Bolded parts of excerpts are my doing. It’s the abbreviated part of the abbreviated parts.
NY Times:
Trump’s Role in Midterm Elections Roils Republicans
President Trump is privately rejecting the growing consensus among Republican leaders that they may lose the House and possibly the Senate in November, leaving party officials and the president’s advisers nervous that he does not grasp the gravity of the threat they face in the midterm elections….
If Mr. McConnell’s warning was not clear enough, Marc Short, the White House’s legislative liaison, used the dinner to offer an even starker assessment. The G.O.P.’s House majority is all but doomed, he said.
But Mr. Trump was not moved. “That’s not going to happen,” he said at different points during the evening, shrugging off the grim prognoses, according to multiple officials briefed on the conversation.
The disconnect between the president — a political novice whose confidence in his instincts was grandly rewarded in 2016 — and more traditional party leaders demonstrates the depth of the Republicans’ challenges in what is likely to be a punishing campaign year.
It’s getting so obvious even Republicans acknowledge it. No, that not complacency, nor is it a guarantee. It’s reporting.
The G Elliott Morris map and forecast can be found here, along with other modeling.
Paul Kane/WaPo:
Democrats were looking at suburban districts. Now they’re glancing toward rural ones too.
However, the more telling special elections might have been a handful in more rural districts President Trump won by overwhelming margins. Five special elections have been held for seats where Trump won 56 percent to 60 percent of the vote — in Kansas, Montana, South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Arizona — and in each of those races the Democrat did much better than expected, winning one and getting very close in two others.
Maloney wrote an after-action review 14 months ago in which his central theme was to focus on the onetime Republican strongholds in the suburbs, where Democrats have been gaining ground, at the expense of the mostly rural districts, such as the one Conor Lamb won last month in Pennsylvania….
Now, Maloney is among the Democrats suggesting that the 2018 field is dramatically larger than anyone could have guessed last year, including in some more rural spots that they once thought of ceding to Republicans.
Steve Cavendish/NY Times and a TN local:
To understand how Phil Bredesen, a former Democratic governor of Tennessee, has a chance of winning this year’s race to replace Bob Corker as the junior senator from this deep-red state, it helps to know a story making the rounds in Nashville about his likely Republican opponent, Representative Marsha Blackburn.
After returning from a 1995 trip to Los Angeles to drum up support for the Tennessee film industry, Ms. Blackburn, the executive director of the state’s Film, Entertainment and Music Commission, submitted her expense receipts to the office of the Republican governor, Don Sundquist.
The office sent them back, saying that a limousine was inappropriate for a state official. Ms. Blackburn said she didn’t hire a limo, but paid the charges; she then set the receipts on fire and sent the ashes to her superiors with a note: “Copy of L.A. expense report as requested!”
The story would remain a fun bit of political lore, save for one detail: Today those ashes are in the care of a Bredesen staffer. Someone in Mr. Sundquist’s circle saved them, waiting for a chance to pass them along to the right person with a pointed message: There are a lot of Republicans waiting to see Marsha Blackburn fall.
G Elliott Morris/blog:
Republicans are Switching Sides
Not only did the Arizona special election show that large Democratic overperformance is happening in high-turnout environments, it also suggested (almost proved) that Republicans are casting ballots for Democrats. Here’s why:
In the 150k early ballots cast in the contest, Republicans had a 21 point lead on party registration. That is, they cast 49% of early ballots, and Democrats cast just 28% with Independents casting 23%. If these groups broke out like we would expect — 100% of Democrats voted for the Democrat, 100% for Republicans, and half of Independents went either way — then the Democratic candidate Hiral Tipierneni would have won just 39.5% of these early voters.
Persuasion, folks. Persuasion. If you can do it without losing your base, do it.
Public Opinion Quarterly, special issue, free article, Nicholas A Valentino Carly Wayne Marzia Oceno:
Mobilizing Sexism: The Interaction of Emotion and Gender Attitudes in the 2016 US Presidential Election
The outcome of the 2016 US presidential election cycle generated a great deal of attention about the political psychology of the average American voter. A familiar narrative was that authoritarianism, perhaps triggered by fears of cultural and economic change, was the primary driver of support for Donald Trump. This article argues that sexism has been underestimated as a political force, especially given the angry emotional climate. The article first explores the electoral role of sexism early in the campaign, finding that sexism powerfully predicted vote choice even after controlling for authoritarianism, partisanship, and other predispositions. Second, the article analyzes American National Election Studies time-series data to examine the impact of sexism in recent presidential elections, demonstrating that 2016 was the only year in which it played a large and significant role. Finally, a survey experiment tests the theorized causal mechanism underlying sexism’s influence: the catalyzing power of anger versus fear. Fear sharply reduced sexism’s impact on support for Trump relative to those who experienced anger. Further, anger powerfully mobilized sexists, a group that would normally be likely to stay home. These results illuminate the role that emotional undercurrents play in catalyzing group-based predispositions into politics.
