Here’s a hot take: Trumpism isn’t all the popular and Ed Gillespie in VA failed bigly in pushing it. Health care was the key in VA and Maine (now a Medicaid expansion state after the election). But remember Andrew Jackson’s famous words: “to the victor belongs the over-interpretations.”
The Hill:
Republican Rep. Scott Taylor (Va.) called Tuesday night’s GOP defeat in Virginia’s gubernatorial race a “referendum” on President Trump's administration.
Taylor's remark represent a break with Trump’s tweeted claim that Republican Ed Gillespie lost because the governor hopeful wouldn’t tie himself closely enough to Trump.
Blueprint for 2018: Ed Gillespie ran a deplorable campaign. And lost. I wonder if Fox will cover it?
NY Times:
Lessons from off-year elections can be overdrawn, but the Virginia race strongly suggests that Republicans running in swing states will have to choose a side rather than try to straddle an uncomfortable line. Mr. Trump’s blunt force, all-or-nothing approach has worked in deeply conservative areas, but Republicans will have trouble replicating that in certain states in the midterms next year when faced with a diverse, highly educated electorate like the one in Virginia.
“We now know what a lot of us in the party already knew: The Trump message is a big loser in swing states and he hurts the G.O.P. far more than helps in those states,” Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist and critic of the president, said in an email. “Suburban voters don’t like Trump and his antics energize Democrats. The myth of Trump electoral power will now start to melt. A wildly unpopular president is a big political problem for the G.O.P. in swing states.”
NBC:
One year after Donald Trump’s shocking election upset, many Americans who live in the key counties that propelled him to victory remain unconvinced that the country is better off now that he’s in the White House, a new poll from NBC News and The Wall Street Journal shows.
The poll, which sampled residents of 438 counties that either flipped from voting Democratic in the 2012 presidential election to Republican in 2016, or saw a significant surge for Trump last year, found that a third — 32 percent — believe the country is better off now than it was before Trump became president…
But the president gets particularly poor marks from these “Trump county” voters when it comes to improving America’s image around the world (41 percent satisfied, 57 percent dissatisfied), helping to unite the country (38 percent satisfied, 60 percent dissatisfied), improving race relations (37 percent satisfied, 59 percent dissatisfied) and improving the health care system (37 percent satisfied, 59 percent dissatisfied).
“I feel that he is tearing us apart and trying to bring more divide between the blacks and whites and Hispanics — and trying to make the rich richer and the poor poorer,” said one man from an Ohio surge county.
“He needs to shut his mouth and he needs to sit and think before he speaks,” said a woman from another surge county in the Midwest. “The economy I am not worried about. I am more worried about the world crisis and his starting a third world war.”
Frank Bruni/NY Times:
The demonstration was convincing. Not only did Northam beat his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, by about nine points — a margin of victory larger than either Clinton’s or the two-point advantage that ushered the state’s current Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, into office four years ago — but Democrats also performed strongly in other Virginia races. So strongly, in fact, that one Democrat, Danica Roem, unseated a longtime Republican incumbent in the House of Delegates and will become the nation’s only openly transgender state representative. The history that she made flies squarely in the face of the bigotry and divisiveness that Trump sows.
Just when we needed a sign that his America is not all of America, Virginia came to the rescue and gave us one. And I guarantee you that the Republicans up for re-election in 2018 saw it, shuddered and will spend the next weeks and months trying to figure out just how much trouble their party is in and precisely how to repair it. Democrats are exceedingly familiar with that feeling.
Morning Consult:
The Trump-era law-and-order message that Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Ed Gillespie embraced near the end of his campaign did not bring him over the finish line in his race against Democrat Ralph Northam, but Republican Senate candidate Corey Stewart said it will be back with full force in next year’s Senate race.
The Associated Press called Tuesday’s contest between Gillespie, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Northam, the state’s lieutenant governor, with 60 percent of precincts reporting. At the time, Northam led Gillespie, 52 percent to 47 percent.
As Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, prepares for the 2018 campaign for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, he is vowing to fully embrace President Donald Trump and his agenda in Virginia, even though the president has declined in popularity in the Old Dominion state since taking office, Morning Consult polling shows.
The best take!!
Jeet Heer/TNR:
The Democrats’ Disarray Is Good for the Party
A diverse coalition necessarily includes warring factions, and civil wars help it evolve. Bring on the recriminations!
These reports of intraparty chaos are surely dispiriting for the left, but history offers some solace. Democrats-in-disarray is not some new political meme; it’s a decades-old narrative, one that the party has confounded by continuing to exist, and even thriving for long stretches. This is not to say the narrative is entirely false, but internal discord is the natural consequence of, perhaps even essential to, the party’s makeup, which distinguishes it from the GOP. Democrats thus should not fear disarray, but embrace it.
