So much of what happens Tuesday is Donald Tump’s doing. Republicans, you brought it on yourself.
Adam Serwer/Atlantic:
The Cruelty Is the Point
President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear
The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.
Because, in the end, what’s more important than owning the libs? Certainly not making this country a stronger place, or, you know, helping its citizens.
By the way, saying “I can handle a win or a loss, but they can’t” is a big tell. We will get to see if he is right about handling a loss.
Ishaan Tharoor/WaPo:
Trump deploys the fascist playbook for the midterms
President Trump’s message is as clear as it is ugly: Fearmongering about illegal immigration will deliver his party the votes it needs to retain control of Congress. And so, in the final stretch before next week’s midterm election, the president and his allies have launched a blitzkrieg of misinformation.
In a move unprecedented in modern American history, Trump ordered thousands of active-duty troops to the border to intercept a caravan of Central American migrants, casting them as a menacing “invasion” of “unknown Middle Easterners” and other shadowy elements. His allies at right-wing media outlets spread lurid conspiracy theories about liberals enabling disease-bearing foreigners to infiltrate the country.
Peter Hamby/Vanity Fair:
“BLOWING SMOKE”: SORRY, PUNDITS, BUT YOU HAVE NO CLUE WHAT WILL HAPPEN ON TUESDAY
Electorates mutate every two years. Using past turnout patterns can be useful when modeling a universe of voters, but the polls cannot tell us with certainty what will happen on Election Day anymore. In a volatile environment where Trump has saturated every inch of our cultural fabric with politics, who the hell knows what’s going to happen
The Virginia result went mostly unexamined after the results came in, as everyone in politics quickly moved on to the latest Trump thing. But the question of why Northam outperformed the polls, and why polls continue to wield such mystical power over the political press, is worth keeping in mind as America prepares to head to the polls next Tuesday. Every piece of evidence we have about voting behavior during the Trump presidency—special elections in various corners of the country, public and internal polls, early voting data in key states—indicates that we are heading for a midterm election with explosively high turnout. University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, who studies voting patterns, estimated recently that almost 50 percent of eligible voters could cast ballots this year, a turnout level not seen in a midterm election in 50 years. Trump, in his way, is loudly trying to juice Republican turnout in red-leaning Senate races by demagoguing the threat of illegal border crossings, which happen to be at their lowest point in decades.
Good piece. Here are two who might, though: Jon Ralston (NV) and Steve Schale (FL).
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
Trump Is in Triage Mode
The president’s offensive on immigration is linked to his party’s struggle to build support for key pieces of its economic agenda
Butch Otter, the outgoing Republican governor of Idaho, didn’t attract nearly as much attention for his big announcement on Tuesday as President Donald Trump did when he pledged to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship.
But Otter’s endorsement of a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid in one of the nation’s most conservative states explains as much about the GOP’s situation in the 2018 midterm election as Trump’s legally implausible gambit; in fact, Otter’s move helps explain Trump’s.
In the final days of the midterm campaign, Trump and other Republicans are focusing their closing arguments on cultural confrontations, from immigration to the bitter confirmation fight over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Otter’s announcement illuminates one key reason the party is placing so many chips on culture: GOP candidates appear to have lost faith that they can win the argument with voters over the key policies in their economic agenda, especially the longtime effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the huge tax cut Trump signed late last year.
Voters have rejected the GOP agenda. So Trump turns to lies, fear and hatred. It’s a twofer (also gets to own the libs). Too bad it’s not working.
Christopher Stroop/Religion Dispatch:
Evangelical PR Blitz Before Midterms Won’t Fix The ‘81% Problem’
Evangelicals—and those who are strongly invested in a “respectable” image for evangelicalism—now seem to be making a concerted effort to push back ahead of the midterm election
The problem is that efforts to better understand evangelicals all too often manifest as a reluctance to be critical and a failure to include the perspectives of both exvangelicals and policy researchers, both of whom are knowledgeable and have legitimate concerns about widespread evangelical tendencies toward the rejection of pluralism and attempts to impose theocracy. In 2014, according to a Christian Post report, an evangelical Times editor, Michael Luo, “told an audience at The King’s College… that whenever his colleagues at the New York Times do happen to botch a report that casts Evangelical Christians in an unfair light, that it is mostly due to ignorance.” Although charges of unfairness are often spurious and a manifestation of conservative evangelicals’ persecution complex, it’s clear why editors and reporters might be reluctant to bring their full critical faculties to bear on evangelical subculture, particularly given how alien it is to many of them.
As a result, in order to avoid kerfuffles, major media outlets often have reporters who are current or former evangelicals, or who are extremely friendly to evangelicals, do the lions’ share of the coverage of evangelicalism. In the Washington Post, evangelicals largely cover themselves. Both Michael Gerson and Sarah Pulliam Bailey are graduates of Wheaton College, arguably the epicenter of “respectable” evangelicalism. And a handful of evangelicals who have become experts at presenting a moderate face to the media are far and away the most frequently quoted sources. Their answers to softball questions are left unchallenged, and there is little or no probing into those areas in which exvangelicals and policy researchers would easily see answers as incomplete or outright disingenuous.
