Ashby Law has a very important tweet storm for everyone:
Rick Hasen/Election Law Blog:
What can be done? Ned Foley nails it for what should happen if Trump fails to concede: “To my mind, what will be key is the conduct and statements of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell as the leaders of the Republican party in Congress. If they publicly concede that Trump has lost, and the media appropriately reports the significance of their concession, the nation’s democratic system can take that as the requisite sign of closure, whatever antics Trump might engage in.”
But Ryan and McConnell need to STEP UP NOW. They should not be wimps. They should condemn this rhetoric as dangerous and say that we all, Democrats and Republicans and those of minor or no parties, support the rule of law. We will all accept the results of the election. And Donald Trump’s comments are dangerous and irresponsible.
And then after the election, maybe Republicans like Kit Bond, McConnell and Ryan can do some soul searching and call off the dangerous voter fraud rhetoric that got us here in the first place.
AZ Central after their Hillary endorsement:
How do we respond to threats after our endorsement? This is how
First, to those who called
To the anonymous caller who invoked the name of Don Bolles — he’s theRepublic reporter who was assassinated by a car bomb 40 years ago — and threatened that more of our reporters would be blown up because of the endorsement, I give you Kimberly. She is the young woman who answered the phone when you called. She sat in my office and calmly told three Phoenix police detectives what you had said. She told them that later, she walked to church and prayed for you. Prayed for patience, for forgiveness. Kimberly knows free speech requires compassion.
Business Insider:
John Kasich's dire warning for the Republican Party: EVOLVE OR DIE
Kasich: Well, I don't want to comment on media outlets, but I will tell you that if the Republican Party does not evolve, the Republican Party is going to die. The Republican Party cannot be anti-trade, anti-immigrant, not out there practicing the politics of people, you know, the issues surrounding drug addiction and mental illness and the cost of prescription drugs and healthcare and student debt and all of these things are very personal to people now. And if the party wants to have an ideological debate, it's never going to win anything in a major way. So I do believe that the party needs to evolve, or I won't be a part of it.
Read this next one carefully, it’s important:
Rick Perlstein/The Baffler:
Pundits—that is to say, the ones who aren’t stitched into their profession’s lunatic semiology, which holds that it’s unfair to call a Republican a liar unless you call a Democrat one too—have been hard at work analyzing what this all says about Mitt Romney’s character. And more power to them. But that’s not really my bag. I write long history books that are published with photos of presidents and presidential aspirants on the covers. The photos are to please the marketers: presidents sell. But my subject is not really powerful people; biography doesn’t much interest me. In my view, powerful men are but a means to the more profound end of sizing up the shifting allegiances on the demand side of our politics.
The leaders are easy to study; they stand still. We can amass reams on their pasts, catalog great quantities of data on what they say in the present. Grasping the shape of a mass public, though, is a more fugitive process. Publics are amorphous, protean, fuzzy; they don’t leave behind neat documentary trails. Studying the leaders they choose helps us see them more sharply. Political theorist James MacGregor Burns’s classic book Leadership explains that “leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers . . . in order to realize goals mutually held by both leaders and followers.” Watching charismatic people try to seize their attention and win their allegiance becomes the intellectual whetstone. As political psychologist Harold Lasswell once put it, a successful aspirant to leadership is one whose “private motives are displaced onto public objects and rationalized in terms of public interest.” Watching those private motives at work, the public they seek to convince comes into focus.
All righty, then: both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them?
Boston Globe:
At a time when trust in government is at a low point, Trump is actively stoking fears that a core tenet of American democracy is also in peril: that you can trust what happens at the ballot box.
His supporters here said they plan to go to their local precincts to look for illegal immigrants who may attempt to vote. They are worried that Democrats will load up buses of minorities and take them to vote several times in different areas of the city. They’ve heard rumors that boxes of Clinton votes are already waiting somewhere.
And if Trump doesn’t win, some are even openly talking about violent rebellion and assassination, as fantastical and unhinged as that may seem.
“If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take. . . . I would do whatever I can for my country.”
He then placed a Trump mask on his face and posed for pictures.
Dylan Matthews/Vox:
Taking Trump voters’ concerns seriously means listening to what they’re actually saying
So what is driving Trump supporters? In the general election, the story is pretty simple: What’s driving support for Trump is that he is the Republican nominee, a little fewer than half of voters always vote for Republicans, and Trump is getting most of those voters.
In the primary, though, the story was, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has explained at length, almost entirely about racial resentment. There’s a wide array of data to back this up.
Great read.
This research paper was provided by the author, J.M. Berger:
The Turner Legacy: The Storied Origins and Enduring Impact of White Nationalism’s Deadly Bible
Julia Sonensheim/Politico:
Revenge of the White Working-Class Woman
The white blue-collar vote isn’t the GOP monolith everyone thinks: It’s splitting fast, and Donald Trump is just part of the reason.
Other demographic trends might place additional weight on the current gender-political split, like the trend of white working-class women staying single for longer. Single women tend to lean to the left, and in recent years white working-class marriage rates have fallen more sharply than those of their more educated and affluent counterparts, who are more likely to delay marriage than not get married at all, according to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of Census data. (Roughly 45 percent of white working-class women are unmarried, according to GQRR’s Nancy Zdunkewicz). In a June/July national survey by GQRR, white working-class women put Trump 23 points ahead of Clinton in a three-way ballot, but when you looked at only unmarried white non-college-educated women, that gap was only 11 percent—a preview, if current trends continue, of a gap likely to grow in the future.
These gender gaps might dash Trump’s campaign hopes this election—a Democracy Corps study from earlier this year asserts that “it is statistically impossible for Trump to turn out enough angry white working-class men to surpass Clinton”—but Trump’s misfiring with the women of the white working class reflects a larger issue as old coalitions collapse and key demographics, like the white working class, are rescrambled across partisan lines….
Explicitly bringing in more white working-class voters to the Democratic tent, though, comes with risks, particularly of alienating other parts of the coalition of Latinos, African-Americans and Asians the party has built, says Gest. Exhibit A: Bernie Sanders, who won a lot of working-class support but didn’t cut it with minorities. “Democrats aren’t willing to broaden their tent at the risk of demographically ascendant groups,” Gest says.
Ruth Graham/Slate:
These Evangelical Women Speaking Out Against Trump Have More Influence Than You Think
As Anglican pastor Tyler Wigg-Stevenson smartly observed, Hatmaker has more Twitter followers than Falwell and his fellow Trump supporters Ralph Reed (former Christian Coalition head), James Dobson (Focus on the Family founder), and Tony Perkins (Family Research Council president) combined. Oh, and she has almost six times as many Facebook followers as Twitter followers. Her 2015 book about “contentment in a world of impossible standards” was a New York Times best-seller, and if you want to see her speak next week at the USF Sun Dome Arena in Tampa, it could cost you up to $149.
But these women are often underestimated as influencers, both from within the evangelical world and outside it. In conservative corners of evangelicalism, the question of whether and how women can properly serve as spiritual teachers is a sensitive topic. “I’m a guy,” a questioner asked the influential pastor and author John Piper in 2010. “Is it wrong for me to listen to Beth Moore?” It’s OK to listen, but be careful not to “become dependent on her as your shepherd,” Piper answered. “There is a certain dynamic between maleness and femaleness that when a woman begins to assume an authoritative teaching role in your life the manhood of a man and the womanhood of a woman is compromised.”
Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone (and as usual with Taibbi, impossible to excerpt, you’ll just have to read it):
In the far-right world, every successive villain has always been worse than the last. It's quaint now to think about how Al Gore was once regarded as the second coming of Lenin, or that John Kerry was a secret communist agent. Then the race element took Obama-hatred to new and horrifying places. But Trumpian license has pushed hatred of Hillary Clinton beyond all reason. If you don't connect with it emotionally, you won't get it. For grown men and women to throw around words like "bitch" and "cunt" in front of their kids, it means things have moved way beyond the analytical.
Where is it all coming from? The most generous conceivable explanation is that the anger stems from a sense of abandonment and betrayal by the political class. This doesn't explain the likes of Giuliani and Trump, but if you squint really hard, it maybe explains some of what's going on with his supporters.
Although a lot of Clinton backers believe she's being unfairly weighed down by negative reports about the Clinton Foundation and her e-mails, her most serious obstacles this year were less her faults than her virtues. The best argument for a Clinton presidency is that she's virtually guaranteed to be a capable steward of the status quo, at a time of relative stability and safety. There are criticisms to make of Hillary Clinton, but the grid isn't going to collapse while she's in office, something no one can say with even mild confidence about Donald Trump.
But nearly two-thirds of the population was unhappy with the direction of the country entering the general-election season, and nothing has been more associated with the political inside than the Clinton name.
The Guardian:
Life after Trump: Republicans brace for betrayal and civil war after 2016
Invariably, Trump supporters rejected surveys that show the Republican nominee facing a catastrophic loss. Linda Hernandez, a middle-aged Hispanic woman wearing a “Deplorables for Trump” shirt, said: “I don’t believe the polls. I believe that the liberal media is controlling everyone’s minds.”
The danger for the Republicans is that, should Trump lose, voters who have not believed the polls and the media will conclude that the party itself betrayed them. Instead of learning lessons, party members fear, Trump’s supports will believe they were stabbed in the back, as Trump has insinuated at rallies.
At least three factions of the party will struggle for control: ideologues led by Ryan, an establishment embodied by former presidents George HW and George W Bush (neither of whom endorsed Trump), and a so-called “Breitbart wing”, led by Steve Bannon of the rightwing news network, now chief executive of the Trump campaign.
Dan Drezner/WaPo:
Where are the profiles of Clinton country?
The mainstream media has reported the heck out of Trump voters. Not so much with Clinton voters. What are the reasons for this?
Clinton voters are not talking. If there has been a genre of Clinton voter stories and columns this election cycle, it’s about the quiet Clinton voters. This happened during the primary, when Clinton outperformed exit polls in many states, suggesting that Sanders voters were enthusiastic to talk to pollsters but there simply weren’t as many of them as previously thought. Indeed, Clinton voters are so quiet that in may cases even their immediate families might not know that they exist: