Tag: Republicans

Republicans were upset about election fraud — before it threatened their candidate

The Republican Party in North Carolina has been slow to accept the investigation into potential absentee ballot fraud. Credit: Erika P. Rodriguez, The Washington Post

Dallas Woodhouse, executive chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, spoke with great concern about the issue of election fraud.

It was 2016, and he was talking to a reporter from “This American Life,” the weekly public radio show, about questions being raised regarding signatures on some absentee ballots in Bladen County on the state’s southern border.

A group funded by Democrats in the state had been working on get-out-the-vote efforts in the area, and McCrae Dowless, a Republican soil and water supervisor with a checkered past, had filed a complaint, despite winning reelection.

View the complete December 6 article by Eli Rosenberg on The Washington Post website here.

GOP silent on election fraud scheme to steal North Carolina House seat

Republicans have nothing to say about evidence that shows one of their nominees benefited from election fraud.

The entire Republican Party machine — from Trump to Congress to Fox News — is refusing to acknowledge evidence of rampant election fraud in a North Carolina congressional race.

There are serious and credible reports that in at least one county, an operative working for Republican Mark Harris’ campaign ran a systemic fraud campaign in which absentee ballots belonging to real voters were either filled in with fake votes for Harris, or thrown away if they had already been filled in for Democrat Dan McCready.

The evidence of this fraud is so strong that the North Carolina State Board of Elections is refusing to certify results that would give Harris a victory over McCready in the 9th Congressional District. House Democrats are even considering refusing to seat Harris in the new Congress unless the controversy is resolved.

View the complete December 5 article by Oliver WIllis on the ShareBlue.com website here.

Are White Evangelicals the Saviors of the GOP?

President Donald Trump attended a worship service at the International Church of Las Vegas in October 2016. Credit: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images

Key voting group has remained virtually unchanged in its political preferences

Amid all the talk about shifting demographics and political changes over the last decade, one key voting group has remained virtually unchanged: white evangelicals.

According to one evangelical leader, a record number of white evangelicals voted in the 2018 midterms after an inspired turnout effort.

“This is the most ambitious and most effective voter education, get-out-the-vote program directed at the faith-based vote in a midterm election in modern political history,” Faith & Freedom Coalition President Ralph Reed said the day after the November elections.

How Trump appointees curbed a consumer protection agency loathed by the GOP

Mick Mulvaney said he expected to be at the CFPB a short time, until Pres. Trump picked a permanent director. In less than a month, he’s turned it’s mission sharply in a new direction. Credit: Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post

Mick Mulvaney struck a jovial tone as he introduced the political appointees who would run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. One was nicknamed Dreamboat, he said in an email. Another was Mumbles. A third had been a “Jeopardy!” contestant.

“They are really great people,” Mulvaney, the acting director, wrote in a holiday message to the agency’s 1,600 staffers last December.

The levity now seems like a cruel joke to career officials.

View the complete December 4 article by Robert O’Harrow, Jr.’ Shawn Boburg and Renae Merle on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s Base Isn’t Enough

There shouldn’t be much question about whether 2018 was a wave election. Of course it was a wave. You could endlessly debate the wave’s magnitude, depending on how much you focus on the number of votes versus the number of seats, the House versus the Senate versus governorships, and so forth. Personally, I’d rank the 2018 wave a tick behind both 1994, which represented a historic shift after years of Democratic dominance of the House, and 2010, which reflected an especially ferocious shift against then-President Barack Obama after he’d been elected in a landslide two years earlier. But I’d put 2018 a bit ahead of most other modern wave elections, such as 2006 and 1982. Your mileage may vary.

In another important respect, however, the 2018 wave was indisputably unlike any other in recent midterm history: It came with exceptionally high turnout. Turnout is currently estimated at 116 million voters, or 49.4 percent of the voting-eligible population. That’s an astounding number; only 83 million people voted in 2014, by contrast.

This high turnout makes for some rather unusual accomplishments. For instance, Democratic candidates for the House will receive almost as many votes this year as the 63 million that President Trump received in 2016, when he won the Electoral College (but lost the popular vote). As of Tuesday midday, Democratic House candidates had received 58.9 million votes, according to the latest tally by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. However, 1.6 million ballots remain to be counted in California, and those are likely to be extremely Democratic. Other states also have more ballots to count, and they’re often provisional ballots that tend to lean Democratic. In 2016, Democratic candidates for the House added about 4 million votes from this point in the vote count to their final numbers. So this year, an eventual total of anywhere between 60 million and 63 million Democratic votes wouldn’t be too surprising.

View the complete November 20 article by Nate Silver on the FiveThirtyEight.com website here.

 

Warning signs mount for Trump reelection bid

‘They haven’t gotten his job approval over 50 percent, like Reagan,’ says one GOP pollster.

President Donald Trump has argued that many voters who support him did not vote in the midterm elections because his name was not on the ballot. Credit: Susan Walsh, AP Photo

Donald Trump insists the GOP’s midterm election shellacking had nothing to do with him. Things will be different, he says, when his name is actually on the ballot in 2020.

While it’s true that most presidents who see their party suffer major losses in their first midterm election get reelected anyway, Trump isn’t most presidents — and there are lots of blaring-red warning lights in this month’s election results for his bid for a second term.

Unlike most of his predecessors, he’s been persistently unpopular, with approval ratings mired in the 40-percent range — so far, he’s the only president in the modern era whose job approval ratings have never been over 50 percent, according to Gallup.

Will the Republican Party keep dancing with autocracy?

When a national leader urges that votes be ignored, or that an election result he doesn’t like might best be set aside, we label him an autocrat or an authoritarian.

When it’s President Trump, we shrug. Worse, many in his party go right along with his baseless charges of fraud.

We are in for a difficult two years. Surviving them will require that Republican senators take seriously the pledge they made in their oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” What we have seen so far is not encouraging.

View the complete opinion column by E.J. Dionne, Jr., on The Washington Post website here.

FBI: Hate crimes have skyrocketed under Trump

Violent right-wing extremists are more emboldened than ever by hateful rhetoric from Trump and Republicans.

Hate crimes are sharply on the rise in the Trump era, according to new data from the FBI. That makes it all the more worrisome that Trump and the Republican Party embraced an openly anti-Semitic message in a desperate last-minute bid to win midterm elections.

Trump’s hateful influence on America started with his high-profile, virulently racist 2015 campaign for president. Between 2015 and 2016, the FBI found a 6 percent increase in hate crimes reported to law enforcement agencies around the country.

But it’s gotten a lot worse since Trump took office. According to the FBI’s latest data, the number of hate crimes reported increased by another 17 percent from 2016 to 2017, rising from 6,093 to 8,437.

View the complete November 13 article by Oliver Willis on the ShareBlue.com website here.

Trump and Republicans settle on fear — and falsehoods — as a midterm strategy

When asked what evidence President Trump had that “unknown Middle Easterners” were in the migrant caravan, he told reporters to “search” with their cameras. Credit: The Washington Post

President Trump has settled on a strategy of fear — laced with falsehoods and racially tinged rhetoric — to help lift his party to victory in the coming midterms, part of a broader effort to energize Republican voters with two weeks left until the Nov. 6 elections.

Trump’s messaging — on display in his regular campaign rallies, tweets and press statements — largely avoids much talk of his achievements and instead offers an apocalyptic vision of the country, which he warns will only get worse if Democrats retake control of Congress.

The president has been especially focused in recent days on a caravan of about 5,000 migrants traveling north to cross the U.S. border, a group he has darkly characterized as gang members, violent criminals and “unknown Middle Easterners” — a claim for which his administration has so far provided no concrete evidence.

View the complete October 22 article by Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey on the Washington Post website here.

Republicans Run On Fear, Democrats Run On Protecting Health Care, Medicare & Social Security

Democrats have a clear message for Election Day: they are running to protect health care, Social Security and Medicare from Republican attempts to gut these vital programs. Republicans, on the other hand, have turned to a campaign strategy of fear and outright lies in order to get votes. The contrast couldn’t be clearer.

Democrats are running on protecting health care, Medicare, and Social Security from Republican attacks.

Yahoo News: “Democrats 2018: It’s the health care, stupid”

NBC News: “Democrats find new ways to talk about entitlement cuts in campaign’s closing days”

Washington Post: “As midterms near, Democrats accuse GOP of plotting to cut Medicare, Social Security”

Washington Examiner: “Democrats warn voters: The GOP is coming for your Social Security, healthcare”

Vox: “Half of 2018’s Democratic campaign ads are about health care”

Trump and Republicans are using fearmongering and lies to get votes.

CNN: “Trump’s midterm campaign of fear”

Washington Post: “Trump and Republicans settle on fear — and falsehoods — as a midterm strategy”

New York Times: “Trump and G.O.P. Candidates Escalate Race and Fear as Election Ploys”

MSNBC: “Trump, GOP look to stoke fear in base to goose election turnout”

Toronto Star: “Donald Trump’s strategy as midterms approach: lies and fear-mongering”