Well, that’s one POV. Since some folks are stuck forever fighting 2016 primary wars, I supposr this is the best way to look at it
Steve Benen/MSNBC:
To win elections, Trump likes to create alternate universes
Watching Trump replace our reality with an alternate universe was, of course, disorienting, which was very likely the point. What we didn’t realize at the time, however, is that would become the first page in his playbook on how to win elections.
Virginians will go to the polls today to elect a new governor, and the president desperately hopes former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie prevails. Republicans, however, face a familiar dynamic: the Democratic incumbent enjoys fairly broad support, and Virginia has thrived in recent years.
Naturally, Trump’s solution is to once again create an alternate reality. “The state of Virginia economy, under Democrat rule, has been terrible,” the president said yesterday. He added this morning that the commonwealth is plagued by “high crime and poor economic performance.”
Whether the president understands this or not, he’s completely wrong.
John Stoehr/US News:
He's No Teflon Don
Don't buy the claim that President Trump is impervious to character attacks.
Those signals, along with Trump's troglodytic temperament, may be giving a percentage of Republican voters incentive to stop identifying as Republicans. They are calling themselves "independents." Along with self-identified Democrats, nearly all of whom categorically pan the president, the independents are pushing his disapproval rating to historic heights.
This process of "dealignment," as it's called in political science, has been happening for years, but it has since gone into overdrive. This is not to say such independents would not vote for the president again, or that they would not support Republicans. But their dealignment warns incumbent Republicans in the Congress that all is not well and to tread lightly.
Dealignment also gives rise to misinterpretation. Jeff Greenfield is a sober Washington observer, but I think he's misguided in saying recently that Trump need not worry about getting impeached, because he has the backing of his party. To be sure, polling show large majorities of Republicans favoring Trump. But, as I said, surveys do not indicate, and cannot indicate, how many Republicans have stopped identifying as Republicans. Many of them may be in fact warming up to impeachment.
Salon:
Journalists also have a “duty to warn”: Are we starting to do our jobs?
Media’s obsession with “balance” and addiction to spectacle led to disaster. Can we get back to real reporting now?
Journalists have a similar responsibility, and bear even more of it, given how flawed journalistic practices helped create our nation's current dire predicament. By adopting a set of conventions that undermined their civic commitment and even usefulness, journalists themselves have helped pave the way for Trump’s emergence, so the admonition, “Reporter, heal thyself!” is clearly in order.
Two critics of journalism struck me as particularly helpful in finding our footing, so I reached out to both for comments to build on what they’d already done. The first is NYU professor of journalism Jay Rosen, proprietor of the long-running Pressthink blog. The second is James Fallows, longtime national correspondent for the Atlantic and author of the 1996 book, "Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy." Both have had cogent responses to Trump, but it’s their appreciation of how we got here that’s even more valuable.
Politico:
As Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno vied for last-minute votes over the frenzied final days of the New Jersey governor’s race, Chris Christie never showed up on the stump. In fact, the governor has not appeared in public once to support Guadagno, who has been by his side for more than eight years.
With Christie’s approval hitting 14 percent among likely voters in a recent poll, it’s not hard to not see why. Once considered by many to be the future of the Republican party, Christie is now too toxic for the very people who helped put him in power.
Is Chris Christie’s present Donald Trump’s future?
Timothy Noah/Politico:
Does Labor Have a Death Wish?
A year ago, many union members broke with their leaders and voted for Donald Trump. He’s done almost nothing to repay them.
Trump was elected with strong support from a white working class that’s voted Republican pretty consistently in presidential elections for nearly half a century. “You can’t steal something you already possess,” I wrote in March 2016 by way of arguing that working-class voters were in no position to deliver the White House to Trump. That proved wrong for a variety of reasons, including more Latino support for Trump than for Mitt Romney in 2012—an outcome that seemed inconceivable—and poor turnout by African Americans. But another reason Trump won the presidency was that 43 percent of all union households, and a 52-percent majority of white union households, voted for Trump. No Republican had done so well with union households since Ronald Reagan’s landslide re-election in 1984.
Jill Lawrence/USA Today:
Seventeen columns in less than seven years, and I know there are more I can’t find, hidden from the world as news organizations switch technologies and erase their pasts. That’s how much this one columnist has written about gun violence.
I personally have said everything there is to say and more, again and again and again, in pleas for action after mass shootings. And you can multiply me by tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions: the politicians and the pundits, the advocates and activists and voters and letter writers. And, especially, the survivors. The families and friends. Those the murdered have left behind.