Heavy.com:
Faithless Electors List: Who Flipped Their Electoral Votes from Trump or Clinton?
It was predictable that more electors flipped away from Hillary Clinton (7) than from Donald Trump (2). Republicans are more tribal, fall in line better and respond to threats better. But protest votes amount to nothing except removing the focus on Trump, so congratulations or something.
Know what the states that had HRC defectors have in common? They were caucus states. Look for rules to be rewritten to prevent that from happening in future. Was that the intent of the faithless electors? I doubt it. But you’ll have a lot of convincing to do if you think this exercise of not voting for Clinton did more good than harm.
As far as I am concerned, getting rid of caucuses is moving higher on my list of reforms. They are non-representative and went overboard in proving it even after the election. Again, congratulations or something.
Politics is a team sport, and needs to be played as such. Play as a team and play to win, or you will not.
David Leonhardt/NY times:
In sum: McCrory tried to change the election’s rules to help himself; pretended he did not lose afterward; and is ultimately overturning some of the election’s consequences.
If he were merely a rogue politician, this story would be a local one. But too many Republicans elsewhere have begun to ignore political traditions, and even laws, to exert power. While Democrats continue to play by more genteel rules, Republicans have subscribed to the Capone school of politics (as Sean Connery fans can recite): “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”...
In several states, Republicans have changed laws to reduce Democratic voter turnout. After Obama’s election, Mitch McConnell rallied Senate Republicans to oppose his policies — even if Republicans agreed with them! — to make Obama a failed president. This year, Republicans refused to fill a Supreme Court vacancy.
Calling out this behavior is difficult for anybody who’s not a partisan Democrat, because doing so makes you sound like a partisan. We in the media, for example, have sometimes framed the events in North Carolina as a case of “partisan polarization.”
That’s akin to reporting Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait under a headline of “Tensions Between Iraq, Kuwait Escalate.” It’s … not false.
CNN:
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced Tuesday that four more people have been charged in connection to the ongoing water crisis in Flint.
Both Darnell Earley, former Flint emergency manager, and Jerry Ambrose, former finance director and Flint emergency manager, face felony charges of false pretenses, conspiracy to commit false pretenses, misconduct in office, and a misdemeanor charge of willful neglect of duty in office. Two of the felony charges carry a penalty of 20 years in prison.
Earley and Ambrose have been charged for "their failure to protect the citizens of Flint from health hazards caused by contaminated drinking water," Schuette said.
Huffington Post:
Mitch McConnell: ‘I Didn’t Think President Trump Had A Chance Of Winning’
He didn’t expect Republicans would hold the Senate either.
Thank you, Jim Comey.
Dan Hopkins/Five Thirty Eight:
Voters Really Did Switch To Trump At The Last Minute
As to what moved these Americans in the final weeks of the campaign, the panel has little to say. The timing of James Comey’s letter to Congress — released on Friday, Oct. 28 — makes it one potential explanation. When making sense of campaigns, people often search for overarching narratives, and Comey’s letter provides a ready-made story. No less a political observer than Bill Clinton recently explained his wife’s loss by pointing to Comey’s letter.
Still, we shouldn’t discount the possibility that voters might have gravitated to Trump anyhow. Research has long suggested that over the course of a campaign, partisans come home to their party’s candidate. Between mid-October and our post-election wave, Trump picked up almost 4 percentage points from people who had backed Romney four years before, suggesting that Republican identifiers were doing just that. Trump’s media coverage in the final two weeks was markedly more positive than it had been during the prior weeks, and it’s possible that shift in coverage was just the opening some Republicans and Republican-leaning voters needed to get behind Trump.
Philip Bump/WaPo:
Trump voters: Republicans need to change DC — and probably their policies, too
There are infinite what-ifs swirling around the results of last month's election, as is probably to be expected given the tight vote margin by which Donald Trump won his electoral college victory. What if FBI director James Comey hadn't sent that letter? What if Hillary Clinton had spent more time in Michigan? What if it hadn't been Clinton at all at the top of the ticket? What if, what if, what if?
That third question may bubble back to the top of the conversation this week, thanks to a new poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. The pollsters asked Trump voters why they ended up backing his candidacy, offering a short list of options from which people could pick. The most common reason people cited as their most important for backing the Republican? To keep Clinton from getting to the White House.
Partisanship wins if the other side is more united than ours, not on policy, but on winning. More, same author:
That's the quandary for folks like House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Their constituencies overlap with Trump's -- he won both Ryan's House district and McConnell's home state. But they won while running as members of the Republican establishment, and in Washington they lead caucuses made up largely of people in the same position. They're the D.C. that Trump voters want to change, offering the policies about which Trump voters are indifferent.
The irony, of course, is that Trump isn't heading to the White House with many detailed policy proposals of his own that can be juxtaposed with what the Ryan-McConnells have to offer. Trump voters want new policies and change and Trump is happy to oblige -- but that change exists as a nebulous idea, not as a detailed, countervailing platform. Trump's shown willingness to break old traditions, certainly, but we'll see what happens when that willingness conflicts with the core beliefs of the status quo.
Those core beliefs hurt people, and policy isn’t easy to implement. For example, WSJ:
Trump Counties Would See Big Impact From Obamacare Repeal
When he campaigned for president, Donald Trump made repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act a signature issue. Polling suggests that such a move would have the biggest impacts on communities that gave Mr. Trump some of his highest levels of support, potentially complicating the politics of a repeal effort.
More than 20 million Americans now depend on the ACA, also known as Obamacare, for health insurance. Data from Gallup indicate that a lot of those people live in counties that favored Mr. Trump.
The Gallup data, analyzed with the county typology from the American Communities Project, show that eight county types have seen increases in health insurance coverage greater than the national average. Six of those types — representing about 77 million people or 33 million votes, a quarter of the total cast — sided with Mr. Trump, some by very large margins.
Nicholas Bagley/Incidental Economist talks about what’s coming:
Patching Obamacare at the state level
If Congress zeroes out the individual mandate—and my hunch is that it will—it’s game over for the exchanges, even if subsidies continue to flow for years. In many states, the exchanges are already precarious. Without the spur to get healthy people into the market, adverse selection will do its inexorable work.
Congress may try to devise an alternative—a continuous-coverage requirement, perhaps, or maybe auto-enrollment. But those alternatives probably can’t be passed in a reconciliation bill because they don’t involve revenues or outlays. Even if one or the other is adopted, it’s unlikely to be effective enough to forestall huge premium spikes for 2018 coverage.
So unless Republicans opt to retain the mandate for several years, the states should brace themselves for the collapse of their individual insurance markets. It’s that simple.
Sarah Kliff/Vox talk about what maybe can be done state level;
Colorado is exploring how to keep its Obamacare marketplace after Obamacare repeal
Could the Obamacare marketplaces survive without Obamacare? Kevin Patterson, who runs Colorado’s state marketplace, thinks so.
Patterson is the chief executive of Connect for Health Colorado, and he knows that within a few weeks, Republicans will likely repeal the Affordable Care Act. Their repeal plans don’t typically include keeping the marketplaces that Obamacare set up, where people on the individual market can shop for and compare different health insurance plans.
But Patterson is working to change that. He is currently exploring how to keep an Obamacare marketplace open in a post-Obamacare era, continuing to use the technology the state built as a way to make shopping for insurance easier.