Nathan Bomey book excerpt/Detroit Free Press:
Why Americans stopped trusting the news
We have entire professions devoted, at least to some degree, to spinning the facts. Public relations. Marketing. Lobbying. Law. Politics. People in those fields are paid to present a filtered version of the truth to their target audiences. And we need them to do their jobs effectively. They should not have to give up their right to bend the truth.
But how much can you bend the truth before it breaks?
As former US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is often said to have decreed, “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
He was right, too. With all due respect to the late Moynihan, however, few of us live by that standard. For most of us, facts are fungible and shapeable. There’s no one who better exemplifies this than President Donald Trump, who trampled the truth en route to the White House.
On the White House Correspondents Dinner:
Vox:
Michelle Wolf skewers Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the White House correspondents’ dinner
Michelle Wolf joins Larry Wilmore, Seth Meyers, and Stephen Colbert on the list of comics to ruffle feathers at the White House correspondents’ dinner.
I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.
Molly Roberts/WaPo:
Michelle Wolf got it just right
The correspondents’ dinner supposedly celebrates the rapport that journalists have with the people they cover. This three-course fete of access journalism has always made some skeptics queasy, but after the Trump administration’s active attempts to undermine every organization in the room Saturday that doesn’t treat the president as an unassailable dear leader, it’s hard to pretend that the fourth estate and its subjects can carry on a relationship that’s adversarial and respectful all at once.
That Wolf’s performance was not “normal” for the correspondents’ dinner is a testament to its timeliness and necessity — nothing is “normal” right now, and pretending otherwise out of a false sense of the fourth estate’s friendship with the executive would have been the real disgrace. Wolf called the Trump administration out for tearing down democracy. Then, the people who are supposed to care most about holding autocrats to account called her out in turn for, essentially, not being chummy enough.
That persistent chumminess is why Wolf’s performance, in the end, wasn’t really for the press.
This is a good time to remind you of some of the worst punditry of all time (2006 WHCD, Colbert hosting, Richard Cohen pontificating):
First, let me state my credentials: I am a funny guy. This is well known in certain circles, which is why, even back in elementary school, I was sometimes asked by the teacher to "say something funny" -- as if the deed could be done on demand. This, anyway, is my standing for stating that Stephen Colbert was not funny at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. All the rest is commentary.
The commentary, though, is also what I do, and it will make the point that Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.
Take criticism in context.
Meanwhile, Trump was running his usual comedy schtick to the same old audience (WaPo):
Less than 20 minutes into the speech, as Trump jumped from assailing former FBI director James B. Comey to the European Union in a speech that appeared largely unscripted, some in the mostly white and older crowd headed for the exits.
At nearly 80 minutes long, the rambling tour d’horizon was lengthier than most State of the Union addresses and featured nods to space travel, the price of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, promises of “crystal clean water,” entertainer Kanye West and plans to rehabilitate local infrastructure.
Carolyn Kormann/New Yorker:
Scott Pruitt’s Crusade Against “Secret Science” Could Be Disastrous for Public Health
A twenty-seven-page draft of the policy is currently circulating online. For a document about “strengthening transparency,” it is exquisitely opaque, favoring phrases such as “parametric concentration-response models” and “spatial heterogeneity.” Dockery said that what concerned him most about the rule was its implications for chemical exposure. “The way we regulate new chemicals is that they are assumed to be safe until it’s proven that they have a deleterious effect,” he said. In Europe, by contrast, new chemicals are subject to stricter regulations. Companies “have to show that a chemical is not harmful before putting it into the marketplace,” Dockery said. But many of those European studies rely on non-public data, meaning that, under the new rule, they would be excluded from the E.P.A.’s consideration. The agency is seeking public comment about the new rule for thirty days. Dockery expects it to be approved.
I guess a risk communications consultant somewhere hasn’t learned the lessons. Letters like this are not spontaneous, and it’s obvious to everyone (except the high-paid consultant) that they aren’t the answer to a problem.
Mike Konczal/The Nation:
Actually, Guns Do Kill People
The research is now clear: Right-to-carry laws increase the rate of violent crime.
What makes this new report so convincing? First, there’s simply a lot more experience with right-to-carry laws: 33 states adopted such legislation between 1981 and 2007. There’s also a lot more data: The researchers were able to track crime statistics until 2014.
Starting in the early 1990s, violent crime plummeted across the United States. That reduction has masked the effects of right-to-carry laws, but the states that implemented them showed a smaller decrease in violent crime than the ones that didn’t. By itself, this isn’t sufficient evidence, since there could be other factors involved. But the study’s authors used a variety of controls to compare the two sets of states, and they found that the increase in violent crime holds. Interestingly, with the additional data, they found that even the methods of researchers like Lott and Mustard confirm this rise.
This thread explains a bit about the Joy Reid thing and our own memories:
There is no conceivable reason to post this video, so naturally I did: