#Nathaniel Rakich an

[tomorrowusa]

An analysis of how progressives did well in two elections in the Midwest earlier this week. Also, inevitable discussion about the Trump indictments.

[nodynasty4us]

As for why [Robert F.] Kennedy [Jr.] himself is apparently doing so well — it’s an illusion based on his last name. CNN/SSRS asked Democrats who said they would consider supporting Kennedy why they might do so, and a plurality (20 percent) said the Kennedy name and his family connections. An additional 10 percent said it was just because they were open-minded and would consider any candidate. Only 12 percent specifically pointed to his views and policies.

Nathaniel Rakich in  FiveThirtyEight

[cavenewstimes]

Donald Trump Is a Convicted Felon. So What?

This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss the fallout from Donald Trump’s felony conviction; the spin-up for Hunter Biden’s trial; and the upshot for college speech from campus protests with Charles Homans. Here are some notes and references from this week’s show: Nathaniel Rakich for 538: Trump’s conviction may be hurting him – but it’s early Sarah Longwell in The…

[truck-fump]

Why The Latest <b>Trump</b> Indictment Looks So Bad For Him | FiveThirtyEight

New Post has been published on https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-latest-trump-indictment-looks-so-bad-for-him/&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjUzM2UwMTY5ZmFhZTIwMGQ6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw3SQaHd8qF1H04sCt6YxYyb

Why The Latest Trump Indictment Looks So Bad For Him | FiveThirtyEight

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that former President Donald Trump has …

[andrewtheprophet]

Great Unrest is Coming to Babylon the Great https://andrewtheprophetcom.wordpress.com/2023/04/01/great-unrest-is-coming-to-babylon-the-great/

[newswireml]

Should Anti-Trump Republicans Clear The Field For DeSantis?#AntiTrump #Republicans #Clear #Field #DeSantis

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited. nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is running for president. Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan decided not to. Sen. Tim Scott is reportedly nearing an announcement. Former Vice President Mike Pence certainly sounds like a candidate.  All of these Republicans…

[best2daynews]

What Are The Most Vulnerable Senate Seats In 2024? - best news

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited. nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): Things are heating up in 2024’s U.S. Senate races! On Monday, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin announced her candidacy for Michigan’s open Senate seat, and last week, Democratic Sen. Jon Tester declared he was running for reelection in Montana. (All these…

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Stories around the allegations that President Trump used the power of the presidency to seek dirt on his political rival in a phone call to the Ukrainian president in July are moving fast. The House has opened an official impeachment inquiry into the president, and some Democrats have even suggested they’ll draft articles of impeachment by Thanksgiving.

But there’s also an election going on (in case you forgot) … so how does the question of whether Congress should move to impeach Trump affect the Democratic primary?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Well, since Sept. 20 — which is both the day the Wall Street Journal broke the news that the whistleblower complaint alleged that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and, not coincidentally, the last time I really thought about the 2020 Democratic primary — Sen. Elizabeth Warren has gained significantly in the Real Clear Politics average, and Biden has slipped.

And I think there are lots of reasons to believe this story would help Warren and hurt Biden.

Warren was one of the first 2020 candidates to come out in favor of impeachment, back in April, and she has been one of the clearest candidates about where she stands on the issue.

So given that support for impeachment has increased among Democrats, as our tracker of impeachment polls shows, I think a sense of urgency among Democrats to impeach Trump could help Warren.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I disagree with this take pretty strongly.

nrakich: Oh good! I was afraid we were all going to agree.

perry: I don’t think the “scandal” (Biden himself did nothing wrong; his son, Hunter Biden, seems to have done something that is perhaps not ideal but not illegal) will hurt Biden among Democratic voters who were already seriously considering voting for him.

Basically everyone in the party is defending him, and I suspect that the people who are likely to say this is a problem for him (by showing he and his family made money through politics/cronyism) were already Warren or Bernie Sanders supporters.

Impeachment is the position of the Democratic Party, and Biden is in line with that. He and Warren are not that different on this issue now.

nrakich: But doesn’t it show leadership on Warren’s part that she was one of the first to call for impeachment?

As for Biden himself, I don’t think a lot of Democrats buy what Trump is selling — that Biden’s activities in Ukraine were corrupt. But I think it could pierce his aura of electability if Democrats worry that it’s something that could be used against him in a general election.

sarahf: Yeah, I tend to agree with Perry, but do think there is a “tug-of-war” around media narratives right now involving the Ukraine scandal, and while Fox News has been the main outlet focusing more on Biden’s involvement in Ukraine, rather than Trump’s conduct, the déjà vu to 2016 makes me think this has the potential to overtake/overshadow the primary.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I think impeachment is pretty clearly good news for Warren. But that’s not mutually exclusive with it being good news for Biden. My initial instinct was that it could help Biden in some ways because (1) Democrats would have to come to his defense, and (2) it makes Trump looks like he fears Biden, which bolsters his electability case. My second instinct, though, is that it isn’t so helpful for Biden.

Why? It’s not so much because his vague aura of electability might suffer, although maybe there’s some of that. But more because it requires a campaign that can be nimble and react to unpredictable news developments in real time, and I’m not really sure that campaign is Biden’s — they’ve run a very risk-averse strategy so far.

perry: But I think Biden is smart to lean into this and basically argue, “I’m so electable that Trump is already trying to cheat to beat me.” That seems like a good argument to me, particularly in the Democratic primary. That argument also seems true!

natesilver: It’s a pretty decent argument!

Another dimension to all this is that if impeachment is in the news all the time, it’s bad news for any candidate who isn’t one of the front-runners now. Since the story occupies a lot of media bandwidth that could be spent on, I dunno, a Cory Booker surge, or whatever.

perry: But in general, I do think a fast-moving event favors Warren, just because her strategy (run to the left) is easy to execute and Biden’s (figure out where the middle of the electorate is) is a bit harder. And if this moves to the Senate, you can imagine Warren being like, “Let’s convict” and Biden being less eager to say that.

nrakich: Maybe this is a bad analogy, but I think maybe the impeachment issue is to Warren as the Iraq War was to Barack Obama in 2008. He had a clear anti-war stance and no past baggage on the issue (unlike Hillary Clinton, who had voted for the war), and that really gave him credibility on an important issue to Democratic primary voters.

Furthermore, Warren’s steady rise in the polls actually started around the time she came out in favor of impeachment in April — although there were also a lot of other factors at play, so we can’t say for sure it was the reason she caught fire.

sarahf: I mean, to some extent, though, this has to be objectively better for anyone who isn’t Biden, because being dragged through the mud on this scandal (regardless of whether any wrongdoing actually happened) isn’t great PR.

And while the Biden campaign has tried to put the kibosh on stories that Biden did anything wrong, I do find it astounding that a Monmouth poll this week found that 42 percent of voters think Biden “probably did” pressure Ukrainian officials to not investigate his son’s business interests.

perry: I still think the number of Biden Democratic primary supporters leaving him over this is close to zero, and the number of Democrats who were thinking about voting for Biden who will be bothered by this is also close to zero.

What percentage of that 42 percent will vote for Trump? Probably most of them.

nrakich: Yeah, and that’s borne out by the crosstabs of that poll — Democrats said 65 percent to 19 percent that Biden “probably did not” inappropriately pressure Ukraine. But as I said above, it’s not about Democrats leaving Biden because they believe the allegations. It’s about them getting scared that he now has a scandal, however unsubstantiated, that could hurt him in the general election.

perry: So they choose Warren instead?

Does that seem likely to you?

natesilver: Yeah I’m with Perry on this!

I think voters aren’t taking “electability” quite as literally as you or I might.

Otherwise they’d consider Amy Klobuchar really electable or whatever, because she’s from a swing-ish state and has won by big margins before.

nrakich: Nate, I agree that the ordinary voter may not spend a lot of time diving into a candidate’s average overperformance above partisan lean or whatever — but I think simpler concepts like “scandals hurt your chances of winning” can resonate. This may be one of the lessons many people took from 2016 (along with, maybe, “America isn’t ready to elect a woman president”) — that even an overhyped scandal like the one over Clinton’s emails can cost someone an election.

And Perry, Warren doesn’t need all those ex-Biden voters to flock to her. She is doing fine on her own. If Biden drops to 15 percent, Warren will probably be in first place by default.

sarahf: I’m not sure we’ll see mass defection from Biden over this. But I do think Warren stands to benefit, however marginally, just by not being at the center of it all. I still think that while the Ukraine situation might not be bad for Biden, it’s not great either.

perry: Part of why I don’t think this will hurt Biden with voters who care a lot about electability is because the rest of the really viable candidates don’t scream electable (the white woman, the black woman, the socialist, the 37-year-old) in the way that voters typically think about electability.

natesilver: We also haven’t really seen how perceptions of Warren change now that she’s perceived by the media as a front-runner — maybe even the front-runner — instead of an underdog. I do wonder if there’s a bit of recency bias in how we’re covering that too.

nrakich: Right. I fully expect a scrutiny cycle for Warren coming up.

