump interfered with the Mueller investigation in a way that amounted to obstruction of justice

Democrats Republicans yes no yes no August 2018 80% 10% 19% 71% March 2019 80 16 21 77 April 2019 81 10 13 77

Source: Washington Post/ABC and Washington Post/Schar School Polls

Partisans also disagree about what Congress should do now. When asked to choose between four possible next steps, a recent Marist poll found that only 27 percent of Democrats wanted to start impeachment proceedings while 56 percent preferred that Congress continue to investigate potential wrongdoing. The other two options were unpopular with Democrats: 6 percent said Congress should publicly reprimand the president, and 7 percent said that it should take no action. By contrast, 82 percent of Republicans in the poll wanted Congress to take no further action. And that April Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 56 percent of Americans think Congress should not begin impeachment proceedings, which is a 10-point jump from last August. A CNN poll conducted last week also found that a majority of Americans in both parties think Congress should look into why the Justice Department started the inquiry that led to Mueller’s investigation, an action Trump has called for.

Americans — and especially Republicans — seemed to gain faith in Mueller once the investigation ended and Barr’s summary was released, but public opinion does not seem to have changed much since the full report was released. There are still deep partisan divisions about what exactly the report revealed, what it means for the president, and what the path forward should be.

Other polling bites

Former Vice President Joe Biden officially joined the 2020 presidential race last week, and in four national polls released since his announcement, he has gained an average of 8 points. While this bump will probably fade, it currently reinforces Biden’s status as the early polling front-runner.

While it’s easy to get caught up in the 2020 horse race polls of the Democratic primary, Ariel Edwards-Levy of HuffPost reminds us that “undecided” is still the real front-runner. According to a YouGov/HuffPost poll, only 29 percent of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic say they have a good idea of who they will vote for, while 61 percent say they’re still making up their mind.

The American Muslim poll, an annual survey conducted by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, asked Americans if they agreed with certain negative stereotypes about Muslims living in the U.S. The poll found that Jewish Americans reported the lowest levels of Islamophobia of any non-Muslim group, lower than religiously unaffiliated people, Catholics, Protestants and white evangelicals.

45 percent of registered voters told CNN that they are “extremely” enthusiastic about voting in the presidential election next year. By contrast, only 22 percent said they were that enthusiastic in July of 2015. CNN has asked this question since the 2004 presidential election cycle and this is the highest percentage of voters who have said they were “extremely” enthusiastic, which may indicate that turnout in the 2020 presidential elections will be higher than usual. The poll did not find a big enthusiasm gap between parties.

According to a survey conducted by The Harris Poll for the American Psychological Association, 86 percent of American adults agree that people with mental health disorders can get better, and 87 percent say that having a mental health disorder is nothing to be ashamed of. And while the survey found that Americans had generally positive views of people with mental health disorders, it did find that younger adults were more likely to associate mental health issues with stigma than their older peers were.

The ongoing political power struggle between Juan Guaidó and Nicolas Maduro for the Venezuelan presidency has created a growing humanitarian crisis that has left only 15 percent of Venezuelans satisfied with the availability of quality health care, according to a Gallup poll. That’s a huge drop from the 72 percent who said they were satisfied in 2006, when Gallup first asked the question. Satisfaction with the availability of health care has rapidly been declining since 2012.

Panamanians head to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, and Laurentino Cortizo of the Democratic Revolutionary Party is currently in the lead in three of the four polls compiled by the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. Rómulo Roux of the Democratic Change party leads one of the four polls and is in second place in the other three. Those two leaders are trailed by three other candidates, including a member of the sitting president’s party (the president is legally prohibited from running for a second consecutive term).

Trump approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 41.8 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 53.1 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -11.3 points). At this time last week, 41.5 percent approved and 53.1 percent disapproved (for a net approval rating of -11.6 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 41.9 percent and a disapproval rating of 52.8 percent, for a net approval rating of -10.9 points.

Check out our 2020 polls tracker.

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theliberaltony · 6 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Republicans suffered a resounding defeat in the 2018 midterms. President Trump now faces investigations not only from special counsel Robert Mueller, but also from Democratic chairpersons who will be running committees in the House. Yet the president’s reaction to his increased political peril has been to invite more of it.

Trump needs the support of congressional Republicans to keep this threat at bay so he can execute his agenda and block any potential impeachment process. But his decision to remove U.S. troops from Syria irritated congressional Republicans. And that policy shift helped lead to the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who congressional Republicans really liked. The president needs to get support from voters outside of his base to win re-election, but Trump’s proposed border wall is unpopular and the public was not in favor of shutting down the government over the wall.

All of that raises a big question: Is the president in danger of a serious challenge for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination? Right now, I don’t think Trump has too much to worry about. But there are two scenarios in which a primary challenger against Trump would be more viable than they are now — and either or both of them could happen in 2019.

Before we get to that, however: Why isn’t Trump in much trouble now? The president is very popular among Republican voters. According to Gallup polling, 89 percent of self-identified Republican voters approve of Trump.1 That support from within the party is similar to the level President George W. Bush enjoyed at this stage in his first term,2 according to Gallup; it’s significantly better than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama’s standing at this point in their presidencies.3

How presidents’ parties viewed them two years in

Average presidential job approval rating among members of the president’s party in the last three polls of each president’s first midterm year

Year President Average job approval 1978 Jimmy Carter 62.3%

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1982 Ronald Reagan 79.7

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1990 George H.W. Bush 81.7

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1994 Bill Clinton 72.7

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2002 George W. Bush 92.3

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2010 Barack Obama 81.3

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2018 Donald Trump 88.7

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Includes only polls that were completed before the end of that calendar year. Because poll timing is not on a consistent schedule, the last three polls of the year covers slightly different time periods for each president. For all presidents other than Trump, polls were conducted in November and December or just in December. Trump’s final three polls of the year were conducted between October and December.

Source: Gallup

None of Trump’s three immediate predecessors faced a serious primary challenge. And, so far, there aren’t any Republicans who are clearly set to challenge Trump, even as a long list of Democrats have either already announced their 2020 candidacies or are likely to do so very soon.

“There is no significant opposition to Trump in the Republican Party,” said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of two recent books about Republican politics. (I talked to several Republican operatives for this story. None of them wanted to go the record, but off the record, they were fairly dismissive of the idea that Trump would be challenged in a primary.)

So how would a serious primary challenge to Trump emerge? First, I should note I am setting a fairly low bar here for a “serious” challenge: Pat Buchanan’s 1992 bid against George H.W. Bush. Buchanan’s challenge was nowhere near as strong as the ones launched by candidates like Ronald Reagan in 1976 (against Gerald Ford) or Ted Kennedy in 1980 (against Jimmy Carter), both of whom won nearly 40 percent of the delegates in those years’ primaries and caucuses. But while Buchanan did not win a single state, he did get 37 percent of the vote in New Hampshire and more than 25 percent in 11 other states, and, more importantly, he showed that there was some wariness about the incumbent president within his own party. So I’m defining a serious challenger as someone who could get at least 30 percent of the vote in one of the early primary states.

I think there are two clear paths that could produce a Trump primary challenger who’s at least as strong as Buchanan. Let’s walk down each.

Path 1: Events weaken Trump’s support

The most obvious path that could lead to a strong Trump challenger would be paved by some new development. For example, Trump could take a policy step that deeply offends a core part of the GOP base. If he picked a pro-abortion-rights nominee for the Supreme Court, for instance, he could alienate evangelical Christian conservatives, a huge bloc within the Republican Party and one that currently strongly supports Trump.

I don’t expect Trump to do this — he has largely stuck to conservative orthodoxy in his first two years in office. I do not consider removing troops from Syria or even Afghanistan (as the president is considering doing) to be moves that would cause an impasse between the GOP base and Trump. There is little evidence that GOP voters (as opposed to congressional Republicans) are bothered by those moves.

But although he has largely embraced mainstream Republican policies, Trump remains unpredictable, and for that reason I think it is possible, if very unlikely, that Trump could end up taking a step that annoys rank-and-file GOP voters.

Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election and whether Trump benefited from Russian interference represents another potential event-driven shift. Right now, that investigation is doing Trump little harm. Polls show that while the majority of Democrats and independents view the inquiry as serious and justified, Republicans overwhelmingly say that it’s a politically motivated attack against the president. But if Mueller uncovers clear evidence that Trump personally supported Russian efforts to interfere in the election, for example, that could change opinion among Republican voters, or at least among powerful Republican elites.

Here’s perhaps the most important potential event that could inspire a primary challenge: a recession. A key argument of Trump and his allies has been that, whatever you think of the president’s personal behavior, the economy has boomed under his leadership. A recession would undermine that argument, particularly if Republican voters are convinced that Trump’s behavior (such as attacking the chairman of the Federal Reserve) or his policies (such as imposing new tariffs) are partly to blame for the economic downturn.

None of these events are all that likely, but I wouldn’t rule them out. And there’s always the possibility that some new scandal breaks or some other unknown unknown weakens Trump’s support. It’s happened before: For much of 1991, George H.W. Bush had sky-high approval ratings among Republicans.4 But the recession that started in 1990 and whose effects were still being felt in 1992 likely hurt the president. And Bush had broken with his party’s base — and broken a campaign promise — by signing a tax increase in 1990.

Path 2: People work to weaken Trump’s support

The second potential path that could produce a strong challenge to Trump is if the various blocs in the GOP who are unhappy with the president to come together and embrace an alternative.

The first reason this is even a remote possibility is that Trump’s staunch support among Republicans isn’t all that it seems. Some political scientists have concluded that a bloc of Trump detractors who were once Republicans are now describing themselves as independents. Pew Research Center data suggests that a big bloc of people under 30 in particular have left the Republican Party in the Trump era. If many Republicans who dislike Trump are removing themselves from the sample, that would boost his average among those who remain. So if calling yourself a Republican essentially means that you like Trump, of course Trump’s approval rating is very high among Republicans.

In addition, we are in an era of rising partisan polarization, where voters, more than ever, tell pollsters they love the president when he or she comes from their party but hate presidents from the other party. Gallup data suggests that Trump is more popular among Republicans than Ronald Reagan was at this stage of his presidency. I wasn’t covering politics in 1982, but I’m not actually sure Trump is more beloved among Republicans right now than Reagan was then. I wonder if the Trump approval data is just telling us that Republican voters are more loyal to their party now — and that they would be just as loyal to another Republican if he or she became the party’s nominee.

Third, Trump has some clear weak spots within the GOP coalition. Polls show Trump has less support among Republicans under 45, those who consider themselves liberal or moderate, women, those who live in suburban or urban areas, those who identify as independents but lean Republican, and those who are not evangelical.

Yes, those groups have considerable overlap. But the Republican Party is not as dominated by old white male evangelicals as the popular narrative suggests. According to Pew, only about one-third of people who identify with the Republican Party are white evangelical Christians. About 40 percent of Republicans and people who lean Republican are under age 50. These various pockets of Trump skepticism in the GOP could add up to a sizable bloc. And remember that in 2016, the non-Trump GOP vote, which included many people who belong to these same demographic groups, was split among a number of candidates. I doubt there will be more than one or two serious GOP alternatives to Trump in 2020, so if we saw a lone Republican contender, that person would likely be able to draw all or most of the anti-Trump vote to themselves, rather than splitting that potential coalition with other candidates.

“Trump’s base is largely confined to those who identify as ‘strong Republicans,’ and that means his base is weaker than it seems,” said Peter Enns, executive director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University. A recent poll seems to confirm Enns’s perspective. PRRI asked a sample of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who they wanted to be the GOP nominee in 2020. Sixty-six percent said Trump, while 33 percent said another person. The fact that a third of the people who lean or identity as Republicans want someone other than Trump on the ballot in 2020 is significant, as it amounts to a considerable chunk of the party. And that 66 percent number is considerably lower than the percentage of self-identified Republicans who approve of the job Trump is doing, according to Gallup polls, which suggests that Trump’s support is concentrated among the most staunchly Republican voters.

Olsen was more skeptical, “There are places [in the GOP electorate] where he is weaker or stronger, but that is strong versus very strong,” he said.

Either way, Trump is still popular enough among Republicans that someone will have to beat him to get the nomination — he can’t be expected to just step aside. An alternative candidate would need to attract support from more than just the people who hate the president. But it could happen. Remember that Hillary Clinton was viewed favorably by about 90 percent of Democrats in June 2014, according to Gallup. She looked unbeatable. Then a viable alternative emerged (Bernie Sanders) and Clinton found herself in a competitive primary.

So who might this challenger be? The candidate probably needs to appeal to the groups I listed above where Trump’s support is weaker. So generally, even though Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton has taken some steps toward a presidential run, I don’t think current circumstances favor someone like Cotton, who mirrors Trump’s conservative stance on immigration issues. Instead, I would look for someone broadly to Trump’s left. Some names given to me by Republican strategists who would not go on the record include former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, departing Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and U.S. Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Will Hurd of Texas.

If you’re reading that list and thinking that none of those people sound like particularly strong challengers to Trump, I agree with you. Barring some exciting alternative from out of nowhere, I think the real danger Trump faces in 2019 and 2020 is some kind of major event weakening his grip on the GOP combined with a strong challenger emerging.

At least right now, none of that seems particularly likely. And that’s good news for Trump. Maybe the primary challenge was an effect, not a cause, but Ford, Carter and George H.W. Bush all lost in the general election after fending off intra-party rivals. Clinton, Obama and George W. Bush all avoided primary challenges and won second terms. If no Republican runs against Trump over the next year, we should interpret that as a positive sign for Trump’s re-election chances — it probably means the party thinks he can win the general election in 2020, and also that it isn’t too annoyed with him. And if Trump avoids facing a challenger, that could also keep the GOP unified and make it easier for him to win.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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It wasn’t supposed to be a walkover, but it just about was one. Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate of the PSL (Social Liberal Party), fell just short of an outright majority in the first round of Brazil’s elections on October 7, winning 46 percent of all valid votes (that is, excluding spoiled and blank ballots). Fernando Haddad of the PT (Workers’ Party) also made October 28’s runoff, finishing a distant second with 29 percent. According to poll aggregator PollingData.com.br, Bolsonaro is a clear favorite, with a 98 percent chance of winning the second round and an advantage of between 6 and 14 percent in the polls.

