Conor Friedersdorf/Atlantic, not one of my favs but this is right:
What Happens If Trump Wins His Bet on Demagoguery?
The president is sowing fear and stoking ethnic anxieties. Voters can punish him for weakening America or ensure more of the same.
Don’t be complicit in what Ayn Rand once called “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” If voters reject today’s Republican tactics, they can bring about a future where they offer a non-odious alternative. A Democratic rout is the likeliest path to a GOP that doesn’t weaken America by inducing us to fear and hate one another. A divided country benefits Trump, and that is the country he will bring about with his rhetoric—until decent Republicans thwart his machinations. It is time to yell, “Stop!”
OTOH what happens if Trump loses? Last polls of the cycle:
Tom Nichols/USA Today, ex-Republican:
This election is a referendum on Donald Trump's corrosive impact on our politics
I wish Republicans had checked Trump and been faithful to the Constitution. But my former party failed. Democrats are better bet to preserve democracy.
The midterm election Tuesday is not a primarily a choice between conservatives and liberals or their policies. It would be, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, “pretty to think so,” but it is not true.
Yes, there are some important issues pending as we head into the 116th Congress: health care, an idiotic trade war, an arms control treaty. Yet they pale in comparison to what should be the overriding concern of every American citizen of any party or affiliation: the preservation and protection of our constitutional system of government.
Montel Williams/USA Today, ex-Republican:
I voted a straight Democratic ticket because health care is on the line
I can't support a party working to sabotage health care for Americans with pre-existing conditions. Health care is more important than partisanship.
Despite these facts, we have Gov. Rick Scott and a Republican-led legislature who've stubbornly refused to lead by expanding Medicaid. The current Republican nominee for governor, Ron DeSantis, actually once suggested that folks who can’t afford health care can seek it out “at the emergency room.” And even now, our Attorney General Pam Bondi has joined into a multi-state lawsuit to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
While some Republicans like Scott might pretend they’ve always supported protectionsfor pre-existing conditions, actions speak far louder than campaign commercials.
Speaking of health care lies...
The Hill:
GOP senator: Dems pushing 'false narrative' on pre-existing conditions
"If we continue down this path, we’re going to have a health-care crisis, not only among those who are serviced by the Affordable Care Act, but the broader health-care market is headed for disaster," [Sen. Thom] Tillis said.
Democrats have made health care the centerpiece of their closing argument to voters during the midterm campaign, hitting Republicans over their efforts to gut the Affordable Care Act.
Former President Barack Obama defended his signature domestic accomplishment while stumping for Democrats last week, telling supporters that Republicans are "lying" when they say they want to protect those with pre-existing conditions.
That’s one of this year’s big lies. The GOP voted for a bill that stripped pre-existing conditions protections. Now they say they didn’t because ‘people would still be covered’. Yes, for flu shots and well visits, but not for their preexisting conditions. Liars, the lot of them.
The kids are voting.
Want some early vote analysis? Florida (Steve Schale) and Nevada (Jon Ralston) are here to help.
D’s are probably slightly winning the early vote in FL but Trump won on E Day, so no predictions other than we can win. D’s are definitely winning the NV early vote so advantage Jacky Rosen (D).
And Texas!
The full round-up of early vote data is here. Just remember we don’t know how they voted yet, only who is voting.
Jon Ralston/Nevada Independent:
Quite simply, Heller does not deserve to win. He wanted to run for governor but was scared off by Adam Laxalt. He doesn’t even seem to be trying hard as a senator, sneaking away from the media in D.C. where reporters have even labeled an escape door after him.
He doesn’t like the job all that much. He didn’t want the job all that much. He won’t have the job that much longer.
It’s sad in a way for me to contemplate this. Heller is genuinely one of the nicest people I have met in politics. That incandescent smile, that buoyant demeanor, that carefree mien. But he has surrounded himself with a confederacy of jerks who have not served him well, and he has traveled far from the days when he was a maverick secretary of state who really seemed to believe in things 25 years ago.
Prediction: Rosen, 48 percent; Heller, 46 percent; others and None of these candidates, 6 percent.
(A side note: I know I should probably rest on my laurels and discontinue this risky public practice every two years of displaying my oracular powers. But even though my record is fairly good – Reid in 2010, that Heller in 2012 call, the Trump loss here in 2016, to name a few – I am always nervous about doing it. But how could I explain balking or bawking now?)
As for the cheating:
What could be more Republican than cheating and then accusing your opponent of what you yourself do?
NBC:
Democrats blasted the announcement, which comes amid the backdrop of one of the nation's most fiercely contested races ahead of Election Day on Tuesday.
Rebecca DeHart, executive director of the state's Democratic Party, said in a statement that the investigation was "yet another example of abuse of power by an unethical Secretary of State."