But I think that’s outside the purview of this chat!

natesilver: I mean, in some ways, you’d think that Biden could gain ground by saying, “While all these other Democrats are out there talking about impeachment, I’m talking about how we can BEAT Donald Trump based on issues that matter to the middle class,” etc.

Except that… the scandal at the heart of Democrats’ best impeachment case directly involves him!

sarahf: I do wonder, though, how much people are generally factoring impeachment into how they think about either a) the candidates or b) the election, period. Granted, this CNN poll is from March, but what stood out to me in that poll is that no one named the Russia investigation as their top issue for 2020. Do you think we’re headed toward a similar outcome here? Or is the dynamic different?

natesilver: At the very least, Democratic voters’ focus on impeachment is likely to increase now that all the party leaders and candidates back it.

perry: Where there might be a shift is in how the primary is fought. Basically every debate up to now has had this super-boring Medicare for All vs. Medicare “for everyone who wants it” discussion. But does that go away now? Are the terms of the campaign now different?

sarahf: Do you think there will now be more questions about whether the candidates support impeachment?

perry: Not impeachment. But the debates have all been very policy-focused. And now I wonder if they will be more about democratic norms and values. “Should Trump be removed from office?” is certainly a question that will be asked.

nrakich: Yeah, the irony of this whole thing is that impeachment is actually an irrelevant topic for a presidential campaign. If any of these people wins the White House, Trump will be out of office anyway!

perry: But impeachment is in the news, and I think it’s more interesting than restating everyone’s Medicare position. It could lead to more interesting questions, too. For example, Kamala Harris’s idea to ban Trump from Twitter has come out of this whole discussion. My guess is Warren may be to the right of Harris on that.

nrakich: Oh, I agree that it will come up. I just find it funny.

natesilver: But calling on Twitter to kick Trump off, though, is (apart from the journalistic case against kicking Trump off Twitter) sort of daft strategically since Trump probably hurts himself politically (and maybe even legally) with his various outbursts on Twitter. You’ve also had Harris calling for Brett Kavanaugh’s impeachment if I’m not mistaken, which seemed very off-message for Democrats.

nrakich: Warren did as well.

perry: The primary has largely been a wonk-fest, which is good for wonky candidates (Warren) and candidates who clearly reject wonkiness (Biden). But maybe this is a new phase of the campaign and a different type of candidate emerges. Maybe someone like Pete Buttigieg who has campaigned a lot on norms and democratic values. He also speaks about foreign policy fairly fluently. I wonder if he can turn this moment into something.

sarahf: Given that support for impeachment is so high among Democrats, do you think any of the candidates have anything to lose by saying they support impeaching Trump?

natesilver: I dunno. If Harris is any indication, I don’t think it’s going to be very easy for any of the other low-polling Democrats to latch onto a good argument about impeachment.

perry: Right, now that impeachment is a position of the party, I think it’s hard to differentiate yourself on it.

natesilver: I guess you could argue it’s good for Tom Steyer, who really was out in front on impeachment.

nrakich: Yeah, by all rights, Steyer should get a boost from this, as he’s run so many TV ads on the topic. But I think your point above about the media oxygen being taken away from non-front-runners is a good one.

natesilver: Maybe in a weird way it’s good, too, for someone like Andrew Yang, because he’s the most unconventional candidate and can counterprogram the most. It’s not like he’s been relying on much traditional media attention anyway.

Like, if you’re airing something alongside the Super Bowl, you don’t want to be showing a college football game. You want something really different.

nrakich: Like the Puppy Bowl???

sarahf: Tulsi Gabbard certainly held out on supporting impeachment — but to Nate’s earlier point, I’m not sure talking impeachment will help differentiate any of the candidates already struggling in the polls.