NY Times:
Fired Up’ Voters in 18 States Are Outpacing 2014 Early Ballot Counts
“We’re in uncharted territory with the size of this vote,” said Michael P. McDonald, an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida who tracks early voting. “In some states, it’s closer to the presidential election than to the 2014 midterm election.”
Thirty-seven states and Washington permit no-excuse early voting, with policies and deadlines varying by state. Most of these states also allow absentee voting.
Populous states like Texas, which has a closely watched Senate race and a handful of competitive House races this year, are giving a big boost to overall advance voting turnout. But early turnout is high even in some states without competitive elections, like Maryland and Louisiana.
Belonging to the community:
Not belonging to the community (in Trump’s mind):
Will Sommer/Daily Beast:
BLEXIT BOOBOO
Pro-Trump Activists Blame Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens for Losing Kanye West
‘They really over-grifted that situation.’
“So we lost Kanye. I guess we’ll make do with Scott Adams and James Woods,” Wintrich said, referring to the Dilbert creator and Casino actor, respectively, who have both become prominent Trump supporters on Twitter.
Wonkblog/WaPo:
Congress thinks the public is way more conservative than it actually is. Deep-pocketed lobbyists are to blame, according to new research.
Overall, the researchers found, aides in Democratic offices better understood public opinion in their districts by a margin of about 13 percentage points. But with the exception of Obamacare repeal, Democratic aides sided with their Republican colleagues in assuming their constituents were more conservative on the issues than they actually were.
“Overall, we find a conservative bias in staffers’ estimations,” the authors write.
Helaine Olen/WaPo:
A new lawsuit reveals how the predatory world of get-rich-quick scams explains Trump
Multilevel marketing, also known as network marketing, is a sales plan that people buy into — the $499 start-up fee that ACN charged its recruits for the “opportunity” to sell video phones is not uncommon. They then have the right to purchase and sell the product promoted. The lure: It’s a great product, and it will make you lots of money. Trump claimed, for example, that joining Trump Network offered its salespeople an opportunity for “unlimited income potential.”
But it’s not selling the goods — be they vitamins, telephones or the scads of others products out there, ranging from Amway (the origins of the DeVos family fortune) to sports drinks, scented candles and jewelry — that earns a payday for eager salespeople. The real money comes when they can persuade others to sign up and sell the company’s products, too. People who enroll in multilevel marketing businesses are explicitly instructed to reach out to friends, families, children’s schoolteachers, work acquaintances and almost anyone in their extended network to talk up the business, its products and the opportunity it represents. It reduces all human interactions to potential commercial transactions, ones that can be monetized for personal profit and gain.
NY Times:
Trump’s Nationalism Is Breaking Point for Some Suburban Voters, Risking G.O.P. Coalition
To see incumbent Republicans like Mr. Culberson or Representative Pete Sessions, whose district is in an affluent part of the Dallas area, locked in difficult re-elections “would have been unthinkable just a few years ago,” said Mr. Straus.
More ominous for the G.O.P. is that the desertion of educated whites following Mr. Trump’s 2016 win could establish a new Democratic coalition in future elections, one that would certainly return to the polls in 2020. That would represent the mirror opposite of 1964, when Barry Goldwater lost the presidential race but made inroads into traditionally Democratic precincts among culturally conservative and economically prosperous voters — presaging Republican success further down the ballot in the years to come.
Just as Goldwater began unmooring conservative whites away from their Democratic roots, it is easy to see which demographic could shift most fundamentally on Election Day: college-educated white women, who were once fairly reliable Republican supporters. The impact of Mr. Trump with these voters is unmistakable: they supported Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama by six percentage points in 2012, before backing Hillary Clinton by seven points four years later.
This not a surprise. In fact, if you have been following me, I said this might happen and it’s why it’s worth keeping communication lines open with ex-Trump voters and Never Trumpers. Not rally voters, a lost cause. But non crazy conservatives, the ones who are repelled at “the shootings and bombings broke our momentum” as if that’s all it meant. And yes, they exist.
Take their vote, and say ‘thanks’ rather than ‘what took you so long’. Stifle it, for the good of the country. You can always change your mind about it later.
Chris Truax/USA Today, Republican:
Trump bears moral responsibility for pipe bombs. Denying it just makes things worse
Nonetheless, the argument being put forward by even traditionally responsible conservatives such as Hugh Hewitt is that no matter how “enthusiastic” their rhetoric, it is deeply unfair to blame political figures for the acts of their most fanatical and obsessive followers.
History of Trump fans threatening violence
This is profoundly hypocritical. The people now defending Trump’s rhetoric are the first people to condemn Muslims who preach contempt for their perceived “enemies” in the West, and they are right to do so. While the vast majority of Muslims will not respond with violence, there is a fanatical fringe that will. But Trump’s defenders cannot, then, disavow responsibility when their own fanatics take up arms against the “traitors” and “enemies of the people” whom they themselves have preached against.
Perhaps even more disturbing is the reflexive “whataboutism” that seeks to absolve Trump of responsibility for these attacks by pointing to excesses on the left. What about Rep. Maxine Waters? What about "antifa" far-left militant groups? What about liberal mobs chasing Trump’s supporters out of restaurants?