Wednesday morning posts are often too early to pick up the best of the election result takes from Tuesday night. We did better than expected in quiet SC and were disappointed (but not discouraged) in marquee GA.
In any case, today’s read is less expensive than a GA-06 primary.
Nathan Gonzales/Roll Call:
Eleven Things I Think I Think After the Georgia and South Carolina Special Elections
One of the best parts about covering elections is that there is a final result. What seems like an endless stream of campaigning and ads and analysis finally comes to an end every time with vote tallies to digest until the next round.
President Donald Trump and the Republicans continue to play with electoral fire, but pulled off two more special election victories; this time in Georgia’s 6th District and South Carolina’s 5th District. As with the previous results in Kansas and Montana, there are enough tidbits in each result to formulate whatever conclusion helps you sleep better at night.
4. It’s possible for Democrats to lose special elections in Kansas, Montana, and even suburban Atlanta and still have momentum in the cycle. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets on January 21 in protest of Trump’s inauguration. Townhall protests are packed with activists angry and the Republican-controlled government. A 30-year old former Hill staffer raised over $22 million in five months. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reported adding 2.4 million people to its email list this year and received online donations from 167,000 first-time donors. The committee raised $9.3 million in May compared to the NRCC's $6.5 million. Democrats haven’t cracked the code in these races, but they have time to harness the energy before next year. Democrats won special elections before losing big in 2010 and Republicans won special elections before losing big in 2006.
James Hohmann/WaPo on Ga-06 (pre-results):
But the polling does not capture the full story. In dozens of interviews on the ground over three days, most Republicans and many independents who have concerns about the House bill stressed that they still detest Obamacare. Their expectations might seem unreasonable to anyone who is closely following the debate or is steeped in the complexities of public policy, but they believe Donald Trump can and should enact a replacement plan that will both reduce their costs and improve their quality of care.
No matter where people fall in the debate, virtually everyone cares deeply about the outcome. The Journal-Constitution survey, conducted the week before last, found that 81 percent of likely voters describe health care as an “extremely” or “very” important “priority” to them, larger than any other issue by far.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
There are three lessons we might tentatively extract. First, we are seeing the parties divide on class and educational lines; how quickly that takes place and how effectively each party is able to find new voters while holding on to a chunk of its existing electorate will determine the results in 2018 and 2020. Second, both sides have nearly 18 months before the “real” midterms. Rather than dwell on the Georgia 6th District election, both would do well to intensify recruitment and use the remainder of the year to drive home their policy messages. Finally, we should remember that the single biggest determinant of midterm results is the favorability of the sitting president. Right now, that should keep Republicans up at night.
Democrats can take solace in seeing their candidates vastly overperform in what should be easy seats for Republicans. Nevertheless, nothing can compete with tallying an outright win. A Democratic victory would have sent a wave of panic through GOP ranks. A loss leaves them anxious, if not a bit exasperated. For now, Republicans averted outright disaster.
This is what’s really important:
Josh Marshall/TPM:
As a political matter, Democrats should be shouting from the rooftops about McConnell’s secrecy. But they should also be hitting what we know, what is really all but certain: that the net effect of this bill will be to deprive tens of millions of Americans of the coverage they currently have – whether that’s because of the loss of market subsidies, Medicaid expansion or because of the curtailment of regulations which allowed various classes of individuals to purchase coverage at realistic rates.
On the extremely notional off chance that Senate Republicans are inexplicably keeping secret a plan that does something different, it is really on them to let everyone know. Journalists should not let McConnell’s secrecy prevent them from providing clarity to readers about the impact of what is coming. Opponents of Trumpcare, who obviously operate from a very different set of priorities and equities, should also not hobble themselves.
Franklin Foer/Atlantic with a very long but very interesting essay about the D party future:
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?
If the party cares about winning, it needs to learn how to appeal to the white working class.
By the spring of 2016, one top Clinton adviser explained to me, the campaign’s own polling showed that white voters without a college degree despised Clinton. The extent of their loathing was surprising—she polled far worse with them than Obama ever had, especially in states like Ohio and Iowa. Trump compounded her challenge. From the moment he announced his candidacy, he aimed his message at the white working class. He pursued that group with steadfastness. The threat that he might capture an unusually large chunk of it persuaded Clinton to pursue professionals with even greater intensity in an attempt to offset Trump’s potential gains.
With hindsight, it’s possible to see the risks of her strategy. Her campaign theorized that dentists, accountants, and middle managers needed to fully understand how Donald Trump surrounded himself with bigots and anti-Semites. “From the start,” she argued in a sharply worded speech in August, “Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia.” Her campaign ads against Trump emphasized his misogyny. The attacks highlighted Trump’s greatest weakness, but also played to his greatest strength. Trump had spent the entirety of his campaign trying to foment a culture war, and Clinton zealously joined it. He talked endlessly about political correctness—trying to convince his voters that they weren’t just losing the debates over gay marriage or immigration, but that the elite wanted to banish them as bigots if they even dared to question the prevailing liberal view. Clinton boosted that cause when she told donors in September, “To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ ” It was meant to be a sotto voce comment, but that’s never how it works, as Mitt Romney could confirm…
Demography’s long arc may yet favor the Democrats, but in the meantime the U.S. electoral system penalizes a party with support concentrated within and around metropolises. White voters without college educations remain a vast voting bloc—especially important to Democrats in Senate races and in contests to control state governments. As the Democrats seek to recover, they need a deeper understanding of the forces that have driven these voters beyond the party’s reach...
To win again, the Democrats don’t need to adopt an alien agenda or back away from policies aimed at racial justice. But their leaders would be well advised to change their rhetorical priorities and more directly address the country’s bastions of gloom. The party has been crushed—not just in the recent presidential election, but in countless down-ballot elections—by its failure to develop a message that can resonate with people beyond the core members of the Obama coalition, and by its unwillingness to blare its hostility to crony capitalism. Polling by the group Priorities USA Action shows that a stunning percentage of the voters who switched their allegiance from Obama to Trump believe that Democratic economic policies favor the rich—42 percent, nearly twice the number who consider that to be true of Trump’s agenda.
LobeLog:
Saudi Bullying of Qatar: A Spurious Game of Thrones Crumbling
Let’s be clear, the Saudi-UAE war-like action against Qatar would not have been attempted on such a scale without these two states believing—rightly or wrongly—that they had a green light from Washington. Yet, the Saudis have already failed. Their action was not about Qatar or Qatar’s support of terrorism. It was all about facing down Iran. The Saudis targeted Qatar hoping to divert Washington away from three main issues that have bedeviled them and, therefore, to bring them two ultimate prizes. So far, the gamble has not paid off.
The Saudis used their well-oiled public relations and influence-peddling machine in Washington, together with the lavishly financed anti-Qatar campaign by the UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaibi, to discredit Qatar and poison the view of senior policymakers in the Trump administration against the tiny, rich emirate. The Saudis underscored this “hearts and minds” campaign to woo the administration with the unprecedented adulation they showered on the president during his recent visit to Saudi Arabia. They obviously succeeded in selling him a fake bill of goods detailing the grievous sins against Qatar, which unfortunately he bought lock, stock, and barrel.
According to a less charitable explanation in The New York Times over the weekend, President Trump has made millions of dollars over the years in real estate and golf course deals with Saudi and UAE royals, but not with Qatar. Accordingly, his immediate support of the Saudi-UAE blockade of Qatar and unproven charge that Qatar is “a funder of terror at a very high level,” raise the “appearance of conflict of interest” between his roles as a businessman and president.
Bloomberg Business:
‘I Need More Mexicans’: A Kansas Farmer’s Message to Trump
Growers and dairies lobby for a path to legalization for the undocumented workers who power their businesses.
Undocumented immigrants make up about half the workforce in U.S. agriculture, according to various estimates. But that pool of labor is shrinking, which could spell trouble for farms, feedlots, dairies, and meatpacking plants—particularly in a state such as Kansas, where unemployment in many counties is barely half the already tight national rate. “Two weeks ago, my boss told me, ‘I need more Mexicans like you,’” says a 25-year-old immigrant employed at a farm in the southwest part of the state, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s trying to get his paperwork in order. “I said, ‘Well, they’re kind of hard to find.’”
