Last Call For That's Real White Of You, Con't

As I mentioned earlier this week, Virginia Democrat and Hillary veep pick Sen. Tim Kaine is running for re-election and his opponent is Republican/Actual White Supremacist™ Corey Stewart, who is already calling for Kaine to be investigated and jailed because of the crime of being Hillary's veep pick, or something.

After responding to his victory rally crowds’ “Lock her up” chants by saying it “might just happen,” the Republican Senate candidate who won the GOP primary in Virginia on Tuesday evening, Corey Stewart, again suggested that his opponent should be jailed. 

During a turbulent interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night, Stewart suggested that his opponent, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) was at the “center” of reports that a government informant was deployed to meet with members of the Trump campaign to probe their contacts with Russian officials at the start of what we now consider the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. President Donald Trump, Stewart —who claims he won because he fully aligned himself with Trump — and other far-right Republicans have seized on reports of the informant as evidence that a spy was sent to infiltrate Trump’s campaign. The President himself has dubbed the whole ordeal “spygate.”

“’ll tell you something, I really do believe that Tim Kaine has been at the center of all this stuff that you’re seeing with regard to the FBI, you know the whole problem is having the FBI spying by federal agency on a presidential campaign,” Stewart told Cuomo, who interrupted him to say there was “no proof” to back up his allegations. 

Stewart shot back: “We’re not in a court of law are we?” 

“That doesn’t mean the truth doesn’t apply, my brother,” Cuomo said. 

Stewart then repeated his claim that Kaine and the entire commonwealth of Virginia were at the “center” of the informant controversy. 

“I would not be surprised if there’s an investigation of Tim Kaine before the year is out,” Stewart said. “Look here’s the question, at the end of the day people have to ask themselves, what has Tim Kaine accomplished in his six years in the United States Senate? Tim Kaine can’t point to a single accomplishment in the United States Senate for Virginia or Virginians. The only thing that Tim Kaine has done in the past six years is run for vice president, and he didn’t even do a very good job at that, I might add.”

Then this morning, Stewart tweeted that Kaine is a terrorist.

Virginia's sitting senator approves of and even applauds his son's participation in a known terrorist organization, #Antifa.

Let that sink in. https://t.co/7foEPLKYHT

— Corey Stewart (@CoreyStewartVA) June 14, 2018

It's only Thursday.  Stewart has been the GOP candidate for Senate for less than 48 hours.  And when I say Stewart is a white supremacist, I'm 100% not being hyperbolic.

He once stood proudly before a Confederate flag, declaring it was not a symbol of hatred, but “about our heritage.” 

After the march of torch-carrying white supremacists in Charlottesville last year, which led to the death of a counterprotester, he criticized “weak Republicans” who “couldn’t apologize fast enough.” 

As officials around Virginia have grappled with whether to remove Confederate statues, he has compared those politicians to leaders of the Islamic State. 

Now Corey Stewart, a county official who for years has played to the hard-right fringe, captured the Republican nomination for Senate in Virginia. 

He did so in a low-turnout primary on Tuesday when many centrist Republicans apparently stayed home, unhappy with a three-way race among candidates all professing strong loyalty to President Trump and given to fiery culture war pronouncements. 

Mr. Stewart, the chairman of a county board of supervisors who briefly led Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign in Virginia, received a congratulatory overnight tweet from the president, who called Mr. Stewart’s Democratic opponent, Senator Tim Kaine, “a total stiff.” 

Tellingly, though, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm, said it would not support Mr. Stewart, who lags far behind Mr. Kaine in fund-raising and has a history of cozying up to white supremacists and anti-Semites that threatens to make him an albatross for down-ballot Republicans. 

White House officials said the president was unlikely to cross the Potomac River to campaign personally for Mr. Stewart unless there were signs that his race against Mr. Kaine had become competitive. 

The real worry for national Republicans — and the hope for Democrats — is that Mr. Stewart’s nomination may cost some incumbent Republicans in Virginia their seats in Congress.

When he loses, I hope he takes the rest of the Virginia GOP down with him.

The Heartbeat (Bill) Of America

Ohio Republicans in the Trump era are wasting no time in preparing to test both GOP Gov. John Kasich and possibly any Trump Supreme Court nominees on state restrictions on abortion.

An Ohio bill that would ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected is headed to the governor’s desk. 

Lawmakers in the Republican-controlled state House voted to approve the so-called “heartbeat bill” Tuesday night after it passed in the Senate earlier in the day, clearing the way for what would be one of the nation’s most stringent abortion restrictions. 

The legislation would prohibit most abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy after the first detectable heartbeat. 

Gov. John Kasich, an abortion opponent, has previously voiced concerns about whether such a move would be constitutional. He has not said whether he plans to sign the measure. 

State Senate President Keith Faber, a Republican, said the twice-defeated bill came back up again because of Donald Trump’s presidential victory and the expectation he will fill Supreme Court vacancies with justices who are more likely to uphold stricter abortion bans.

Asked if he expects the Ohio proposal to survive a legal challenge, Faber said: “I think it has a better chance than it did before.” 

The ban would make an exception if the mother’s life is in danger but not in cases of rape or incest, he said. 

NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio said the move would block access to abortion before most women even know they’re pregnant. “This bill would effectively outlaw abortion and criminalize physicians that provide this care to their patients,” said Kellie Copeland, the group’s executive director.

So again, two questions here: One, will "moderate" Kasich sign the nation's most restrictive abortion law (or more likely just wait ten days and it will become law automatically) and two if he does, how will the Trump administration handle the almost certain injunction against the measure?  This would almost certainly come before Trump's new SCOTUS nominee if it went to the high court in a couple of years.  It's very possible the court will refuse to hear the case after it's struck down, as similar measures in Arkansas and North Dakota were left unconstitutional when SCOTUS refused to take up either state law.

But it's also possible that a new justice and a new court could want to take it up, too.

It's a stupid law designed solely to see if SCOTUS will let states get away with banning abortions after six weeks.  I don't know if Kasich will join this mess or not, or if it even matters because Republicans would only need three-fifths of both the Ohio House and Senate to override a veto and they'll almost certainly have to numbers to do that. Odds are even if this survives a Kasich veto that the fight will end up being a big embarrassment to the state and cost taxpayers millions.

That certainly hasn't stopped Republicans elsewhere.

Last Call For The Rise Of The Emoprogs

Jerome Armstrong, one of the founders of old school netroots blog MyDD, argues that progressive blogs have failed:  failed to get the kind of control the tea party has over the GOP, failed to get a much more progressive America, and most importantly, failed to stop the rise of Obama, who Armstrong sees as the mortal foe to progressives.

I didn’t see Lieberman’s 2006 win in quite as pinnacle a light at the time, and it certainly wouldn’t have been, had we followed it up more often, and won.

Yet I certainly peg the crux of lost movement with the rise of Obama’s campaign. It was an awful place to be in with Clinton vs. Obama, in the 2008 primary. My basic impulse (after Edwards –who had the populist message– imploded) was, like many bloggers (not the masses), to go with Clinton because she at least showed signs of being accountable to the netroots movement, unlike Obama. He didn’t need the netroots for his message and candidate-movement, he had places like Politico to push out of, and was basically an identity-politics cult for many new to politics that flooded the blogs.

Armstrong goes on for some length in this general vein, viewing Obama as nothing more than a Wall Street puppet and arguing that Clinton, while not much better, would have at least elevated Armstrong and his ilk to the level of courtiers.

BooMan has an important piece setting Armstrong straight on where the Netroots went wrong.

I just find it bizarre to be lectured by a man who first came to my attention as Mark Warner's agent to the blogosphere. I like Mark Warner and think he is a good man and a decent senator. But I would never confuse him with a progressive. And then Jerome jumped on the Clinton bandwagon, which may have seemed like a solid career move, but it wasn't where most progressives were going. And then he bailed out to work on Gary Johnson's libertarian campaign for president, which was definitely a move out of the DLC camp, but a move that traded agreement on some issues like the Drug War and surveillance for disagreement about just about everything else in the progressive playbook.

I have never thought of Jerome as a progressive, and insofar as he immersed himself in the progressive backlash against Obama's presidency, which was led by Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, I think he excommunicated himself from about 90% of progressives in this country.

It's telling that he still resents Barack Obama for not coming to him with his hat in his hand. 

And that's the real reason behind the emoprog rancor towards Obama:  he doesn't need them, because he plays a different game than the Clintons do.  Armstrong especially was in it for the money and the prestige, not for the advancement of progressive political goals.  Could we have done better than Obama, given our choices were Hillary and John Edwards?  I'm going to argue that at the time, no.  Clinton certainly knew how to play the game and gave rise to many of the attacks the right still uses against Obama today.  And Edwards?  We dodged a hail of bullets by not nominating him, his personal foibles would have given us President McCain and Vice President Moose Lady for sure.

