NY Times:
Boris Johnson Finds His Party Loyalists Aren’t as Loyal as Trump’s
In London, rebels in the Conservative Party staged a dramatic insurrection in the past week against Prime Minister Boris Johnson, blocking his plan to withdraw Britain from the European Union even without a deal. In Washington, scarcely a handful of Republicans have stood up to President Trump, even when he has flouted party orthodoxy on issues like trade, immigration and the deficit.
The Tory party’s revolt against Mr. Johnson, and his ruthless purging of the rebels, are reverberating through British politics, threatening his hold on power. For dispirited Republicans, though, this British revolution has become an object lesson in how a center-right party can stand up to a wayward leader.
The Conservative rebels “showed courage and principled concern about the impact of bad policy on the U.K. economy,” said Daniel M. Price, who served as an economic adviser to President George W. Bush. “This contrasts with congressional Republicans here who have mostly been meek, mute or complicit.” …
While many Republicans deplore Mr. Trump’s divisive language and erratic conduct, few accept the argument — at least publicly — that he poses a comparable threat to the United States. However distasteful they find him, Republicans largely back his agenda, whether it is the appointment of conservative judges, the passage of tax cuts, or deregulation.
They are even willing to tolerate his overturning of traditional Republican priorities like free trade, in part because of the damage they fear a vengeful Mr. Trump could do to them personally at the polls. The president has thoroughly taken over the Republicans, remaking the party of Lincoln in his image and institutionalizing policies that, only a few years ago, would have seemed extreme to them.
Dispirited they are. But lacking in judgement and courage they also are.
It’s traditional to leave the impartial Speaker be. But what’s tradition to Boris Johnson?
Who is Speaker Bercow? Read this and then watch this.
This is what they do (see Liz Cheney, below). They twist reality to justify their craven loyalty.
Cause a problem, problem solved for you, take credit for solution. Rinse and repeat.
This is Ivanka and Don Jr fighting over who runs next. Or inherits the MAGA hat concession. Whatever. Same thing.
WaPo on tricky next steps:
He defied Boris Johnson. Now the prime minister’s party is gunning for his seat, with Brexit on the line.
Just getting to an election may require shenanigans aplenty. Johnson is expected to lose on Monday when he asks Parliament to support a vote, his second such defeat in as many weeks. With the opposition dismissing election calls as “a trap,” the prime minister may end up needing to resign before the voters can have their say.
Whether it’s weeks or months off, analysts say a new election is all but inevitable given Johnson’s lack of a majority. And in Bracknell, all sides are already preparing for it.
Yet here, as is the case in districts nationwide, the calculus will be exceptionally tricky. The country remains polarized along the binary lines of leave or remain, with polls showing a nearly even divide three years after the referendum.
But an election would offer voters a full spectrum of options that will ensure that neither the pro- nor the anti-Brexit camp is fully united.
Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight:
How To Handle An Outlier Poll
But [Monmouth’s Patrick] Murray doesn’t have any real reason to apologize. Outliers are a part of the business. In theory, 1 in 20 polls should fall outside the margin of error as a result of chance alone. One out of 20 might not sound like a lot, but by the time we get to the stretch run of the Democratic primary campaign in January, we’ll be getting literally dozens of new state and national polls every week. Inevitably, some of them are going to be outliers. Not to mention that the margin of error, which traditionally describes sampling error — what you get from surveying only a subset of voters rather than the whole population — is only one of several major sources of error in polls.
What should you do about these seeming outliers? If you’re a pollster, you should follow Monmouth’s lead and publish them!! In fact, printing the occasional expectations-defying result is a sign that a pollster is doing good and honest work. Plus, sometimes those “outliers” turn out to be right. Ann Selzer’s final poll of Iowa’s U.S. Senate race in 2014, which showed Republican Joni Ernst ahead by 7 percentage points over her Democratic opponent, might have looked like an outlier at the time, but it was the only one that came close to approximating her 8.5-point margin of victory there. The small handful of polls that showed Donald Trump leading in Pennsylvania in 2016 look pretty good too, even though most Pennsylvania polls had Hillary Clinton leading.
In the long run, failure to publish results that pollsters presume to be outliers can yield far more embarrassment for the industry than the occasional funky-looking set of topline numbers. Suppressing outliers is a form of herding, a practice in which pollsters are influenced by other polls and strive to keep results within a narrow consensus.
Dave Leonhardt/NY Times:
Democrats Need to Get More Ruthless
And to stop helping Trump’s re-election chances
Before I get into the polling, I want to make clear that I’m not making the argument that some centrists and conservatives have made. By now, you’ve probably heard claims that Democrats are hurtling toward socialism and instead must return to the triangulation of the Bill Clinton years. The evidence doesn’t support that view.