Jeffrey Young/HuffPost:
The Not-So-Secret Truth About the Senate GOP’s Secret Health Care Bill
The details matter. But at its core, it’s still a massive tax cut paid for by depriving millions of health care.
Senate Republicans are hurling themselves toward passing an incredibly unpopular set of health care reforms that even they don’t understand, haven’t seen and likely won’t see until just before it hits the floor.
This rightly has raised the hackles not only of Senate Democrats and the media, but anyone who values transparency in government or is anxious about the consequences of reordering the American health care system and taking away health coverage from millions of people.
But as important as the legislation’s details will turn out out to be, there’s a simple, fundamental, incontrovertible fact about whatever the Senate health care reform bill winds up looking like: The purpose of this bill is to dramatically scale back the safety netso wealthy people and health care companies can get a massive tax cut.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Sorry, folks. The GOP’s devious strategy for ramming Trumpcare through is working.
But here’s the really key finding from the CBS News poll: Americans are in the dark about the measure. The poll finds that Americans say by 76-23 that they haven’t heard enough yet about the GOP plan to have a good understanding of it. Independents say this by 76-22.
The juxtaposition of these findings neatly underscores the profound cynicism at the core of the GOP approach. As Brian Beutler has argued, GOP leaders are not merely lying about what is in the bill. They are also lying about the process itself, because copping to what they are actually doing would implicitly admit that their bill — which is very likely to be almost as cruel in its broad strokes as the House bill — cannot survive genuine public debate. This new polling illuminates the point: Republican leaders are willing to endure the public’s disapproval of their efforts to hide the bill from the public (to the degree that they care about that disapproval at all), precisely because those efforts are keeping the public ignorant about what they actually intend to do to our health-care system.
Axios:
A key moderate Senate Republican says she's uncomfortable with the emerging Senate health care plan, which is likely to cap Medicaid spending and shift it to a lower growth rate in 2025. "I think that's a problem. I think that sort of defeats the purpose of keeping people on, and at a level at which the program can be sustained," Sen. Shelley Moore Capito told me this morning. "I don't look favorably on it, that's for sure."
Why it matters: If Republicans lose the votes of moderates like Capito, it's hard to see how the bill can pass. Capito is from West Virginia, one of the states that expanded Medicaid.
Seth Masket/Pacific Standard:
WHAT TYPOS CAN TELL US ABOUT THIS WHITE HOUSE
Typos in official correspondence are tiny errors on their own, but they suggest a much larger problem within the administration.
The takeaway here is that, even for relatively minor letters, at least four sets of eyes typically saw the document before it got the president's signature and went in the mail. If it were a form letter (to be sent to thousands of people) or something on a particularly sensitive or shifting political topic, often more people would review it.
Once in a rare while, we'd make a mistake. Sometimes the writer, who would do most of the research on a letter, might get a particular fact wrong, and other people in the chain would defer to that person's expertise. But it would have actually been very difficult to misspell a common word and not have that caught before the letter was signed.
What does it say that this is occasionally happening in Trump's White House? There are a few possibilities. It's possible that a writer or editor has gotten some azure paper and is sending letters out outside the usual chain of command. Perhaps rules for access to the presidential signature machine have been relaxed. Maybe there just aren't enough political staffers to do the job right, or maybe people who do the typesetting have quit and not been replaced. This would be consistent with what we've seen in many other areas of this administration.
Regardless of the precise reason, it is suggestive of a larger problem within the White House organization. For a very long time, this has been a highly professional institution that has performed its official and ceremonial functions capably even when the president himself was embattled, unpopular, or under scrutiny. This may be changing.
Richard Painter and Norm Eisen/USA Today:
Robert Mueller terrifies President Trump. Of course he wants him gone.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller scares the daylights out of President Trump and the White House. The president is obsessed with the Russia investigation, refusing to let go of it on Twitter and otherwise. Many of his top aides are caught up in it, including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Almost every top White House official, including the vice president, is lawyering up. Even the president's lawyer has gotten a lawyer.
If the president or those around him have done anything wrong, Mueller represents a real threat. He is about as good a special counsel as one can imagine, having bipartisan credentials and deep prosecutorial experience — far more than the late Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. And Mueller is assembling a dream team of expert deputies. Of course the president would love an excuse to get rid of Mueller.