🇺🇸BREAKING: DEMOCRACY WINS AS NEWSOM BEATS BACK GOP RIGHT-WING DISRUPTION IN CAL. BY NEARLY 2-1 MARGIN!

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=c6f2a3b9-b11e-439c-8262-d24cdfb93690&v=sdk

A sigh of relief for California

Voters chose to keep Gov. Newsom, sparing the state from more than a year of turmoil.

Phew.

We can rest easier now that Gov. Gavin Newsom will not be removed from office early and replaced by right-wing provocateur Larry Elder, a radio host with no experience in elective office and who doesn’t seem interested in being a governor for all Californians — only those who share his extremist, intolerant views.

Voters statewide showed overwhelming support for keeping Newsom, and news outlets started calling the race before 9 p.m. This is what the recent polls predicted, based on the early and heavy turnout of Democratic voters, who outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1 in California.

Elder, as expected, led the field of replacement candidates. He admitted defeat Tuesday night, telling supporters, “We may have lost the battle. But we’re going to win the war.”

It was a nice surprise given that, before election day, Elder and other Republicans had seeded the suspicion that if the recall failed it would be due to fraud rather than the more plausible scenario that millions of voters, most of them Democrats, heard what Elder had to offer and said “no thanks.”

Voters evidently saw through the smokescreen that recall proponents threw up about how Newsom was responsible for every bad thing that has happened in California over the last few years: wildfires, COVID-19, homelessness, crime, income equality, and on and on.

The decision to reject the recall is the best outcome for California.

Even if you dislike Newsom, it would have been a disaster to abruptly hand over leadership of the state to Elder or any of the other 45 people listed on the replacement ballot in the middle of a public health crisis and with a regular election little more than a year away.

Moreover, Newsom has been a strong leader during one of the most challenging periods in California’s recent history. It would have been madness to swap him for anyone, let alone someone with no relevant experience.

While the recall option is an important tool for democracy, it should be used sparingly and only in cases of clear dereliction of duty — and certainly not as a cynical ploy by political opponents to remove a legitimately elected governor.

This was not about Newsom’s performance, not really. The recall campaign started life as a referendum on Newsom’s liberal values, which were clear when he won with 62% of the vote in the 2018 election.

It’s unfortunate taxpayers had to spend between $200 million and $400 million to hold an election that didn’t change anything. But it could pay off down the road if it convinces the state’s Republicans that using the recall isn’t a fair, honorable — or even effective — way to win office.

Yes, it worked in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced Gov. Gray Davis, but that was a unique situation driven in large part by the fame of the winning candidate.

If Republicans want to end the “one-party rule” in California, then it’s up to them to develop a platform that appeals to voters, rather than trying to gain power by gaming the state’s direct democracy system.

Newsom now should get back to work but not rest on his laurels — he’s got another election in less than 14 months.

The recall failed, but millions of people voted to oust him nonetheless.

That the recall qualified at all, rather than dying in the signature-gathering stage as most recall efforts do, exposed a deep ambivalence by Californians about the direction of the state.

Though the dust hasn’t yet settled on this election, let’s start talking about fixing the state’s deeply flawed recall law. This election has shown that the process is confusing and the outcome potentially undemocratic.

It takes a majority of voters to oust the governor (or any elected official), but the replacement needs only to win a plurality of votes. A system that makes it possible for a California governor to be replaced with someone who has received a small fraction of the total votes cast in the election is nuts.

It seems California has escaped that possibility this time. Let’s do more than hope there isn’t a next time.

**********************************

Another scurrilous attack by the neo-fascist GOP on American democracy and liberal, progressive values defeated! And, in the process, they wasted hundreds of millions of dollars that could have been used to make the lives of Californians better!

Sure, California has problems that need to be solved. But, the idea that any of the GOP clowns trying to replace Newsom could solve them, or would even be interested in trying, is beyond absurd!

