#if al gore and hillary clinton had gotten elected who knows?

[lazyscience]

so there's something I feel like young leftists are not getting at all when they rail furiously about how "we keep voting for Democrats but they keep just pandering to the right, what are we supposed to DO to get them to change OTHER than not vote for them?"

It has to do with fundamental assumptions about what "governing" is supposed to mean in the modern era, and this is a conversation that has to happen culturally in and around what is happening at the ballot box in a lot larger sense than it is. putting in a readmore because this gonna get long and also ranty.

It also means I'm taking another Tumblr break because I can not, I CAN NOT with the current political discussion any more and even with terms blocked I'm seeing it, and I don't want to spend my evenings alternating between rage and depression, I get enough of that from the news.

This conversation was happening even earlier than this, but the timepoint at which it was first coming to a head and when I became familiar with it was 1994 and Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America". Prior to this point, the ethos on both sides of the aisle (in public) was that in general, a congressperson's job (especially in the House, a little less so in the Senate maybe) was while you were under the umbrella of one of the two parties, you were mostly looking out for the particular agenda of your state and only secondarily working towards a national agenda. And secondary to this idea, most of them agreed on basic principles that gridlock was bad (wouldn't produce anything useful/re-electable for your state), civil service employees and appointees weren't supposed to be blatant political operatives (there were, of course, but that was considered more sleazy and corrupt than "elections have consequences, hurr hurr") and that for the stability of the country, things like the debt ceiling were best mutually avoided.

So for the better part of the 20th century, the Democrats were more the party of regulation, the social safety net and the reality and use of powers on a federal level; the Republicans were the party of "leave these decisions to the individual states" (this is obviously a grotesque oversimplification, people have literally written dozens, probably hundreds, of scholarly books about this shit). And Newt Gingrich, ambitious little shit from an at the time deep red Republican state, said "you know what, we need to embrace a national party and federal control the way the Democrats have--because until then, WE can't control it." So the Contract With America was born - and the goal became instead of "well, whatever, as long as I can weasel out concessions for my state/special interests that hired me" the game ALSO became "demonstrate that federal government doesn't work by MAKING it not work." By using all the procedural stupid dirty tricks that a reactionary old bunch of white dudes that had just been through a war put into place to make any point of settled law that had happened basically as hard to change as fucking possible.

Now, the Democrats couldn't/didn't WANT to play by those rules, because their biggest and most popular successes (qualified, imperfect, but still) - Social Security, Medicaid, the civil rights movement, antitrust, worker protections, environmental protections - are all contingent on a federal government apparatus that actually fucking works. And now that the Republicans can win either by getting what they want OR by yelling "look, this process is clearly broken and doesn't work!", the only way Democrats can make sweeping changes without having to fight tooth and nail every step of the way is to have a majority in both houses of Congress, control the Presidency, and the Supreme Court.

Because again, the reactionary old white men who had just lived through a butt ton of social upheaval wanted to make it hard for one group of (rich white, male enfranchised) people to control another - and they literally at that time could not have envisioned the way the country would grow into both a far more unified AND polarized place that would take these safety rails and exploit them to block every achievement their opponent might make, whether or not it was actually in the best interests of the people they're representing.

(I mean, they should have, political parties and all that toxicity were not new to the British Empire before the colonies even existed, but well, I think we all know by now there's a lot of things they couldn't have imagined. See also: the second amendment)

So here's the deal - if you punish Joe Biden for being a confused corporate-friendly war-hawkish atrocity-enabling weenus - which he totally is sometimes! - you are kneecapping any actually progressive congressional candidates you elect unless you can also deliver 67+ solidly Democrat/Green/whatever the fuck Angus King is votes in the Senate, and 290+ equally staunch Democratic representatives. Because otherwise, that Republican President's just gonna veto everything they legislate that isn't what he wants. And yes, the Senate has to approve any federal judges or Supreme Court justices he wants to appoint - but again, the Republican party sees the federal court system being slow, backed up and impossible to use as a totally acceptable compromise in return for being able to block any significant Democratic legislation from going forward.

Since 1789, do you know how many vetoes have been overridden by supermajority? 109, out of 1,484.

Now, if you could GET that supermajority in the Senate and the House? You could amend the Constitution! You could make mail-in votes mandatory, and/or mandated paid time off for voting. You could mandate ranked-choice voting, so that leftists could vote for the candidate they actually want without splitting up the bloc to the advantage of the fash/fash-adjacent. You could do things like mandate that a Presidential election isn't valid until a minimum threshold number of votes has been achieved that's actual a majority of eligible voters, not just whatever fanatical minority shows up that day, so some asshole who won with 20 percent of eligible voters can't claim to have "a mandate from The People."

BUT WITHOUT THAT SUPERMAJORITY, VOTING TO PUNISH ELECTED OFFICIALS FOR NOT DOING THINGS THEY CANNOT FUCKING DOOOOOO MEANS NOTHING BUT LOSING FOR ALL OF US!

Especially when the other fucking asshole candidate wants to make it legal for the National Guard to LIVE FIRE WITH ACTUAL MILITARY BULLETS ON PROTESTORS, and the Supreme Court has just made it possible for him if elected to order that and have it not be illegal! If he wants to start deporting all Muslim immigrants like he was trying to push for last time he was elected, or round up LGBTQ people and put them in re-education camps, if he gets elected, he could do that now! Because crimes committed as "official acts" are no longer crimes!

So you want to not have to regularly make shitty compromises in the voting booth any more? Great, neither do I. Here are the only ways I see this going forward:

Get 2/3rd of the states of the union to call for an Article V constitutional convention - and be willing to have the process potentially hijacked by fash nutjobs at the state level if those 2/3rds aren't all Democratic-controlled. It's possible - I mean, the system was specifically designed to work that way - but the fact that a) an Article V convention has not successfully been called in the history of the US, and b) the only people advocating for that in the year 2024 are the actual fucking Heritage Foundation of the infamous Project 2025, Ben Shapiro of "but pussy doesn't get wet" fame, Greg "the solution to Uvalde is arming teachers" Abbott and similar nutjobs make me think that's not the safest way to get the outcome we want here.

Hold your noses and get 67 Senators and 290 Representatives elected that are either Democrats or who will reliably caucus with them like Socialists or Greens and have them pass a law to require ranked choice voting for the presidency - there's a chance it'll get a constitutional challenge from the Supreme Court, but there's not a solid precedent either forbidding or encouraging, and by the time it's an issue hopefully we're back in 5/4 liberal court territory if Alito and Thomas either retire or get canned. That will mean a lot of mid corporatist conservative Dems who will make decisions you don't like and don't want to support, but with an endgame of someday getting to stop doing that. This is honestly probably the most achievable, so it is also the one Republicans are fighting against hardest with gerrymandering and voter suppression, and they have banned it on the state level in Florida, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee and Idaho.

Let Republicans get elected to prove a point. This will result in an unknown but presumably acceptable to you number of deportations, convictions, legal abuse and deaths among people the Trump administration declares undesirable, including Muslims, Palestinians, trans people, anyone working in gender studies or race studies, the unhoused, potential child labor, and people of childbearing potential among others. This is not a threat to get you to fall in line. It is a prediction based on the previous behaviorand stated policy positions of Mr. Trump, the Republican National Convention, and the decision of the Supreme Court allowing his administration to carry out what would otherwise be crimes but for a president are "official actions" now apparently. It will also at the very least make easier the capture of the Supreme Court for another two or three decades during which no effective challenges can be brought for voter suppression, gerrymandering, and violent suppression of protest.

honest question: how, exactly, if it becomes an illegal act to talk about racism, queer liberation or police reform, are you proposing to get your better, more leftist candidates elected? I am so serious right now, why do you think after another four years of Trump provided he doesn't just immediately declare martial law like he already almost did once, do you think people would be willing to stick their necks out to identify themselves as enemies of the state? Think about the stranglehold Joseph McCarthy had on this country from 1947-1957.