But OK, if the conversation does become more about norms and values and how we think about the office of the presidency, does that actually change the primary that much?

natesilver: I guess one way it could be bad for Warren is if it makes the debates less policy-driven. Then again, I’m not sure if Warren is benefiting from her policy positions so much as being branded as The Policy Candidate

.

nrakich: One point worth reiterating is that we’re still probably very early in the Trump/Ukraine/impeachment story timeline. The story will continue to evolve, and we don’t know where that will take the political conversation.

perry: After the El Paso shooting, Beto O’Rourke was in the news a lot. But his numbers didn’t move, and that tells me that he is still very unlikely to break through. And so while this feels like the kind of story where Buttigieg can come in and say, “This is another example of how Washington is broken and we need fresh faces,” I would not be surprised if he didn’t gain in the polls either.

A lot of what we are seeing in the polls right now is Warren gaining from Harris, Sanders and, to some extent, Biden. So I think the biggest shift for Warren, as Nate was hinting at, is not her stance on impeachment, but that she is now doing so well that her rivals will attack her more and the media will increase its scrutiny of her. Perhaps this is an atmosphere in which the primary is shaken up a bit. Warren has already kind of won the college-educated, Hillary Clinton-voter mini primary over Harris and in some ways has won the populist mini primary over Sanders, too. But what happens next is unclear.

[anghraine]

538′s real time forecaster is terrifying

[tomorrowusa]

Except maybe on Fox News, we are no longer hearing “Republicans are the overwhelming favorites to take control of the House”. 😄

In your typical midterm election with an unpopular Democratic president, you’d expect Republicans to be flying high. But the evidence is mounting that the national political environment right now actually leans toward Democrats.

On Tuesday, Democrat Pat Ryan defeated Republican Marc Molinaro in a special election for New York’s swingy 19th Congressional District by 2 percentage points, 51 percent to 49 percent.1 At the same time, Republican Joe Sempolinski defeated Democrat Max Della Pia by a closer-than-expected margin of 7 points in the special election for New York’s solid-red 23rd District. On their own, these elections could be dismissed as flukes, chalked up to local factors or particularly strong or weak candidates. But given how these two elections are part of a larger pattern of good results for Democrats over the last two months, they suddenly look a lot more like signal than noise.

To go with his article, Nathaniel Rakich created this revealing chart showing the partisan trend in US House special elections for the 117th Congress.

What’s implicit is that if there is anything even close to a D+9 trend in every district in the midterms then the Trump Republicans are likely to lose US House seats.

The shocking anti-abortion Dobbs decision by the Trump Republican Supreme Court reminded Americans that their rights are hanging by a thread. A Republican Congress could outlaw abortion even in states where it currently remains fully legal. So pro-choice Democrats began experiencing a spike in popularity starting with the SCOTUS demolition of Roe v. Wade.

In addition to abortion, Republicans are also hurt by this summer’s revelations regarding Trump’s involvement in the January 6th coup attempt and his illegal possession of classified materials including nuclear documents at Mar-a-Lago.

While this is good news for pro-democracy Americans, elections are not won with polls, charts, and optimistic comments from analysts. We need to make a strong commitment to vote this year. Voting has to get a high priority – and so does encouraging vote slackers to go to the polls.

Be A Voter - Vote Save America 

It may be inconvenient for some people to get around Republican-imposed obstructions to voting, but the reward could be HUGE. In addition to a productive Democratic House, a Senate where Dems pick up two seats would make it Sinemanchin-proof. The 118th Congress has the potential to be the best in over half a century.

[cavenewstimes]

Why ‘Bidenomics’ Isn’t Working For Biden

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited. nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): For a long time, the economy has been seen as a big liability for President Biden in his reelection bid. Inflation soared in 2021 and 2022, culminating at a rate of 9.1 percent last June. The same month, average gas prices exceeded $5 per gallon. And in…

[disillusioned41]

Since the Civil War, midterm elections have enabled the president’s party to gain ground in the House of Representatives only three times, and those were in single digits. The last few midterms have been typical: In 2006, with Republican George W. Bush in the White House, his party lost 31 House seats. Under Democrat Barack Obama, his party lost 63 seats in 2010 and then 13 seats in 2014. Under Donald Trump, in 2018, Republicans lost 41 seats. Overall, since World War II, losses have averaged 27 seats in the House.

Next year, if Republicans gain just five House seats, Rep. Kevin McCarthy or some other right-wing ideologue will become the House speaker, giving the GOP control over all committees and legislation. In the Senate, where the historic midterm pattern has been similar, a Republican gain of just one seat will reinstall Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader.

