The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his facebook page:

David Leonhardt’s column today, rightly in my view, approvingly notes a recent op-ed by Theda Skocpol in USA Today:

Theda Skocpol — the Harvard social scientist who has studied the Tea Party and the anti-Trump resistance, among many other things — has a new op-ed in USA Today that argues that the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are ignoring the lesson of 2018. By doing so, Skocpol says, they are increasing the chances that Trump will win re-election. As Democrats prepare for their second round of debates this week, I think Skocpol’s message is worth hearing.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

The Diverse White Working Class

By which I mean: this vast demographic contains multitudes. Far from a seething cauldron of nativist sentiment, there is a wide array of political sensibilities among this group and plenty of room for Democrats to make–and keep–gains. Tom Edsall’s recent column lays out some interesting data that makes this point.

How to make these gains? Hint: not by decriminalizing the border, not through Medicare for All that abolishes private health care plans; not by providing health coverage to undocumented immigrants and other similar–and similarly unpopular-ideas. The obvious answer is programs that are popular both with Democrats’ base voters and with significant sectors of the white working class. As Edsall notes, channeling the views of many Democratic leaders, both black and white:

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his facebook page:

I don’t know how many are familiar with Rachel Bitecofer of Christopher Newport University and her forecasting models. I did feature them in some posts in the runup to the 2018 election. To Bitecofer’s credit, her model, which is based on the predictive value of negative partisanship in the current environment, did perform very well indeed in 2018, predicting both the number and location of the seats flipped very accurately.

Well, she’s out early with a prediction for the 2020 general election and it’s worth checking out. Of course, any one model should be treated with caution, no matter how accurate it has recently been. And I have some questions about her analysis, which comes perilously close to saying it doesn’t really matter whom the Democrats nominate. But here’s her bottom line:

“Barring a shock to the system, Democrats recapture the presidency. The leaking of the Trump campaign’s internal polling has somewhat softened the blow of this forecast, as that polling reaffirms what my model already knew: Trump’s 2016 path to the White House, which was the political equivalent of getting dealt a Royal Flush in poker, is probably not replicable in 2020 with an agitated Democratic electorate. And that is really bad news for Donald Trump because the Blue Wall of the Midwest was then, and is now, the ONLY viable path for Trump to win the White House.”

In terms of the map, her model predicts that the Rustbelt three of MI, PA and WI will all move back to the Democrats. AZ, FL, IA and NC are seen as toss-ups. All states Democrats took in 2016 remain Democratic.

Could be. These new data from Morning Consult certainly suggest the model predictions are plausible.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his facebook page:

This article by Robert Shapiro that just got released by Democracy journal is worth a look. Shapiro looks at employment data by race-ethnicity and education since the Great Recession and finds strong evidence of white working class decline. In Shapiro’s view, progressives’ failure to recognize the salience of these economic trends–and respond to them–is undermining their ability to reach these voters and provides a clear lane for right-wing populists like Trump.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

With Trump kicking off his re-election campaign with a boffo rally in Orlando, FL, it’s a good time to check in on how the Prez is doing in the Sunshine State. Felicitously, Quinnipiac has just released a new Florida poll that allows us to assess this.

According to the poll, Trump is doing rather poorly. In a matchup with possible Democratic nominee Joe Biden, he is behind by 9 points, 50-41. Lest this be deemed too much of an outlier, Trump was behind by a similar margin in Florida in the leaked Trump campaign polls (which he claims don’t exist; maybe he’ll claim Quinnipiac doesn’t exist either).

In his New York Times column, “When It Comes to the Senate, the Democrats Have Their Work Cut Out for Them: Regaining control of the upper chamber may lie just outside the party’s grasp, but it is not out of reach,” Thomas B. Edsall provides a source-rich exploration of Democratic prospects for winning a Senate majority in 2020. Edsall checks in with several of the most perceptive political analysts, and concludes,

Leah Gose and Theda Skocpol, sociologists at Harvard, have been tracking on-the-ground mobilization efforts by over 100 resistance groups in Pennsylvania and they are more optimistic about Democratic prospects in 2020.

In “Resist, Persist, and Transform: The Emergence and Impact of Grassroots Resistance Groups in the Early Trump presidency” Gose and Skocpol argue that anti-Trump efforts “have remade American civic life and politics since 2016.”

The two observe that the anti-Trump mobilization has not been “restricted to liberal states or to ‘blue enclave’ areas where voters mostly support Democrats” but extends into “places where Democrats or liberals are a beleaguered minority.”

Skocpol sees little or no letup on the part of local resistance groups. In an email, she wrote:

“Almost all groups plan to be very active going into 2020. The national media obsesses with the presidential horse race and the impeachment argument, but local groups are keeping at the fundamentals in many places.”

Democrats who have been frustrated by Republican control of the Senate — from 1995 to the present Congress, Republicans will have been in the majority for 19 years to the Democrats’ nine — had better hope that Gose and Skocpol are right.

If not, Democrats can bank on more years of staring at what Will Bunch, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, described as “Mitch McConnell’s democracy-crushing smirk” while McConnell presides over a Republican majority that has become the fervent ally of a president determined to embrace and embolden a white America hostile to immigrants, committed to an immoral racial hierarchy and eager to eviscerate the social progress of the past 60 years.

We encourage TDS readers to take the time to read the entire Gos/Skocpol paper, including their appendices, references and other notes. Their research not only provides a hopeful guide to successful progressive organizing projects in current context; they also shed light on how new groups can form and add to this all important coalition. In the paper’s abstract, the authors explain:

The November 2016 election sparked the creation of thousands of local groups committed to resisting the new Trump administration and Republican Congress. Our paper uses online surveys and interviews as well as evidence from fieldwork and web searches to analyze the development, demographics, and activities of such groups operating since late 2016 in eight non-metropolitan counties in four states as well as in dozens of cities, towns, and suburbs spread across the state of Pennsylvania. Local groups were founded through friendships and social media contacts and most of their members and leaders are middle-class white women. Often networked across states and regions, grassroots resistance groups have reached out to surrounding communities and generated and supported new candidates for local, state, and national offices. During the 2018 midterms and beyond, they are challenging and often remaking the Democratic Party at the local level.

Skocpol and Gos note that “Describing and analyzing the characteristics and activities of these widespread grassroots resistance efforts has been a challenge for scholars, because they are not part of any one big national organization, their participants are not flagged in national surveys, and their leaders and activities are only sporadically featured in the national media.”

Focusing on key swing states, the authors used “innovative forms of data collection – via fieldwork in multiple states, interviews, online surveys, and tracking of the Facebook pages of local groups – to offer the first comprehensive description and analysis of grassroots resistance organizations formed from late 2016 in four states and dozens of communities across North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, and (most extensively) Pennsylvania. Specifically, we ask: how did anti-Trump resistance groups form, grow, and sustain themselves at the local level from November 2016 to early 2019? Who formed and joined these groups and what have they done?” Among their insightful observations:

…Research concentrated on street demonstrations and other mass public protests cannot not get at the heart of what makes recent electorally sparked popular upsurges in the United States so consequential…Grassroots resistance groups were built by citizens who found other like-minded people nearby. For those who set up and went to resistance meetings, attendance was about more than political engagement because it provided emotional support and community-based opportunities to connect, organize, and act at what they felt was a shocking moment for America.

in a section entitled, “The Social Characteristics of Grassroots Resisters,” Gose and Skocpol note,

According to responses to our online individual questionnaires (see Appendix D) – and what we see with our own eyes when attending local meetings around the country – most participants in resistance groups are middle-aged or older white college-educated women. Our largest set of individual responses comes from participants in the pro-Trump counties who fit a consistent profile. Nine of every ten are women, and our field observations suggest that male members of local groups are often husbands or partners of the female members. Furthermore, the leadership teams for groups found in the eight counties are either all-female or (in two instances) include a woman teamed up with one or two men.

Nine of ten respondents report their race as white (compared to 8% who identified as nonwhite and two percent who do not indicate a category); and the respondents are even whiter than the surrounding populations in these overwhelmingly white non-big city areas. As for age, these resisters are mostly older adults ranging upward from their 30s into their retirement years (plus one 19-year old). The overall median age is 55 years. And they are highly educated people, with 37% reporting college degrees and another 46% holding advanced post-graduate degrees. Some of these participants are retired. Among both retirees and those still at work, the most frequent occupations cited are school teacher or university professor; health care positions; work in retail or human services jobs; and business management positions.

In addition to the demographic portrait, a sense of interpersonal conection and community is clearly a leading factor in activist participation:

Many resisters also placed high value on camaraderie and joint action with other local people who share their views and want to join forces to create “strength in numbers.” Social ties formed in local resistance groups and projects are crucial, as we have learned. Leaders and participants who did not previously know one another told us they have become close friends while working together in these groups. This dynamic can have a downside, of course; if one friend pulls back, that can reduce the other’s motivation. Yet at the same time, as the months have passed, people often tell us that they are remaining involved despite feelings of burnout, precisely because they value the fellowship. As one female co-leader in North Carolina put it in an email to the authors explaining why she is sticking with her group while another exhausted leader pulled back, “Working with our community makes me happy. I grow appreciative of the interconnectedness we share. I learn about myself and my world. Indivisible members have been a great blessing to me.” Attachments to fellow participants were apparent in many questionnaire responses. As we suggested earlier, the grassroots resistance has created and reinforced interpersonal social ties in the course of drawing volunteer citizens into new levels of activism.

In one of the most hopeful observations, Skocpol and Gose write, “we wondered at the onset of this research whether local resistance groups would tend to cluster in the most liberal states and in the more liberal cities and college towns of conservative “red” states. But that is not what we find. Similar grassroots groups have emerged all over the United States, in and across every state…Indeed, we find many indications in our field visits, interviews, and questionnaire responses that centrist and liberal residents of conservative counties may have felt an even stronger need to come together than their counterparts in liberal-leaning areas.”

As for issues of particular concern to the activists,

Virtually all were horrified at threats they perceived from the Trump administration and the GOP Congress; and most wanted to fight to try to save the Affordable Care Act from repeal once Trump and the Congressional leadership made this a top 2017 priority. But beyond that, various subgroups of resisters cared most about the environment, or were especially determined to push for gerrymandering reforms, or were worried about education spending cutbacks at the local and state as well as national levels.

Almost every one of the several dozen groups we have followed devoted a lot of participant energy to the early year-long fight to save the Affordable Care Act. That fight was ideal for a combination of local organizing and national purpose, because it involved repeated critical junctures as each house of Congress took steps toward repealing or eviscerating the landmark 2010 law that extended health insurance coverage to millions of Americans. Resistance efforts on this front were especially intense and relentless during the spring and summer of 2017 – when local groups used tactics like letter writing and “post card parties,” calls or visits to elected officials and their staffs at district offices, writing opinion pieces, and holding public demonstrations and “die-ins” (for accounts, see Griffin 2017, Weigel 2017, Zremski 2017). Defending health reform was a common challenge around which disparate local resisters could organize, build ties, and hone skills. Members of grassroots resistance groups were engaged at all levels and quite intensely; and even as efforts across many places were nationally attuned, local networks of resisters could take steps to inform their neighbors and local news outlets about what the Affordable Care Act does and what would be lost if it were repealed. Because this “all hands on deck” struggle went on for quite some time, it taught local members and regional networks ways to engage the media and press their representatives on other issues.

Finally, the fight to block health reform repeal boosted the widespread resistance because it ended up “winning” in two important ways. Congressional votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act ultimately fell just short in the Senate, and grassroots efforts at least contributed to this outcome. Those efforts prodded the GOP Congress to keep trying different variants of repeal over many months. And they pushed Maine Senator Susan Collins to become one of three Republican senators who blocked repeal (Cassidy 2017; Levin, Greenberg, and Padilla 2017b). What is more, in a larger sense, during 2017 U.S. public support for the Affordable Care Act shifted from net negative to net positive (Kaiser Family Foundation 2018). Whether or not widespread local resistance agitation directly caused either the Congressional repeal failure or the shift toward more favorable public views of health reform, these coincidences were encouraging to resistance members. Vital lessons were learned about how to act locally to affect national outcomes.

Gose and Skocpol also provide some cogent insights about burnout, attrition and ‘group persistence’ and note the important role of social media, particularly Facebook, in sustaining the activist projects. They also explore the sometimes problematic relationships between the groups and the local Democratic party and Democratic campaigns. They conclude,

Whatever unfolds, our research so far suggests that movement sparked by the Trump election will not push U.S. liberal politics toward the uncompromising far left. The kinds of grassroots resistance groups we have discovered and studied do not espouse the sorts of purist ideological stances sometimes taken by professionally run progressive advocacy groups. Grassroots groups have strong local connections, and their participants are closely engaged with candidates and officeholders with varied backgrounds and views. If these female-led voluntary groups persist as an important part of center-left politics in the United States, they are unlikely to further uncompromising ideological polarization. As before throughout American history, women’s civic activism may revitalize democratic engagement and promote a new birth of responsive government in communities across the land.

The research of Skocpol and Gose provides hope that the new ‘resistance’ activist groups can indeed help steer America in a more progressive direction. How effectively Democrats support and interact with these groups may also help the party win the presidency, secure working majorities in Washington and in state legislatures across the nation.

At CNN Politics, Harry Enten explains why “Why Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment strategy is politically smart,” and notes, “After Mueller’s statement, Pelosi again decided to strike a center chord. She didn’t call for impeachment proceedings to begin, but indicated such action may be necessary in the future depending on what House committees investigating potential obstruction of justice issues find…Polling shows that’s likely the right move for now. Voters seem most open to a path in which obstruction of justice is investigated, but not via an impeachment inquiry. A clear majority of voters (57%) agreed with the statement that Congress should “investigate whether Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice during the course of the Mueller investigation” in a CNN poll taken after the Mueller report was released. This includes 94% of Democrats, 52% of independents and even 18% of Republicans…In the CNN poll, 61% of voters were against impeaching and removing Trump from office…An ABC News/Washington Post poll similarly showed that only 37% of Americans want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings, while 56% were opposed…Put it all together: Voters are very much open to the idea that Trump did something wrong, but they don’t want to go the road of impeachment just yet.”

Writing about the CNN poll, Daniel Politi notes at slate.com “Among Americans as a whole, support for impeachment increased only slightly to 41 percent, up from 37 percent last month. On the opposite end, 54 percent are opposed to impeachment. And despite the slight uptick, it is hardly the highest it has ever been compared to the 47 percent who supported impeachment in September 2018…Democrats are increasingly in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump, with 76 percent saying they support the move to oust the president from office, according to a new CNN poll. That marks a seven-percentage-point increase from April when support for impeachment stood at 69 percent among Democrats, according to the poll conducted by SSRS.”

From “Democracy Fights Back: Republican attempts at voter suppression have inspired a movement to restore and expand access to the polls” by Adam Eichen at The New Republic: “Florida is just the tip of the iceberg. Activists are winning pro-democracy battles across the country. Just on election night 2018, voters approved over 20 pro-democracy ballot initiatives. Now, 15 states and Washington, D.C. have automatic voter registration. Nineteen states and D.C. have same day registration. Fourteen states and D.C. will have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (with three more likely to join by the end of the year). Public financing of elections is spreading via municipalities. Five states last year attempted to limit gerrymandering(with varying degrees of success). And on a federal level, the House of representatives passed the For the People Act (H.R.1), an omnibus package that includes, among many other things, public financing of Congressional elections, nationwide automaticand same-day voter registration, and independent redistricting commissions.”

“Twitter is not exactly known as a platform for centrist, middle of the road, political discourse,” Hana Trudo writes in her article, “Dem Centrist Group Launches Twitter Campaign to Get People to Ignore Twitter” at The Daily Beast. “But Third Way, the prominent think tank for moderate Democrats, is hoping to change that. The group is targeting roughly 10,000 “influencers” on the platform by promoting paid content that aims to change the progressive conversation to centrist chatter ahead of 2020. And they’re doing so, in large part, by encouraging the individuals they’re targeting on Twitter to not pay too much attention to Twitter…with Democratic lawmakers continuing their leftward drift, the group is rethinking what type of incentive structures matter. The Twitter campaign is a recognition that social media conversations—and the powerful public opinion shapers who participate in them—can be as influential in shaping how lawmakers act as, say, polling data…Ultimately, Third Way’s goal is not simply to influence the influencers, but to shape the direction that the Democratic Party takes heading into the 2020 primaries.”

At the lefty Counterpunch, John Rynn, author of author of Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The Power to Rebuild the American Middle Class,” has some salient thoughts on the importance of a permanent infrastructure strategy for Democrats. An excerpt: “Increased infrastructure spending is proposed by the Democrats, Our Revolution, the Green Party, the the CPC, and BLM up to about $200 billion per year, to fix what is clearly crumbling…What we actually need right now is a massive increase in spending to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure and create new green infrastructure to prevent the worst of global warming and other environmental catastrophes. This spending could provide a decent job to anyone who wants one and at the same time rebuild the critical manufacturing sector (I have proposed an approximately $1.5 trillion per year plan for this purpose).” Rynn urges creation of a “permanent sector of the economy”  dedicated to “permanently spend all of their time maintaining, updating, and expanding national infrastructure…Infrastructure thus enables modern wealth creation and growth, supports manufacturing, creates millions or even tens of millions of jobs, and ideally can be used to prevent ecological collapse…There is plenty of infrastructure building in American and world history to be proud of in the past hundred years or so that can provide lessons for current agendas. Promoting economic democracy is a new function of government that could help evolve left-of-center parties from declining, boring remnants of the past into inspiring and attractive political movements of the future.”

Gabriela Resto-Montero’s “Democratic presidential candidates call for change at California’s Democratic Party Convention” at Vox  rounds up choice comments of the 14 Democratic presidential candidates, including: ““Here’s the thing, when a candidate tells you about all the things that aren’t possible, about how political calculations came first, about how you should settle for little bits and pieces instead of real change, they’re telling you something very important — they are telling you that they will not fight for you,” she [Elizabeth Warren] said…“Beating Donald Trump is a must, but that is a floor, not a ceiling,” [Sen. Cory] Booker said. “We are bigger than that, we have greater ambitions than that.” And, “In these times, Democrats can no more promise to take us back to the 2000s or 1990s than conservatives can take us back to the 1950s,” [Mayor Pete] Buttigieg said. “If we want to defeat this president and lead the country in a new direction, we must be ready to transform our economy and our democracy into something different, something better.”

Emily Yoffe explains why “Democrats Need to Learn From Their Al Franken Mistake: The country lost an opportunity to model how fair procedures can work in a #MeToo case” at The Atlantic: “The lessons of this debacle remain unlearned, and the consequences of Franken’s case continue to play out, in the presidential race and beyond. The Democratic reaction to the Franken allegations and the precedents it set will present a danger to the Democratic Party until it reconsiders the episode, and thinks about ways to stop such unfair and swift destruction from happening…The Senate is the rare workplace in which an established set of proceduresaddresses such violations. The inquiries are conducted by staff (or sometimes outside attorneys) with subpoena power. They are intended to provide an unbiased examination, and recommend proportional punishment—if appropriate. One of the greatest misfortunes of the Franken case is that this process was abruptly terminated in favor of political posturing…The Senate could have modeled how fair procedures can work in a #MeToo case outside the criminal-justice system, illustrating the necessity of restraint and patience when volatile issues are being adjudicated…When people are accused and punished unjustly, a backlash inevitably ensues. When that happens, the crucial and urgent cause of addressing sexual misconduct is undermined.”

Progressive activists are keeping watch over who is sponsoring the Republican Convention. David C. Morris notes at Fortune that “CREDO Action, which is associated with the wireless provider CREDO Mobile, has gathered more than 65,000 signatures for a petition urging Google (GOOGL, -1.34%) and Microsoft (MSFT, -1.70%) to pull out of supporting the RNC, saying “It is irresponsible and dangerous for corporations like Google and Microsoft to promote Trump’s hate by sponsoring the Republican convention.”…Microsoft has already said that it will provide only technology and support, not cash, to the convention. Coca-Cola (KO, -0.24%) has also dramatically scaled back its support of the event… Facebook has confirmed to Recode that it will remain a sponsor of the GOP’s July convention in Cleveland. That’s despite an activist group urging tech companies to pull their support for the event, which they characterize as “sponsoring” Trump’s contentious platform.” Facebook and Google would be difficult to boycott, but activists can certainly make them conclude that supporting the GOP convention is not worth the headaches and bad image they get from sponsoring the most extremist GOP in history.

At FiveThirtyEight, Amelia Thomson-Deveaux addresses a question that may be of interest to the various presidential campaigns, “Who Do Non-Religious Democrats Prefer?” Thomson-Deveaux observes, “People who identify as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” accounted for 35 percent of Democratic primary voters in 2016, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study,¹ and as we mentioned in our article, are a growing constituency within the Democratic Party. And according to crosstabs from Morning Consult’s weekly tracking poll for May 20-26, support for Sen. Bernie Sanders is higher among religiously unaffiliated voters than among religiously affiliated voters. Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has an edge among religious Democrats…religiously unaffiliated Democrats — in particular, atheists and agnostics, who together accounted for 17 percent of primary voters in the 2016 CCES study — are substantially more liberal than Democrats who are still part of organized religion…Marshaling Democrats by invoking their secular identity, though, would be risky for Democratic politicians…”

There are obviously many things Donald Trump does every day that bug me. But there’s one in particular that is simply enraging, and I wrote about it this week at New York:

On the 2016 campaign trail, Donald Trump famously predicted that if elected he’d do such wonderful things for African-Americans that he’d win 95 percent of their votes in 2020. Since he won a booming 8 percent of the black vote against Hillary Clinton, there was nowhere to go but up, and indeed, Republicans won 9 percent of the African-American vote in 2018, according to exit polls. But the signs for Trump were really bad:

“An election-eve poll of African-American voters, moreover, showed that 83 percent said Trump made them feel ‘disrespected,’ and 79 percent ‘angry.’ In the same poll, 48 percent of African-Americans labeled Trump a racist who is deliberately trying to hurt minorities.”

If that surprises you in any way, be aware that a Google search for “racist Trump” pulls up 163 million hits. Aside from his exalted status among white nationalists and his deeply reactionary domestic agenda that would devastate poor and minority communities, the man’s reflexive defense of neo-Confederate symbolism and his solidarity with racist politicians make the troubles Republicans have had with African-Americans for decades look benign.

Nonetheless, Trump’s reelection effort will include an effort, well, not so much to win over African-Americans as to encourage them to stay home on November 3. A notable falloff in black turnout in 2016 was one of several key factors leading to Clinton’s fatal underperformance in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which, in the end, were the ball game.

This was not entirely an accident or just a product of Barack Obama’s not being on the ballot, as Philip Bump explains:

“’They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary,’ Trump said. ‘They didn’t come out. And that was a big — so thank you to the African-American community.'”

According to reporting from Bloomberg shortly before the 2016 election, the campaign was working hard to ensure that they didn’t. A senior campaign official told reporters Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg that they had “three major voter-suppression operations underway,” including one aimed at dampening turnout among black voters. In part, the Bloomberg report suggested, that included running under-the-radar ads on Facebook tying Clinton to the 1994 crime bill.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Trump is already pulling the same stunt with possible 2020 opponent Joe Biden, calling the 1994 crime bill “a dark period in American History” that the former vice president should apologize for, and contrasting that with Trump’s involvement in criminal justice reforms that “helped fix the bad 1994 Bill.”

The mendacity of this line of argument is stunning. Aside from Trump’s personal history of backing the nastiest kind of law-and-order politics, he’s acting as though the sentencing provisions of the 1994 crime bill, which many observers now blame for contributing to mass incarceration, was some sort of “Democrat” scheme. Yes, a majority of House Republicans opposed the final version, but that was due to its assault-weapons ban and its crime-prevention programs; the GOP wanted purely punitive legislation, as the New York Times reported:

“The bill that passed trimmed the original package from $33.5 billion, with nearly two-thirds of the cuts from prevention programs that Republicans had branded as useless welfare spending …

“A measure proposed by Representatives Bill Brewster, Democrat of Oklahoma, and Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, to scrap the bipartisan compromise and approve a plan with no money for so-called prevention programs — and no ban on assault weapons — failed, 232 to 197. ”

All but 30 House Republicans voted for that lock-’em-up-and-let-us-keep-our-guns version of the bill. No, Trump wasn’t in Congress then, but, if anything, he has represented a return to the brutal anti-crime and war-on-drugs policies and messaging that helped make Republicans toxic to minority voters before he came on the scene.

But Trump’s slurs about (and/or ignorance of ) the 1994 crime bill are nothing compared with his chutzpah in bragging about the criminal-justice-reform legislation that “helped fix the bad 1994 bill.” His 2016 law-and-order campaign derailed a bipartisan drive for a more comprehensive reform bill after Mitch McConnell decided to yank it out of fear of contradicting Trump (and his chief Senate agent, Jeff Sessions, a bitter opponent of reform). With Sessions installed as attorney general, it looked as if criminal-justice reform might be dead, but then presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner got behind a modest prison-reform bill in the House, eventually merging it with a few sentencing-reform provisions in the Senate, and spent months trying to convince Trump to get onboard the bipartisan train. Finally, and reluctantly, the president agreed to a watered-down mini-version of the bill he indirectly killed in 2016. And now he’s acting as though it was all his idea.

So Trump’s insulting audacity in addressing African-American voters isn’t abating at all. And he’s hoping he’ll demoralize them into failing the exercise the franchise. What a scandal for a president from the Party of Lincoln.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

I’m not sure how many people have even absorbed the fact that there is now a competitor to the National Election Pool-sponsored exit poll, the AP VoteCast survey–used by Fox and AP affiliates–which has a very different methodology than the standard exits and purports to replace it.

Is it any better? Probably not. Both polls perform reasonably well in helping predict the outcome of races on election night, though some misses are inevitable. The real problem here is that people rely on the exit polls to give them a portrait of the demographic and attitudinal voting patterns of the electorate and therefore the underlying dynamics of the election. But the exit polls have been shown time and again to be inaccurate on this score and it is unlikely that the AP VoteCast survey is much better.