Polls significantly undershot both Bolsonaro and Haddad’s numbers, with the biggest polling firms putting Bolsonaro around 40 to 41 percent and Haddad around 24 to 25 percent. I had warned before the election that one should take polling figures in Brazil with a grain of salt. So what went wrong? And could these problems happen in other places, too?

Polls in Brazil suffer from problems that also afflict other countries, but these problems can be accentuated because of limitations with Brazilian polls. The Brazilian Polling Error Database (BPED) — compiled with Mathieu Turgeon of the University of Western Ontario for a working paper currently under review — shows that the average absolute error for polls conducted just one day before the 2014 presidential election was 4.86 percent (most other countries average between 2 to 2.5 percent).

One reason is that it can be difficult to access certain areas, which make face-to-face surveys more difficult. However, according to Neale El-Dash, the statistician behind PollingData, they are still often better than telephone-based surveys, which have generally been conducted with lists of phone numbers bought from companies without regard to their origins or possible biases.

To compensate, El-Dash says that “almost all surveys before this year were with quotas,” with some even conducted in public places with passersby. These quotas tend to be primarily for sex and age. This could have underestimated the effect of evangelical voters, who are, ceteris paribus, more likely to be poor and live in difficult-to-access areas. Evangelicals also voted en masse for Bolsonaro.

When Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016, outperforming poll predictions, some political scientists and commentators proposed that many Trump supporters could have been reluctant to share their preference for him to pollsters. The evidence has been mixed, but the unwillingness to publicly say socially undesirable things has been shown to affect survey responses on a variety of topics, including sex, drug use, and vote buying. Some voters might refuse to acknowledge support of controversial politicians to pollsters while still voting for them.

This looks to have applied to Bolsonaro, whose fondness for saying repugnant things is no secret. A reliance on face-to-face interviews could have produced an especially pronounced social desirability bias with Bolsonaro, a particularly controversial candidate; telling an interviewer to their face that one supports Bolsonaro could be more difficult than doing so on the phone.

The US was also not the only country with two unpopular leading candidates. Both Bolsonaro and Haddad had sky-high rejection rates going into the election, both of them eclipsing 40 percent. Much like Trump captured an anti-Hillary vote and vice versa, both Haddad and Bolsonaro attracted votes by using the imminent threat of their opposite number.

As polls began to indicate that Bolsonaro and Haddad were the two leading candidates, this could have led to last-minute shifts among those who opposed one of them. A certain subset of voters looks to not “waste” their vote on a candidate with no chance of winning — and this is especially salient when voters want to “stop” certain unpopular candidates. This can lead to two candidates pulling away from others, even in multi-round elections, as happened here.

In the US, we often talk about a coattails effect: The support for one high-profile candidate (typically president) can affect the support of candidates running for other positions. In Brazil, this effect exists, too, but it also exists in reverse: Local politicians use their networks to support majoritarian candidates.

Picking a candidate who ends up losing gains nothing for elites; picking one who wins can give them a job and influence. Something that passed under the radar this year, but was possibly very influential, was the fact that the National Congress of Brazil’s rural caucus abandoned the PSDB’s Geraldo Alckmin for Bolsonaro five days before the election. Alckmin duly underperformed expectations by 3 to 4 percent while Bolsonaro outperformed them.

This kind of shift might not have as big an effect as it did in the 1980s, but it is not irrelevant. While campaigning is illegal 24 hours before the election, it still exists — and sometimes with offers of cash as well. This sort of practice rarely influences voters who have already made up their minds, but it still could affect elections when people don’t have preferences for that race.

This time around, 10 to 16 percent either did not respond or did not choose a candidate in the last polls before the first round. Pre-election polling would not have been able to capture this type of movement or catch if it would systematically help (or harm) one candidate in particular.

In short, many of the same problems that have plagued polling in other countries are also present in Brazil. Yet they are likely accentuated by certain factors that are more specific to Brazil. Pollsters elsewhere — particularly in other developing countries — will have to be attuned to these potential pitfalls, or else they could repeat the same mistakes.

Original Source -> Pollin’ ain’t easy: why did Brazilian pollsters go so badly astray in 2018?

via The Conservative Brief

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