🤡Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-14-21

🏴‍☠️BRING IT ON! – “Moscow Mitch” 🇷🇺 Throws Down The Gauntlet, Challenges Trump For “Vilest Pol In America” 🤮☠️ — Can He Beat A Guy Who Uses The “Bully’s Pulpit” To Encourage Americans To Drink & Inject Poison? ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️ — Nobel Prize 🏆 Winning Economist Paul Krugman @ NY Times Tells Us How “MM” Can Go Even Lower: “So yes, McConnell’s position is stupid. But it’s also vile.”

Paul Krugman
American Economist, Columnist, & Nobel Prize Winner

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/mcconnell-coronavirus-states.html

Krugman writes, in part, in the NYT:

. . . .

So yes, McConnell’s position is stupid. But it’s also vile.

Think of who would be hurt if state and local governments are forced to make drastic cuts. A lot of state money goes to Medicaid, a program that should be expanding, not shrinking, as millions of Americans are losing their health insurance along with their jobs.

As for the state and local government workers who may be either losing their jobs or facing pay cuts, most are employed in education, policing, firefighting and highways. So if McConnell gets his way, America’s de facto policy will be one of bailing out the owners of giant restaurant chains while firing schoolteachers and police officers.

Last but not least, let’s talk about McConnell’s hypocrisy, which like his stupidity comes on multiple levels.

At one level, it’s really something to see a man who helped ram through a giant tax cut for corporations — which they mainly used to buy back their own stock — now pretend to be deeply concerned about borrowing money to help states facing a fiscal crisis that isn’t their fault.

At another level, it’s also really something to see McConnell, whose state is heavily subsidized by the federal government, give lectures on self-reliance to states like New York that pay much more in federal taxes than they get back.

We’re not talking about small numbers here. According to estimates by the Rockefeller Institute, from 2015 to 2018 Kentucky — which pays relatively little in federal taxes, because it’s fairly poor, but gets major benefits from programs like Medicare and Social Security — received net transfers from Washington averaging more than $33,000 per person. That was 18.6 percent of the state’s G.D.P.

True, relatively rich states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut probably should be helping out their poorer neighbors — but those neighbors don’t then get the right to complain about “blue state bailouts” in the face of a national disaster.

Of course, McConnell has an agenda here: He’s hoping to use the pandemic to force afflicted states to shrink their governments. We can only hope both that this shameless exploitation of tragedy fails and that McConnell and his allies pay a heavy political price.

******************************

Read the rest of Krugman’s article at the link.

Have we all just been transported to “Jonestown 1978” ☠︎⚰️☠️⚰️?” Is our “Clown Prince” 🤡 actually the reincarnation of Rev. Jim Jones 🏴‍☠️?

Tired of being in the “Blue Majority” supporting “Red America” while excluded from control of our National Government? Tired of a Government of self-centered grifters — incapable of governing responsibly and in the public interest, but great at lining their pockets and those of their fat cat backers? Tired of an “Amateur Night at the Bijou” foreign policy that diminishes our nation and makes us the laughingstock the world? Tired of dealing with dirty water, polluted air, and crumbling bridges while the “Chief Clown” 🤡 sharpens his golf game? Tired of a kakistocracy that’s also a kelptocracy 💸 and practices nepotism? Tired of expensive health care that too often doesn’t improve the health of our nation? Tired of wages stagnating and benefits disappearing while the stock market goes bonkers and execs and shareholders get big payouts? Tired of lousy, anti-democracy judges 👨‍⚖️ who advance the interests of corporations, guns, and the GOP over the rights and dignity of individuals under our laws? Tired of paying the salaries of Neo-Nazi bigots like Stephen Miller? Tired of funding the “Afternoon Clown Show” 🤡 from the White House every day and dealing with its never-ending stream of dangerous ☠️ lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications?

Vote ‘Em Out, Vote ‘Em Out!

This November, send the “Clown Prince” 🤡, MM 🤮, and the rest of their anti-American party of disunity, incompetence, disorder, cruelty, stupidity, racism, and grift packing! Vote like your life depends on it! Because, it does!

PWS

04-24-20

UNDER THE RADAR SCREEN: Historian Heather Cox Richardson On Why “J.R. Five’s” Enthusiasm For GOP’s Voter Disenfranchisement/Suppression Plan In Wisconsin Is A Very Bad Harbinger For November & The Survival Of American Democracy! — You Know You’re In Trouble When The “Umpires” Take The Field Wearing The Home Team’s Colors!

http://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxtkU1v4jAQhn8NuRX5I4Fw8KECQYNKpO4GKL1Ejj0QB2OnjtMQfv0G2MtKK81opHdmNB-P4B5O1vWsto0P2gZcriSLcIxQTAPJQonjKA5Ukx8dwIUrzbxrIajbQivBvbLm3kBQRGlQMjSNI0wRmQrAEqgQxyKGkEpCjiSEsAjuY3LeSgVGAIMfcL01EGhWel83I_o6IsvBSuC-BCfs1SlRcicba8ZNWzSei_NY2MtQUw_Oa6f0y-SFIIJGdOntGcyILqBfY0F2_SfR56SyeJOdus3idHufr7uCpuivfkuzQ7TJDk1y0aWcJ5NNtg3TKkFpdYjSvlP8M70NdUq87dR7lnRptrklqlOC7tRDX81uco77r_2ykiv9U6j1bLyC4gvvAV5rG03L4mA-6vJ3sbhuF5pcl7te7auP86rZ_spRoNh9cxSiKYpRGE3HeGy_25moJmdUjkJ0OZF_zg4cW4MxypwaTIY8t_ohDzjyIV5ao3yfg-GFBvkk5Z9oH4_3fQ3MQNdo8B7cUxzw0Wgyw5NgmCTtwNiw__3_D1PIvsA

There is complicated news nabout voter suppression tonight out of Wisconsin. It has overridden today’s news of the extraordinary outburst of Trump’s acting Secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, who flew almost 8000 miles to Guam to harangue the sailors from the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

I’ll cover the Modly story later in the week, but for tonight, Wisconsin.

There is a crucial election there tomorrow that landed tonight at the US Supreme Court. The backstory is that in 2010, thanks to REDMAP the Republican Redistricting Majority Project I wrote about on Saturday, the Wisconsin legislature was controlled by Republicans. They worked to guarantee their control, gerrymandering the state so effectively in 2011 that in the 2012 elections, Republicans lost a majority of voters, but took 60% of the seats in the legislature. (They won only 48.6% of the votes, but took 61% of the seats.)

With this power, they promptly passed a strict voter-ID law that reduced black and Latino voting, resulting in 200,000 fewer voters in 2016 than had voted in 2012. (Remember, Wisconsin is a key battleground state, and Trump won it in 2016 by fewer than 23,000 votes.)

Now, there is a move afoot to purge about 240,000 more voters from the rolls, thanks to the old system called “voter caging.” The state sent letters to registered voters, largely in districts that voted Democratic in 2016, and those who did not respond to the letters have been removed from the voter rolls on the argument that the fact they didn’t respond to the letters must mean they have moved. Initially, the purge was supposed to happen in 2021, after the election, but a conservative group sued to removed them earlier and a conservative state judge, Paul V. Malloy ordered it done. Malloy’s decision has been appealed to the Wisconsin state supreme court, which has deadlocked over the issue by a vote of 3-3.

On tomorrow’s ballot is a contest for a seat on that court. The Republicans desperately want to reelect their candidate, Justice Daniel Kelly, who recused himself from the voter purge vote pending the election. Trump has endorsed Kelly, who will uphold the purge if he is reelected. Before the pandemic, observers thought Kelly’s opponent had a good chance of unseating him because of expected high turnout among Democrats. But now, of course, all bets are off, especially since the Democratic strongholds in the state are in the cities, where the residents are hunkered down.

