Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) called out his Republican colleagues on the floor of the House today for offering “stunts instead of solutions, extremism over bipartisanship.” It’s a shame, he said, because the Republicans’ narrow majority “could have given us a chance to work together in a bipartisan way.” Instead, Republicans have caved to their most extreme members, who have been “skipping their real jobs to take day trips up to New York to try to undermine Donald Trump's criminal trial.”
McGovern suggested that perhaps they were trying “to distract from the fact that their candidate for president has been indicted more times than he's been elected” and “is on trial for covering up hush money payments to a porn star for political gain not to mention three other criminal felony prosecutions.”
Representative Jerry Carl (R-AL), the temporary chair at the time, rebuked McGovern, who noted that the fact that the former president is in a court of law is the truth. Just last week, McGovern pointed out, a Republican member of the House was not admonished when he complained about “the former president of the United States being hauled into court day after day with a sham trial.”
Carl reminded McGovern that members “must avoid personalities in debates.”
McGovern replied: “[A]t some point, it's time for this body to recognize that there is no precedent for this situation. We have a presumptive nominee for president facing 88 felony counts, and we're being prevented from even acknowledging it. These are not alternative facts. These are real facts. A candidate for president of the United States is on trial for sending a hush money payment to a porn star to avoid a sex scandal during his 2016 campaign and then fraudulently disguising those payments in violation of the law. He's also charged with conspiring to overturn the election. He's also charged with stealing classified information, and a jury has already found him liable for rape in a civil court. And yet, in this Republican-controlled house, it's okay to talk about the trial, but you have to call it a sham.”
Representative Erin Houchin (R-IN) demanded McGovern’s words be stricken from the record. The chair agreed to do so, saying that “it is a breach of order to refer to the candidate in terms personally offensive, whether by actually accusing or merely insulting.” Republicans banned McGovern from speaking on the floor for the rest of the day. McGovern observed: “You can only talk about the trial on the House Floor if you're using it to defend Donald Trump.”
It was curious timing for extremists to silence a Massachusetts lawmaker.
In 1836, Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed a resolution to table, or put aside without action or discussion, all petitions relating to slavery. Repeatedly thereafter, former president John Quincy Adams, now representing Massachusetts in the House, rose to read a petition and was silenced. But the First Amendment protects the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances—King George III had pointedly rejected the colonists’ 1775 Olive Branch Petition trying to avoid war, and the framers of the new government wanted to be clear that people had a right to be heard—and people in the North increasingly understood the silencing of those who were determined to stop debate over slavery as an attack on their constitutional rights.
The House got rid of the “gag rule” in 1844, but just twelve years later, on May 22, 1856—exactly 168 years ago today—South Carolina representative Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate after Sumner criticized southern enslavers, particularly Brooks’s relative South Carolina senator Andrew Butler.
The gist of Sumner’s speech was that a small minority of men were trying to impose their will on the majority of the American people by forcing enslavement on the territory of Kansas, much as enslavers like Butler forced themselves on the women they enslaved. Sumner’s speech was insulting, but beating him into a welter of blood while he sat at his Senate desk for representing his constituents suggested that enslavers would tolerate no dissent.
Jodi Kantor, Aric Toler, and Julie Tate tonight broke the story in the New York Times that the upside-down U.S. flag associated with the January 6 insurrectionists was not the only anti-American flag Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito displayed. In at least July and September 2023, over his beach house in New Jersey there flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag like the one carried by January 6 rioters. This banner is also known as the “Pine Tree flag,” but it is not the same one currently under consideration to become Maine’s state flag.
This flag represents the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. As Ishaan Jhaveri of Columbia University’s Tow Center in the Graduate School of Journalism explained in 2021, in the days of the American Revolution, the flag “was meant to symbolize the right of armed revolution in the face of tyranny.”
But in 2013 the flag was the symbol of a group working to put Christians into public office to create a government based on their ideology. In 2015, those trying to stop the Supreme Court from legalizing gay marriage flew the flag; in 2016, supporters of the militias that occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge did so, too. In 2017 the flag was behind Trump when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and in 2020, those opposed to Covid shutdowns carried it.
More recently, the January 6 rioters carried it, and so have neo-Nazis. It is the same flag that House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) displays outside of his congressional office. Scholar of religion Bradley Onishi noted: “It’s a flag symbolizing Christian revolution. It’s used by extremists.”
These extremists appear to have turned to Trump, who is, as McGovern pointed out, facing 88 felony counts and is currently on trial for paying off a sex partner in order to prevent voters from hearing about their encounter and then violating the law to hide the payments, because they believe he will crash through the laws and bureaucracy that are designed to protect the democratic institutions that would stop them from seizing power.
And now it turns out that a flag representing the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, that the people should engage in armed revolution against tyranny, and that the United States should be a nation based in Christian theology has been flying over the home of Justice Alito, who is supposed to be defending the United States Constitution impartially. Alito wrote the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
Election columnist Laura Bassett of The Cut wrote: “The [A]lito flag story does not teach me anything new about his politics but it does reveal how confident he is that nobody can do anything about him.”
There is indeed a sense of power and entitlement coming from MAGA Republicans as they impose new limits on their fellow Americans and call those constraints freedom. Lori Rozsa of the Washington Post today noted that Florida governor Ron DeSantis is rewriting the history of the summer of 1964, made famous as Black and white organizers fanned out in Mississippi to register Black Americans to vote, by launching his own, new “Freedom Summer.” From May 27 through September 2, bridges in the state are prohibited from displaying rainbow colors for Pride Month in June, orange for National Gun Awareness Month, or yellow for Women’s Equality Day. The only colors they can display are red, white, and blue.