[odinsblog]

Back in 2001, Senate Bill 1 passed the Texas state legislature and banned Harris County - that's Houston - from keeping polls open late into the night, or overnight, so that shift workers could vote, while expanding early voting in rural counties. It lets the state throw away absentee ballots that don't come in with the voters drivers license number attached, without telling people that their vote hasn't been counted. It makes it a felony for any state employee to mail out an unsolicited absentee ballot. It requires election officials to do monthly purges of voting rolls, without notifying voters that they'll no longer be able to vote.

It provides new legal protections for so-called, non-partisan poll watchers.

They're actually recruiting Proud Boys down in Texas to be poll watchers, and it makes it a one year in prison offense if you try to stop them or confront them.

And it maintains the state's lack of convenient online voter registration, making it the most difficult state in the union to vote in. That was two years ago to set up Greg Abbott's election victory in the election of 2022.

Now they're coming back with a brand new piece of legislation that would allow the Republican Secretary of State to throw out all the votes in any county with over 2.7 million people, if the secretary of state believes there are any “irregularities” in the count. Now interestingly enough, the county that has Dallas has 2.6 million people and it votes Republican. The county that has Houston, which votes Democratic, has 2.7 million people. It has over 2.6 million, so in the law they made it only apply to any county with over 2.6 million people.

This is just one small piece of a much larger effort.

As the Texas Civil Rights Project noted, in just the first four years after five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Texas Republicans closed 1173 polling places in mostly Black and Hispanic counties that had previously been protected by the Voting Rights Act, but none of that was enough for them.

As the Houston Chronicle noted two days ago, the effort is now to be able to throw out election results in Houston, and then say, “now the state has to have a new election that has to be paid for by the county,” or “now the county has to have a new election that has to be paid for by the county.”

And of course they want to do this because they know that special elections have very low turnout, and low turnout always favors Republicans, because the people who can most easily vote are the people who are salaried, upper middle class — white people mostly, and people who are retired. You know the aging Republicans in Texas, and you know it's pretty straightforward stuff.

Out of the 254 counties in Texas, only Harris County, only Houston was selected for this. And this is, you know, a county now that is led by people of color, as the Harris County attorney pointed out.

And Republican Secretaries of State across the nation were vigorously purging people from the polls. Over 17 million, more than 10% of America's active voters were purged off voting rolls in just the two years leading up to the 2018 elections, according to NBC News.

In North Carolina, now this again after the Voting Rights Act was gutted by five Republicans on the Supreme Court, in North Carolina 158 polling places were permanently closed in the 40 counties with the largest African-American populations leading up. This was just before the 2016 election, the Donald Trump election. This led to a 16% decline in African-American early voting in that state.

An MIT study found that nationwide, Hispanic voters wait 150% longer than white people do in line.

Black voters wait 200% longer in line.

In Indiana when then Governor Mike Pence passed a rigorous new Voter ID law, it produced an 11.5% drop in African-American voting in Indiana. This is why we didn't get President Al Gore or President Hillary Clinton. We would have gotten both of them if it wasn't for voter suppression.

Down in Florida, Jeb Bush knocked 90,000 African-Americans off the voting rolls so that his brother could win by 537 votes. Or we would have had President Al Gore, if it had been illegal for Jeb Bush to throw those people off the voting rolls.

And the same thing in 2016: an 11.5% drop in African-American voting just in Indiana, because of a law that Mike Pence passed.

Well, it was happening all over the country. By 2016, the Republican Party had really fine-tuned this voter suppression machine.

The New York Times reports in 2017 that just in Wisconsin, this is in the 2016 election, about 17,000 registered votes were turned away from the polls because of a new Voter ID law from Scott Walker.

In 2018, Greg Palace sued a number of Republican Secretaries of State and got his hands on purge lists that included 90,000 people in largely Democratic parts of Nevada, and 769,000 people in Colorado.

Keep in mind this is when Colorado was run by Republicans. 340,000 people in Georgia, and 469,000 people purged in Indiana.

In the dissent, in the Huston v. Randolph case, this was the case in 2018, where five Republicans on the Supreme Court said, “Yeah, it's fine. You can keep purging people from voting rolls.”

This was the Ohio Secretary of State, Stephen Breyer pointed out in his dissent, and I quote, “the record shows that in 2012, Ohio identified 1.5 million registered voters, nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters as ineligible to remain on the voting rolls because they changed their residences,” and he points out that's 20% of the state's voters - who were kicked off for moving, when on any average year, about 4% of Americans move. How do these numbers come in while they just, you know, hey, Brown people, Black people, college towns, let's just purge them.

Calling the findings disturbing, the Brennan Center said, almost 4 million more names were purged in the rolls between 2014 and 2016. This led up to the Trump election.

Then between 2006 and 2008, this growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33%, far outstripping growth of both total registered voters, 18%, and total population 6%.

This has been their strategy for years and years and years, to throw people off the voting rolls. Now on top of that, they're waging their culture wars, but the culture wars are not all that popular among most Americans.

—Republicans cry “Voter Fraud!” while enacting massive Voter Suppression laws

[tribbleenchantress]

Its such a false Dichotomy to compare what Bush became as a president from his then nonincumbent run vs someone like Trump where there is first hand experience of what he will do if he gets back in power. As controversial as the Nader vote push was its absurd to A) state its the only way Gore lost, (Gore was not at all popular, Hillary Clinton literally tried to sabotage his campaign, he's kind of an Asshole and had negative pr about it his entire campaign, he was also far too associated with Bill Clinton which at that point in time was a terrible thing to be) B) Making the prediction that Bush a, "Compassionate Conservative" (which doesn't even exist anymore) who was running on a fairly boring conservative platform of withdrawing troops from foreign countries and decreasing our foreign oil interests was going to cede an insane amount of power to dick cheney and preside over the post 9/11 era.

The truth of the matter is that the 2000 election at the time was ostensibly one of the few times in American politics where the main candidates were actual flops and the stakes were actually quite low, hence why someone like Ralph Nader was able to scrape away so much of the vote. Which as I should add was actually almost nothing in terms of third party engagement compared to the previous big third party Ross Perot in the elections prior with his 8%, which if you're wanting to talk about the spoiler effect would be the only reason Al Gore had enough of a political career to run.

Voting third party in this election is absolutely a bad idea but you're a total partisan hack if you're trying to claim that voting third party has always been a bad idea, especially voting for a liberal third party candidate following an absolutely unprecedented upset in the two party system in the 90s. Sure maybe we would've gotten Gore, you know how else we would've very likely gotten Gore? If he didn't literally concede following the Supreme Court ruling.

With Kamala/Walz going up DAILY, I've seen more people talking about voting third party/Jill Stein (EW) and I believe the above screencaps from @three--rings can explain WHY Third Party votes NEVER work NOR is this the election to screw around in.

Everyone....like she says above.....PLEASE LEARN FROM HISTORY!!!

(Because if Trump gets in, he's NEVER LEAVING).

[acquariusgb]

9/11 Bill POV

While Hillary was in Washington and Chelsea in New York, Bill was in Australia. Here's an extract from Man of the World by Joe Conason, describing the events from that day.

In Clinton’s suite at the Sheraton Mirage, a luxurious hotel surrounded by palm trees, he turned on the television to see the nightmarish images that would soon become a historic symbol of horror for Americans. Across the bottom of the screen, a crawling ticker listed the names of passengers on the four flights hijacked by the al Qaeda terrorist teams. Suddenly, Clinton saw the name of a friend, someone who had worked with him for years, a man with a family of his own. “Oh my God,” he breathed.

He knew Chelsea was in New York City, visiting a friend before her scheduled departure for England. Now he had to find out exactly where she was and who was with her, but nobody had been able to find her yet. When Hillary finally got through to his room, she pretended to know already that their daughter was safe, hoping to calm him—even though she felt inwardly frantic as her Senate staff continued to try to locate their daughter.

By her own account, Chelsea had been watching television at her friend’s apartment in Union Square when the second plane hit, and quickly tried to call her mother in Washington—but as she spoke with an aide in Hillary’s office, overburdened phone lines went dead. In a panic, she left the apartment and headed downtown, searching desperately for a pay phone to reach Hillary’s Senate office again. She was standing in line at a pay phone, about twelve blocks from the disaster scene, when she heard the deafening roar of the second tower collapsing. She headed back toward Union Square, eventually found her friend, and they walked uptown, like thousands of other New Yorkers. When she found a working phone and reached Hillary, her mother burst into tears of relief.

At Clinton’s office in Harlem, Karen Tramontano and members of the foundation staff were meeting in a conference room with a panoramic southward view when they saw the first plane. Someone came running into the room and suddenly they were watching the catastrophe on television. Tramontano picked up a phone immediately, trying to reach Band in Australia.

With all flights into the United States canceled, the Clinton entourage was stranded in Australia. After talking with Band, Tramontano placed a call to Condoleezza Rice to ask for help. After some wrangling that involved more calls from Band to the Secret Service and to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, the Pentagon dispatched a military aircraft to pick them up at Cairns Airport in Port Douglas. “It won’t be very comfortable,” Rice warned, “but it’s the only plane we have available out there right away.”

It wasn’t comfortable at all aboard the C-130 cargo plane and the trip took almost twenty-four hours. There were no seats, there was no food, and at thirty thousand feet, the interior of the plane was cold—very, very cold. They stopped in Guam and switched to a refueling plane, which was no better. Band had tried to scrounge some sweaters and other warm clothing at the hotel, but they were all bone-chilled, starved, and exhausted when the plane finally landed at Stewart Airport, a New York National Guard airbase about fifty miles north of Chappaqua. Almost immediately they departed for Manhattan, where they headed to Union Square.

Despite their ordeal, Clinton was grateful to have gotten home, unlike thousands of Americans left overseas with no way to return until the airports reopened. Among them was Al Gore, who had been in Vienna when the terrorists struck, giving a speech to an Austrian Internet forum.

Evidently the Bush White House was not prepared to provide military transportation for the former vice president, who could find no way to get back except via Gander Airport, a tiny facility in Newfoundland. From there, he and an aide would have to drive southward across the Canadian border.

While seeking help with their predicament, a former Gore aide—who had also worked in the Clinton White House—called the Harlem office. Gore and Clinton had exchanged messages within the first hours after the terrorist attack, but had not spoken yet. Distant as relations between their bosses had become, the staffers remained friendly. When Gore’s aide reached Tramontano, they talked casually about “the crap that’s gone on for far too long” between Gore and Clinton—who literally had not spoken since a bitter two-hour argument about who was to blame for the disastrous outcome of the 2000 election. She suggested that on the long drive down from the Canadian border, Gore might stop in Chappaqua. When Tramontano reached Clinton to discuss the proposed sleepover, she wasn’t surprised by his enthusiasm. That evening around 8 p.m., the former vice president picked up his cell phone to speak with the former president for the first time in many months.

“Why don’t you come down here, and then we’ll fly down together Friday morning?” Clinton asked. An Air Force jet provided by the White House would take them to the capital for the special memorial service on September 14 at the National Cathedral.

Hours after midnight, driving a rented car, Gore arrived at the five-bedroom colonial on Old House Lane. Clinton was waiting for them in the living room, where he had been napping on and off, and got up to greet Gore.

As he climbed the steps to the front porch, the former vice president noticed a refrigerator, sitting where it had been moved while the kitchen was undergoing renovation—a tableau that struck him as more hillbilly Ozarks than chic Westchester. Eyeing the fridge, he cracked, one Southerner to another: “Well, you’ve really come a long way, haven’t you?” At the door, Clinton roared with laughter.

They stayed up almost until dawn, talking mostly about the 9/11 attacks, their own efforts to deal with terrorism, and the murky times ahead. Chelsea met them in the morning at Westchester Airport to fly to Washington. On the flight down, Gore invited the Clintons to join his family after the memorial service for lunch at his home in Arlington, Virginia.

At the cathedral, a century-old Gothic Revival structure on the northern outskirts of the capital, Clinton sat in a front pew alongside President Bush and the other living former presidents, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush. He listened as the president delivered words of compassion for the bereaved and a warning to the enemy. He was speaking out forcefully in support of Bush at every opportunity, starting with his departure from Australia. He had canceled all of his speaking engagements abroad to remain in Manhattan, spending hours at local vigils and especially at the Armory on Park Avenue, where he tried to comfort families whose loved ones were missing and presumed dead.

“They cheered, they wept, they hugged him,” wrote a reporter for London’s Daily Mirror. “All around him, New Yorkers gathered, some to pass on their thanks that he had rushed to their side, others to grab his hand and use him as an emotional crutch. . . . All felt lifted to be in the presence of the man they had looked to for most of the past decade when their country was in its hour of need.”

The Mirror correspondent was not alone in contrasting Clinton’s instinctive leadership with the unsteadiness displayed by his successor in the early hours following the attack, although Bush soon righted himself and took command. America and the world had turned a page, moving beyond the petty controversies that had almost consumed Clinton in the days after he left office. Gaunt, somber, and worried, he and his fellow Americans now found themselves in a very different world.

Not everyone was willing to leave old habits behind, however, especially among Clinton’s most rigid detractors on the right. Even as Bush and congressional leaders prayed for the nation to unite, the habitual haters simply could not resist a fresh opportunity to target him. Nothing mattered more than proving (or at least asserting) that the terrorist attacks of September 11 should be blamed not on the current president, but the one who preceded him. Before long a writer for National Review warned, only half-jokingly: “If we members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy don’t get back to our daily routine of obsessive Clinton-bashing, then the terrorists will have won.”

[claremal-one]

Trump Can’t Postpone The Election, But He Can Delegitimize The Results.

Welcome to a special edition of FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Earlier today, President Trump tweeted that the 2020 election should be delayed “until people can properly, securely and safely vote.”

Postponing the election, of course, is not something the president can legally do. But it’s also kind of besides the point. Trump has already been fighting to delegitimize the results come November, claiming that voting by mail can lead to mass voter fraud.

So let’s dive into that. How would you describe Trump’s efforts to throw November’s results into question? He did something similar in 2016 when facing Hillary Clinton. How is this different?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Well, in many ways it’s exactly what Trump was doing in 2016. It’s just that he’s president now. And thus, his words are even more damaging (and they were already very damaging in 2016).

