Twenty Years Later

That you can draw a straight line from the 9/11 terrorist attack to this picture of Bush having Thanksgiving dinner with troops in Baghdad in 2003 is a damning indictment of U.S. political culture. Source: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=27709. White House photo by Tina Hager.

Anniversaries of innocent people losing their lives in terrorist attacks encourage reflection. I was an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia on September 11, 2001. The morning of the attacks, I was in the building that housed the religious studies department and I was reading in a chair. A professor came walking down the hallway. I had never had a class with him and did not know him. I forget exactly how the exchange went, but he told me about the attack and said something about how we shouldn’t be surprised given U.S. behavior abroad. I don’t remember how I felt about his observation. It wasn’t a crazy notion at the time in hindsight and it certainly hasn’t aged worse than many other reactions in the aftermath. It was more an emotional response than a nuanced take on what we’d learn was Osama bin Laden’s own stated reasoning.

Of course, there’s a distinction between the idea that Americans should not have been surprised by what happened and the idea that the US deserved what happened. I don’t think the professor who broke the news to me was implying that the US deserved it. I know this sounds like a distinction without a difference to many people, but you could believe that U.S. foreign policy might have motivated the attack without thinking that the US deserved it. Indeed, by now it’s banal to all but the most jingoistic Americans that U.S. foreign policy creates enemies abroad. Whatever you thought of the terrorists’ motives and their bases in U.S. foreign policy at the time, it was obvious that the terrorists had killed thousands of innocent people. It was a tragedy for the victims, their loved ones, and for the country.

The news was shocking. I packed and went upstairs to the computer lab to get on the internet and find out what was happening. It may be banal to point this out but we did not have Wi-Fi at the time and the fastest way to get some news was to find a computer with a hardwire internet connection. I saw images of what was happening at the World Trade Center. I don’t remember what time it was exactly or what we knew for sure about what had happened.

My next clear 9/11-related memory is of Thanksgiving dinner almost two months later. My family went to the home of my parents’ longtime friends. By then, the US was waging war in Afghanistan after failing to come to terms with the Taliban over bin Laden and al-Qaeda. It was already clear that U.S. air strikes had killed hundreds of civilians. My girlfriend and I got into a heated argument with my parents and their friends over whether waging the war was justified or served a purpose. It was one of those stereotypical Thanksgiving dinner arguments between “naïve” liberals and their “crank” relatives. It was the only Thanksgiving dinner I ever participated in that became that way. I forget how it ended and whether we were able to enjoy each others’ company much after, but it was a formative moment for me. I was young and stupid, sure, but I knew I was right that the US was on shaky moral ground in the way it invaded Afghanistan and that its dilettantism would result in nothing but misery and waste. Twenty years later, it is obvious that I was right.

The myopia that led the US to destroy hundreds of thousands of lives and waste trillions of dollars over the last twenty years is still rampant in our political culture as evidenced by the freak-out over the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Amateur-hour armed excursions into other countries are stupid. Waging immoral war is evil. These are truisms, but it is impossible to conclude otherwise when we look at the costs.

Republicans Fight for the Cause of Death by COVID-19

Get vaccinated, please. Fighting to preserve one’s right to become infected with a potentially fatal virus and to infect others with that virus may not be a cause worse than slavery, but it’s close. Attribution: Spencerbdavis, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ulysses Grant correctly understood that slavery caused the Civil War. Regarding that cause, he wrote that it was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Fighting to preserve one’s right to become infected with a potentially fatal virus and to infect others with that virus may not be a cause worse than slavery, but it’s close.

Yesterday, President Joe Biden announced “new federal vaccine requirements for as many as 100 million Americans… in an all-out effort to curb the surging COVID-19 delta variant.” These requirements are necessary in a country that has been more interested in debates over how to manage the feelings of the unvaccinated than it has been in reckoning with a political culture and its policies that have led to 652,480 deaths due to COVID-19.

Republicans and the unvaccinated who claim that vaccine mandates violate their civil liberties are misguided or wrong about the issue as a matter of law at best. At worst, they are sociopaths. Most Americans are vaccinated and most Americans support vaccine requirements. This is a good fight for Biden and Democrats to have because it is right as a matter of public health and because it is good politics.