“Thanks to the leadership of Gov[ernor] Ron DeSantis,” Florida Department of Transportation secretary Jared Perdue wrote on X, “Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation.”
It was Stephen Colbert who, perhaps, put it best. MAGA, he said, now apparently stands for Make America Germany Again in 1938. Go ahead, chuckle—that came hot on the heels of Trump announcing that he wanted to create a “unified Reich,” alongside some fairly fascist imagery.
That’d be literally Nazi stuff, by the way.
So. Do you remember when we used to warn of all this, and, sigh, yawn, shrug, scream, we’d be attacked as alarmists and hysterics and so forth. Here we are, a front-runner for President literally saying the Nazi part out loud. Shortly after that, by the way, one of the far-right’s leaders in Germany caused a furore by defending…wait for it…the SS.
This is where we are, my friends. As I often say, we were right, yet they hate us for it, and that’s why they’re losing…to the…self-proclaimed…what looks a whole lot like…Nazis. I mean, if I say I want to build a Reich…is it fair to call me a Nazi? ****, this is the kind of thing that gets me in trouble. Not with the fascists. With the liberals. Go ahead and laugh, because that’s why we’re all effed.
Anyways. You probably want to know: how bad would—will, at this rate—the next Trump years be? It’s obvious to anyone who takes a cursory glance at the comments that you’re incredibly learned people, and I take my cowboy hat off to you. The comments here are resplendent with wisdom, truth, courage, and grace. So, in a sense, you already know the answer.
But I’ll come back to that, after we discuss…
America’s Now Entering a Social Mania Around Trump
Right about now, something very, very strange is happening in—to—America. Societies go through periods of social manias. And right about now, sadly, America’s in one. About Trump. Not against Trump. But increasingly, for him.
The Democrats have shredded their coalition. They appear, like I said, more interested in hating us—and that means everyone from young people to minorities to women to people of color, anyone who’s not, say, an establishment white guy Dem named Josh—than actually trying to stop the fascists. And of course, like I said, you can cry foul and scream, but when somebody says they want to build a Reich…what else are we to call them?
By now, it’s not “alarmist” or “hysterical” anymore to say that Trump’s all these things. I mean, for crying out loud, hello, literal Nazi language. And that’s the strange part. Because the social mania is happening despite all of this.
America’s in a period where there’s a new social mania building around Trump. You can see it in swing voters, “independents,” in the way the Democrats decided that shredding their own coalition was More Important Than Fighting The Fascists, incredibly. All these things are signs of a social mania.
You see how there’s a sort of…euphoria…rising…around Trump’s return to power…even amongst those in the middle, not just the die-hards? How it feels good to them, feels right? How even minorities and young people are sort of walking away from the Dems in disgust, and then they get a taste of this euphoria, and some of them begin to question their own leanings?
Social manias create this sense of euphoria, and such euphorias are dead giveaway of social manias. But they don’t happen in a vacuum. The euphoria surrounding Trump is sort of the polar and precise opposite of the moral repugnance, the bad, gross, feelings, for example, the Dems have created over Gaza and more. That’s not to say it’s right. It just is. And the point is that euphorias happen in vacuums of leadership, around demagogues, who promise salvation from the moral injury and neglect and betrayal of tainted elites.
This is where we are in 2024—a social mania is growing around Trump, producing a dizzying sense of euphoria, while the Dems have made it feel dirty and bad and gross to be a part of them, something you do holding your nose, for much of their coalition—and that’s a bad, bad place to be.
Now, I want to stress. Some people might not get that. That’s OK. But it’s clearly happening. So why is it happening? The mania, the euphoria, and conversely, the feeling of grossness that the Dems have sort of made much of their base feel?
Consider the long-in-the-tooth fact that…should anybody be losing to Donald Trump? Trump’s list of cons, by now, as a candidate, is longer than Satan’s litany of temptations, more or less—leading a coup, trying to overthrow an election, serial abuses of power, etcetera, etcetera. And yet here he is—as if none of those things ever happened.
Now, it’s true, to the MAGA base, those are all good things. But I highly doubt they can be to anyone remotely in the center, a swing voter, an independent, a young person, a minority, all of whom are rapidly defecting to Trump, or at least away from Biden. And this is what social mania is: people stop thinking with their rational minds.
The Democrats, for their part, have made that easy, because looking at the mess they’ve made of Gaza sort of turns the stomach, and so the rational mind shuts down, a victim of moral injury.
What Makes Social Manias Work? Or, Euphoria, Norms, Destabilization, and Irrationality
And yet social manias proceed in more furtive ways, too. What really makes them manias? The social part, and that’s sort of what’s happening in America.
The closest analog to all this is Brexit. Back then, no matter how anyone warned what it would do, from economic ruin to fiscal catastrophe, nobody much was prepared to listen. Even the “left” leaning Guardian—chuckle in horror with me—backed Brexit. And that was because it became a kind of norm, amongst certain social groups—the badge of belonging to said social group was taking said position. And if someone said, no wait, maybe this is a bad idea, instantly, they were kind of shouted down, brought into line, by a veritable army of true believers.
It became cool to believe in Brexit. Despite the warnings, despite the litany of them. And behind that process of encooling, if you like—that’s the Don Draper in me, sorry—was the process of social bandwagoning. If you weren’t part of the bandwagon, it didn’t feel good. You were kind of ostracized, maybe, or treated a little more coldly, to the point that you questioned your own beliefs, which is how you get to such incredibly preposterous moments in history as the Guardian backing Brexit.
Trump is on the cusp of a social mania just like this in America. You know by now that nothing registers with die-hard MAGA types. But now it’s different—nothing registers with those on the fence, and in the middle. No matter how hard we warn them, it doesn’t matter. Because being a true believer is becoming a kind of norm. A process of encooling is going on, and you can see it in how Trump swaggers and struts, knowing that everything he says and does has some kind of weirdly perverse golden touch.
The euphoria’s encoded into the social norm, in other words. And rationality, even the merest semblance of it, quickly flies out of the nearest window.
But why is that?
What Happens During the Second Trump Years
Let’s now come to what’ll happen next. This part’s obvious. How much plainer can Trump’s side make it? They’ve announced they want to, among other things—
• Purge and reshape the entire structure of federal government, for which there’s a 1000 page plan
• Instantly use shock and awe tactics like mass deportations to change the ethnic makeup of the country
• Start a trade war, raise tariffs, etcetera
• Take control of interest rates, away from the Fed
• Devalue the dollar
And much, much more. In other words, there’s already a huge, sweeping agenda. Now, that part people don’t seem to be getting. This isn’t like the first time around, where even they admitted they were surprised by winning, and didn’t have an agenda, so were left to sort of cobble one together, as they tried to understand how governance actually worked. This time? There’s an agenda for radical social transformation already in place.
That’s why they just called it a Reich, hello.
Now. What’s the effect of all this going to be? It’s going to be economically disastrous for the average person, probably, because of course, all those things will cause inflation and prices to spike, from tariffs to devaluations to labor shortages. It’ll throw the world economy into turmoil, in fact, because up next is probably Trump defaulting on America’s debt, which his advisors have already floated. And of course after that comes accelerating climate change, whose price tag is shudder-inducing.
So. It’s not going to be good, and I haven’t even gotten to the sort of moral valence category of stuff, as in, do you really want to live in a society where men with guns in black vans are taking people away just because they’re not really people at all? Nor have I gotten to the next set of problems, which is that Trump’s already out there “joking” about being a three or four term President, as in, so much for democracy.
Anyone who’s been paying the merest sliver of attention should sort of know all that.
And so if you’re kind of…worried…concerned…let me assure you, you should be.
The Triumph of the Reich, or Why the Second Trump Years Will Be a Glorious Success (Until It’s Too Late)
But will it matter? You see, social manias do strange things to societies. They cause a kind of hangover, in which people, in a kind of cognitive dissonance, won’t admit they made a mistake. To this day, in Britain, Brexit’s non-negotiable—even though by now, the majority regret it, and it took a solid half decade plus to get that far.
That’s what social manias do. They alter societies in deep, lasting ways, making it impossible to admit mistakes, leaving this kind of hangover of dazed confusion, in which nothing seems real, and it can’t possibly be that bad.
That’s probably what’s going to happen next, too. Will things get bad? Yes, very much so. But will the average person admit it? Probably not. Not so much the die-hard MAGA fringe, but remember, the marginal person in the middle. Those are the ones who made Brexit go, too, and in that same sort of way, it taking them half a decade plus to come out of their…coma…
So it’ll be for America. Societies don’t just snap out of social manias and say to themselves, my God, we made a terrible mistake, and we’ve got to fix it. We’re approaching a decade since Brexit, and it’ll take another two to three—if ever—for Britain to even begin to broach being European again, and that’s if there’s an EU left. Social manias are like Big Life Mistakes—it takes us years to really come to grips with them, and then we fall into a period of sort of paralytic remorse, more of than not, before we can get back to…being rational, mature, grown-ups again.
So the next Trump years will be this sort of strange, destabilizing combination. They’ll be pretty terrible in every imaginable way, economically, socially, culturally, and that’s not petty politics, but empirical, as in, indicators will all slide downhill. But the average person won’t feel that way. They’ll probably tell you that the economy’s doing much better, society feels much more cohesive, and so on, for quite a while, before reality sets in.
And when it does, it’ll probably be too late. Just as Brits can’t undo Brexit now, so too Americans aren’t going to be able to undo another Trump Presidency’s long-term effects. From, wait, will there even be another election again?, to trade wars, debt crises, social norms altering, and so on. Those changes will be semi-permanent, as in, hey, if you’re sort of middle-aged like me, welcome to the rest of your life.
Steel Yourself, Because It’s Going to Be All Our Fault
So. How bad will it be? For those of us who are thinking types, creative types, empathic types, learned types—it’s going to be really, really bad. On the one hand, we’ll see history repeating itself through a glass darkly, and on the other, we’ll see that the social mania induces a kind of euphoria in people, whose effervescence hides truth, reason, and reality, and isn’t quick to fade.
My best advice, then, I suppose, is…I don’t know…steel yourself. Because one final blow is going to make it that much worse. Liberals will still keep on hating us, and telling us it’s all our fault. Go ahead, roll your eyes with me. When has it ever not been? We’re supposed to ride to their rescue, time and again, women, minorities, people of color, those who are different in any way, and yet they’re rarely, barely there for us, and when we call them out on it…they attack us for it, and then when they lose, it’s our fault, not theirs, for being incompetent, weak, and sort of ungrateful. This is the fatal bargain that got us all here, and it’s the same one, by the way, that got Weimar Germany there. If you ask me? It’s on them, this social mania, because they only happen in a vacuum of true leadership.
It turns out that Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito is not the only one flying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag. Leonard Leo, the man behind the extremist takeover of the American judiciary, also flew that flag at his home on Mount Desert Island in Maine.
So now we have the Appeal to Heaven flag, which represents the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, that the people should engage in armed revolution against tyranny, and that the United States should be a nation based in Christian theology, in front of the office of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and over the houses of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito and the architect of the right-wing theocratic takeover of the federal courts, Leonard Leo.
Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of June 16, 1858, is often described as defining the difference between the North, based on the idea of free labor, and the South, based on enslaved labor, and the idea that one or the other must prevail.
But the speech is much more than a simple depiction of the conflict between freedom and slavery. It details a long-standing plan to destroy American democracy.
Lincoln outlined the steps that the United States had taken away from freedom toward tyranny, and noted:
“[W]hen we see a lot of framed timbers…which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance—and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house… we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.”
Lincoln did not choose the names of his workmen at random. Stephen was Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, who had popularized the idea that local voters should be able to decide whether their territory would permit slavery, no matter what the majority of Americans wanted; Franklin was Franklin Pierce, who had presided over the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting enslavement to move into the western territories; Roger was Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court that decided Dred Scott v. Sandford, saying that Congress could not keep slavery out of the territories; and James was President James Buchanan, who urged Americans to accept the judgment of the Supreme Court. By spreading enslavement westward, that judgment would create new slave states that would work with the southern slave states to make slavery national.
Together, Lincoln said, these four workmen had constructed an edifice to support human enslavement, an edifice working against the nation’s dedication to freedom established by the Declaration of Independence. "A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,” he said. “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
Today the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. After the 2020 census, when it was clear that a South Carolina district was becoming competitive, the Republican-dominated legislature moved the district lines to cut Black voters out and move white voters in, thereby guaranteeing Democrats would lose. Voting rights advocates sued, saying that moving around voters on the basis of race violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. A federal district court agreed.
Today, by a vote of 6–3, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision and signed off on the new South Carolina congressional map that dilutes Black votes. It approved the map because, it said, the gerrymander was politically, rather than racially, motivated. And, it said, “as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.”
From now on, as Mark Joseph Stern noted in Slate, it will be virtually impossible for Black voters to prove that lawmakers targeted their race rather than their politics when redistricting, and partisan gerrymandering has just gotten the Supreme Court’s approval (previously, as Stern noted, the court had said federal courts could not intervene even if partisan gerrymandering violates the Constitution; today they said it does not violate the Constitution). Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) said: “Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision…is further affirmation that this Court has chosen to disenfranchise Black voters and rob us of our fundamental access to the ballot box. Equitable representation is the hallmark of a healthy democracy and in this case, the Supreme Court is attempting to steer the country back to a dark place in our history.”
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the Supreme Court has no power to redraw district maps at all. As Stern noted, Thomas places the blame for what he sees as judicial overreach on the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. After that decision, Thomas says, the court invented powers to remedy the problem. If Brown invited overreach, all the landmark voting decisions of the 1960s did, too.
And so, almost exactly 70 years after the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board, it appears that the framed timbers designed to reverse the expansion of minority rights are falling into place.
But in 2024, those of us eager to protect the idea of human equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence have an advantage that Lincoln’s generation did not. “James”—James Buchanan, who cheerfully backed the Dred Scott decision—is not in the White House.
Instead of sympathizing with the extremists, as Buchanan did, President Joe Biden has worked to undermine the sense of grievance that has permitted them to amass power. In the 1850s the federal government had few ways to weaken the ties of ordinary people to the state leaders who were determined to spread the institution of slavery that had made them enormously wealthy, but the modern administrative state has given Biden more options.
The administration has used the power of the federal government to begin to unwind the trickle-down economy that between 1981 and 2021 transferred $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of the U.S. to the top 1%, hollowing out the middle class. The result has been solid economic growth of 5.7% in 2021, 1.9% in 2022, and 2.5% in 2023.
The unemployment rate has been at record lows of under 4% for more than two years, the strongest run since the 1960s. Inflation is not rising; it is falling and is now at 3.4%, higher than the Federal Reserve’s preferred mark of 2% but down significantly from its high of 9.1% in June 2022, just after the worst of the pandemic eased. At 4.5% growth over 2023, wage growth outpaced inflation, meaning that although prices have risen, workers have come out ahead. The S&P stock market index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
In the 1930s, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, federal investment in the impoverished South quieted much of the region’s opposition to the federal government. Limiting crops in exchange for subsidies both brought higher prices and helped to repair damaged soil, new labor regulations got children out of factories and raised workers’ pay, and the government brought electricity and health care to places private industry wouldn’t go.
Biden appears to be aiming for the same result, but he might be stymied by a news system that has many Americans not just unaware of the good economic news, but believing the opposite. Lauren Aratani of The Guardian reported earlier this week on an exclusive Harris poll showing that 56% of Americans believe incorrectly that the U.S. is in a recession. Those following the stock market are slightly more informed: 49% of them think the S&P stock market index is down for the year. Almost half of those polled—49%—think unemployment is at a 50-year high. Seventy-two percent think inflation is increasing. Fifty-eight percent of those polled blame Biden for mismanaging an economy that is in fact the strongest in the world.
Tempting as it is to blame the media for its relentless focus on bad news rather than good, a study from NBC News at the end of April showed that those who follow national newspapers and media swing heavily to Biden, while those who either don’t follow politics or get their news from YouTube and social media favor Trump or Robert Kennedy Jr.
Those sources seem unlikely to explain that Leonard, Sam, Clarence, Mike, and Donald have been swinging hammers.
I’ve had various readers tell me that I’m saying people shouldn’t be worried about the presidential election. That’s not true at all. I want people to have a realistic sense of the situation and I want people, for lack of a better word, to worry productively. But along these lines, I wanted to mention something that legit worries me. I think we all know that there’s a high likelihood of post-election shenanigans and potentially things much worse than shenanigans, especially if Joe Biden wins but wins narrowly. But there’s one scenario that particularly has my attention.
Let me walk you through it.
I’ve mentioned a number of times that at present the race is basically tied in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania while Biden is significantly behind in Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. So it’s not a crazy idea to imagine that Biden holds those three Blue Wall states and loses the other three. That gives us a Biden 270, Trump 268 Biden win.
But there’s an important additional detail.
There are two states which do not use the standard winner-take-all approach to allotting electoral votes: Nebraska and Maine. Both states have one district that often goes to the party that doesn’t win the state overall.
Now let’s zoom in on the single electoral vote that Democrats have usually won in Nebraska in recent elections. My 270-268 total assumes Democrats get one vote out of Nebraska and Republicans get one out of Maine. So it’s a wash.
Earlier this year, Republicans made a push to change their system in Nebraska and make it winner-take-all. They absolutely know how important it is. They weren’t able to do it. Too much resistance in the state, especially in the state’s 2nd district.
But let’s say we get that 270-268 finish. Do we think Republicans are going to say, “well, we came close but I guess we lost. Oh well.” I kind of doubt it. Given that Republicans and especially the Trump campaign simply tried to reverse the results in multiple states and led a violent insurrection against the Capitol when he lost by a good margin, I really doubt they just take the L.
It seems to me there would be a massive push to get the state to give all its electoral votes to Trump. Can it do that? Well, by any normal standard, of course not. There’s pretty good law out there saying that states can run their elections mostly as they please but can’t change the rules after the election has occurred. And yes, courts generally shot down all the efforts to change the results in 2020. We can also note on the other side of the equation that Trump coupism has become normalized in the GOP since 2020 and most of the elected election administrators in red states are now very Trumpy and very “stop the steal.” But the big attempt in 2020 was to have state legislatures simply change the results of the election. So Biden wins Arizona and they want the state legislature to say “Trump won.”
But this isn’t the same. Trump will almost certainly win Nebraska. No one has to come up with a different vote result. The question would simply be how to allot the electors. And states have broad discretion to make those rules as they choose. There can’t be anything wrong with winner-take-all since it’s the system in 48 states.
Let’s be clear. I’m not saying it would be okay giving that Biden elector to Trump. Not remotely. It breaks the most foundational rules. In any sane world, it breaks all the rules. I’m simply saying it’s a touch fuzzier. And that gives more leeway, more of an excuse for corrupt justices like Sam Alito and Brett Kavanaugh and the other four to participate in Trump’s coup this time rather than block it.
What can anyone do about it? I guess they could start talking to folks in Maine to be ready to even the score if it happens. Or more people could start thinking through the legal arguments now to drive home the illegality of such a maneuver and warn judges off from going along with it. Maybe the state legislature will just say no. They did refuse to change the rules in advance when they were totally entitled to do so.
Anyway, worth keeping in the back of your head.
Remember, an electoral tie is not a tie. Even if the House goes Democratic (which I’m expecting at this point), the House chooses the next President based on the vote of state delegations and Republicans will almost certainly control the majority of state delegations even if they lose control of the House. So a 269-269 tie is Trump presidency.
On Wednesday, May 22, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who had been the candidate for anti-Trump Republicans, said she will vote for Trump. Haley ran against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination and maintained a steady stream of criticism of him, calling him “unstable,” “unhinged” and “a disaster…for our party.” Since she suspended her campaign in early March, she has continued to poll at around 20% of Republican primary voters.
There are two ways to look at Haley’s capitulation. It might show that Trump is so strong that he has captured the entire party and is sweeping it before him. In contrast, it might show that Trump is weak, and Haley made this concession to his voters either in hopes of stepping into his place or in a desperate move to cobble the party, whose leaders are keenly aware they are an unpopular minority in the country, together.
The Republican Party is in the midst of a civil war. The last of the establishment Republican leaders who controlled the party before 2016 are trying to wrest control of it back from Trump’s MAGA Republicans, who have taken control of the key official positions. At the same time, Trump’s MAGA voters, while a key part of the Republican base, have pushed the party so far right they have left the majority of Americans—including Republicans—far behind.
Abortion remains a major political problem for Republicans. Trump appointed the three Supreme Court justices who provided the votes to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion, and he has boasted repeatedly that he ended Roe. This pleases his white evangelical base but not the majority of the American people.
According to a recent Pew poll, 63% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while only 36% think it should be illegal in most or all cases. But Republicans are continuing to push unpopular antiabortion legislation. On Thursday, Louisiana lawmakers approved a law classifying mifepristone and misoprostol, two drugs commonly used in abortions, as dangerous drugs—a category usually reserved for addictive medications—making it a crime to possess abortion pills without a prescription.
Louisiana prohibits abortions except to save the life of the mother or in cases in which the fetus has a condition incompatible with life. The law requires doctors to get a special license to prescribe the drugs, one of which is used for routine reproductive care as well as abortions. The state would then keep a record of those prescriptions, effectively a database to monitor women’s pregnancies and the doctors who treat them. Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, a Republican, is expected to sign the measure into law.
Trump has repeatedly promised to weigh in on the mifepristone question but, likely aware that he cannot please both his base and voters, has not done so. On Tuesday, May 21, though, he stepped into a related problem. Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, antiabortion activists have begun to talk about contraception as abortion, with some warning that it is “unbiblical.” But in February, 80% of voters polled said that contraception was “deeply important” to them, including 72% of Republican voters. On Tuesday, Trump said he was open to regulating contraception and that his campaign would issue a policy statement on contraception “very shortly.” He later walked back his earlier comments, saying they had been misinterpreted.
On May 19 the same judge who tried to remove mifepristone from the market by rescinding the FDA approval of it, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, blocked the Biden administration from implementing a new rule that requires sellers at gun shows and online to get licenses and conduct background checks. The rule closes what’s known as the “gun show loophole.” According to the Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy, 86% of Americans want mandatory background checks for all gun purchases.
Trump himself is a problem for the party. His base is absolutely loyal, but he is a deeply problematic candidate for anyone else. As Susan Glasser outlined in the New Yorker yesterday, in the past week he chickened out of testifying in his ongoing criminal trial for paying hush money to an adult film actress to keep damaging information from voters in 2016 after insisting for weeks that he would. He talked about staying in office for a third term, ran a video promising that the United States will become a “unified Reich” when he wins reelection, and accused President Joe Biden of trying to have him assassinated. He will be 78 in a few weeks and is having trouble speaking.
In addition to his ongoing criminal trial, on Tuesday a filing unsealed in the case of Trump’s retention of classified documents showed that a federal judge, Beryl Howell, believed investigators had “strong evidence” that Trump “intended” to hide those documents from the federal government.
Also revealed were new photographs of Trump’s personal aide Walt Nauta moving document boxes before one of Trump’s lawyers arrived to review what Trump had, along with the information that once Trump realized that the men moving the boxes could be captured on Mar-a-Lago’s security cameras, he allegedly made sure they would avoid the cameras. The new details suggest that prosecutors have more evidence than has been made public.
This might explain why, as Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley of Rolling Stone reported today, Trump is pressuring Republicans to pass a law shielding presidents from prosecution in state or local courts, moving prosecutions to federal courts where a president could stop them.
Yesterday, Marilyn W. Thompson of ProPublica reported on yet another potentially harmful legal story. There were a number of discrimination and harassment complaints made against the Trump campaign in 2016 and 2020 that Trump tried to keep quiet with nondisclosure agreements. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the Trump campaign to produce a list of the complaints by May 31. Those complaints include the charge that the 2016 campaign paid women less than men and that Trump kissed a woman without her consent.
Trump’s current behavior is not likely to reassure voters.
Yesterday he wrote on social media that “Evan Gershkovich, the Reporter from The Wall Street Journal, who is being held by Russia, will be released almost immediately after the Election, but definitely before I assume Office. He will be HOME, SAFE, AND WITH HIS FAMILY. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else, and WE WILL BE PAYING NOTHING!”
There is no good interpretation of this post. If Trump does have that sort of leverage with Putin, why? And why not use it immediately? Is he openly signaling to Putin to ignore the Biden administration’s ongoing negotiations for Gershkovich’s release? Trevor Reed, who was arrested in Russia in 2019 when visiting his girlfriend in Moscow, noted: “As a former wrongful detainee in Russia, I would just like to remind everyone that President Trump had the ability to get myself and Paul Whelan out of Russia for years and chose not to. I would be skeptical of any claims about getting Evan Gershkovich back in a day.”
Reed was freed in 2022 as part of a prisoner swap arranged by the Biden administration.
Last night, at a rally in New York, Trump accepted the endorsement of alleged gang members, rappers Michael Williams (Sheff G) and Tegan Chambers (Sleepy Hallow). In 2023 the two men were indicted with 30 other people on 140 counts, including murder, attempted murder, illegal possession of firearms, and at least a dozen shootings. Sheff G was released from jail in April after posting a $1.5 million bond.
Then, Trump’s people claimed that 25,000 people turned out for the rally, but they requested a permit for only 3,500, and only 3,400 tickets were issued. Aerial shots suggest there were 800–1,500 people there.
MAGA voters don’t care about any of this, apparently, but non-MAGA Republicans and Independents do. And this might be behind Haley’s promise to vote for Trump. The unpopularity of the MAGA faction might allow Haley to step in if Trump crashes and burns, so long as she kowtows to Trump and his base. Or it might be calculated to try to repair the rift in hopes that the party can cobble together some kind of unity by November. As The Shallow State noted on X, Haley’s announcement showed that “Trump is fragile.”
But Haley’s statement that she will vote for Trump does not necessarily mean her voters will follow her. Deputy political director for the Biden campaign Juan Peñalosa met with Haley supporters in a prescheduled zoom call hours after Haley’s announcement. On Thursday afternoon the campaign issued a press release titled: “To Haley Voters: There’s a Home For You on Team Biden-Harris.”
MAGA Republicans know their agenda is unpopular, and they are working to seize power through voter suppression, violence, gerrymandering, and packing the legal system. But there are signs a bipartisan defense of democracy may be gathering strength.
Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.
That cheers me right up.
So. There’s this..really…really strange thing happening. The polls about Biden are consistently poor, and getting worse, and meanwhile, for some reason, his team…”doesn’t believe them.” They’ll say that…out loud, sort of bizarrely enough, in a display of hubris? Overconfidence? Meanwhile, in poll after poll, Trump’s pulling ahead, gaining momentum, a sort of social mania building.
Who’s right, and who’s wrong? Are the polls wrong, and is team Biden right “not to believe them”? Allow me to humbly shed a little light on the matter. Having designed some of the world’s largest research projects, and literally sort of redesigned the way that much of the field thinks about research, let me help you understand this mess.
Before I do that, let’s just take a glance at how…oddly…furiously resistant to reality the Dems are becoming. The New Yorker did an interview with a guy called Simon Rosenberg, who’s helping run the Biden campaign, and it’s sort of…jaw-dropping, because, well, read for yourself:
• The Times did something on the so-called zombie vote in Presidential primaries, and found that nineteen per cent of Republican primary voters were still voting against Trump. But that’s a smaller percentage than in any other Republican or Democratic primary in the past twenty-four years.
• It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters.
• None of it matters?
•No.
• Maybe a little bit of my concern is that that suggests that you don’t need a new strategy, you don’t need to do anything else, if you think you’re ahead. And that’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about.
• No. No. But what I said, repeatedly, and what I write every day, and I even did a piece last week saying that the election is close, and neither candidate is ahead or behind.
On and on it goes. Rosenberg threatens to walk out of the interview when pressed. It’s just sort of the most vivid demonstration that there’s something going badly wrong here. He just sort of refuses to even consider what Isaac Chotiner from the New Yorker is trying to get him to think about. No. No. No. La-la-la I’m not listening.
Are the Polls Right? is Biden Losing?
The polls are probably right. If anything, they understate Biden’s poor performance.
Why is that? Am I just being mean? Do I hate Biden? Nope, liberals hate folks like you and me, but that’s another story, which I’ll come back to, because it’s sort of…ignoring polls like this is a form of ignorance, and it’s going to end in disaster for Biden.
I say that with more or less utter confidence, because, hey, I didn’t just “design research,” I literally created the paradigm of research that transformed the industry and field. But never mind, that’s just in case you need some bona fides.
Look—here’s the deal, and it’s pretty simple.
The reason the Biden team doesn’t “believe the polls” is that they blame polling systems and methods. This is a line that’s being echoed across the Democratic establishment now. The polls are run by phone! And nobody even answers the phone anymore! The sample sizes are small! And nobody answers the phone! On and on it goes.
Listen. This isn’t real criticism of a method. It’s true that reaching people by phone is hard…but so what? That doesn’t necessarily bias a result one way or another. And more to the point…
The polls are all showing exactly the same thing.
That’s what really clues us into the fact that these results are likely real. As in, a valid representation of how people are likely to vote or not. Let’s imagine that the criticism was, instead, what was valid. What would we see? A lot of noise in the signal. One poll might show this, having gotten some random number of people on the phone that day, and another poll that. We’d see mixed results, that’d paint a picture that wasn’t…
Internally consistent. How do we know if the results of our research are “real,” aka valid, when it comes to social science, anyways? Leaving aside the dreary sort of micro-issues of statistical testing, we look for consistency. If we know we’re doing something pretty inexact—like polling people about election preferences, which is always sort of riddled with error to begin with—then how we check for some level of accuracy and validity is through consistency.
That is, we run many tests, not just one, and see if they sort of point in the same direction. If they don’t, then we know we’ve got an issue of bias or error in some way—the sample size really is too small, all those pesky phones really are creating some sort of selection effect, and so on.
But if we run test after test, and the results begin converging on the same finding, then we know we’re onto something. Because we’ve attained a fair degree of internal consistency. What we’re doing is sort of correcting for the noise in the signal by repeating tests, and seeing if the noise gets repeated, too, and remember, noise is all over the place, not some kind of pattern.
Now. Let’s come to the issue of whether this thing of phones is some sort of deal-breaker. It’s probably true that surveying people on land-lines isn’t exactly cutting edge social science, and it’s certainly not how I’d design the poll. But again, if the results were invalid, they’d probably also be inconsistent. The idea that “only old people have land-lines, and they’re all Trumpists!” Is sort of wishful thinking. If anything, older people support Biden more heavily. His approval rating with them is among the highest of any group. So if that sort of theory were even naively true, it’d bias the polls for Biden, not against him.
And that only really takes a moment’s thought. Which is scary, because it tells us Dems haven’t even done that much, and just are sort of trotting out the line that “the polls can’t be believed!” Without thinking about it at all.
The Democrats Need Actual Grown-Up Professional Help
I often wonder: who’s advising these guys? Is anyone here thinking at all? Now I know, it’s guys like Rosenberg, who appear to have literally not the faintest idea what they’re doing. I’m not trying to be mean, but this is garden league stuff, and no real professional would ever make these mistakes. When I was running research at one of the world’s top marketing and communications groups, if any of my team made these elementary errors, they’d be swiftly…on the way out.
So. For all those reasons, the polls are probably right. Let’s go through them again.
• The polls are all consistent. Even though they’re done by different groups and organizations, and even use different methods, they all point to the same result, which is that Biden’s beginning to lose momentum badly, and Trump’s gaining it.
• None of the polls—none of them, to my knowledge—show the slightest bit of evidence to the contrary, which is pretty strong evidence that, no, it’s not noise in the signal, which’d presumably show up somewhere.
• Worse, the theories that are used to justify “the polls are wrong!” would bias the polls for Biden, which immediately tells us they’re absurdly wrong, or if they’re right, Biden’s losing even more badly in reality than the polls suggest.
I could go on and on.
