Jim Acosta and CNN win Round One.
The worst possible take of the Acosta ruling is that media must take care (Acosta is aggressive) and is at risk for being seen as anti-Trump. If the facts are anti-Trump, so be it; not media’s problem.
Worrying about looking bad to Republicans (and conservatives) drove Facebook's crappy decisions and drives broadcast media's crappy decisions today (Facebook is a media company). That's why there are 2 Rs to every D on Sunday shows.
"The straight news and facts are so bad for the GOP and the WH that we have to put our finger on the scale for balance" is a bad look.
Did someone say elections?
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
Those topline numbers contained a stark divergence that drove the pattern of congressional results. This year’s exit poll found that just over three-fifths of whites without a college degree approved of Trump’s performance. That helps explain why Democrats made only very modest gains in rural or heavily blue-collar House districts. (Northeast Iowa and two upstate New York seats were among the few exceptions.)
On the other side of the ledger, almost exactly three-fifths of whites with a four-year-college degree or more disapproved of Trump, as did just over 70 percent of nonwhites. That gale-force rejection powered the sweeping Democratic gains in white-collar and diverse metropolitan House districts across the country. Democrats swept away Republicans clinging to House seats in otherwise blue metropolitan areas in and around New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Northern Virginia, Miami, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Denver, Tucson, Seattle, and the northern exurbs of Los Angeles.
The recoil from Trump extended even to many of the metro areas where the GOP had maintained an advantage in recent years. Republicans lost House seats in Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, California’s Orange County, and possibly Salt Lake City. For Republican members in both varieties of suburbs, occasional votes against party positions or tepid and intermittent public quibbles with Trump’s behavior could not mollify voters dismayed by the GOP’s overall subservience to his leadership.
Yair Ghitza/Medium:
What Happened Last Tuesday: Part 2 — Who Did They Vote For
Last week, I shared the news that we at Catalist have developed a new methodology for projecting the true shape of an electorate, almost immediately following Election Day. We followed it up on Friday with estimates of the composition of the electorate, going back to 2006.
Today, we’re releasing round 2 of our results: what were the voting preferences of each group? In other words, who did they vote for? Like the last post, we’re going to focus on the national Congressional election[1], and we will be leveraging a large-scale poll conducted by YouGov, which we combine with our large-scale voter registration database. We’ll also refer back to the changes in turnout/composition described last week, to provide a fuller picture of each of the relevant groups discussed below.
Tara Golshan/Vox:
Ousted House Republican: Trump will make it almost impossible to win back the House
Republican Rep. Mike Coffman lost reelection. He blames Trump.
Coffman warns it’s only going to get harder for Republicans trying to regain a footing in the House when Trump is actually on the ballot in two years.
Coffman has a three-part theory on why he lost, but every one of his points boils down to one common denominator: Trump.
1) First, Coffman pointed out that history wasn’t on his side. After all, the party that controls the White House is usually disadvantaged in the midterms.
2) That said, Trump’s message nationalized the midterm elections and strategically abandoned vulnerable House members, Coffman thinks.
“I believe, quite frankly, that the president had a strategy of focusing on the Senate at the expense of the House,” he said. “That the map had it where that there were red states that Trump carried that had competitive Senate races and what he did was made the midterm a national election and about him.”
3) And when the race is nationalized, it was impossible to separate himself from Trump, Coffman said — especially when the party wasn’t doing it.
Jamelle Bouie/Slate:
Democrats Have Made One Thing Very Clear About 2020: They’re Over White Men
Or, why Kamala Harris looks like a likely nominee.
Democratic primary voters are still moving in the two directions shown in their choices in the 2016 presidential race. Reflecting the influence of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, they want unambiguously progressive policies. The incrementalism of Hillary Clinton’s campaign has not worn well in the face of a radical, right-wing Republican presidency. And yet, Democrats still want to make history and elevate candidates from marginal and underrepresented groups. Instead of reacting to President Trump’s misogyny and racism by favoring male candidates, Democratic voters are leaning into the multicultural and multiracial nature of their coalition, facing the president’s exclusionary rhetoric with a spirit of inclusion.
Axios:
To win re-election, President Trump must wage a two-front war: Not only does he have to defend Democratic-leaning Midwest states that sealed his victory in 2016, but he now needs to defend against clear Republican erosion in the South and Southwest.
What they're saying: "Changing demographics and Trump have blown up the electoral map that has dominated American politics since 1992," said Doug Sosnik, a White House adviser to President Bill Clinton who is one of the best trend detectors in U.S. politics.
- Why it matters: Sosnik projects that there could be more tossup states in the South and Southwest than in the Midwest — with almost twice the number of electoral votes at stake.
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
Does Trump actually believe his own hype?
