There's No Fixing The GOP
Plus, are we seeing signs of a Republican polling rebound? Is Mandela Barnes blowing his chance to unseat Ron Johnson in Wisconsin? And a defense of Maggie Haberman.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up below.
I’ll be Zoom Chatting tomorrow, and I’m super excited that John Sides will be joining me. John is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and, in my opinion, one of the smartest observers of American politics. The book he co-wrote on the 2016 election, “Identity Crisis,” might be the best appraisal of what happened in that election. This month, he and his co-authors, Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch published their look back at the 2020 election, “The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy” (which is equally great). We’ll talk about the new book, the 2020 election, what happened, why Trump lost, and what it portends for the future of American politics. “Bitter End” is full of fascinating insights, so this should make for a great conversation. The Zoom link is here — and I look forward to seeing you at 12:30 tomorrow.
Midterm Update
Nate Cohn is detecting some signs that the GOP may be rebounding in the run-up to the midterm election:
For the first time since the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Google searches for the economy and immigration have overtaken searches about abortion. Searches for democracy or the Jan. 6 hearings have also fallen.
The new Google trends numbers resemble the figures from the spring, when Republicans held the edge before the Dobbs ruling and the Jan. 6 hearings, and before the F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Trump. In all three cases, an unusual outside event helped focus the electorate on an issue that helped Democrats. As those galvanizing factors fall into the rearview mirror, the electorate’s gaze appears to be drifting back toward the earlier set of issues.
Cohn also points to Biden’s approval ratings, which have stopped improving, a few recent Senate polls that show Republicans making “modest gains,” and two new generic ballot polls that show the GOP reclaiming a slight advantage when it comes to voter enthusiasm.
To the latter point, two recent generic congressional ballot polls show a slight boost for Republicans:
The Economist/YouGov poll shows a major shift in one week: from Democrats +5 to Republicans +1. Democrats +5 was probably an outlier, but a 6-point change in a week is notable. Likewise, the Politico/Morning Consult poll went from Democrats +5 to Democrats +2. To be sure, a 2-point lead for Democrats is good news, but a 3-point shift in just over a week is less good, especially if it’s the beginning of a trend.
On the positive side for Democrats, the Selzer poll has them up by 4. Selzer is considered the gold standard for Iowa polling. I’m not sure its reputation is as strong when it comes to national polling.
Vanity Fair’s Chris Smith dived into the Wisconsin Senate race, and he’s underwhelmed by Democratic candidate Mandela Barnes’s challenge to incumbent Republican Ron Johnson.
Johnson’s campaign has outraised Barnes’s roughly $17 million to $7 million, and outside groups have roughly spent $26 million on behalf of Johnson, compared with $16 million for Barnes. Incumbency is a powerful financial advantage, of course. The gap also seems to be a product of the fact that small-dollar donations to Barnes have been sluggish, compared to those for other Democratic candidates around the country—which is surprising, given that this is a highly-winnable, high-stakes race.
In addition, Smith passes along reports from Wisconsin Democratic operatives that Barnes is running far too muted of a campaign. That’s never a good sign. The other problem here, which Smith touches on, is that Barnes is a Black man running in a state that is 61 percent white and only 12 percent Black. Barnes should get a boost from higher turnout in predominately Black Milwaukee, and that might be enough for him to narrowly defeat Johnson. But never underestimate the role of racism in American society — and Wisconsin does not have a sterling history of electing Black politicians to statewide office. Johnson is probably the most endangered Senate incumbent running this cycle and his favorabilities in Wisconsin are dreadful. But he’s still probably the narrow favorite to win a third term in November.
I’m not sure what to make of this, but there are a couple of surprising poll results out of Oklahoma, in the governor’s race between incumbent Kevin Stitt and his Democratic challenger Joy Hofmeister.
Neither one of these polls is considered top-notch. At 538, they grade the Sooner Poll a C+ and the KOCO-TV poll a B/C. And another recent survey gave Stitt an 18-point lead (though that feels a bit outlier-ish). Oklahoma is about as red as it gets, so it’s hard to imagine a Democrat winning here, but Cook Political Report just moved the race from Solid “R” to Likely “R,” so this might be one worth keeping an eye on.
And, of course, no Midterm Update would be complete without a Doug Mastriano self-immolation story:
State Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, said in 2019 that women should be charged with murder if they violated his proposed abortion ban.
In an interview with Pennsylvania radio station WITF, Mastriano was pressed about a bill he sponsored that would generally bar abortions when a fetal heartbeat could first be detected, usually around six weeks. Mastriano’s remarks in that interview were previously unreported.
Under his proposed legislation, Mastriano was asked whether a woman who decided to get an abortion at 10 weeks gestation would be charged with murder. Critics of the bill Mastriano backed, and of other "heartbeat bills," say the approximate six-week timeframe is often before many women know they are pregnant.
"OK, let’s go back to the basic question there," Mastriano said. "Is that a human being? Is that a little boy or girl? If it is, it deserves equal protection under the law."
Asked if he was saying yes, they should be charged with murder, Mastriano responded: "Yes, I am."
As I’ve noted before … oof.
A Broken, Irredeemable Party
I have a new piece up at MSNBC making the case that the strategic decision by Democrats to undermine less extreme Republican candidates in GOP primaries, like Rep. Peter Meijer in Michigan, and help MAGA Republicans, has proven justified. The latest evidence came last week:
On Wednesday, the House voted on the Presidential Election Reform Act. The bill would protect American elections from the kind of machinations that endangered our electoral process just two years ago, such as making it more difficult for state legislators to overrule election results and clarifying that the vice president plays only a ministerial role in counting electoral votes.
Every Democrat backed the legislation, but just nine Republicans joined them. All holdout Republicans, which included co-sponsor Rep Liz Cheney, are either retiring or, like Cheney, lost their party’s nomination to a pro-Trump Republican. Eight of the nine voted to impeach President Trump in January 2021, and all nine have publicly acknowledged that Trump lost the 2020 election.
This contingent – along with a handful of others – were seen as the few bulwarks within the GOP willing to stand up and fight for basic democratic norms. But last week’s vote confirms that electing any Republican, even those who are not fully indoctrinated in pro-MAGA thinking, risks placing American democracy in peril.
If Meijer had won his primary and then reelection, he almost certainly would have voted to make House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House. At the very least, he’d be one more crucial seat helping Republicans win a majority in the House. His past apostasy notwithstanding, Meijer would be yet another enabler of the GOP’s anti-democracy caucus. And that caucus includes the overwhelming majority of Republicans.
The criticism of Democrats was born out of a quaint belief that there is a sane and reasonable wing of the modern GOP that can exercise influence over its dominant jihadist wing. That belief, however, misunderstands the modern Republican Party, where party loyalty and tribal identification are the two most dominant characteristics.
If there were reasonable Republicans like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, who I imagine would not have voted to make McCarthy Speaker, maybe things would be different. But those two are unicorns. Kinzinger didn’t seek reelection, and Cheney lost her Republican primary by more than 30 points. Even the honest and courageous Republicans, like Meijer, are MAGA-lite. So, from a pro-democracy perspective: are America’s democratic institutions or the sanctity of the nation’s election process “better off with a Democratic majority in the House or a Republican majority with a smattering of “reasonable” Republicans? The answer is obvious.
In Defense of Maggie Haberman …
This is largely an inside baseball issue that mostly plays out on Twitter, but I agree with everything Dan Drezner has to say about the latest spate of attacks against New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.
Much of what we know about the terrible behavior of former President Trump and his administration came from Maggie's reporting. Yet, liberals practically fall over themselves to attack her. Why? Because they claim she traded access to Trump for positive coverage of the president in her reporting. People who say this are not just wrong; they are badly uninformed. Virtually all of Haberman's coverage of Trump was lacerating. But there's an annoying tendency on social media to pick up on the one example that allegedly makes one's case while ignoring the 99 other examples that don't.
The latest social media freakout over Haberman comes from the publication of her much-awaited biography of Trump, "Confidence Man." According to excerpts published this week in the Atlantic, Trump told Haberman in September 2021 that he'd taken documents from the White House. Here's how she described the revelation in her Atlantic piece:
He demurred when I asked if he had taken any documents of note upon departing the White House—“nothing of great urgency, no,” he said, before mentioning the letters that Kim Jong-un had sent him, which he had showed off to so many Oval Office visitors that advisers were concerned he was being careless with sensitive material. “You were able to take those with you?” I asked. He kept talking, seeming to have registered my surprise, and said, “No, I think that’s in the archives, but … Most of it is in the archives, but the Kim Jong-un letters … We have incredible things.”
Some argued that Haberman should have reported this information in real-time — and not wait to publish it in a book. Meh. Journalists don’t simply run every tidbit of information a source tells them — and frankly, there’s not a lot here. Additional sourcing might be needed and, in this case, likely would have been essential. Moreover, in the Fall of 2021, this information had far less relevance than it does today. Trump’s admission seems like a huge deal in light of the FBI’s search at Mar-a-Lago. But a year ago … not so much. So I’m not surprised that Haberman, while certainly registering Trump’s revelation, didn’t find it groundbreaking.
In addition, reporters operate by agreed-upon ground rules when interviewing politicians. For a reporter working on a book, there is often an understanding with sources that material will come out in the book — not the next day’s New York Times. While journalists obviously have a responsibility to inform the public, there’s an equally important responsibility to adhere to one’s word. If a reporter tells a source one thing and does another, who will trust them in the future?
The thing with Haberman (and in full disclosure, we are friendly and also friends on Facebook, though I’ve never met her in person) is that she’s a reporter for the New York Times, which means, like most Times reporters, she tells things straight. There’s no editorializing or even much in the way of moral and ethical judgments. For better or worse, that’s the culture of the Times. So much of the criticism of Haberman and the NYT comes from people outraged that the paper’s reporters don’t share their same level of outrage. But their job is to report, not to editorialize (that’s my job). I’ve had my share of disagreements with Maggie, but her reporting on Trump over the past seven years has been incredibly informative. Stop dumping on her and try to recognize that she is doing her job -- and for the most part, she does it quite well.
What’s Going On
Pitchfork has a new list of the 150 best albums of the 1990s. I’m baffled by the love for Bjork, “Exile in Guyville” and “My Bloody Valentine” and Wilco’s “Summerteeth” and the Flaming Lips, “The Soft Bulletin” should be much higher, but all-in-all it’s not bad.
One of the migrants shipped to Martha’s Vineyard tells her story.
This is a great piece by Jill Filipovic on the likely next steps in the GOP’s assault on reproductive rights.
Musical Interlude
Zoom link for tomorrow's chat https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82586778661?pwd=VGNNRE0zYVZ1aDAwR2ZkWWJTSng5QT09