Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The question for the Republicans trying to take the Glenn Youngkin path to Trumpism without the Trump is how long they can avoid the "without the Trump" part.

Donald Trump is expected to maintain a prolific schedule of campaign rallies to boost Republicans in next year's midterms. But on the heels of Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia -- accomplished without a single Trump cameo -- some of the former President's aides and allies warn there could be parts of the country where he may now be encouraged to keep his distance. 

The "stay away strategy," as one aide described it, would involve Trump steering clear of states or districts where a confluence of factors -- such as his popularity and the demographic makeup -- could mean his presence might sabotage Republican chances. 

"There are absolutely places he shouldn't go. I wouldn't put him in Maryland, New Hampshire, or Arizona," said a person close to Trump. Despite the former President previously campaigning in those states for his own campaigns or other candidates, this person suggested Trump harm GOP Senate or gubernatorial hopefuls if he were to make appearances next year. 

The approach assumes an unusual level of deference from the prideful ex-President, who has long insisted his support is the most essential ingredient in any Republican candidate's quest for victory. Trump has relished his position atop the GOP since leaving office and has spent much of the past week huddling with aides and outside advisers at Mar-a-Lago to discuss his involvement in 2022 and where he should be most active on the ground. Trump has already endorsed Republican primary challengers and incumbents at national and statewide levels in Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Wyoming, Ohio, Alaska, Texas and several other states. 

It also poses a challenge to candidates who determine it would be best for them if Trump focused his attention elsewhere, but do not wish to run afoul of the former President by asking. 

"They will have to make a strong case and it can't be, 'I just don't want him around,' because at the end of the day many of these guys are running on his policies," said the person close to Trump, adding that it's "a delicate balance that certain candidates are going to have to dance, but the whole point of elections is to be strategic and to win, not to appease a former President."

 

Hard truth time again, folks.

 

They're not going to be able to do both. 

 

Trump is cunning, but he cannot keep his raging malignant narcissism in check. The more stories like this that the press runs, that Trump is a liability to 2022 Republicans in general elections, the more rage Trump will burn with. You won't be able to keep him out of Arizona, for example, or Wisconsin, or Georgia. He's gonna show up, he's gonna do rallies, and he's going to remind everyone why he's a loser.

He'll burn down the party rather than stay home, and we all know it. It's the one thing Dems truly have going for them in the elections ahead.

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

As I told you previously, as I warned you about for months, the most likely outcome of the infrastructure bill was House progressives folding and passing the Senate bill into law, and then President Manchin and VP Sinema killing the Build Back Better plan slowly. We're well into phase two of that plan.

Red-hot inflation data validates the instinct of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to punt President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda until next year — potentially killing a quick deal on the $1.75 trillion package, people familiar with the matter tell Axios.

Why it matters: The data released Wednesday set the president and White House staff scrambling. Slowing down work on the massive tax-and-spending plan is against the fervent desire of the administration and House progressives. 

With a limited number of legislative days left in the year, Manchin is content to focus on the issues that need to be addressed, Axios is told. They include funding the government, raising the debt ceiling and passing the National Defense Authorization Act. Manchin, like a group of House moderates, also wants to see a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the true cost of each of Biden’s proposed programs, as well as the tax proposals to fund them.

The big picture: Progressives have long worried that after centrists got their $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, they'd find excuses not to move on the budget reconciliation package. It includes billions to expand the social safety net and fight climate change, among other Democratic priorities. 

Business groups also are stepping up their attacks on the package, warning congressional Democrats about its overall costs, potential effects on inflation and $800 billion in corporate tax increases.

Manchin still hasn't agreed to the specifics of Biden's plan to spend $555 billion to combat climate change. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer convened a call today with senators who participated in COP26, where they discussed how climate provisions in both bills were well received in Glasgow. During the call, the senators also strategized about how to get Manchin to agree to Biden's climate provisions — a recognition they have more work to do.

Driving the news: Prices rose 0.9% from last month for an annual inflation rate of 6.2%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The president labeled it "worrisome, even though wages are going up." He told a crowd in Baltimore: "[O]n the good side, we're seeing the highest growth rate in decades, the fastest decrease in unemployment ... since 1950."

White House chief of staff Ron Klain tried to couch Biden's spending plan as a long-term strategy to lower inflation. "What it does is it makes sure that our federal spending meets the things that families really need: bringing down the cost of child care, bringing down the cost of drugs, bringing down the cost of elder care, bringing down the cost of preschool, cutting taxes for middle-class families," he told CNN's Jake Tapper:

Between the lines: Manchin has been warning about inflation since the summer. He's argued Congress should take a “strategic pause” on the bigger package until Congress had more time to assess the effects of the nearly $5 trillion COVID stimulus spending in 2020 and earlier this year. His statements on Wednesday amounted to an I-told-you-so. 

“By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse,” Manchin said. “From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and D.C. can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.”

 

Here's the hard truth.

 

Manchin has been calling the shots on this since July, folks. 

He's got the bill he wants, and now he can keep the BBB plan in the basement and torture it for months. He had the most hard and soft leverage in the fight, and the most willingness to use that leverage to accomplish his own goals.

It's time to ask Manchin what his future plans are, because he definitely has them. He's the Democratic version of John McCain, and McCain had his national ambitions too.

