“United In Our Loathing For Trump”: Why Donald Trump Is Probably Praying For An Amnesia Epidemic
There are a few unfortunate people in the world who, because they experienced a brain trauma, are unable to form new memories. They exist in a combination of the distant past and the present moment, unable to contextualize what they see right now with what happened yesterday or the day before. If Donald Trump is to become president of the United States, he needs a majority of the American electorate to experience this cruel brand of amnesia.
To understand what I mean, let’s start with where Trump is right now. While the contest for delegates is in a phase of uncertainty, it’s still likely that Trump will become the Republican nominee. And Trump is not just unpopular, but spectacularly unpopular. The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll showed 67 percent of voters have an unfavorable opinion of him. Not only has no presidential candidate with negatives that high ever won, no candidate has ever had negatives that high, period, with the sole exception of KKK leader David Duke. Trump is disliked by majorities of men and women, whites, blacks, and Latinos, young people and old people, rich people and poor people, Southerners and Northerners, liberals and conservatives. America may be a divided country, but we’re united in our loathing for Trump.
Even a candidate with the evident weaknesses of Hillary Clinton would not just beat Trump, but destroy him. Based on the polls as they are now, not only could Clinton win the states Barack Obama won four years ago — enough to give her a comfortable victory in the Electoral College — but some Republican states, as well. One poll even shows her beating him in Utah, one of the most conservative states in the country.
But not to worry. Trump promises everything is going to change, just as soon as he has pulverized Ted Cruz and John Kasich. “When I take them out, I will be so presidential you won’t believe it,” he said earlier this week. He goes on: “And then, of course, I’ll start on Hillary, and then I’ll be a little bit less presidential. But assuming I win, I will be very, very — the country will be very proud of me and we will make America great again.”
One can’t help but wonder what being “presidential” means to Trump, besides not being a jerk. He has said more than once that when it’s necessary, he’ll transform into someone completely different. And if he’s going to have any chance at all to win, he’ll have to. But once he does, will the public forget the person he is now?
Sure, every presidential candidate adapts when moving from the primaries to the general election. But most of the time, that involves a change in emphasis, highlighting a different set of issues to appeal to a broad electorate with different priorities from your party’s faithful. For instance, if Cruz becomes the nominee, he’ll probably talk less about building border fences and repealing the Affordable Care Act, and more about creating jobs and fighting terrorism. Wholesale flip-flops are exceedingly rare; instead, candidates seek to alter the ingredients of voters’ decision-making, putting their more widely popular positions nearer to the top of voters’ agendas.
The problem for Trump, however, isn’t just the positions he’s taken but the way he’s taken them. Try to imagine, for instance, that he stopped talking about his border wall and deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, and instead made some kind of push to woo Latino voters. To succeed, he’d need one of those little memory-wiping devices from Men in Black. According to that Post-ABC poll I mentioned, only 15 percent of Latinos view him favorably, while 81 percent view him unfavorably. It’s going to take an awful lot to change their minds, given Trump’s extreme and vivid rhetoric about immigrants.
Or what about women, 75 percent of whom view Trump negatively at the moment? Are they going to forget his long history of misogyny? What could he possibly say to change their minds?
Trump is counting on Americans having not just short attention spans, but incredibly short memories. He’s planning on giving a series of policy speeches, which is presumably supposed to make voters say, “Huh, I used to think he was the biggest ignoramus ever to run for president, but I guess he’s actually pretty wonky and really knows his stuff.” I have no doubt that once the primaries are over and he’s won the nomination, Trump will alter his tone. But for such a shift to be successful, millions upon millions of voters will have to get temporary amnesia on election day.
Are our memories really that short? It looks like we’re probably going to find out.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, April 15, 2016
“His Red-State Wins Matter More Than Hillary’s”: Why Is Bernie Sanders Slamming Southern Democrats?
So what do we make of Bernie Sanders’s continuing habit of denigrating the Democratic voters of the South? He did it Wednesday night on Larry Wilmore’s show, when he said that having early Southern primaries “distorts reality.” And he did it again in the debate, when he dismissed the importance of Clinton’s votes from the South because the region is “the most conservative part of the country.”
Okay. I’m (in)famously on record as saying the Democrats should just forget the South. The argument of that column, admittedly florid rhetoric aside, was that for the purposes of general elections, the Democratic Party shouldn’t even try very hard in the South anymore. The party should of course fight to hold the African American House seats, and there might be occasional opportunities to swipe a seat in a college town. But other than that, for the foreseeable future, the South is gone, I argued, and the Democrats shouldn’t throw good money after bad down there. You can agree or disagree with that, but it is an argument about general elections (I wrote it right after Mary Landrieu lost to Bill Cassidy in a Louisiana Senate race).
Primary elections, however, are completely different animals. Primary elections are about voters within a political party—and sometimes without, in open primaries, which are another debate that we may get to in the future—having their shot at choosing which candidate their party should nominate. There are of course some states that matter more than others. But there aren’t any individual votes that matter more than others, at least among primaries (caucuses don’t usually report individual votes). For Sanders to dismiss Clinton’s Southern votes as distortions of reality is hugely insulting to Democrats from the region.
And to one group of Democrats in particular, who are concentrated in the South and who happen to be the most loyal Democratic voters in the country. I don’t think Sanders has a racist bone in his body, but is there not a certain racial tone-deafness in dismissing the votes of millions of black voters as distortions of reality? This is the one moment, their state’s presidential primary, when these African American voters have a chance to flex some actual political power in the national arena.
And then to write off Clinton’s Southern votes as “conservative” is just a lie intended to fool the gullible. Sure, the South is conservative at general-election time. But at Democratic primary time, it’s pretty darn liberal. It’s blacks and Latinos (where they exist in large numbers) and trial lawyers and college professors and school teachers and social workers and the like. They’re not conservative, any more than the people caucusing for Sanders in Idaho and Oklahoma are conservative, and he knows it.
The topic of Sanders’s own red state wins actually raises another point. He’s won seven states that both he and Clinton would/will lose by at least 15 points in November, and in many cases more like 30: Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, and Alaska, along with the aforementioned two. And he won them in caucuses, not primaries, which nearly everyone agrees are less democratic, less representative of the whole of the voting population.
Now let’s look at Clinton’s red-state wins. She’s won 10 red states: Texas, Arizona, Missouri, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina (I’m calling North Carolina purple, and of course Virginia and Florida and Ohio). Neither she nor Sanders would probably win in these states either, although a Clinton win over Donald Trump seems conceivable in a couple of them.
In any case, yes, they’ve both won states that are unwinnable in the fall. Yet do you hear Clinton going around saying that Sanders’s victories in these states are distortions of reality? I don’t. But Sanders goes around bragging, as he did at the debate, about winning eight of the last nine contests, “many of them by landslide” margins, referring to these very states where he or Clinton would get walloped in the fall, while denouncing her red-state wins as aberrational. What is it about his red states that count—or more to the point, perhaps, what is it about hers that makes them not count?
I try to set a limit on the number of times I use the “imagine if” device, because candidates have different histories, and those histories provide the context for our reactions to the things they do. But here goes. Imagine if the situation were reversed and Sanders had won the Southern states, and it was Clinton dismissing Southern Democratic votes as meaningless. The more sanctimonious among Sanders’s supporters would have tarred and feathered her as a racist weeks ago. Her very reputation among Democrats would likely be in tatters.
I’m not sure what the thinking is in Sanders land. Their collective back is against the wall, and they’re in a high-stress situation. But Sanders and his team—wife Jane, campaign manager Jeff Weaver—have been saying these things repeatedly now, for weeks. I guess it’s part of an electability argument. Even that is wrong—as I noted above, a couple of Clinton’s red states are possibly gettable in the fall, while none of Sanders’s states are. But insulting your own party’s—oh, wait. Ah. Maybe that has something to do with this too. Whatever the reasons—not a good look.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 16, 2016
“Just The Way They Do Business”: The Conservative Go-For-Broke Legal Strategy Suffers A Blow
These days, conservatives don’t suffer too many unanimous defeats at the Supreme Court, even in its currently unsettled status. But that’s what happened today, when the Court handed down an 8-0 ruling in a case called Evenwel v. Abbott, which had the potential to upend an understanding of democratic representation that has existed for two centuries, and give Republicans a way to tilt elections significantly in their favor before anyone even casts a vote.
The conservatives lost. But losing cases like this one is part of the way they do business. With a (usually) friendly Supreme Court, in recent years they’ve employed a strategy of maximal legal audacity, one that has yielded tremendous benefits to their cause.
This case was a relatively low-profile part of a comprehensive conservative assault on voting rights — or perhaps it’s more accurate to call it an assault on the ease with which people who are more likely to vote Democratic can obtain representation at the ballot box. The question was about how state legislative districts are drawn, and the principle of “one person, one vote.” We’ve long had a legal consensus that all districts in a state have to be approximately the same size, to give everyone equal representation; a state legislature can’t draw one district to include a million people and another district to include only a thousand (although you might point out that we do have a legislative body that violates this principle; it’s called the United States Senate, where Wyoming gets one senator for every 300,000 residents and California gets one senator for every 20 million residents).
The plaintiffs in Evenwell argued that instead of using population to draw district lines, states should use the number of eligible voters. Apart from the fact that we know population numbers fairly precisely because of the census, and we have no such precision regarding eligible voters, that would exclude huge swaths of the public. You might immediately think of undocumented immigrants, but counting only eligible voters would also mean excluding people with green cards on their way to citizenship, children, and those who have had their voting rights taken away because of a criminal conviction. In practice, drawing districts this way would almost inevitably mean taking power away from urban areas more likely to vote Democratic and sending power to rural areas more likely to vote Republican. Which was of course the whole point.
This case was a real long shot from the beginning, as you might gather from the fact that the conservative activists who filed it were suing the state of Texas, which is controlled by Republicans and is not exactly enthusiastic about ensuring everyone’s voting rights (the state’s incredibly restrictive voter ID law is still working its way through the courts). The problem they ran into came from the fact that the lawsuit alleged not that a state may draw districts based on the number of eligible voters and not the population, but that it must draw districts that way. That was the only way for them to file the suit, since they were trying to force Texas to change how it was drawing districts.
Since Texas had chosen to use population, just as every other state does and always has, in order to force a change the plaintiffs wanted that method declared unconstitutional. If they had prevailed, that could have meant that every state legislative district in the country would have had to be redrawn. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the ruling, “As the Framers of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment comprehended, representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote.”
About the legal audacity I mentioned before: As unlikely as this case may have been to succeed, it’s another reminder of how legally aggressive the right has been lately. Again and again, whether it’s about voting rights or the Affordable Care Act or some other issue, they’ve come up with some novel legal theory that at first gets dismissed as completely absurd, then begins to sound mainstream as conservatives see an opportunity to gain a victory and rally around it. Even if they ultimately lose in court, the controversy can open up new legal and political avenues that hadn’t been evident before.
They lost today, and if you get Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to agree with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor that your claim is bogus, you know you’ve gone pretty far. But this case leaves an open question, which is whether a state can switch to an eligible-voter count in order to draw its districts if it chooses. No state has chosen to do that, but don’t be surprised if now that the issue has gotten some attention, conservative Republican legislators in deep-red states — particularly those with large numbers of Latino immigrants — start proposing it. I’d keep my eye on Texas.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, April 4, 2016
“Trump’s Many Racist Supporters”: Not All — But A Lot Of ’Em
In a Republican debate last month, Donald Trump was asked whether his claim that “Islam hates us” means all 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide hate the United States.
“I mean a lot of ’em,” Trump replied, as some in the crowd — Trump supporters, presumably — laughed and applauded.
That ugly moment comes to mind in describing how many of Trump’s supporters have racist motivations for backing him: Not all — but a lot of ’em.
Just as it’s unfair to paint all Trump backers as bigoted, it’s impossible to ignore a growing volume of public-opinion data showing that a large number of his supporters are indeed driven by racial animus.
A Pew Research Center national poll released Thursday found that 59 percent of registered voters nationwide think that an increasing number of people from different races, ethnic groups and nationalities makes the United States a better place to live; only 8 percent say this makes America worse. But among Trump backers, 39 percent say diversity improves America, while 42 percent say it makes no difference and 17 percent say it actually makes America worse. Supporters of GOP rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich were significantly more upbeat on diversity.
This was no anomaly. The week before, my Post colleagues Max Ehrenfreund and Scott Clement reported on a Post/ABC News poll that asked whether people thought it more of a problem that African Americans and Latinos are “losing out because of preferences for whites” or that whites are “losing out because of preferences for blacks and Hispanics.”
Trump had the support of 34 percent of Republican-leaning voters overall, but among those who said that whites are losing out, 43 percent supported Trump. Ehrenfreund and Clement did a further analysis finding that racial anxiety was at least as important as economic anxiety — the factor most commonly associated with Trump backers — in predicting support for Trump. Though the two factors were statistically close, those “who voiced concerns about white status appeared to be even more likely to support Trump than those who said they were struggling economically.”
Other somewhat-related attributes may be as or more predictive of whether somebody will support Trump: approval of deporting undocumented immigrants, strong feelings that the government is dysfunctional, and support for banning Muslims from entering the United States. (Authoritarian child-rearing attitudes, believed by some to be closely related to Trump support, were less predictive.)
But Clement, The Post’s polling manager, told me: “What was striking to me in analyzing the data is that even after controlling for a variety of demographics and attitudes [including all those above], believing whites are losing out continued to be a key predictor of Trump support. . . . Its importance persisted under a wide range of scenarios.”
This, in turn, confirms previous findings. Earlier this year, University of California at Irvine political scientist Michael Tesler, citing data from Rand Corp.’s Presidential Election Panel Survey, found that “Trump performs best among Americans who express more resentment toward African Americans and immigrants and who tend to evaluate whites more favorably than minority groups.”
Trump’s supporters overall tend to be older, disproportionately male, less likely to have a college degree and more likely to be suffering economically. But race is an ever-present factor among Trump supporters. Trump support, it has been shown, is high in areas where the number of racist search queries on Google is also high. The Post’s Jeff Guo has documented that Trump, in GOP primaries, performs best in areas where the middle-aged white death rate is highest — that he effectively channels “white suffering into political support.”
Various polling of more dubious methodology has found that Trump supporters are more likely to support the Confederate battle flag, oppose Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and support the Japanese internment camps of World War II. But Thursday’s poll by nonpartisan Pew, a well-respected outfit, finds antipathy toward minorities as well: Sixty-nine percent of Trump supporters say immigrants burden the country, and Trump supporters are significantly more likely than other Republican voters to want illegal immigrants deported, to favor a wall along the Mexican border and to support extra scrutiny of Muslims in the United States solely because of their religion.
Some Trump supporters may not be overt about (or even conscious of) racial motivations. One indication: Trump support is higher in automated or online polls than in surveys conducted by a live interviewer — about five percentage points, according to a study by the polling firm Morning Consult. One possible factor is a “social desirability bias” that leads them to tell an interviewer not what they believe but what they think is acceptable in society.
This may mean some Trump supporters feel a sense of shame — and that’s good. Trump makes bigots feel safe to come out of the shadows. But that doesn’t excuse them.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 31, 2016
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