Over the past two decades, incomes for most Americans have barely grown. Median wealth has declined. Americans are frustrated, and a majority supports a populist agenda: higher taxes on corporations and the rich, expanded government health care and financial aid, a higher minimum wage, even a Green New Deal.
The Democrats are on solid ground, substantively and politically, by pushing all of these issues. They should be casting Trump as a plutocrat in populist’s clothes, who has used the presidency to enrich himself and other wealthy insiders at the expense of hard-working middle-class families. It’s a caricature that has the benefit of truth. When pundits yearn for economic triangulation, they’re the ones confusing their own policy preferences with good political advice.
The mistake that Democratic candidates have made is thinking that just because they should activate their progressive id on some issues, they should do so on all issues.
WaPo:
Joe Biden ahead in Democratic race, with Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren filling out the top tier
The survey is a snapshot of the still-early Democratic race, with five months of campaigning before the first votes are cast in Iowa, followed by contests in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Nearly 6 in 10 Democratic-leaning voters say they would consider switching to support another candidate for the party’s nomination or that they still don’t have a preference…
Biden also has made ending Trump’s presidency after one term a principal part of his campaign message, and the new poll underscores the degree to which he is seen — and by a wide margin — as the Democrat best positioned to do that. Currently, 45 percent of Democratic voters name Biden as having the best chance to defeat Trump, the same percentage that said this in July. He is followed by Sanders at 14 percent and Warren at 12 percent.
On a related question, however, Biden’s advantage mostly disappears. Asked who would make the best president, regardless of which candidate has the best chance to defeat Trump, Biden still has an edge, but with 24 percent. On this measure, 20 percent pick Warren and 16 percent choose Sanders.
Bottom line: it’s fluid but Biden has strength, don’t underestimate him. But looking at early states, it’s a 3 way race:
Christopher Hooks/NY Times:
Something Strange Is Going On With All Those Retiring Texans
A wave of G.O.P. House members leaving Congress is a political opportunity for hungry Democrats.
The Republican Party of Texas appears to be molting. Last week, Representative Bill Flores became the 10th Texas Republican in the House to announce his retirement since the 2016 election, and the fifth this year. Others are expected this year.
If Democrats can flip the congressional districts they lost by less than five points in 2018 — including one represented by Will Hurd, a retiring local maverick who was once considered a Republican rising star — they will make up the majority of the state’s congressional delegation for the first time since 2005.
This has been branded “Texodus,” proof the Republican Party is running scared. A good deal of the churn has a simpler explanation: By 2016 the state’s Republican delegation had gotten long in the tooth, with some of the older members serving since the 1980s. Now they’re in the minority, and that stinks.
But there is something strange going on here, and it’s been going on for a while. Arguably, Texodus really started in 2015, with the most consequential retirement in the state in many years, that of Gov. Rick Perry. The Texas Republican Party had rarely looked stronger than it did that year — and has rarely had a stranger and more off-putting run than the period that came after.
See also the American Meteorological Society:
Response to NOAA Statement
The American Meteorological Society fully supports our colleagues at NOAA, who consistently put the safety of the American public first and foremost. They work tirelessly employing state of the art science to keep Americans safe. With respect to the press release that was issued by NOAA on Friday, 6 September, regarding the forecast of Hurricane Dorian, AMS believes the criticism of the Birmingham forecast office is unwarranted; rather they should have been commended for their quick action based on science in clearly communicating the lack of threat to the citizens of Alabama.
WaPo:
NOAA staff warned in Sept. 1 directive against contradicting Trump
The Birmingham office sent the tweet after receiving a flurry of phone calls from concerned residents following Trump’s message.
The agency sent a similar message warning scientists and meteorologists not to speak out on Sept. 4, after Trump showed a hurricane map from Aug. 29 modified with a hand-drawn, half-circle in black Sharpie around Alabama.
“This is the first time I’ve felt pressure from above to not say what truly is the forecast,” the meteorologist said. “It’s hard for me to wrap my head around. One of the things we train on is to dispel inaccurate rumors and ultimately that is what was occurring — ultimately what the Alabama office did is provide a forecast with their tweet, that is what they get paid to do.”
David A Graham/Atlantic:
The Republican Party Is Losing Its Future
Representative Will Hurd’s retirement leaves the party with just one black member of Congress.
The Hurd departure hurts more than most. Hurd just won an extremely tough reelection race in his Texas district; his retirement means that Democrats might be able to build on their slow return in the Lone Star State. But Hurd is more than a number. A charismatic young politician, an African American, and a former CIA officer, he has won respect from Democrats and was an emerging leader on national-security issues. In 2017, he even went on a widely publicized road trip from Texas to Washington, D.C., with then-Representative Beto O’Rourke.
Short takes: