Tag: Republicans

‘We’re thinking landslide’: Beyond D.C., GOP officials see Trump on glide path to reelection

Conventional indicators suggest the president’s bid for a second term is in jeopardy. But state and local GOP officials see a different election unfolding.

By most conventional indicators, Donald Trump is in danger of becoming a one-term president. The economy is a wreck, the coronavirus persists, and his poll numbers have deteriorated.

But throughout the Republican Party’s vast organization in the states, the operational approach to Trump’s re-election campaign is hardening around a fundamentally different view.

Interviews with more than 50 state, district and county Republican Party chairs depict a version of the electoral landscape that is no worse for Trump than six months ago — and possibly even slightly better. According to this view, the coronavirus is on its way out and the economy is coming back. Polls are unreliable, Joe Biden is too frail to last, and the media still doesn’t get it. Continue reading.

Republicans are engineering an electoral disaster this fall

Washington Post logoAFTER A shambolic election two years ago — and several examples of poorly run primaries leading up to this week — one might have imagined that Georgia would have prepared better for its Tuesday primary vote. Instead, polling places in and around Atlanta were swamped and lines stretched for hours as poll workers struggled with new voting machines and sanitation procedures. Georgia’s experience confirmed that the coronavirus pandemic, combined with the sort of Election Day incompetence that has for years been a sad fixture of American democracy, threatens the integrity of the November presidential election. There is hardly anything more important than getting voting procedures and technology right over the next five months.

Unfortunately, many Republican politicians continue to manipulate voting rules for partisan advantage, exploiting the pandemic as an opportunity to suppress voting. The latest example is in Iowa. The state held a notably successful primary last Tuesday that smashed turnout recordsdespite the closure of many polling places, in large part because the state’s Republican secretary of state sent every voter an absentee ballot application. That allowed local officials to consolidate in-person voting locations without causing the sorts of massive backups that marred primaries in Wisconsin, the District and Georgia. Continue reading “Republicans are engineering an electoral disaster this fall”

Trump asserts his power over Republicans

The Hill logoPresident Trump is strengthening his grip on the Republican Party as they head into the heat of an election season that Democrats want to make a referendum on Trump and his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Trump flexed his muscle on Capitol Hill last week by scuttling bipartisan legislation to extend the intelligence surveillance powers that had passed the Senate easily and was expected to pass the House.

Once Trump threatened on Wednesday to veto the measure, Republican support in the lower chamber fell away quickly, forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi(D-Calif.) to pull the bill from the schedule. Continue reading.

We Have No More Excuses For Trump Voters

The past several days have offered a kaleidoscope of a Trump-addled America, a telling, if depressing, pastiche: Amy Cooper’s bigoted entitlement; the homicidal tactics of Minneapolis police officers; the knowing encouragement of the president, who has mounted his second campaign on the same foundation of rank prejudices and crude stereotypes as his first. It adds up to a portrait of a nation unwilling to retreat from its racist history, unable to chart a path toward a future that pays tribute to its more egalitarian founding creed.

President Donald J. Trump is merely a symptom, not a cause, not the sickness itself. During his first campaign, I worried less about his outrageous conduct and inflammatory rhetoric — he is, after all, just one malign actor — and more about the millions who danced to his music, rejoiced in his racist diatribes, sang in his chorus.

In 2016, I would not have accused every voter who cast a ballot for Trump of racism. Some were one-percenters bent on protecting their riches; some were lifelong Republicans leery of crossing party lines; some were Bernie Bros who couldn’t curb their misogyny and vote for Hillary Clinton. Still, there were many who eagerly followed after a man who defamed Mexicans, denounced Muslims and claimed that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Continue reading.

A grandiose collective paranoid fantasy: It’s time to speak honestly about the GOP’s evolution into a conspiracy cult

AlterNet logoOne of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.

Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all. Continue reading.

What’s really behind Republicans wanting a swift reopening? Evangelicals.

Washington Post logoHILLSBORO, OHIO — Polls conducted since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic find that Democrats take the virus more seriously than Republicans, and are more willing to support restrictive government edicts in response to the outbreak. Most of those pontificating from the left conclude that Republicans get bad information from President Trump, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, to name a few, and therefore aren’t as worried as they should be.

Blaming so-called right-wing media for the strikingly different attitudes between the GOP and Democrats is in this case too simplistic. The Republican Party has long been home to conservatives and libertarians, who have a natural resistance to any governmental expansion of reach and authority over citizens. For many, if not most, Republicans, “give me liberty or give me death” is not outdated rhetoric.

Most Republicans are appalled at how casually governors — in their view — trampled the Constitution at the behest of state and federal health departments. As one small business owner in Tennessee said of the lockdowns, “If constitutional rights can be taken away whenever there is a crisis, then they are not rights at all — they are permissions.” Continue reading..

Why Trump, GOP are running into trouble in Arizona

The Hill logoPresident Trump and Republicans are running into trouble in Arizona, where polls show them trailing in both the presidential race and in a key Senate battle that could help determine the balance of power in the upper chamber.

Arizona has been a reliably Republican state in presidential and Senate contests and has only voted for a Democratic president once in the past 70 years, when former President Clinton won the state in 1996.

But things are changing. Continue reading.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of people who paved the way for Trump

AlterNet logoThe folks at Atlantic Studios have produced a video that demonstrates Trump’s lack of leadership on the coronavirus crisis by comparing him to the leaders of other Western democracies. It’s brutal.

Commenting on the video, Anne Applebaum writes this:

Americans, as a rule, rarely compare themselves with other countries, so convinced are we that our system is superior, that our politicians are better, that our democracy is the fairest and most robust in the world. But watch this video and ask yourself: Is this the kind of leadership you expect from a superpower? Does this make you feel confident in our future? Or is this man a warning signal, a blinking red light, a screaming siren telling all of us, and all of the world, that something about our political system has gone profoundly awry?

Continue reading.

Freed by Court Ruling, Republicans Step Up Effort to Patrol Voting

WASHINGTON — Six months before a presidential election in which turnout could matter more than persuasion, the Republican Party, the Trump campaign and conservative activists are mounting an aggressive national effort to shape who gets to vote in November — and whose ballots are counted.

Its premise is that a Republican victory in November is imperiled by widespread voter fraud, a baseless charge embraced by President Trump but repeatedly debunked by research. Democrats and voting rights advocates say the driving factor is politics, not fraud — especially since Mr. Trump’s narrow win in 2016 underscored the potentially crucial value of depressing turnout by Democrats, particularly minorities.

The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and Mr. Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.

‘It’s just cuckoo’: Brian Kemp apologizes after state Health Department chart wrongly shows downward trend in COVID-19 infections

AlterNet logoGeorgia Gov. Brian Kemp has been widely criticized by health experts for prematurely reopening non-essential businesses in his state, and even President Donald Trump — who has been calling for states to ease coronavirus-related restrictions sooner rather than later — asserted that Kemp was moving too quickly. Now, more criticism is coming Kemp’s way over reports that the Georgia Department of Public Health’s website showed a decrease in new coronavirus infections in parts of the state where no such decreases were occurring.

Journalists Willoughby Mariano and J. Scott Trubey of the Atlanta Journal Constitution explain, “In the latest bungling of tracking data for the novel coronavirus, a recently posted bar chart on the Georgia Department of Public Health’s website appeared to show good news: new confirmed cases in the counties with the most infections had dropped every single day for the past two weeks. In fact, there was no clear downward trend. The data is still preliminary, and cases have held steady or dropped slightly in the past two weeks.”

After “more than a day of online mockery, public concern and a letter from a state representative,” Mariano and Trubey report, the Georgia Department of Public Health changed the graph on Monday morning, May 18. Continue reading.