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): There’s also a very important distinction here. Before, Trump was just a candidate casting doubt on the election, but now he’s a sitting president doing that.

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I’d characterize this as an exercise in control and influence over his party and the news cycle. Everyone is forced to respond to what he says, even if they’re not responding positively. Trump isn’t effective at that many aspects of the job, but he’s pretty effective at agenda control.

clare.malone: I would also say that calling for the delay of the actual vote feels VERY dictatorial in nature. Like, we’ve perversely gotten used to the “fake votes,” “fake news” stuff. But encouraging a change in the election date feels sort of explicitly over a line.

sarah: And to ask a somewhat obvious question — but one that has to be asked — this is another unprecedented, norm-defying and democratic-value jeopardizing moment, right? To put it another way, has another sitting president ever done this?

julia_azari: I’m always nervous about the “never” question with past presidents, but yeah, most presidents have not been willing to take on all the formal rules, the legal system and other branches of government while in office. Congress — which has the power to change the date of an election — used to be stronger, too, and there was no Twitter. My go-to example for this is we still had a presidential election in 1864, during the Civil War.

geoffrey.skelley: And in modern times, incumbents who have lost reelection have exited office without too much of a fuss. Take George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, or if we go further back, Herbert Hoover. Granted, incumbents don’t often lose. So it’s important to note that each of those incumbents lost decisively, meaning there wasn’t much to stand on even if they had wanted to fight the result. But it’s not like Gerald Ford created a stir in 1976 when he lost narrowly.

julia_azari: Candidates have also conceded even when the election was a mess. See Al Gore in 2000, Samuel Tilden in 1876.1

sarah: But on this question of actually changing the election date. How much power does Trump have to do that?

clare.malone: He does not have the power to change the date of the election.

julia_azari: None. It’s up to Congress, and elections are administered by the states.

clare.malone: Here’s my question, though: What happens if Trump refuses to leave the White House on Jan. 20, and there are no official election results at that point?

Like, in that dire scenario (Trump not leaving, no clear winner) does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi become president and someone has to haul him out of the building?

geoffrey.skelley: If for some reason the Electoral College hasn’t acted or the electoral votes haven’t been certified by Congress, Trump’s term ends on Jan. 20, according to the 20th Amendment. So there’d be an acting president, who would be the Speaker of the House per the order set out by the Presidential Succession Act — assuming congressional elections occurred.

But of course, that’s how it’s written, not how it might go.

sarah: Did someone mention

the 20th amendment

?

julia_azari: I keep imagining this scenario, and I have to say, I have a hard time imagining that Trump refuses to leave office. I don’t want to be complacent, but like a lot of people on Twitter, Trump seems to be comfortable tweeting out bold ideas and not as great at standing firm under political pressure.

So as I see it, there would be a couple of components needed for this to actually happen. There would be the political pressure — what are advisors, including Jared and Ivanka, telling him to do? This would help us understand if there are people who have influence over Trump who have some interest in seeing the system remain intact and legitimate.

The second thing would be the actual formal power — does the Secret Service force him out? Does the military gets involved? These are wild scenarios.

I would be surprised if these institutions don’t have plans for this somewhere, even if they are not publicly known.

geoffrey.skelley: Not to take things down an even darker road, but in this scenario, I think it’s important to consider how other institutions like the military act and how the president’s supporters behave in the face of attempts to delegitimize the election results.

clare.malone: Totally. I think that’s where many people’s minds go, too. And as a country, I think we are deeply uncomfortable (and rightly so) with the military being involved with a power transition. I mean, I personally find it incredibly chilling to consider.

geoffrey.skelley: I’ve seen Seven Days In May. Great movie but, uh yeah, disturbing.

But it’s a sign of the times when you have Biden actually saying he thinks the military would escort Trump out of the White House if he refused to leave.

sarah: Because that’s the thing, as you’re all saying, there are mechanisms via the 20th amendment to ensure Trump leaves office. But there’s still a very real question of how some of this would actually be enforced if it came to this, right?

julia_azari: Exactly. The 20th amendment was ratified to shorten the period between the presidential election in November and the inauguration, which had been in March. There was growing instability around the time it was ratified, after the 1932 election, and that’s some of what it intended to deal with, but it wasn’t really designed with this problem in mind.

I’m trying to stake out the ground that acknowledges a lot of people won’t have much incentive to let Trump violate the rules in this way.

clare.malone: Julia, when you say that a lot of people won’t have incentive to let Trump act contrary to the rules, whom are you thinking of?

julia_azari: I guess I’m thinking of people who might want to run for president later.

clare.malone: Republicans?

julia_azari: Or make money off the Trump brand. This includes his kids, and yeah, other Republicans.

clare.malone: That is, people with sway over him. Got it.

julia_azari: Military leaders, too, as we saw many of them push back after the D.C. protesters incident in June.

sarah: So let’s talk about the other big doomsday scenario here: The results aren’t considered legitimate. What are the signs that that idea is already taking root?

julia_azari: That’s a good way to frame that, but I’m not sure there are signs that it’s taking root any more than it’s sorta been lurking in the conversation since 2016 — and even before.

geoffrey.skelley: In the face of COVID-19, states are expanding absentee voting and, in some cases, vote-by-mail. But the president is making the case that mailed ballots are illegitimate and highly vulnerable to fraud — this is not true, of course, but by casting aspersions, he’s setting up the potential for delegitimizing the results as they come in, on and after Election Day. And the after part is probably what really matters, especially if the election is close.

clare.malone: Yeah, I was going to say, we’ve spent the past 4 to 5 years conditioning a certain segment of the population to distrust most everything in American life, unless it comes from the president’s mouth.

Someone shared this 2017 survey that found that around half of Republicans would be ok with delaying the 2020 election. Granted, the question was framed around whether people would support delaying the election to make sure people weren’t voting illegally (a big claim of Trump’s in 2016). But I still thought that was surprising.

It’s especially striking when you get to 2020, and the questions revolve around the pandemic. I was shocked to see, for instance, the share of Republicans and Democrats who were willing to delay the election because of the pandemic (roughly 39 percent of Americans supported delaying the election, according to that survey from April).

sarah: Yeah … it is mind boggling. That finding is also at least somewhat corroborated in this paper FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman published with the Voter Study Group earlier this year. In an examination of democracy in the U.S., Drutman and his coauthors found that both Republicans and Democrats were open to their preferred presidential candidate “rejecting the legitimacy of the election if they claim credible evidence of illegal voting or foreign interference.” And in that vein, 29 percent of Republicans said it would be appropriate for Trump “to refuse to leave office because he claims that he has credible evidence of illegal voting.”

julia_azari: One quibble with that study, though, knowing I have the utmost respect for Lee and his coauthors, is that each scenario lays out a justification for delaying the election, which I think makes it harder to say no. And I think people’s willingness to tolerate this in practice is conditional on their evaluation of that evidence, the credibility of the claims and the person making the claims. (E.g., Trump, who isn’t very popular.)

clare.malone: Totally fair.

I was pretty shocked in general to see how amenable people were to changing this very foundational thing! Even with the reasonings the survey questions provided them.

julia_azari: I was, too, but I think it’s not unreasonable for people to have limits on how much they trust elections if they think those elections were not administered fairly.

geoffrey.skelley: And if the election is close and a state or two is in doubt, any questions about administration could become explosive. See: the 2000 election.

julia_azari: Right. It’s actually amazing how explosive that wasn’t. But things are different now — I wonder how this plays out if we flip it around.