Just saying.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Five Thirty Eight's Hakeem Jefferson and Michael Tesler dive into why racist White Republicans will vote for Black Republican candidates over any Democrat whatsoever, and yeah, tribal loyalty in the Trump cult is definitely a thing if you haven't been keeping up with, I dunno, the last 5 years of politics.

Can white voters who back a Black candidate still hold racist beliefs and views?

That question has come to the fore in the wake of Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory in the blueish state of Virginia. Conservatives were quick to counter claims that Youngkin’s win represented the effectiveness of stoking racial fears with results from Virginia’s down-ballot election for lieutenant governor — a contest where the Republican candidate, Winsome Sears, made history by becoming the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, for example, emphatically mocked the notion that “voters called white supremacists elected a Black Lt. Gov.” Conservative commentators on Fox News and Twitter, including Sears herself, also used the historic victory as an ostensible shield against accusations of Republican racism.

But supporting a Black candidate hardly precludes voters from harboring racist beliefs and motivations. Republicans are increasingly more likely than Democrats to hold prejudiced views of minorities, so Black Republicans like Sears often draw especially strong support from white Americans with otherwise anti-Black views simply because they draw most of their support from Republican voters.

A clear example of this was in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, when Ben Carson made a bid to become the GOP’s first African American presidential nominee. Support for Carson was positively correlated with the belief that Black Americans have too much influence on U.S. politics, according to data from Washington University in St. Louis’s American Panel Survey (TAPS) in late 2015.

Whites who thought African Americans had “far too little” influence disliked Carson and preferred Hillary Clinton by 60 percentage points in a hypothetical general election matchup. Meanwhile, Carson was very popular among whites who were most concerned about African Americans having “too much” influence in politics. So much so that whites who thought African Americans have “far too much” influence preferred Carson to Clinton by 45 points.

Again, much of that relationship is down to partisanship — Republicans are more likely to hold prejudiced views and also more likely to support a Republican candidate. But that’s the point: For many white GOP voters, anti-Black views don’t seem to get in the way of supporting a Black Republican.

You can see a similar pattern in the January 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study. Carson received more favorable evaluations among the sizable minority (40 percent) of overtly prejudiced whites who agreed with the racist stereotype that “most African Americans are more violent than most whites.” This group rated Carson significantly more favorably on a 0-100 scale than the white moderate Republican presidential candidate, Jeb Bush (52 to 39, respectively). Then-candidate Donald Trump was the only politician in the survey who was rated higher than Carson among overtly prejudiced whites.1

The contrast between how prejudiced whites rated Carson and Obama is rather revealing, as well. The sharp negative relationship between support for Obama and the endorsement of anti-Black stereotypes is consistent with several studies showing that prejudice was an unusually strong predictor of opposition to Obama from the 2008 election through the end of his presidency. These patterns also fit well with other political science research showing that racially prejudiced whites tend to be more opposed to Black Democrats than to white Democrats.

To make sense of why racially prejudiced white Americans are willing to support some Black candidates, it is worth considering why they so strongly oppose Black Democrats in the first place. Given the racialized nature of the two-party system in the United States, most Black political candidates are Democrats who embrace liberal positions on issues of race and justice. When asked whether they would support such a candidate, research shows that racially prejudiced white voters worry that these candidates will represent the interests of Black Americans, both because of a shared African American identity and because Democrats are perceived as the party more supportive of Black interests. So, it makes sense that racially resentful white Americans oppose candidates like Obama, as his racial identity and partisanship signaled to voters that he was more supportive of Black interests than prior presidents.

Put another way: Racially prejudiced white voters are not opposed to Black candidates simply because they are Black, but because they believe that most Black candidates will fight for “those people” and not “people like us.”

 

Yep.

 

It's the "those people" rule again.

It's why white voters, especially white women, abandoned Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a big part of why Trump won.

Racist Republicans love candidates that will fight for white folk and actuvely hurt Black and brown folk. Trump and Carson were the candidates who were best seen as making these racist views not only permissible, but possible as US policy.

They saw Hillary as a race traitor, more interested in helping Black America than white America. Winsome Sears on the other hand is a Black former Marine and small businesswoman openly posing with a rifle in her arms, and she won easily. (Same went for Jenean Hampton here in KY in 2015).

Permission to be racist is what they want, and you don't get much more permission to be a racist than "Well I voted for Virginia/Kentucky's first Black woman Lieutenant Governor and she won, so we're clearly not racists, YOU ARE, LIBTARD!"

That's it. That's what they want, that's what they got. Useful idiots serving the cause of white supremacy by bowing down to it, no matter how many of their own they hurt. A Black woman advancing the cause of white America? That's how it should be, to the Trump cultists.

They couldn't be happier.

StupidiNews!

• As Americans observe Veteran's Day, the Pentagon is allowing the public to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for the first time in 96 years to commemorate the Tomb's centennial.
• New Jersey state Democratic Senate President Steve Sweeney has conceded last week's race to Republican Ed Durr in a close race.
• US climate envoy John Kerry and China have issued a joint agreement to lower emissions and protect forests at this year's COP26 Glasgow climate summit.
• US Secretary of State Tony Blinken says America and its allies would "take action" if China directed military action towards Taiwan.
• As federal vaccine mandate rules continue to face court battles, the Biden administration says that private sector and local government mandates have lowered the number of unvaccinated by 40%.