"To be very clear, Brian Kemp's scurrilous claims are 100 percent false, and this so-called investigation was unknown to the Democratic Party of Georgia until a campaign operative in Kemp's official office released a statement this morning," DeHart said. "This political stunt from Kemp just days before the election is yet another example of why he cannot be trusted and should not be overseeing an election in which he is also a candidate for governor."
Simon Schama/Financial Times:
Next week’s US midterms are a fight between two very different visions of nationhood
Ten days before the midterm elections in America, murder came to the Tree of Life. Shouting “all Jews need to die”, a neo-Nazi gunman with an animus against the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society slaughtered 11 Jews gathered at their synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. Two days earlier, pipe bombs had been sent to 14 critics of Donald Trump by a man who had turned his van into a rust-bucket shrine to MAGA and its great apostle. One day previously, Gregory Bush, thwarted in his attempt to enter a black church in Louisville, Kentucky, had shot and killed two African-Americans at a local supermarket. Before he was arrested, he shouted “whites don’t kill whites”. All three perpetrators believed they were engaged in saving white America.This onslaught of actual and attempted killing, along with Trump’s unanticipated revelation that he would like to abolish birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, has decisively changed the character of what was in any case a midterm election like few others. At the last post it has come down to a conflict between two mutually hostile visions of national identity. Battles like this are presently raging worldwide, from the removal of Indian citizenship from Muslims in Assam, to the Brexit debate over just what it means to be British. But because the US has historically been seen, generation after generation, by those who have dreamt of getting there as the immigrant haven par excellence, this battle between a heterogeneous and a homogeneous patriotism has been engaged with unforgiving intensity.
Will Bunch/philly.com
Stop blaming millennials for not voting. Blame America’s screwed-up system — and fix it!
Look, we all can take some personal responsibility in our lives, and so I have nothing but praise for the millions of millennials who successfully Googled "how to buy stamps" and have registered to vote in Tuesday's election. And if you're like me and you know there's somedifference between the two parties ("Yo, Aaron from Atlanta … a Republican president is gutting all the climate change rules put in by [checks notes] a Democrat …"), indifference can be annoying. But as someone who's (ineptly) parented two of today's 20-somethings, I know that yelling at them … is not a strategy.
Let's be honest: America — the supposed beacon of democracy — is one of the world's worst developed nations for voting. Millennials had nothing to do with that. Even worse, my generation of baby boomers has essentially been running the United States for the last quarter-century, and we've done nothing to fix that. We've generally made voting worse. We're the ones who need to be shamed.
Francis Wilkinson/Bloomberg:
Republicans’ Race War Predated Trump. And It May Outlast Him.
Their resentments are key to the party’s identity
Republican claims of pervasive voter fraud are unqualified junk. The baseless claims of the party’s chief vote-fraud hunter, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who could be elected his state’s governor on Tuesday, were exposed in a Kansas courtroom earlier this year.
But when a political party endorses lies, year after year, in full defiance of the fact record, and its members convince themselves that the lies are so justified by circumstance as to be practically true, there is something powerful – and very dangerous -- at work.
The alleged mass killer at a Pittsburgh synagogue is said to have acted on a belief that a caravan of immigrants was coming north, under the guidance of nefarious Jews, to overrun white people in the U.S. His action, a racist mass murder, was monstrous. Yet the belief that appears to have inspired him is only a slightly more paranoid variation on the theme described by Ayres, and very closely linked to one echoed by the GOP’s white-nationalist-in-chief.
By this reasoning, the nonwhite citizens who are “in the tank” for Democrats are similar to the alien horde pressing toward the nation’s vulnerable “open” gates. The alien inside and the alien outside are twin elements of the Democrats’ effort to multiply Democratic votes.
Christopher Stroop/Religion Dispatches:
Evangelical PR Blitz Before Midterms Won’t Fix the ‘81% Problem’
Because we have very few such journalists—Nina Burleigh of Newsweek is an exception—the U.S. media has contributed mightily to the normalization of white evangelicals, an overwhelmingly anti-pluralist, anti-democratic demographic that researchers have identified as “uniquely conservative.” However, thanks to white evangelicals’ unwavering Trump support—81 percent voted for him and 71 percent still view Donald Trump’s presidency favorably—we’ve recently seen an unusual amount of critical coverage in typically friendly outlets over white evangelicals’ prevailing attitudes toward asylum seekers and refugees. Evangelicals—and those who are strongly invested in a “respectable” image for evangelicalism—now seem to be making a concerted effort to push back ahead of the midterm elections, in which evangelicals’ reputation will be tied to what many will see as a referendum on a historically unpopular authoritarian president for whom they remain the single most supportive demographic.