Let’s say Trump wins.

(I mean, this sorta already happened in 2016. Trump won, yet he went right ahead and tried to delegitimize parts of an election he had won.)

But let’s say it happens again, and he wins narrowly once again? Who questions the results? And would that be the right thing to do?

geoffrey.skelley: Yes, I wanted to bring this up! Trump said there were at least 3 million illegal votes in an election he won — conveniently undoing Clinton’s popular vote margin. And then he set up a task force to investigate fraud after he took office. It found nothing.

julia_azari: But there will likely be this question of “credible evidence,” as they cite in that Voter Study group paper. What if Trump wins, and people were standing in hours-long lines in Black neighborhoods in Ohio?

In other words, I think there will be a question of how much skepticism about elections is reasonable, and how much is chaos?

clare.malone: I think there is just going to be skepticism about this election, full stop.

geoffrey.skelley: I would not discount opponents of Trump taking to the streets in that scenario. A recent simulation by a group of experts about what could happen in these sorts of scenarios did not bring me much comfort. They found that every scenario — Trump winning or losing but someone defying the result — ended in street-level violence and political gridlock.

sarah: Oof. It’s interesting to me, though, that the desire to delegitimize results isn’t purely a Republican thing, as that Voter Study paper found. Democrats also showed signs of also being willing to reject the legitimacy of the election if it helps their preferred candidate.

clare.malone: Stacey Abrams’s non-concession concession speech in 2018 provided an interesting template for a potential Biden response (in case of a loss to Trump).

Though I do think Biden is such a conventional politician and institutionalist that he wouldn’t respond in the same way Abrams did, justified or not.

sarah: Yeah and Biden obviously isn’t waging a campaign of disinformation in the way that Trump is either. But perhaps one unintended effect of all this is, to Clare’s point, that skepticism of the election (depending on its margin) is going to be rampant.

julia_azari: Although Biden seems like … truly angry at times about the Trump presidency. It’s not obvious what the institutionalist move is in that scenario, IMO.

clare.malone: A good point!

julia_azari: I think there’s a strong possibility that skepticism is persistent and embedded in Trumpist ideology and among his followers, but not that widespread if the election is not close.

clare.malone: I mean, let’s go back to 2016.

If Trump had lost, we were all preparing for the launch of Trump TV, a perch from which he would rail for the impeachment of President Clinton.

I can sort of see something similar happening if Trump loses (unless, of course, he’s too tired to start the Trump TV experiment!)

geoffrey.skelley: OANN would love to have him.

julia_azari: Again, I don’t want to be complacent. I spend way too much time on politics Twitter. I spend all my time on politics Twitter.

But if Biden wins by a lot and Trump tweets a bunch, most Americans will just go on about their lives. That’s sorta how 2000 played out, and that was obviously really close and subject to questions, too.

geoffrey.skelley: Thing is, I can’t imagine Trump conceding in a 2000-esque situation in the way Gore eventually did.

clare.malone: Of course, 2000 is the election that a lot of people point to as the start of mistrust in elections as institutions. And like, the era of “voter fraud” alarmism really ramped up under George W. Bush.

julia_azari: But the angry minority has demonstrated that it can drive politics and policy to a great degree. So I don’t want to be complacent, but I do want to be specific in my fears.

clare.malone: So you could say people went on with their lives, but there were corrosive effects.

julia_azari: If he loses, I sometimes imagine that people around Trump will say, “People will say nice things about you if you do a good concession speech,” and so he does. But it’s not encouraging that that’s what it might come to.

clare.malone: Right, the integrity of democratic institutions might come down to a pep talk from “Javanka?”

sarah: So at the outset of this chat, I asked how Trump’s tweet to postpone the election was different from what he’s already done to try and delegitimize November’s result. And we’ve also pointed out that there have been prior points in American history where voters have mistrusted election results.

But I think given the abnormal aspects of Trump’s presidency, it’s easy to point to historical comparisons without really probing whether the moment we’re in doesn’t have a historical comparison, as historian Rick Perlstein did in his tweet, telling the media he didn’t want to do more interviews on how this moment might compare to 1968.

julia_azari: I think Perlstein is right, but I also think that we should be precise about how abnormal politics interacts with normal politics, because that has been the story of the Trump presidency IMO.

clare.malone: So, I mean, I take Rick’s point in this tweet; there’s this instinct that we have to comfort ourselves with history (i.e., American democracy has weathered much worse) but I do think that we sometimes dwell a bit in history without facing the new challenges that Trump presents us.

We sort of have to respect the new paradigm that’s been created and understand that there are limits to what history can teach us in this particular case; i.e., Twitter, plus Trump, plus 20 years of diminishing electoral trust.

geoffrey.skelley: It’s interesting that people would comfort themselves with history — I take little comfort from it. We’ve been on the brink before with the 1876 election, for instance.

julia_azari: I think that’s absolutely true. I don’t see history as a comfort but rather as a guide to how much luck and skill it takes to maneuver through this stuff.

I also think history is helpful because it shows what’s not normal. (And what shouldn’t be, but is.)

from Clare Malone – FiveThirtyEight https://ift.tt/39H0l41 via https://ift.tt/1B8lJZR

[megacircuit9universe]

IMPEACHMAS

WED DEC 18, 2019

Today was the historic day where Donald Trump became the third President in American history to be impeached.

People like to point out that no President who was impeached, was ever removed from office... a quickie fact that’s meant to pour cold water on any hopes that Trump could be removed.

But let’s take a step back today, and look at the impeachment picture with a little more perspective...

President Andrew Johnson only served one term, from 1865 to 1869.  Having been Lincoln’s vice President, Johnson was inaugurated on April 15th, 1865 in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, to serve out a partial term of 3 years, 323 days... or 42 days shy of a full, four-year term.

He was impeached on February 24th, 1868, or... six weeks shy of the third anniversary of his inauguration.

So, don’t let anybody tell you Trump was the first President to be impeached in his first term... Johnson was too... for being a hate mongering racist.  

At any rate, while Johnson was not removed by the Senate, he also did not serve a second term, because his own party* declined to nominate him at the convention, even though he wanted to run in the general election.  Instead, they went with Ulysses S. Grant as their candidate.

So... though he was not removed by the Senate, Johnson’s own party made sure he would be a one-term President.

Now, before we get to Clinton, we need to talk about President Richard Nixon, because he was the second President in American history to have any kind of impeachment procedure underway against him, which went all the way to articles of impeachment being passed in a House committee... one step away from a full floor vote like we saw with Trump today.

Had those three articles of impeachment made it to the floor of the full House, Nixon would have been impeached.

However, Nixon resigned before that could happen... having been assured by members of his own party that if impeached in the House, he would surely be removed by the Senate.

Given that his resignation would not have happened, had there not been articles of impeachment passed in committee... we can say that both Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon had their political careers abruptly ended by the impeachment process.

Nixon had won his second term by a historic landslide in 1972, to be inaugurated in January 1973. Yet the three articles of his impeachment passed committee in late July of 74... only a year and a half into his second term, and he resigned in early August, well before the mid-terms.

Such is the swift, career ending power of impeachment... which is what people should be focused on when we talk about this stuff... rather than actual removal from office by the Senate.

Okay... now let’s talk about President Bill Clinton, first inaugurated in January of 1993. 