This is a Politics Blog

I’m back and surveying the land after a long hiatus.

I try to understand the coalitions of American voters that form to empower political parties and their politicians. By understanding the formation of past coalitions, I can sometimes predict the outcomes of future elections. At minimum, I can describe the important variables that impact future elections. My record of predictions and descriptions during the 2016 presidential election is good. If you’d like to see why I might be worth reading going forward, please check out these predictions and analyses:

For some useful descriptions of the state of American politics, political media, and political messaging, please see these posts:

For some insight into my own values and party preferences, please see these posts:

  • This is a personal, evergreen essay on guns in American society.
  • The most viewed and liked post on my old blog was about why Bernie Sanders supporters should have voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election after it became clear that she would win the nomination.

I’m sure that my attitudes and the value that I can add to your understanding of modern American politics will become clearer as I get this iteration of the blog up and running. Thank you for reading, and please come back!

New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, Part 2

In a post a few days ago, I wrote about New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, the district in which I grew up. I briefly discussed the current representative, Mr. Rodney Frelinghuysen, a Republican, and introduced the promising Democratic Party challenger, Ms. Mikie Sherrill. This year, the 11th’s seat in the House of Representatives could be competitive. I may have gotten a bit ahead of things in the previous post by diving straight into demographic features of the district, so let’s back up a bit and take a look at how the 11th voted in the 2016 general election.

First, some maps for geographic context:

NJ_11th_Extent
Map A

Residents of the 11th have been reliable Republicans for some time. They have sent Mr. Frelinghuysen to Congress every election since 1994, and in recent presidential elections they went for Senator John McCain in 2008 and Mr. Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2016, voters in the 11th got a little wonky: they voted even more heavily in favor of Frelinghuysen than they had in the two previous elections, but were less decisive than usual on the presidential ticket.

Here’s a chart that breaks the aggregate percentages down:

11th District Results
Note: The presidential election numbers are not accurate because they include all voters in three municipalities – Bloomfield, Montclair, and West Orange – which have significant populations that fall outside the 11th’s boundary. Also, those three towns skewed heavily towards Clinton. Indeed, if we take those three towns out entirely, Donald Trump received the most votes in the remaining municipalities that lie entirely within the 11th District. In those, Trump received 52.8% of the two-party vote.

Here’s how the presidential vote looks by municipality as measured by Mr. Donald Trump’s vote share:

NJ_11th_2016_P
Map B

And here’s how the vote for congressional representative looks by municipality as measured by Frelinghuysen’s vote share:

NJ_11th_2016_H
Map C

In these two maps, I used the Republican candidates’ vote shares and kept the percent ranges consistent around the 50% majority threshold so that the contrast would be clear. Several things stand out:

  • As mentioned above, if we take out the three municipalities that do not lie entirely within the 11th District, Trump won the remainder of the municipalities, and he won them by a wide margin.
  • Again, if we take out those three municipalities, we are left with 51 municipalities. Of those, only four preferred both Ms. Hillary Clinton for president and Mr. Joseph Wenzel, the Democratic candidate for the House seat.
  • Thirteen municipalities preferred Clinton but voted for Frelinghuysen, the Republican House candidate.
  • Sixteen municipalities gave Trump between 50 and 56 percent of their votes and voted overwhelmingly (56% or more) for Frelinghuysen.
  • Eighteen municipalities voted overwhelmingly for both Trump and Frelinghuysen.

What can we make of these facts? An indisputable conclusion is that voters in the 11th are staunch Republicans. They have a history of giving clear majorities to their long-serving Republican House member and Republican candidates for president. Even when some of them were repulsed enough by Trump to vote for Clinton or another party’s candidate, many still went with Frelinghuysen. Less indisputable but likely, it appears as if some people who usually vote party-line for Democrats voted for Frelinghuysen.

Any Democrat will have an uphill battle trying to win the 11th’s House seat. Winning in the 11th would require that the Democratic Party’s candidate be a good one, that she has a good strategy, and that she gets lucky. Sherrill has already met two of the three requirements: she’s an excellent candidate, both by biography and her policy positions, and she’s lucky in the sense that conditions are ripe because out-party candidates tend to do better when the incumbent party’s president is as unpopular as Trump seems to be. Add to that the fact that the Republican Party just passed a tax bill widely understood to benefit corporations and certain real estate moguls at the expense of affluent homeowners – precisely the kind of people who live in the 11th – and Frelinghuysen may be running into a bit of a buzzsaw this year.

That leaves strategy, which is where spatial analysis can come in handy. Above we found 13 municipalities that, judging by their votes, wanted a Democratic Party president (above Map B) but a Republican House member (above Map C). Generally speaking, it is irrational to split one’s votes among candidates from the different political parties because the major parties promote entirely different policy agendas. Perhaps many of these voters were happy with Frelinghuysen’s constituent services, or perhaps they thought Frelinghuysen would shield them from tax increases under Clinton should she have won. But again, generally speaking, voters in our political era should understand that the Democratic and Republican parties stand for completely different policy agendas.

Why did voters in these 13 municipalities choose a presidential candidate who would ensure affordable healthcare, a woman’s right to choose her own form of healthcare, a safe environment, efforts to mitigate climate change, and infrastructure investments, while they voted for a House candidate who would deny all of those things? Whatever the answer, these 13 municipalities are places where Sherrill’s policy arguments might persuade voters.

Further spatial analysis suggests that Sherrill should spend time campaigning in the four municipalities that backed both Clinton and Wenzel last year. Motivating one’s proven base of support is always a good way to go.

Another strategy involves boosting voter turnout in general. In the 11th, 334,190 people physically residing in the 11th cast votes for House representative in 2016. Currently, there are approximately 578,429 people of voting age in the 11th, which means there are approximately 244,239 people of age who did not vote in 2016 (unfortunately, dismal turnout rates like the 11th’s approximate 57.8% in 2016 are hallmarks of American democracy). Last year, Frelinghuysen beat his Democratic challenger by 64,610 votes. Demographic analysis will really tell us what kind of potential there is in the 11th for a Democrat, but for now, we can conclude there is a massive number of potential voters in the 11th who could be registered and/or mobilized to go out and vote.

To game out the turnout strategy a little further, if Sherrill could get half of the eligible people who didn’t vote in 2016 to go out and vote in 2018 – 122,120 people – and 75% or more voted for her, she could win the election without changing a single 2016 voter’s mind, assuming they all went out and voted for the same party’s candidate as they did in 2016. This is a bit ambitious, but speaks to the potential of the 11th’s electorate. More detailed demographic analysis would indicate just how viable a strategy of increased voter turnout may be. Since people of color and younger people are the ones who tend not to vote, and if they are indeed the populations that haven’t been voting in the 11th, then efforts to boost their turnout would be a great strategy. I’ll be working on that analysis for my next post about the 11th.

 

 

2018 Midterm Elections – New Jersey 11th Congressional District

Happy 2018! If the Democratic Party can take control of either the House or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, it will have been a good year. There are a lot of interesting opportunities for Democratic candidates to beat Republican incumbents or pick up open seats. One is the district in which I grew up – now known as New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District.

The 11th is currently represented by Mr. Rodney Frelinghuysen, a Republican who has held the seat since 1995. New Jersey has a total of 12 representatives. Congressman Frelinghuysen is one of five Republican representatives from New Jersey while the other seven are Democrats. Frelinghuysen has been a reliable vote for the Republican/Trump agenda, and 11th District voters need to send him home.

Successful efforts to unseat incumbents or to win in hostile districts usually require good candidates as a first step. Luckily for the 11th, Ms. Mikie Sherrill, Democrat, is an outstanding candidate. Her biography alone – Naval Academy graduate, Navy helicopter pilot, federal prosecutor, and mother of four – is powerful and will be attractive to the affluent white voters who dominate the district. She is also a strong supporter of most of the Democratic Party’s platform, which will be attractive to voters in the 11th who care about policy.

Winning candidates also usually need effective strategies. To that end, this year I aim to produce a series of maps that point candidates to areas in their districts where campaigning and “get out the vote” efforts can make a difference. The map below illustrates ample opportunity in the 11th:

NJ_11th_1

New Jersey’s statewide population is 68.1% white. The 11th is about 82.7% percent white. That makes it a challenge for Democratic candidates, but with indications that whites in the 11th may be ready to consider non-whites and women for elected office, the time may be ripe for a candidate of Ms. Sherrill’s caliber. Her strategy should focus on motivating people in the red, orange, and yellow areas indicated in the map above to register and then get out and vote. Ms. Sherrill can also make a strong play for affluent whites who feel betrayed by the Republican Party, but she should not risk alienating people of color and educated women by compromising her policy positions. If we know that voting for Republicans and Trump is mainly a function of white identity politics, and we should, Democratic Party candidates should prioritize mobilizing people of color in their districts.