Now. The criticism’s sort of fair. The polls should be done in a much more modern and sophisticated way. Me? I’d use some mixed-methods research, and make it fun. I’d run online polls, and sort of have them backed up with more formal surveys, and back that all up with qualitative research, which is where the real juice is in issues like this. I’d send teams onto the street and ask people—not focus groups, which are notoriously unreliable, and prone to self-selection errors and groupthink—just ask people on the street things like: “Do you feel like the Democrats like you or hate you?”
Sure, that’s sort of a leading question, and that’s the point. It leads into the truth of human emotion, which is where we glean all the richest insights, which are the ones we really need to hear, chew over, understand, reflect on, and use, if we’re going to do something about it all.
We can’t just sort of go on believing what we want to believe, which is what the Dems are doing right now.
That’s all sort of Level 1 thinking, How to Be a Not Terrible Social Researcher, if you like. Now let’s go to the next level.
The Secret Hate Vote, or, Why Democracy’s Death is Always a “Surprise”
What do we know about elections and polls from history, especially recent history? When we ask people, in any form, really, how they’re going to vote, they tend to fairly dramatically understate their support for the far right. And so we get effects like Brexit or Trumpism 1.0 happening, which take establishments by surprise, even when they believed in polls.
All of that I call the Secret Hate Vote. And what it means in practice is that we should probably adjust the results of social research. To account for that bias. By how much? Maybe up to 5% or so, which is hugely significant, when it comes to elections, because the Secret Hate Vote’s been that large, in recent history, and if anything, it shows signs of growing over time.
It’s not so hard to understand just why there’d be a Secret Hate Vote. When we do survey-based research, we sort of have to know in advance that people aren’t always going to tell us the truth. And we have to account for that. Sometimes, we might even be in situations where the “shrouding” effect—that’s what it’s called in economics, people sort of hiding their true intentions—is so large the research just can’t be done.
What’s happening here is that pollsters are doing some pretty weak social science. They’re not adjusting at all for the Secret Hate Vote, or, in more formal terms, for shrouded preferences and intentions. That can be done in many ways—probably the most naive way is to expand the "margin of error.” A better approach involves estimating risk, which is what we’re really trying to do. Pollsters, though, have sort of given up on this, and it…sucks. It’ makes the results less and less credible over time, which is how we get to…
“I don’t believe in the polls.” And it’s hardly just the Dems who are guilty of that. Trump does it too, whenever they go against him. So the criticisms are fair, this methodology is outdated and sort of obsolete, and pollsters should be a better job.
But that doesn’t mean “the polls are wrong!” In the same way that even a crappy camera can show you a blurry picture, so too can this level of methodology show us something. And in this case, we don’t necessarily need a super granular picture—just the outlines of one, because we’re talking about a set of binary outcomes.
When Organizations End Up Thinking Knowledge is Ignorance, Duck! The Growing Risk of a Trump Landslide
So what are the Dems really doing here?
They’re…being willfully ignorant. I don’t say that in the way of an insult, but in a technical way, almost. What we have here is knowledge. It’s not sort of Grand Knowledge, in the way the Theory of Relativity is. It’s just little-k knowledge. Biden is losing, and more and more badly, especially in swing states. That much appears to be eminently true.
What do we with knowledge? If we’re smart, we learn from it. If we’re dumb, we ignore it, and we become ignorant that way. Being ignorant results in a pretty predictable pattern. Reality bites you, usually right in the ass, when you don’t want it to most, and then you express shock, dismay, and disbelief.
Because, of course, you never learned anything, and gained knowledge, and now you have to catch up, suddenly, in a way that you don’t like, because ignorance usually doesn’t benefit you, only your adversaries and opponents.
So the Dems are being willfully ignorant, and it’s…sort of shocking? Dismaying? Idiotic? To behold.
Remember, I’m the guy that literally designed what research is in a huge chunk of the economy. And to me, this is like…I don’t know…watching someone shred their own brain, and then wonder why they can’t walk or talk anymore. It’s sort of crazy.
But you know, on a personal level? I don’t even know…if I should be astonished anymore. I was raised to value knowledge, not just for myself, but as a sort of public good. Knowledge Benefits Humanity, Young Obi-Wan, kind of thing. And to see the side that’s supposed to for democracy…slinking into willful ignorance…it’s just kind of…sorry, I have to say it…pathetic. In the true sense of the word: saddening, predictable, and grotesque, almost, in the way that it evokes a sense of pathos.
Being willfully ignorant isn’t going to help the Democrats.
Right now? They should be learning. I wrote last time about a little field research I did, asking people how they thought the Dems felt about them. And I learned something. I was surprised to find out that everyone I asked thought the Dems basically hate them. And that made me think of how much liberals have hated me over the years.
“Anecdata”? No, my friend, it all points in the same direction. What qualitative and quantitative evidence we have, which is everything from polls to student protests to young people rolling their eyes to minorities feeling betrayed to women feeling abandoned to the long-lost working class, defecting in rage to Trump. All of the “data”—and that’s all data, or at least information, to a good scientist—points in exactly the same direction.
We are trying to glean truths, not just play statistical games. And when all the evidence tells us the same thing…what do you think the reality is?
Me? I say openly now that the chances of a Trump Landslide are growing by the day, and right about now, they’re pretty good. If the election were held today, after all, Trump would likely carry every swing state, save maybe—maybe—one or two. That’s a landslide.
This is where willful ignorance leads. To defeat on this scale.
This is the fire the Dems are playing with. Unfortunately for the rest of us, we’re all trapped in the basement, which is the only place they’ll let us be.
The Election, The Polls, Biden Sinking, Why the Dems “Don’t Believe It,” or How to Make a Democracy Self-Destruct