The election was originally scheduled for tomorrow, but the pandemic has gummed up the works. A stay-at-home order went into effect in the state on March 25, and more than a million voters have requested absentee ballots. But this huge surge means the state is running behind and hasn’t been able to deliver the ballots. Meanwhile, roughly 7000 poll workers, who are volunteers and often elderly, have said they would not come manage the election, so a large number of polls can’t open. The city of Milwaukee, whose 600,000 people normally would have 180 polling places, will have five. Milwaukee tends to vote Democratic.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, tried to get the Republican-dominated legislature to postpone the election or to mail ballots to all voters for a May 26 election deadline, but it refused. Over the weekend, the mayors of Wisconsin’s ten biggest cities urged the state’s top health official, Andrea Palm, to “step up” and use her emergency powers to replace in-person voting with mail-in voting, as Ohio did when faced with a similar problem. On Monday, Evers signed an executive order postponing the election until June 9—something even he was unsure he had the power to do, but he said he felt he had to try to keep people safe– but Republicans challenged the order and the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court blocked it.

Last Thursday, a federal judge permitted absentee ballots to be counted in the election so long as they arrived back to election officials by April 13, but Republicans immediately challenged the decision. Tonight, in a 5-4 decision, the US. Supreme Court refused to permit this extension of time for the state to receive absentee ballots, arguing (apparently without any self-awareness) that the federal judge made a mistake by changing the rules of an election so close to its date. This means that absentee ballots have to be postmarked tomorrow, even if the voter hasn’t gotten one by then.

The court insisted that the issue in the decision was quite narrow, and had nothing to do with the larger question of the right to vote. The four dissenting justices cried foul.

Writing for the four other judges in dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that “the court’s order, I fear, will result in massive disenfranchisement.” “The majority of this Court declares that this case presents a “narrow, technical question”…. That is wrong. The question here is whether tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens can vote safely in the midst of a pandemic. Under the District Court’s order, they would be able to do so. Even if they receive their absentee ballot in the days immediately following election day, they could return it. With the majority’s stay in place, that will not be possible. Either they will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others’ safety, or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own. That is a matter of utmost importance—to the constitutional rights of Wisconsin’s citizens, the integrity of the State’s election process, and in this most extraordinary time, the health of the Nation.”

The New York Times editorial board echoed Ginsburg, warning that what is happening in Wisconsin, where Republicans are trying to use the pandemic to steal an election, could happen nationally in 2020. This is why Democrats tried to get robust election funding in the $2.2 trillion coronavirus bill to bolster mail-in ballots, and why Trump said: “The things they had in there were crazy, they had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to, you would never have another Republican elected in this country again.”

This crisis in Wisconsin has national implications. The reelection of Kelly will likely mean Wisconsin loses another 240,000 voters, most of them Democrats. This will increase Trump’s chances of winning the state in 2020, and Wisconsin is likely key to a victory in the Electoral College.

This is why I watch the minutia of politics so carefully. It’s hard to imagine that the election of a state judge in Wisconsin matters to our nation of fifty states and 330 million people, but it does. Oh, boy, does it.

**************

Remember, if more voters turn out, Trump & the GOP lose. The “J.R. Five” will be doing everything in their power to make sure that doesn’t happen. That’s why it’s critical for Dems to get out the vote and create a “Roberts-proof” majority. Also, winning the Senate is the way to start pushing back on the J.R.Five’s plans to dismantle democracy and with it any semblance of equality in America. Voter suppression is just the beginning.

PWS

04-07-20

SUPREMELY PARTISAN: “J.R. Five” Aids GOP Voter Suppression In Wisconsin As RBG & “Gang of Four” Lash Out In Dissent!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/supreme-court-wisconsin-absentee-ballots.html

Mark Joseph Stern reports for Slate:

On Monday, by a 5–4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court approved one of the most brazen acts of voter suppression in modern history. The court will nullify the votes of citizens who mailed in their ballots late—not because they forgot, but because they did not receive ballots until after Election Day due to the coronavirus pandemic. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent, the court’s order “will result in massive disenfranchisement.” The conservative majority claimed that its decision would help protect “the integrity of the election process.” In reality, it calls into question the legitimacy of the election itself.

Wisconsin has long been scheduled to hold an election on April 7. There are more than 3,800 seats on the ballot, and a crucial state Supreme Court race. But the state’s ability to conduct in-person voting is imperiled by COVID-19. Thousands of poll workers have dropped out for fear of contracting the virus, forcing cities to shutter dozens of polling places. Milwaukee, for example, consolidated its polling locations from 182 to five, while Green Bay consolidated its polling locations from 31 to two. Gov. Tony Evers asked the Republican-controlled legislature to postpone the election, but it refused. So he tried to delay it himself in an executive order on Monday. But the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court reinstated the election, thereby forcing voters to choose between protecting their health and exercising their right to vote.

Because voters are rightfully afraid of COVID-19, Wisconsin has been caught off guard by a surge in requests for absentee ballots. Election officials simply do not have time, resources, or staff to process all those requests. As a result, a large number of voters—at least tens of thousands—won’t get their ballot until after Election Day. And Wisconsin law disqualifies ballots received after that date. In response, last Thursday, a federal district court ordered the state to extend the absentee ballot deadline. It directed officials to count votes mailed after Election Day so long as they were returned by April 13. A conservative appeals court upheld his decision.

The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the only protection in place to ensure that voters could still safely cast ballots.

Now the Supreme Court has reversed that order. It allowed Wisconsin to throw out ballots postmarked and received after Election Day, even if voters were entirely blameless for the delay. (Thankfully, ballots postmarked by Election Day but received by April 13 still count, because the legislature didn’t challenge that extension.) In an unsigned opinion, the majority cited the Purcell principle, which cautions courts against altering voting laws shortly before an election. It criticized the district court for “fundamentally alter[ing] the nature of the election by permitting voting for six additional days after the election.” And it insisted that the plaintiffs did not actually request that relief—which, as Ginsburg notes in her dissent, is simply false.

. . . .

**************************

Read the rest of Mark’s article at the link.

Just last week Trump admitted that if more Americans voted, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahUKEwjBz7eao9XoAhUrlHIEHV-oARIQFjAAegQIARAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2F2020%2Fmar%2F30%2Ftrump-republican-party-voting-reform-coronavirus&usg=AOvVaw2AKTPjFL8DI8bt9ii1CYF2

John Roberts and his fellow GOP partisans on the Supremes got the message loud and clear. Although, they didn’t really need much direction from their Great Leader, since the GOP Supremes have scarcely ever seen a civil rights or voting rights law that they didn’t want to gut and pervert.

With markets wobbling, unemployment rising, and Trump’s “malicious incompetence” threatening American lives every day, the GOP hopes for November could depend on large-scale disenfranchisement and massive voter suppression. And, the J.R. Five have made it clear that they are primed and ready to twist and manipulate the law as necessary to guarantee their party’s minority stranglehold on government.

So much for “just calling balls and strikes.” Nope! The J.R. Five “resizes the strike zone” as necessary to guarantee victory for “their team” and defeat for American democracy.

PWS

04-06-20

EXPOSED: In Matter of A-B-, Sessions & An Immigration Judge Found That The Government Of El Salvador Offered “Reasonable Protection” To Persecuted Women & That Internal Relocation Appeared “Reasonably Available” To A Severely Battered & Threatened Woman — They Lied!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/el-salvador-votes-for-president-as-the-country-seeks-a-new-way-to-deal-with-gangs/2019/02/02/1ce34c1e-2288-11e9-b5b4-1d18dfb7b084_story.html

Anna-Catherine Brigida reports on the recent El Salvadoran presidential election for the Washington Post:

. . . ..

“The ultimate actor who determines whether you have more or less homicides tomorrow or right now or in a week is not the government. It’s the gangs,” said José Miguel Cruz, an expert on Salvadoran gangs at Florida International University. “They do it for political purposes as a bargaining tool to improve their position vis-a-vis the government or vis-a-vis the society.”

. . . .

*****************************************************

Read Anna’s complete article at the link. This is a “must read” for members of the NDPA or anyone else handling El Salvadoran asylum cases in this “Post-Matter of A-B- Era.”

Fact is, the gangs are in many practical ways the “de facto government” in El Salvador. That makes Sessions’s suggestion that persecuted individuals can get reasonable protection from the government or avoid persecution in a tiny, totally gang-infested country absurdly disingenuous. It also calls into question the judicial integrity of those U.S. Immigration Judges who mindlessly “parrot” Sessions’s “parallel universe” dicta regarding conditions in El Salvador. Indeed, it has been reported elsewhere that gangs are actually the largest employer in El Salvador, exercising far more power over politics and the economy than the government! https://www.newsweek.com/ms-13-barrio-18-gangs-employ-more-people-el-salvador-largest-employers-1200029

Also, this article illustrates the absurdity of the position often taken by the BIA and some Immigration Judges that resistance to gangs is not a “political act.” In a country where gangs and government are inextricably intertwined, and gangs actually control more of the country than does the national government, of course resisting or publicly standing up against gangs is an expression of political opposition to those in power. And, it’s a political statement for which the consequences all too often can be deadly.

Matter of A-B- has yet to be tested in a Court of Appeals. But, it spectacularly “flunked” its initial judicial test before Judge Sullivan in Grace v. Whitaker. https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3rd Judge Sullivan clearly saw through many of Sessions’s biased conclusions that contradict not only the history and purpose of he Refugee Act, but also well established case law. Although A-B- was an Immigration Court case, and many of Sullivan’s conclusions would apply in Immigration Court proceedings, EOIR saw fit to construe Grace narrowly as applying solely in “Credible Fear Reviews.” https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3BE

It’s important for advocates to press all challenges to Matter of A-B- in the Circuit Courts of Appeals. If appellate judges agree with Judge Sullivan, all of the erroneous “summary denials” of asylum based on A-B- will come back to Immigration Court for rehearings, thus further adding to the Administration-created mess in America’s most dysfunctional and fundamentally unjust court system, where Due Process for asylum seekers has become a bad joke rather than the watchword.

PWS

02-04-19

HOPEFUL SIGNS FROM THE BADGER STATE: EVEN IN DEEP RED “TRUMP COUNTRY” FOLKS APPEAR FED UP WITH BOORISH, CONFRONTATIONAL TRUMP GOP BRAND – TURN TO DEM IN KEY STATE ELECTION!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ready-for-an-anti-trump-wave-in-november-look-at-wisconsin/2018/01/17/3b8ec8d6-fbca-11e7-ad8c-ecbb62019393_story.html?utm_term=.6fdc123a44b9

By E.J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post:

“If you are appalled by the chaos, division and meanness of the Trump presidency, if you are tired of the lies he and his apparatchiks tell, take heart. Most of your fellow Americans feel the same way.

There is a condescending habit in the nation’s capital of seeing voters as detached and indifferent to the day-to-day workings of government.

The folks who promised to drain the swamp are guilty of a particularly pernicious form of this elitism. President Trump’s defenders regularly claim his base is so blindly loyal that nothing he says or does will ever drive its members away.

But news from across the country should shatter these illusions. A large majority of voters, including many erstwhile Trump supporters, is rebelling. The evidence is overwhelming that the president’s foes are as determined and motivated as any opposition in recent memory.

This message was already delivered in elections in November and December. The latest tidings are from Wisconsin, which led the way toward the style of politics that Trump exploited to get to the White House, even though he fared poorly there during the 2016 Republican primaries.

Democrat Patty Schachtner was elected to represent a traditionally conservative Wisconsin Senate district in a victory over Republican Adam Jarchow on Jan. 16. (WQOW)

In the rural 10th Senate District in the state’s western reaches, Democrat Patty Schachtner defeated Republican Assemblyman Adam Jarchow by an impressive nine percentage points in a special election on Tuesday. Also consider that Trump carried the district by 17 points in the last presidential election (up from a six-point margin for Mitt Romney in 2012), and that the seat had been held by a Republican for 17 years.

It was, as my Post colleague David Weigel noted, the Democrats’ 34th legislative pickup from the Republicans since Trump’s election. Republicans have flipped just four.

And lest anyone dismiss the importance of what happened, Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who rode to power in Wisconsin on the 2010 conservative wave, warned that Schachtner’s victory was “a wake up call for Republicans in Wisconsin.”

It might usefully rouse Republicans in Washington, too.

Wisconsin matters, and not simply because it was, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, one of the closely contested states that gave Trump his electoral college victory. It is a place where American progressivism took root at the turn of the last century, but also one where conservatives have staged a dramatic realignment of popular sentiments over a short period.

. . . .

But backlash politics provokes a backlash of its own, and during an interview on Wednesday, Cramer said the voters are weary of division. “Wisconsinites believe in ‘Wisconsin Nice,’ ” she said, “and they really dislike ‘us versus them’ politics.”

This is certainly Schachtner’s view. The chief medical examiner for St. Croix County — Trump prevailed there by 18 points — told the Associated Press that her victory “could be” a portent of Democratic gains, and added: “My message has always been: be kind, be considerate and we need to help people when they’re down.”

Now this would be a change of pace.

With Washington engulfed in controversy over Trump’s hate-filled comments about people from certain countries, Republicans would do well to note the costs of unkind politics.

A Quinnipiac poll released on Wednesday made clear where the passion in politics lies right now. The survey found Trump with a dismal 38 percent job approval rating. More significantly, only 29 percent strongly approved of his performance, while 49 percent strongly disapproved. Intensity of feeling is important to voter turnout, especially in midterms.

Predicting November’s elections in January is, of course, a fool’s game. But failing to see the depth of the loathing for Trump is a form of political malpractice. He has given nice a chance to prevail.”

**************************************************

Read Dionne’s complete article at the link.

Cruelness, nastiness, lies, and meanness usually prove counterproductive in the long run. Certainly true in court. And, perhaps also in politics.

Always wondered what had happened to “Wisconsin Nice” during the regime of GOP Gov. Scott Walker.

PWS

01-19-18

POLITICS: According To The Polls & Mainstream Media, Trump Is Historically Unpopular & The GOP Can’t Govern — But, That’s News To Actual Voters Who Continue To Prefer The GOP To Dems!

Upset, schmupset, the four consecutive House races that Dems have lost in the “Trump” era are exactly the types of elections they are going to have to consistently win to retake power. Yes, it’s an improvement for our system when there are more competitive races, and it’s good for Dems that they are actually taking races in “GOP Territory” seriously.

But, in Georgia, the Democratic Candidate John Ossoff actually ran behind Hillary Clinton who narrowly lost the District to Trump. There was no GOP incumbent, and now-Rep. Karen Handel actually beat Ossoff by a very comfortable margin of almost 4 points.

I keep saying it. The strategy of counting on Trump to self-destruct, the inability of the GOP to govern, and criticism of the GOP’s “help the rich, stiff everyone else” agenda isn’t working any better in the post-election era than it did for Hillary. The Dems are leaderless, programless, and all too often clueless. Until that changes, the reign of Trump and one-party government in America is likely to continue, notwithstanding the polls and the media.

And, speaking of polls and the media, remember their performance in predicting the mood of America and the results of the 2016 election. Not much has changed.

PWS

06-21-17

A sigh of relief for California

Voters chose to keep Gov. Newsom, sparing the state from more than a year of turmoil.

🤡Due Process Forever!

Related posts:

Vote ‘Em Out, Vote ‘Em Out!

This November, send the “Clown Prince” 🤡, MM 🤮, and the rest of their anti-American party of disunity, incompetence, disorder, cruelty, stupidity, racism, and grift packing! Vote like your life depends on it! Because, it does!

PWS

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