Last night was a very close election in OH 12. The polls were right, suggesting a tossup that we (probably) lost (provisionals and absentees to be counted), (probably) losing the battle but on the way to winning the war. The NY Times version:
Republican Holds Thin Lead in Ohio District Trump Won Big
For some perspective:
Fivethirtyeight:
Ohio’s 12th District is traditionally Republican. According to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric,1 it is 14 percentage points more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole. But most districts (along with the one state) that have hosted federal special elections since Trump’s inauguration leaned strongly toward Republicans, and most of those races were decided by single digits. In other words, Democratic enthusiasm, Trump’s unpopularity and the normal mean-reversion tendency of midterm election cycles have transformed normally safe Republican seats into nail-biters.
We also defeated a right to work in MO (an enormous win for unions), saw more women win Gov primaries (MI and KS), and saw a close R KS primary to face D Laura Kelly in which Trumpster Kris Kobach may win (making Kelly’s job easier in November, as that would be a tossup).
All in all a very good night for Ds, even though no one likes to lose a close race. But R’s won’t be able to dump resources into every race like they do in specials. Bring on November.
Kansas had some great races!!
And Washington:
Incumbent Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers barely won in a “top two go to November” against Lisa Brown, the Democrat (by 0.4%).
Flip that, of course. Noah is a conservative. The point is that conservatives understand what we saw last night just as well as we do.
Will Bunch/philly.com:
44 years after Nixon's resignation, don't wait for Watergate's lightning to strike twice
The emotional pull of seeing the aging lions who brought down Nixon night after night, the thrill of seeing a Carl Bernstein byline taking on a modern president, the swelling drama of a movie like “All the President’s Men” all carries a subliminal message, that the system that worked in 1974 is going to work again — maybe not this week, but soon.
Isn’t it pretty to think so? The reality, of course, is that while some of the giants of the Watergate era still roam the earth, the planet that they inhabit is nothing like the world that existed two score and four years ago — mainly because the powerful institutions that supported the Nick Ackermans and the Jill Wine-Bankses and the Woodwards and Bernsteins have collapsed.
John Stoehr:
The Public Has Trump's Number
Despite journalism's troubles, most of the people have figured him out.
True, the Republicans have no spines. I doubt their patriotism. The president has no scruples. I know he’s no patriot. People on the margins of power are seeing dark times. Trump’s policies—from purging “illegal” immigrants to damaging trade relations to banning Muslims from entering the country—will hurt for years. All this matters.
But these are matters of normal politics, not of a public that can’t make heads or tails of what’s happening. Indeed, it’s the opposite. Despite a social media plague of ignorance, propaganda, anti-intellectualism and magical thinking—and the demagogues who exploit them—the public has had 17 months to get used to this president, and most of the people most of the time have Trump’s number.
The Next Generation of Doctors Is Pushing for Universal HealthcareThe student caucus of the American Medical Association got the organization to agree to reconsider its decades-long opposition to single-payer healthcare.
The ins and outs of the AMA’s policy making may sound like inside baseball. But this year’s youth uprising at the nexus of the medical establishment speaks to a cultural shift in the medical profession, and one with big political implications.
Amid Republican attacks on the Affordable Care Act, an increasing number of Democrats—ranging from candidates to established Congress members—are putting forth proposals that would vastly increase the government’s role in running the health system. These include single-payer, Medicare-for-all, or an option for anyone to buy in to the Medicare program. At least 70 House Democrats have signed on to the new “Medicare-for-all” caucus.
Henry Olsen/NY Times:
Why the Midterms Won't Be Won by Playing to the Base
Some people changed which party’s nominee they voted for from 2012 to 2016. They are key to who wins the House and Senate.
Most strategists and analysts say this November’s midterms will be determined by turnout. According to this view, whichever party more fully energizes its partisans will come out on top. New data, though, shows this common wisdom has it exactly backward. It’s the voters who sit between the two parties, not the party bases, who will choose which party wins.
That’s a surprising finding from the most recent Democracy Fund Voter Study Group poll. This biannual poll, which asks thousands of Americans their views on issues, personalities and voting intentions, has been querying the same people going back to 2011 (in the polling world, this is known as a longitudinal survey). That means it is large enough and has the right sort of questions to do what most polls can’t: report accurately on small groups within the overall electorate.
Two of these groups are of vital import: “Romney-Clinton” voters and “Obama-Trump” voters. Each consists of people who changed which party’s nominee they voted for from 2012 to 2016. Where they go will determine who wins because they are strategically placed in most of the target House and Senate races up for grabs this fall.
We discussed this in the comments on Monday but time for a feature, especially given OH-12 yesterday. That district had enormous (up to 30 point) swings between 2012 and 2016, validating the idea that there really are swing voters.
Nancy LeTourneau/Washington Monthly:
The Existential Crisis We Face
Either the Great Recession didn’t kill the American dream for blacks and Hispanics, or they recovered an awful lot faster than the rest of us. My theory has always been that black and brown people developed the ability to hope against the odds in a way that too many white people in this country still haven’t.
An alternative narrative that takes all of that into account is one in which it was not just the Great Recession that sent white men into such a funk. It was a combination of that, along with several other things that Tim Wise called the “perfect storm of white anxiety.”
HuffPost:
Trump’s Tariffs Are Screwing Farmers. Many Still Won’t Blame Him.
“You’ve heard the last few days that our exports are really record high. No!” said Link, who has been farming soybeans and corn since 1960. “The reason we’ve lost $2 a bushel on beans is because our exports aren’t good.”
Link, who lives in Abingdon and was a GOP local elected official for years, said he goes to coffee every morning with “some pretty strong Republican farmers” and tries to talk about Trump’s tariffs being bad for agriculture.
“When we make every country upset, it will be hard for us to get our exports and trading partners back,” said Link, whose wife Maryanne stood nearby nodding. “I am very upset with our Republican president. Very upset.”
As the interview wrapped up, Maryanne said she had one thing to add about Trump celebrating his tariffs:
“He has no concept of what it’s like out here in the real world.”