Like Nixon, Clinton won a second term in office by a comfortable margin, to be inaugurated again in January of 1997.  His impeachment by the House came at the very end of 1998... his second year in that term... being acquitted by the senate in Februrary of 1999.

It’s tempting to think that Clinton was the one President who’s political career wasn’t destroyed by impeachment, but... he was a lame duck by the time it was decided.  The 1998 mid-terms were over by then, and the GOP retained control of both houses of Congress.

People like to say that Clinton’s impeachment backfired on the Republicans because his approval ratings went up afterward, and Democrats picked up several seats in the House in those 98 mid-terms, but... they still failed to gain a majority in either chamber.

As for the career ending power of impeachment... in Clinton’s case, this took a while to play out, but I would contend that, even though he was not removed from office, the scarlet letter of his impeachment transferred over to his VP, Al Gore, who famously lost his 2000 Presidential bid... 

...and also to Clinton’s wife, Hillary, who not only lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in 2008, but then famously lost her 2016 Presidential bid to good old Donald Trump.

So, to sum the above analysis... Impeachment, even when it doesn’t make it to a full House vote... is always radioactive.

In Johnson’s case, it cost him the nomination of his party.  In Nixon’s case, his own party forced his resignation.  And in Clinton’s case, it kept his party out of the White House for eight more years, and destroyed the political careers of his two closest allies... his VP, Gore, immediately... and his wife, who patiently waited for sixteen years... through two terms of Bush, and another two terms of Obama... only to lose to the biggest buffoon in all of American political history.

Given all this... the factoid about how neither of the first two who were officially impeached were removed, is a red herring.  It’s two data points!  And it’s meaningless.

So, what does this all mean for Donald Trump, now that he too has been branded with the big, radioactive, letter I?

Well, it means a lot of things have changed...

For one thing, we know how much he despises both the Clintons and Obama, and now he has to live with the fact that he is equal to Clinton, in terms of this impeachment stigma... and forever inferior to Obama!

Meanwhile, he was delivered to such a horrible fate by a WOMAN!  

We need to unpack this more... 

In 2016, he was striving to defeat a woman... who was also a Clinton. Okay.  And when he achieved that victory, he set about to undo everything that the black president, Obama, had gotten done.  

Defeat the social justice warriors; Democrats, women, blacks and browns... and make America great again!  That was his mandate... and is the core of his identity.

And he went on to soundly defeat that prolonged attempt to impeach him, that was the Mueller probe.  Took some doing... took firing Jeff Sessions and replacing him with William Barr as AG... but the impeachment movement was quashed.

All hail the king!

And yet somehow... here we are.

(???)

Somehow... he fucking got impeached anyway!... before 2020 could even get started!... and it was done to him by a woman!!!

What the fuck is going on?!!

This is the crazy plot twist that, without doubt, will be tormenting Trump’s heart and mind like nothing before in his life... causing him, without doubt, to go far more batshit crazy than we’ve ever seen him... which is saying something.

We got a glimpse of this new level of batshit crazy yesterday with his unhinged flame letter to Pelosi.  And we are going to see a lot more going forward.

This, in turn, is going to make it that much more difficult for Republicans to just hold fast and stay loyal... even those down in the bunker with him, like McConnell and Graham... because they can’t just steamroll this trial process the way they’re used to doing with routine legislation coming up from the House.

Tonight, Speaker Pelosi, as backed by Schiff and Nadler, after formally announcing the passage of the two articles of impeachment... basically called out McConnell for his statement earlier this week that he was working in concert with White House defense... didn’t consider himself impartial... and wouldn’t allow any witness testimony, or other evidence to be introduced.

The card here, being played by House leadership... they don’t have to send the articles over to the Senate right away... and would like to see the outlines of a fair trial taking shape before they do.

But rather than dictate what a fair trial should look like... Pelosi simply said what one does not look like... and that would be one in which the foreman of the Jury is working with the defense and... where no witnesses can be called.

Like so many other moves in the past 86 days since the Impeachment inquiry was first announced... this one was not foreseen by the public, the media, or the GOP. 

But the Speaker knows she can apply this kind of pressure, because in this case, Mitch cannot act unilaterally, and must negotiate with that handful of GOP senators who have not lost their minds.

But he’ll be going into such negotiations after having shot himself in the foot, by getting too cocky earlier in the week. The longer he tries to play tough guy, the more rational and reasonable Chuck Shumer is going to look.

And the more insane and unhinged Trump becomes in the mean time... the more the leaders of his party... outside the bunker... are gonna see this impeachment as their off-ramp back to sanity land.

The longer the debate goes on within the Senate, about the importance of being impartial, and having a trial with true legitimacy... the worse Trump, and his extremist lieutenants will look to the voting public... and the smaller the margin of his acquittal becomes... with the likelihood of his reelection dropping proportionately.

Trumps hardcore fans, tonight, are fantasizing that this impeachment will only energize the base to come out on election night in record numbers to own the SJWs, just like they did in 2016.  

Impeachment will guarantee his reelection... flip the House back to the GOP, and strengthen their hold of the Senate... to pave the way for a second term in which Trump will reign supreme... free from criticism or opposition.

But... history says his party will drop him in 2020.  Not the ones in the bunker, but... in Congress... as well as out in the streets of America... they’re more likely to drop him and move on than to quadruple down on this guy who had his ass kicked in the mid terms, got impeached despite beating the Mueller probe, and is now devolving into a flaming pile of outrage.

The candidates he rallies for get routed by Democratic nobodies.  All of his friends are either in jail, or going to jail.

He’s a loser!

The final thing to keep in mind here is... the twenty-teens are over.

I know... it’s sad... we’re all getting older, and now YouTube is being destroyed by something known as TikTok.

I have written much in this blog about what a crazy decade the twenty-teens have been... the decade best known for causing those living through it to ask; 

“what parallel reality did we slip into, and how do we get back?”

“How did we wake up in this nightmare shadow realm?”

“Why can we not agree on the color of this dress?”

“Did the world actually end in 2012 like the Mayan calendar predicted?”

But it’s December of 2019 now, and, well... Trump’s impeachment is a nice way to end all this madness, just before the odometer turns over and we roll into a new decade.

And this prospect, of leaving the twenty-teens behind... is one I believe almost everybody is looking forward to.

We’ll all laugh about it later... much much later... but right now, we need this crazy bullshit to end. 

And there is no, one American, more emblematic of the crazy twenty-teens now, than Donald Trump... from his freakish Presidential win, to his parasitic reliance on Twitter, and his fan base occupying Facebook like a cancer.  

Nobody really wants any of that to survive into the 2020s... and we have the opportunity for a nice clean break next November, so my guess is we will take it as our off ramp... even if the Senate misses their exit this January.

That’s my take tonight.

Merry Impeachmas to all! 

I’m going to bed.

*Johnson was a Democrat... back when Democrats were racist and Republicans were anti-slavery.  He was chosen as Lincoln’s new VP after the Civil War in a bid to heal the nation with a show of bipartisanship before reconstruction. 

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll(s) of the week

We know that former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are popular among Democratic voters. But how do they fare among the general public? A recent poll from Gallup shows that opinions about this trio are far more mixed among all Americans than they are among Democrats. And relative to previous high-profile candidates, they don’t seem to be as popular. Gallup’s poll found that the net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) of these leading Democrats was roughly even or negative among the general electorate, with Sanders at +1, Biden at -1 and Warren at -5. Granted, we found that none of them are as unpopular as Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump were at this point in the 2016 cycle, but they’re also not as favorably viewed as George W. Bush in 2000, Barack Obama in 2008, or even Rudy Giuliani in 2008.

We looked at non-incumbent candidates’ favorability ratings in each cycle dating back to 2000, focusing on the last four months of the year before the election. We found that Biden, Sanders and Warren are less well-liked than many well-known presidential contenders from the past two decades.1 These numbers could be a red flag for Democrats looking ahead to the general election or a product of our increasingly polarized politics. You can see that since 2008, many candidates’ net favorability ratings have been negative or close to zero.

Biden, Sanders, Warren aren’t as popular as past candidates

Average net favorability ratings (favorable rating average minus unfavorable rating average) of well-known presidential candidates* in national polls from the last four months of the year preceding the primary, 2000 to 2020

Candidate cycle party Fav Avg Unfav Avg Net George W. Bush 2000 R 56.2% 23.4% +32.7 Barack Obama 2008 D 49.3 29.8 +19.5 John McCain 2008 R 45.3 31.2 +14.0 John Edwards 2008 D 45.5 32.5 +13.0 Rudy Giuliani 2008 R 47.5 35.2 +12.2 Al Gore 2000 D 43.2 39.0 +4.2 Hillary Clinton 2008 D 47.5 45.5 +2.0 Mitt Romney 2012 R 37.5 35.8 +1.7 Elizabeth Warren 2020 D 39.8 40.2 -0.4 Joe Biden 2020 D 43.4 44.3 -0.8 Bernie Sanders 2020 D 43.6 45.2 -1.6 Hillary Clinton 2016 D 41.9 50.9 -9.0 Newt Gingrich 2012 R 30.8 45.3 -14.5 Jeb Bush 2016 R 30.8 51.1 -20.3 Donald Trump 2016 R 32.6 58.7 -26.1

Data does not include incumbent presidents. Additionally, we only included candidates for whom at least 75 percent of respondents had an opinion (the lone exception is Mitt Romney, who was within two points of the threshold, but as the 2012 Republican nominee, we included him). In 2004, no Democratic candidate was close to clearing the 75 percent threshold. When a poll presented multiple observations, larger sample populations were prioritized, such as adults over registered voters or registered voters over likely voters.

*Data for 2020 candidates is from polls released through Nov. 20, 2019.

Source: Polls

By comparison, the top-tier candidates in the 2000 and 2008 campaigns all had net positive favorability ratings at this point — some of them quite high, too. Bush, for instance, had by far the strongest numbers of any candidate, at +33 points. Obama, John McCain, John Edwards and Giuliani also had net favorability ratings higher than +10. Al Gore and Clinton2 were closer to an even net favorability rating, but they were still viewed somewhat positively.

But a candidate’s favorability ratings at this point don’t necessarily line up with election results — a lot can change between now and next November. For instance, while Bush was viewed more favorably than Gore in late 1999, they fought out the 2000 election to a near-draw, which in the end was decided in Bush’s favor by an incredibly narrow margin in Florida. And in 2016, Trump won the presidency over Clinton despite being viewed less favorably, which remained true through Election Day.

The good news for Democrats is that Americans like Trump even less. Gallup’s poll found Trump’s net favorability at -18, far below the three leading Democratic contenders. So, in other words, as long as the Democratic nominee wins over those who view the president negatively, even an unpopular nominee could still have a pretty good shot at winning. Still, Democrats could find themselves in trouble if the election becomes a race to the bottom, where both Trump and the Democratic nominee are heavily disliked. Exit polls in 2016 found that Trump still won 15 percent of voters who had an unfavorable opinion of him, as he was likely aided by the fact that Clinton was also viewed pretty negatively.

Other polling bites

A survey by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to connect extreme weather patterns to climate change. Nationally, the widest disagreement between the two groups was over whether climate change played a “major factor” in the occurrence of extremely hot days. Seventy percent of Democrats said yes, compared with only 24 percent of Republicans. There were also regional disagreements, as 63 percent of Democrats in California and the Southwest said climate change was a major part of droughts and water shortages, versus 20 percent of Republicans in those states.

New polling from the Institute of Politics at Harvard University found that 18-to-29 year olds likely to vote in 2020 are divided over whether they prefer big, sweeping change versus a slower, more pragmatic approach to governing. Among those likely to vote in the general election, 44 percent said they prefer policies “that stand a good chance of being achieved,” while 40 percent want major structural changes “even if they will not be easy to carry out.” But among those planning to vote in the Democratic primary, this result was flipped: Forty-five percent said they prefer sweeping changes, versus 39 percent who said they prefer more achievable goals.

In last week’s Pollapalooza, we looked at former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nascent presidential campaign and found that his horse-race and favorability polling weren’t that great. A new national survey of Democrats from Reuters/Ipsos released this week echoed this analysis, finding Bloomberg at 4 percent. That poll also found that only 7 percent of Democrats viewed Bloomberg “very favorably” compared to 26 percent or more for candidates such as Biden, Sanders and Warren. Notably, however, Bloomberg’s limited support seemed to come at the expense of Biden, who fell from 30 percent to 26 percent when Bloomberg was added as an option.

A new study from Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that 56 percent of Americans believe local news organizations are doing “very well” or “somewhat well” financially, at odds with the difficult reality facing these outlets. However, Americans still value local news — 86 percent said everyone should have access to it even if they don’t pay for it — and education about the trying media landscape and journalism’s role in a democratic society could help attract more financial backing. When supplied with information about the financial problems faced by local media and journalism’s positive effects on democracy, 58 percent of respondents said they would be willing to donate to a local news nonprofit organization versus only 40 percent among those who weren’t told this information.

New data from YouGov shows that 32 percent of parents with children under the age of 18 believe that the flu vaccine can actually cause the illness itself, which is a myth the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has worked to debunk. However, despite misconceptions surrounding the flu vaccine, 60 percent of adults said they plan to get one this year.

The Public Religion Research Institute and AAPI Data collaborated to survey over 2,500 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in California, and what they found was a state of “two Californias” among AAPIs, with one group enjoying financial stability while the other is financially insecure. In terms of economic security, 23 percent of AAPIs reported they were working but struggling with poverty, compared to 37 percent who said they were working and not struggling (another 40 percent were retired, students or not otherwise working). But 62 percent of AAPIs believed the “American Dream” still holds true, though this was much higher among those who had immigrated to the U.S. (69 percent) compared to native-born AAPIs (43 percent).

The cost of health care in the U.S. has gotten a lot of attention in the 2020 campaign, and a new study from Gallup and West Health found that roughly 13 percent of Americans reported knowing at least one friend or family member who died in the past five years after not receiving medical treatment because they couldn’t afford it. Another 23 percent of Americans said that at least once in the past 12 months they or someone in their household couldn’t afford the medicine or drugs prescribed to them. Sixty-nine percent of Americans said the costs of prescription drugs are “usually much higher than what consumers should be paying,” though Democrats were somewhat more likely than Republicans to think this (76 percent to 64 percent).

Tuesday marked the first debate ahead of the United Kingdom’s general election, and a post-debate survey of debate viewers by YouGov found that 51 percent felt Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the Conservative Party won, compared with 49 percent for Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn. The Economist’s polling tracker shows Conservatives holding a 43 percent to 30 percent lead over Labour.

Thanksgiving is almost here, which means many Americans can look forward to arguing over divisive political topics with family members. But on a lighter note, YouGov delved into a classic Thanksgiving debate by asking about turkey meat preferences. Apparently ignoring their taste buds, 50 percent of respondents said they prefer eating white meat, while only 32 percent preferred dark meat.

Trump approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 41.9 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 53.6 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -11.7 points). At this time last week, 41.2 percent approved and 54.5 percent disapproved (for a net approval rating of -13.3 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 41.2 percent and a disapproval rating of 54.5 percent, for a net approval rating of -13.3 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot, Democrats currently lead by 5.8 percentage points (46.8 percent to 41 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 5.7 points (46.8 percent to 41.1 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 6.3 points (46.6 percent to 40.3 percent).

[theconservativebrief]

They called it “the Lewinsky scandal.”

Bill Clinton was the one who abused his power, entering into a relationship with a White House intern when he was the president of the United States. Yet pundits and ordinary Americans alike typically referred to the episode by Monica Lewinsky’s name.

That’s just one of the things Lewinsky hopes will change now, two decades after Clinton’s impeachment. She’s appearing in a docuseries about the scandal, premiering on Sunday at 9 pm Eastern on A&E, and, she writes in Vanity Fair, “It’s titled The Clinton Affair. Bye-bye, Lewinsky scandal. … I think 20 years is enough time to carry that mantle.”

The series comes as Lewinsky, after an adulthood defined, against her will, by her relationship with Clinton, is having a public second act as a prominent voice in the #MeToo era. In a series of essays at Vanity Fair, where she is a contributing editor, Lewinsky has been writing her own history of the “Clinton affair,” and making the argument that in cases like hers, women’s voices need to be heard.

After years of being forced into the roles of punchline, temptress, or troublemaker, she’s stepping into the role of spokesperson — and it fits her strikingly well.

In 1995, Clinton began a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, then a 22-year-old intern in the White House. In 1998, he denied the relationship during a deposition in Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit against him. But later that year, he admitted that he had lied, and he was impeached on the grounds of perjury and obstruction of justice. After a trial in the Senate, he was acquitted, and went on to serve out the remainder of his second term as president.

Though he stayed on the sidelines during former Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton was soon back in the spotlight, representing the high-profile Clinton Foundation and campaigning for Democrats, most notably his wife. While Donald Trump made Bill Clinton’s past an issue in the 2016 election, many Democrats seemed content to pretend his relationship with Lewinsky never happened.

Lewinsky, meanwhile, struggled. Before and during Clinton’s impeachment trial, the American public had learned intimate details about her sex life, including the fact that Clinton had once gotten semen on her blue Gap dress. She’d also been mocked and vilified in the press, with one Fox News poll asking if she was an “average girl” or a “young tramp looking for thrills” (“young tramp” won).

Lewinsky made some public appearances in the wake of Clinton’s impeachment, appearing on Saturday Night Live in 1999 and briefly hosting a dating show in 2003. But in 2005, she retreated from public life, moving to England and enrolling at the London School of Economics. After graduating with a master’s degree, she tried to find jobs in communications and branding, but employers were wary of hiring her because of her history.

Then, in 2014, she went public again, with an essay in Vanity Fair on public humiliation. “When news of my affair with Bill Clinton broke,” she wrote, “I was arguably the most humiliated person in the world. Thanks to the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.”

She became an anti-bullying advocate after the suicide in 2010 of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University student who took his own life after his roommate secretly streamed footage of him kissing another man. She later advised the group Bystander Revolution. And earlier this year, she began writing about #MeToo.

In 2014, Lewinsky had written that her relationship with Clinton had been consensual, and that “any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.” But by February 2018, in light of the #MeToo movement, she had begun to reconsider.

The movement has drawn attention to the power imbalances between bosses and their subordinates, and raised the question of whether sexual relationships between the two can ever be completely consensual. Clinton, as president, was perhaps the most powerful boss in the country — and today, Lewinsky believes that the power dynamics between the two made the issue of consent “very, very complicated.”

“I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent,” she wrote. “Instead, the road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege.”

And, she added, “I—we—owe a huge debt of gratitude to the #MeToo and Time’s Up heroines. They are speaking volumes against the pernicious conspiracies of silence that have long protected powerful men when it comes to sexual assault, sexual harassment, and abuse of power.”

But even as she was thanking the women who helped define the current era of #MeToo, she was becoming one of them.

In 2017 and 2018, the Clinton impeachment and everything that led up to it have returned to the forefront of public consciousness. The #MeToo movement — and, in particular, sexual misconduct allegations last year against Senate candidate Roy Moore and Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) — led to a reexamination of Clinton’s behavior with Lewinsky (as well as allegations against him by other women).

Bill and Hillary Clinton began to be asked about Lewinsky in interviews — and their answers left a lot to be desired. When asked earlier this year if he owed Lewinsky an apology, former President Clinton insisted he did not. And last month, Hillary Clinton said her husband had not abused his power by having a relationship with Lewinsky.

But in her work at Vanity Fair this year, Lewinsky has consistently offered the nuanced analysis of her relationship with Clinton that this historical moment demands.

“The dictionary definition of ‘consent’?” she wrote in February. “‘To give permission for something to happen.’ And yet what did the ‘something’ mean in this instance, given the power dynamics, his position, and my age? Was the ‘something’ just about crossing a line of sexual (and later emotional) intimacy?”

And on Tuesday, she wrote about what she’d like to see from former President Clinton now. “What feels more important to me than whether I am owed or deserving of a personal apology is my belief that Bill Clinton should want to apologize,” she said. “I’m less disappointed by him, and more disappointed for him. He would be a better man for it . . . and we, in turn, a better society.”

It’s a level of compassion and complexity that’s been absent from the Clintons’ responses, and from so many statements by people in power about sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era.

In her writing since 2014, Lewinsky has honed a particular style that’s all her own. She’s erudite and allusive. Considering a Clinton-era Los Angeles Times headline that read, “The Full Monica: Victim or Vixen?”, she writes:

Victim or Vixen? That’s a question as old as time immemorial: Madonna or Whore? Predator or Prey? Dressed scantily or appropriately? Is she telling the truth or lying? (Who will believe thee, Isabel?)

Shakespeare references aside, she doesn’t take herself too seriously. “Do I wish I could erase my years in D.C. from memory, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–style?” she asks herself at one point. “Well, is the sky blue?”

Her writing is chatty, relatable, like a conversation with a friend who’s smart but has a somewhat corny sense of humor, not someone at the center of one of the biggest American political scandals of the 20th century. At the same time, what she’s been through has given her a clearer eye than many when it comes to the aftermath of trauma.

“The process of this docuseries led me to new rooms of shame that I still needed to explore, and delivered me to Grief’s doorstep,” she writes. “Grief for the years and years lost, being seen only as ‘That Woman’—saddled, as a young woman, with the false narrative that my mouth was merely a receptacle for a powerful man’s desire.”

Her experiences have taught her that she, and other women like her (though, of course, there are no women exactly like her) deserve to be heard.

“Throughout history, women have been traduced and silenced,” she writes. “Now, it’s our time to tell our own stories in our own words.”

For decades, America didn’t know what to do with Monica Lewinsky. Was she a celebrity? Her dating show was swiftly canceled. Was she a regular person? Not when she couldn’t get a job. After what she’d been a part of, no path seemed fully open to her.

Finally, in this time of reckoning around sex, gender, and abuse of power, the country is ready to hear from Lewinsky. And she is more than ready to speak.

Original Source -> Monica Lewinsky is finally having her moment

via The Conservative Brief