Trump’s mood could be about other factors, like internal White House turmoil, or it could be about the fact that he now has to contend with House Democrats using their majority to investigate him. But according to Dawsey and Rucker, the election continues to be a source of frustration. Trump has also fixated on the Senate race in Florida, lodging conspiracy theories and alleging Democratic foul play without providing evidence.
The totality of it suggests he wasn’t exactly prepared for this outcome, which he really should have been. Perhaps he truly believed he was a popular president prepared to shock prognosticators again. Maybe he really thinks his approval rating among African Americans is 40 percent, even though there’s no conceivable way that’s true.
As indicators of how insulated from reality he often finds himself, it’s a pretty good case in point.
In non-election news:
WaPo:
Surgeons — many of them gun owners — recommend new gun-safety approaches
The American College of Surgeons’ Firearm Strategy Team represents two key kinds of insiders, Faust said: “As surgeons, they know firsthand the havoc that guns can impart. As gun owners, they understand the issues that non-gun owners might not fully appreciate.”…
James Ficke, a Johns Hopkins surgeon who served for 30 years in the Army and described himself as a life member of the NRA, expressed concern that the #thisisourlane campaign could backfire by alienating responsible gun owners and making the debate even more divisive.
“We acknowledge that we have different ‘lanes,’ but we absolutely need to interchange and align,” said Ficke, who was an author of the new report.
The authors emphasize the importance of “preserving the right to own and use a firearm” and embracing the viewpoints of gun owners.
“It’s the way we would deal with bicycle safety,” said Ronald M. Stewart, a trauma surgeon in San Antonio and a leading author of the paper. A public health approach to bicycle safety would engage with bicycle riders, he explained, because they have expertise on bicycles, understand the practicalities of riding them and also are at risk.
Natasha Bertrand/Atlantic:
What Trump’s Latest Outburst About Mueller Could Mean
The president was unusually specific in his attacks against the special counsel.
The recent rumors about forthcoming indictments have not been baseless. Donald Trump Jr. has reportedly been telling friends that he expects to be indicted as early as this month, though it’s still unknown what he would be charged with. Roger Stone has also said he is “prepared” to be indicted “for some extraneous crime pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election.” (Stone’s shifting story to the House Intelligence Committee about his interactions with WikiLeaks in 2016 may have left him exposed legally.)
And a Stone associate, the right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, said earlier this week on a live-streamed video that he’d been informed by the special counsel that he will be indicted for lying to investigators. Prosecutors apparently confronted him with phone and email records that contradicted his testimony. After repeated interrogations, “my mind was mush,” he told NBC News.
NYT:
At Brexit Crunch Time, Theresa May Takes a Pummeling
Theresa May rose to her feet before the British House of Commons on Thursday to make the sales pitch of her life, promising that the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union would be “smooth and orderly.”
It was not supposed to be a laugh line.
But the members of Parliament laughed out loud at Mrs. May. They laughed uproariously, and for long enough that she had to pause, eyes flickering over her papers, and wait for them to stop, so she could continue.
Over the past two and a half years as prime minister, Mrs. May, 62, has plenty of experience being derided and conspired against. On Thursday, the day she publicly presented her long-awaited, 585-page deal to withdraw from the bloc, or Brexit, she took such a pummeling that her survival as prime minister was in question.
David Roth with a great essay icymi:
This Is All Donald Trump Has Left
His politics, to the extent that they’ve ever been legible, have always been off-the-rack big city tabloid bullshit—crudely racist exterminate the brutes/back the blue authoritarianism in the background and ruthless petty rich person squabbling in the front. His actions since becoming president have been those of a dim, cruel child playacting at being a powerful man—giving orders without quite knowing what they mean or how they might be carried out, taunting enemies, beating up the people he can afford to beat up without having to be called to account for it, lying as needed or just for yuks. He hasn’t changed a thing since graduating from punchline to president. It’s been clear for decades that Trump was both an asshole and a dummy; this is now a problem not just for the odd unlucky cocktail waitress and his staff of cheesy apparatchiks but for literally every person on earth.
Presidents exert a kind of ambient influence on the culture, but as Trump is different than previous presidents his influence necessarily feels different. Barack Obama wanted to be a cosmopolitan leader who brought people together and into a deeper empathy through a mastery of reason and rules; the country he governed doesn’t work like that, though, and the tension between that cool vision and this seething reality grew and grew. By the end, his presidency had the feeling of a prestige television show in its fifth season—handsomely produced and reliably well-performed but ultimately not really as sure what it was about as it first appeared to be. Trump has no such pretense or noble aspiration, and has only made the country more like himself; living in his America feels like being trapped in a garish casino that is filling with seawater, because that is what it is.