How to Build on Alabama

doug_jones_flag
Just a Democrat winning a Senate seat in Alabama, like a boss. By Digital Campaign Manager Doug Jones for Senate (Doug Jones for Senate Committee) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Last night, Democrat Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore and picked up an unlikely U.S. Senate seat for Democrats in Alabama. It was a close one – Jones won with 49.9% of the vote against 48.4% for Moore and 1.7% for write-ins. Before getting to the good news, though, it’s worth noting that the Republican Party came within 20,000 votes of putting a theocratic pedophile in the Senate. That’s awful, and we should not be confused about the awfulness of the current Republican Party at pretty much every level.

Jones won for a variety of reasons, not least of all the good fortune of drawing a terrible opponent. For Democrats, his victory is encouraging because he ran as a solid, unapologetic Democrat. He offered passionate arguments for Democratic policies. He refused to be ashamed of his support for minority rights or women’s reproductive freedom. The fact that Jones won without basing his candidacy on appeals to the “white-working class” proves that Democrats can win with or without these people. Indeed, it’s quite possibly the case that the Democratic Party is more likely to win races in Republican-leaning districts by motivating its own base to get out and vote. The exit polling suggests as much (all tables borrowed from CNN):

Table 1: does doug jones share your values?
jones
moore
no answer
yes

48%
 96% 4% n/a
no

49%
 6% 91% 3%
2387 respondents

Only 6% of people who said Jones did not share their values were willing to vote for him. He won because people who support him and the Democratic Party’s agenda were willing to go out and vote.

Table 2: vote by race and sex
jones
moore
no answer
white men

35%
 26% 72% 2%
white women

31%
 34% 63% 3%
black men

11%
 93% 6% 1%
black women

17%
 98% 2% n/a
latino men

1%
 n/a n/a n/a
latino women

2%
 n/a n/a n/a
all others

3%
 n/a n/a n/a
2387 respondents

The savviest voters in the United States are black women, and it is not even close. Their 98% support for Jones follows their 96% support for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I interpret these numbers to mean that black women as a group are the most aware of their own interests and the public interest. Another way to think about it is they are the least confused about the consequences of their votes. Democrats need to step up their efforts to gain black women’s support, and that must be alongside a national fight to protect and reestablish voting rights for all Americans. Jones would have won more comfortably yesterday if more black Alabamians had been able to vote.

Table 3: vote by age
jones
moore
no answer
18-24

8%
 59% 40% 1%
25-29

5%
 62% 35% 3%
30-39

12%
 66% 32% 2%
40-49

20%
 53% 46% 1%
50-64

32%
 46% 53% 1%
65 and older

23%
 40% 59% 1%
2387 respondents

I wish CNN could have broken this table out by race, but perhaps it did not because of sample size issues. In any case, these numbers clearly show Democratic Party strength with Alabamians under the age of 50 and especially under the age of 40, a pattern I would bet exists in most other states. As an aside, I wonder if Democratic strength in my own 30-39 cohort has to do with our experience of the younger George Bush’s presidency and what an epic disaster that was. We American voters tend to solidify our party loyalty in our 20s and 30s.

Table 4: vote by party and ideology
jones
moore
write-ins
no answer
liberal democrats

16%
 98% 2% n/a n/a
mod./conserv. democrats

20%
 98% 2% n/a n/a
independents

21%
 52% 43% 5% n/a
mod./liberal republicans

9%
 21% 79% 0% n/a
conservative republicans

33%
 5% 94% 2% n/a
2387 respondents

This table suggests that independents do not actually exist. Moore’s candidacy was the perfect experiment for trying to tease out whether “independents” are truly independent or are party loyalists with a self-proclaimed independent identity. All other things being equal, a true independent would be unlikely to vote for someone like Moore. He had been credibly accused of sexual assault and pedophilia, he refused to debate Jones, and he committed many other sins expected to offend independents. Yet only 52% of Alabamian independents went for Jones while 43% went for Moore. That’s nearly a coin flip. If independents were real (truly independent) they would be expected to skew heavily towards Jones, probably to the tune of 60-80%.

The moral of this story is do not fetishize independents. Democrats should not tailor messaging to this group because it is an ideological mess: independents are overwhelmingly loyal Democratic voters and loyal Republican voters, while some are simply uninformed about politics and make up their mind about whom to vote for the day of an election.

Conclusion

There are many reasons to think the Republican Party is in trouble for the 2018 midterm elections, but that does not mean Democratic victories are inevitable. To take back the House and/or the Senate, Democrats need to run strong candidates (Jones was a great candidate, especially for Alabama), they need to know who their voters really are, they need to make it easier for them to vote, and they need to motivate them to vote. Appealing to the better angels of Republican voters’ natures is a mug’s game.

The IRS Targeting Scandal Was Hugely Important, and Not a Scandal

internal_revenue_service_logo
The real scandal is this logo. By United States Department of the Treasury [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Today we learned definitively that the “scandal” involving the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups was never really a partisan scandal at all. The IRS used similar methodology in establishing criteria that resulted in the flagging of both liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning groups for extra scrutiny. It was poorly designed oversight policy applied equally to all groups. The policies should have been changed, and they were, and the people responsible for them should have been held accountable, and they were.

It sounds boring (it is), but if you haven’t been following this story closely it’s difficult to explain just how important this “scandal” has been in Republican politics. It has supplied much of the outrage energy necessary for a political coalition based on little but cultural and racial grievances.

Scandals that weren’t actual scandals were really all Republicans had during Barack Obama’s presidency. Republican framing of issues like “death panels,” “IRS-targeting,” and Benghazi were incoherent nonsense and transparently so. This should have been clear to anyone not irredeemably lost to the Fox News bubble, but Republicans were very effective at weaponizing their bullshit. By using these “scandals” to stoke the prejudices and grievances of its base of white people, the Republican Party was able to continue winning elections off this angry energy without developing a policy agenda.

I don’t know what we can do to prevent this stuff in the future. Maybe it’s a good first step to expose this nonsense and put reasonable people on notice that many of what Republicans push as “scandals”  are nothing more than lies, disingenuous interpretations of events, or the banality of complexity in government administration.

Enabling Nazis, Klansmen, and White Supremacists Is No Way to Go Through Life, Son

Donald Trump’s presidency has been unsurprising. One of the least surprising aspects of it thus far is that Nazis, Klansmen, and white supremacists are marching through American streets and assaulting peaceful counter-protestors with impunity.

There is irony in the fact that a clear majority of white people, decrying what they perceive as Democrats’ “identity politics,” joined forces with bona fide Nazis, Klansmen, and white supremacists in 2016 to elect to the presidency a man who cannot perceive anything beyond the grievances generated by his own ego. If the term “identity politics” means anything, it means banding together with one’s racial and cultural group to assert the group’s racial and cultural preferences. Trump made his racial and cultural preferences abundantly clear – immigrants are violent criminals, foreigners cheat us, take our jobs, or are terrorists, women should find a new job if they don’t like being harassed at work, sexual assault by powerful men is fine, this is a Christian nation, African Americans’ lives and communities are hell, and so on. At the same time he was emphasizing these identity issues, Trump failed to develop any actual policies for the economy, international relations, the environment, criminal justice, etc. What is identity politics if it is not a clear majority of white people voting for a candidate who has no substantive policies but who speaks to their shared racial and cultural grievances?

If self-proclaimed nice, respectable Republican voters do not want to be associated with Donald Trump, Nazis, Klansmen, and white supremacists, then those voters need to stop voting to empower them. Maybe most Republican voters are generally good people in their personal lives – and I can attest that many are – but that is not enough anymore, not in the world’s most important democracy.

Voting is a moral duty with moral consequence. Many Republican voters take the duty seriously, but not the consequence. They love to tell everyone how moral they are, how responsible they are, yet it is Republican voters who elected a know-nothing president in 2000 who then led the country into war on false pretenses. It was Republican voters who elected a man with a fondness for sexual assault to be president in 2016, a man who also was on the side of Nazis, Klansmen, and white supremacists, and knows nothing.