"Truly bold political actions—culminating in landmark legislation to improve the economic and social well-being of vast numbers of Americans—will be essential to improve the slim chances that Biden's presidency won't lead to a Republican takeover of Congress midway through his term."

To prevent such disastrous results, Democrats would need to replicate what happened the last time the president’s party didn’t lose House or Senate seats in a midterm election—two years after Bush entered the White House. The odds are steeply against it, as elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich points out: "Bush was very popular in 2002 in the aftermath of 9/11. According to a retrospective FiveThirtyEight average of polls at the time, he had a 62 percent approval rating and 29 percent disapproval rating on Election Day 2002. And in this era of polarization—where presidential approval ratings are stuck in a very narrow band—it's hard to imagine (President) Biden ever reaching that level of popularity."

It's not just history that foreshadows a return to Capitol power for the likes of McCarthy and McConnell. All year, Republican officeholders have been methodically doing all they can to asphyxiate democracy. And they can do a lot more.

With new census data, the once-in-a-decade chance to redistrict means that Republican-dominated state legislatures can do maximal gerrymandering. "Because Democrats fell short of their 2020 expectations in state legislative races," FiveThirtyEight politics reporter Alex Samuels says, "Republicans have the opportunity to redraw congressional maps that are much more clearly in their favor." All this year, awaiting census figures to manipulate, Republican legislatures have been enacting outrageous new voter-suppression laws, many of the sort recently greenlighted by the Supreme Court and calculated to destroy voting rights.

Related Content

In Leaked Video, GOP Congressman Admits His Party Wants 'Chaos and Inability to Get Stuff Done'

Jake Johnson

In the face of impending election disasters in 2022 and beyond, denial might be a natural coping mechanism, but it only makes matters worse. Reality should now spur a sustained all-out effort—in courts, legislatures, Congress and public venues—to safeguard as many democratic processes as possible for next year's elections, while organizing against the dozens of major voter-suppression tactics of recent years.

At the same time, truly bold political actions—culminating in landmark legislation to improve the economic and social well-being of vast numbers of Americans—will be essential to improve the slim chances that Biden's presidency won't lead to a Republican takeover of Congress midway through his term. Though largely drowned out by the din of mainstream punditry urging "bipartisan" approaches, many astute voices are urgently calling for measures that could transform political dynamics before the 2022 general elections.

"We've got to go big, and take it to another level," first-term Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman said in an email to supporters this week. "We've got to deliver and get this done for our communities. So why on earth are we wasting time trying to compromise with Republicans?" Bowman added: "If we do not fight for our communities and put them in the center of the work we do—if we continue to prioritize the myth of 'bipartisanship' over the people we were elected to fight for and represent in Washington—we will lose elections. If we want to maintain control and the opportunity to do great work beyond 2022, Democrats need to deliver in this very moment."

Nina Turner, who's likely to become a member of Congress in November after a special election for a vacant seat in a northeast Ohio district, said recently: "When are we going to learn? Republicans plan for the long term. What can we do right now before the next election cycle and get it done and go big? Because power is fleeting. You've got to use it while you’ve got it."

Days ago, in a Washington Post column, The Nation's editorial director Katrina vanden Heuvel posed "the critical question" as Congress reconvened after a holiday break: "Are Democrats ready to act?" She wrote: "While President Biden is selling the bipartisan infrastructure deal as a 'generational investment,' the real effort will come from using the budget reconciliation process to pass vitally needed public investments with Democratic votes only. For all the focus on Biden's ability to work across the aisle, the true challenge is whether he and the congressional leadership can work with all Democrats. That test will do much to determine whether the party can retain or increase its majorities in the next election—and whether the country will begin to address the cascading crises that it faces."'

What remains to be determined is whether such warnings will end up being the tragically prophetic voices of Cassandras—or clarion calls for action that are heeded in time to prevent an unhinged Republican Party from taking control of Congress when 2023 begins.

[andrewtheprophet]

Great Unrest is Coming to Babylon the Great

BRANDON BELL / GETTY IMAGES How Trump’s Indictment Could Affect The 2024 Election By Nathaniel Rakich MAR. 31, 2023, AT 9:54 AM On Thursday, a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict former President Donald Trump, making him the first president in U.S. history to be indicted. As of now, though, we still have many questions — including how this bombshell will affect his campaign to regain the…