But it's the fact that these same people refuse to give Obama credit for the progressive acts he does, or worse, take credit for "forcing" him into those acts.  They still believe they run the game, and they will never admit they don't. If they do, the game ends.

And I'm sick and tired of playing games with these fools.  I for one am glad the President ignores them.  They've earned that.

Last Call

Just for my own edification, here's what the Gallup registered voter poll for President looked like through mid September 2008:





And the 2012 version:

They're pretty damn similar.  By the way, it was about this time 4 years ago that after closing the gap, Obama then blew McCain out of the water and his campaign fell apart:



Candidate Obama was actually behind in early September, and went on to rip McCain up in the debates and win handily.  He was up 13 points among RVs on Oct 31, 2008, but they were tied as late as September 22 of that year.

Starting to look like that may be the case again.   The first debate was September 26 then, and it just got worse for McCain from there.  I'm betting we'll see a similar pattern this year.

Last Call

The number one golden rule of statistical analysis:  Correlation does not always equal causation.  Having said that, there's pretty strong correlation in this NY Times analysis of areas with high incidences of racially charged Google searches and areas where President Obama underperformed in 2008 by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz:

Consider two media markets, Denver and Wheeling (which is a market evenly split between Ohio and West Virginia). Mr. Kerry received roughly 50 percent of the votes in both markets. Based on the large gains for Democrats in 2008, Mr. Obama should have received about 57 percent of votes in both Denver and Wheeling. Denver and Wheeling, though, exhibit different racial attitudes. Denver had the fourth lowest racially charged search rate in the country. Mr. Obama won 57 percent of the vote there, just as predicted. Wheeling had the seventh highest racially charged search rate in the country. Mr. Obama won less than 48 percent of the Wheeling vote.

Add up the totals throughout the country, and racial animus cost Mr. Obama three to five percentage points of the popular vote. In other words, racial prejudice gave John McCain the equivalent of a home-state advantage nationally.

Yes, Mr. Obama also gained some votes because of his race. But in the general election this effect was comparatively minor. The vast majority of voters for whom Mr. Obama’s race was a positive were liberal, habitual voters who would have voted for any Democratic presidential candidate. Increased support and turnout from African-Americans added only about one percentage point to Mr. Obama’s totals.

If my findings are correct, race could very well prove decisive against Mr. Obama in 2012. Most modern presidential elections are close. Losing even two percentage points lowers the probability of a candidate’s winning the popular vote by a third. And prejudice could cost Mr. Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania.

The argument here in my eyes is whether or not this has already been factored into the votes.  My theory is that in these areas where President Obama underperformed, race was a factor, but people were honest about not wanting to vote for President Obama, they just lied about the reason why.  If that's correct, the polls actually are already taking this into effect, and why crosstabs don't always appear to make sense.

You can say you're planning to vote for Romney because of the economy.  You can really just not like Barack Obama because he's black.  The point is people aren't going to lie and say they're going to vote for Obama when they lie about race as a factor, so the numbers are still where they would be if the reasons were honestly reported.

Second, in the areas where this is the most prevalent, President Obama lost by more than that margin in those markets.  West Virginia without the seven point thumb on the scale would have been at best a tie as Obama lost there by 15 points, and that's again assuming the votes were factored in.  If the average was 3-5 points, Kentucky's 16 point McCain win would have been always out of reach.  The electoral college blunted the effect here and will do so again in 2012.

I'm not surprised by this and in fact it's pretty damn impressive (and depressive) to see just how many American voters are lying to pollsters and kudos to the approach used here, but after 5 years of this in primaries and the 2008 and 2010 elections, by now the folks who aren't going to vote for Obama based solely on race are either living in areas where the state will stay red anyway, or they've found other reasons to oppose him to tell pollsters instead.  I have my doubts that these preferences aren't already being factored in to current polls...in fact I can almost guarantee you they are.

Which is good news, in one sense.  Yes, we should be very concerned with several million Americans out there with their bigotry in full bloom.  But they're already counted in the polls is my guess.  No need to double-count them and borrow even more trouble.  If anything, at least Team Obama knows what markets now they need to be paying special attention to...and which are lost causes.  That's valuable knowledge in and of itself.

Depressingly awful and maddeningly terrible knowledge, but useful nonetheless.