It is long past time for many otherwise decent people in this country to stare at the Republican Party, with clear minds about what it has become, and decide whether it is a mirror image of their own moral selves.

Republicans May Pass a “Health-Care” Bill As Soon As Next Week

 

cbo_ahca_health_insurance_coverage_impact
Is Trumpcare a health-care bill if it leaves tens of millions of people worse off in order to cut taxes for high earners and corporations? By Congressional Budget Office (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52752) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Republicans in Congress are using reliable tactics to achieve quick results on their various “health-care”* bills. That is, Republicans have avoided public scrutiny, misled, obfuscated, tossed around word salads, pointed fingers, and even lied – all in service of passing unpopular “health-care” legislation that is mostly a vehicle for tax cuts. Since they ran against Obamacare for the last eight years Republicans might as well follow through on their threats to destroy it, end Obamacare’s higher payroll taxes on high earners and other taxes, and then get on with income and corporate tax cuts.

(*I put “health-care” in quotes because the bill passed by the House and what we’ve heard about the Senate’s version so far are not really pieces of health-care legislation. They result in loss of coverage for over 20 million people and worse or less affordable coverage for millions more who had benefited from Obamacare. In addition, millions of Americans with employer-sponsored coverage will be worse off than they were in the pre-Obamacare status quo. Trumpcare dismantles government programs, regulations, and subsidies that make health insurance accessible, affordable, and useful to poor and working class Americans, all in the name of tax cuts for high earners and corporations. Really, a fairer way to describe what Republicans are up to is to say they are trying to offset tax cuts for the rich by stripping millions of poor and disabled Americans of their coverage and making insurance less affordable and useful to many other Americans. Some have referred to Republican plans as “wealthcare” but whatever we call it, the most important thing is to understand what it is.)

This is a good time to remind readers of a post I wrote describing a heuristic for understanding elected Republicans’ behavior. In “Why Trump Can Do Whatever He Wants,” I argued that the only way to make sense of their policy priorities is to realize that they are united in service of one goal: cutting taxes for the wealthiest. Why else are so many Republican members of the House and several senators marching to what many think is certain doom in their 2018 elections by taking health coverage away from their voters?

The answer is that you get elected to do stuff, even if that stuff may cost you your job. Republicans think they got elected to enact tax cuts financed by Obamacare repeal.

Back in 2009, Democrats thought they got elected in 2008 in part to make the health-care system work better for poor and working class Americans. They passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) and improved the system even though many of them knew Republicans would be able to demagogue the issue and beat them at the polls in 2010. Indeed, that came to pass and Democrats have been in the minority in the House since their 2010 wipeout. But some Democratic House members of the 111th Congress who lost their job consider their vote worth it. They got into office to make things work better for more American people. If the price of that decision was their seat in Congress, so it goes.

In a sense, that is what is going on with Republicans in Congress now. Except the constituency they are serving is not the poor and working class, but the highest 2% of American earners and corporate interests. This is an entirely reasonable thing to do. You get elected to do stuff, and most Republicans think they got elected to cut taxes on high earners and corporations. How they have been able to win elections while obscuring their overarching policy goal is interesting but beside the point. The fact is Republicans in Congress agree wholeheartedly on one main goal and want to achieve it. Funding that supports poor and working class Americans’ access to the health-care system stands in the way of tax cuts, so Republicans need to remove the obstacle.

Americans ought to debate these policy choices. But we kid ourselves and risk damage if we pretend these choices do not come with different sets of winners and losers. For example, one of the dumbest things any Democrat did during the ACA debate was when President Obama said people would be able to keep coverage and doctors they already had if they liked them. That line was meant to comfort a portion of the electorate that already had coverage and was nervous about potential negative effects of changes to the system. Unfortunately, as the ACA went into full effect some Americans had to find new carriers and provider networks, so Obama was either wrong or a liar. He and other Democrats avoided a full accounting of the ACA’s effects and one can argue they suffered accordingly at the ballot box.

Now, Republicans want to cut taxes for the wealthy, but they do not want to explain how that comes at the expense of the health of the poor and working class. What are they to do? Exactly what Republicans have been doing: rush legislation through with little analysis or public debate, and when challenged hedge or pretend the bills don’t do what they actually do.

For example, West Virginia’s Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito is saying she does not look favorably on the Medicaid cuts rumored to be in the Senate’s bill. But in the end she’ll vote for the bill because that’s what she thinks she was sent to the Senate to do: free up money for tax cuts by repealing Obamacare. In the meantime, Capito will pretend she’s “concerned” and “worried” and “troubled” and “uncomfortable” about the Medicaid cuts to deflect from her true intentions. If she actually cared about the Medicaid cuts, after all, she’s free to debate the bill’s details in public and vote against the bill if she does not like the final product.

In the real world where policies have consequences, Capito and other “concerned” Republicans have two choices: 1) maintain or tweak coverage for poorer and lower income Americans and the taxes that finance it, or 2) cut hundreds of billions of dollars out of the system, kick millions of people out of the system, and use the savings for tax cuts. Capito and her fellow travelers insist on a third option: express concern about people losing coverage, vote to take away that coverage, and pretend cutting hundreds of billions of dollars out of the system won’t make anyone worse off, somehow (because freedom maybe). That’s just not how this works in the real world, but Republicans will dismantle Obamacare because of – not in spite of – this kind of dissembling. It works all the time in American politics.

I don’t know where all this goes in the medium term. In the short term, I’d bet Republicans succeed in gutting Obamacare but I hope I’m wrong. If I’m right, then Republicans up for election in 2018 and then 2020 will be running on their support for Trumpcare. Democrats say that removing hundreds of billions of dollars and important consumer protections from the system will have broadly negative consequences, including coverage loss for millions; Republicans say no it won’t, that citizens will once again have the freedom to not plan for an adverse health circumstance. We’ll see who’s right and whose interests are best served, and then we’ll see what voters think about it.

(But again, I’d rather Republicans not dismantle Obamacare. It’d be much better if they stopped sabotaging Obamacare and in fact made some tweaks to improve it. That’s very unlikely to happen, but I should make my preferences clear.)

 

Meaningful Differences Between Democrats and Republicans, Part Infinity

photograph_of_mrs-_reagan_speaking_at_a_22just_say_no22_rally_in_los_angeles_-_nara_-_198584
Just say no to rational drug policy. By Unknown or not provided (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is doubling down on some of the worst aspects of the War on Drugs. If people think Hillary Clinton’s attorney general would have done this, I’ve got coveted spots at Trump University to sell them.

The stupidest votes in the 2016 presidential election were the votes that ignored meaningful differences between America’s two major political parties. The worst policies coming out of President Donald Trump’s administration so far are the same policies any generic Republican president would’ve pushed. The fact that Trump has also instigated a constitutional crisis four months into his presidency is actually beside the point.

I don’t blame the Trump voter who places high value on her pro-life/anti-choice stance above all else. I don’t blame the Trump voter who places high value on being able to purchase any kind of gun or ammunition he wants whenever he wants above all else. I don’t really even blame the White Trump voter whose sense of cultural or racial grievance motivated his vote. At least these people got what they voted for.

The real problem right now is that we have a significant bloc of voters in this country who don’t want conservative policies but also don’t recognize differences between the agendas of the two major parties. As long as 10 to 15% of the electorate continues to not understand that the parties are different, we will always be at risk of electing presidents who enact agendas that a majority of the country doesn’t want.

This 10-15% of the electorate includes Obama-Trump voters and third party voters for Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, write-ins, etc. Some of these voters will defend themselves by insisting that Democrats should not have made them choose between Trump and Clinton, two equally loathsome candidates in their minds. Loathsome or not, this way of thinking about candidates is entirely divorced from policy considerations and is really a poor way to process one’s choices.

I don’t really know what we do about this as a country. Perhaps Trump’s presidency will be a wake-up call. But for now I don’t see any reason to believe that future elections will be different. As a polity I fear we are doomed to suffer the whims of a perpetually significant proportion of the electorate that looks at two candidates and says “sure, that one is an ignorant, moral monster and will destroy affordable healthcare for tens of millions of people, but the other one’s emails…” Something similar happened in 2000 with people who thought “sure, that one doesn’t know anything about anything and is lying about his tax cut proposal, but the other one sighed during the debates…”