[Gilithin]

y66, on 2021-November-02, 19:21, said:

Looks like taking down all those monuments and renaming stuff in Virginia wasn't such a good idea.

That is a very strange association to make. Prior to Afghanistan and the Democratic in-fighting in Congress, McAuliffe had a comfortable lead despite the timetable disadvantage that gave Youngkin essentially several weeks of uncontested TV time to create a personal image that was much more moderate than reality. I would humbly suggest that monuments and renaming probably does not even make the Top 10 of reasons for this (apparent but not yet called) loss.

[pilowsky]

Hunter S Thompson wrote fear and loathing on the campaign trail in 1972.
It is a book of truths about politics that resonates 50 years later.

HS Thompson said:

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional."

When people get angry they don't hop onto the Water Cooler in a Bridge forum and try to comprehend the mysteries of daily life.
They vote for whoever says they really are important and tells them that if they try really really really hard and pray every night, they too can be President.
After all "we're people".

[y66]

Gilithin, on 2021-November-02, 20:08, said:

That is a very strange association to make. Prior to Afghanistan and the Democratic in-fighting in Congress, McAuliffe had a comfortable lead despite the timetable disadvantage that gave Youngkin essentially several weeks of uncontested TV time to create a personal image that was much more moderate than reality. I would humbly suggest that monuments and renaming probably does not even make the Top 10 of reasons for this (apparent but not yet called) loss.

Monuments. CRT. Parents rights to censor assigned reading of black authors ... White backlash by any other name was definitely a factor in determining the outcome of this race outside the beltway. How much of a factor? Fair question. My sense is a lot. Matt Yglesias disagrees. But he lives on the other side of the Potomac River. Will be interested to see how this gets analyzed and reported.

[y66]

Nate Cohn at NYT/Upshot said:

As Democrats try and make sense of the wreckage tonight, one fact stands out as one of the easiest explanations: Joe Biden has lower approval ratings at this stage of his presidency than nearly any president in the era of modern polling.

[y66]

Dave Wasserman at Cook Political Report said:

Youngkin juiced base GOP turnout in rural counties to a degree McAuliffe couldn't match in urban VA:

Augusta Co., VA (Shenandoah Valley):

2017: Gillespie ® 17,217, Northam (D) 6,030
2021: Youngkin ® 26,086, McAuliffe (D) 7,176

The relatively flat (by comparison) Charlottesville turnout was indeed an Election Day clue:

2017: Northam (D) 13,943, Gillespie ® 2,315
2021: McAuliffe (D) 14,191, Youngkin ® 2,746

[y66]

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg said:

https://www.bloomber...y?sref=UHfKDqx7

The big headline in Tuesday’s off-year election is a good one for Republicans, with Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin leading a sweep of statewide offices in Virginia and possible capture of the lower house of the legislature. Meanwhile, Republican Jack Ciattarelli was doing surprisingly well in Democratic New Jersey, with the race too close to call as I write this.

You’re going to hear plenty of explanations, but if you actually want to know what happened, it’s pretty straightforward. This is the 11th out of the last 12 times that the president’s party lost the Virginia gubernatorial election — the numbers in New Jersey are similar — and with President Joe Biden currently at 43% approval measured by public opinion polls, the result was pretty much what one would expect.

If Biden is at 43% or lower a year from now, the chances are very good that Republicans will win big in the midterms. Of course, the next question is why Biden’s popularity has slumped, but the bulk of that is surely about the latest pandemic wave and a mediocre economic quarter. Sure, other things may have mattered on the margins, both for Biden’s popularity and the Virginia and New Jersey elections, and the margins can be extremely important when it comes to winning and losing. But the big picture isn’t very complicated. Republicans are doing well because there’s an incumbent Democrat president, and he’s not very popular right now. Just as Democrats did very well in 2017 with an unpopular Republican in the White House.

That’s the bulk of what actually happened.

But it’s not all that’s important. Political scientist Matt Glassman explains:

And now the real politics begins — the politics of explanation/meaning. The bivariate result is obviously very important, but perhaps more important is how other officials — elected and not, in VA, in Washington, and elsewhere — understand it, and alter their actions/behaviors.

Much of the early chatter among Democrats centered on the legislative battles on Capitol Hill. The most moderate Democrats blame the most liberal ones for stalling final approval of the infrastructure bill that’s already passed in the Senate with bipartisan support. The most liberal Democrats blame their party’s centrist Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona for failing to support the rest of the the party’s agenda. Congress scholar Josh Huder is right that any such explanation “overestimates (1) voters attentive to legislative politics, and (2) the amount of disarray in Congress.” But those who are involved in legislative politics are happy to use any weapon available, and so they’ll certainly try to make those interpretations stick.

Some of these interpretations are transparently self-serving for the party actors involved (although they may also be sincere, given that people tend to believe what is in their interest). Others will try somewhat harder to find more plausible reasons for the Democrats’ bad day. But plausible or not, these understandings of election results can be incredibly important if they become widely accepted within the party.

Party scholar Seth Masket’s wonderful book, “Learning From Loss,” studied the ways that Democrats came to understand how they lost the 2016 presidential election, and how that produced a focus within the party on “electability” (defined in a particular way) that eventually heavily influenced the nomination of Biden in 2020. What’s important was not whether an interpretation is correct in some absolute sense, but whether the party, or at least important parts of the party, come to believe it.

And all of this is as true for winning as it is for losing. Republicans, too, will examine what happened on Tuesday and their conclusions will affect how they behave. This year’s Republican rejectionism in Congress was a predictable consequence of their interpretation of their landslides after similar behavior in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections following Democratic wins in 1992 and 2008.

So whatever the parties wind up believing about Tuesday’s election results really matters. Will Republicans conclude that culture wars, including attacks on the way U.S. racial history is taught in schools, are the key to future victories? Will they listen to former President Donald Trump when he insists he was responsible for their success, or will they decide that keeping him at arm’s length or more was actually why things worked out well? Will they try to find ways to emulate Virginia and avoid high-profile contested primaries?

Party actors trying to make these decisions are often both seeking more influence for themselves and the party groups they belong to and sincerely attempting to give the party a better chance to win future elections.

So as we move on from these off-year elections, pay close attention to how the parties talk about what happened. Not because it will be correct or because it will be wrong — but because it will contain huge hints about what they’re going to do next.

[y66]

Ross Douthat at NYT said:

https://www.nytimes....896ed87b2d9c72a

After Terry McAuliffe stumbled to defeat in a state that Joe Biden won by 10 points exactly one year ago tonight, a mild suggestion seems in order: Democrats probably need a new way to talk about progressive ideology and education.

In the Virginia race, the script for both candidates was straightforward and consistent: Glenn Youngkin attacked critical race theory, combining it with a larger attack on how the education bureaucracy has handled the Covid pandemic, while McAuliffe denied that anything like C.R.T. was being taught in Virginia schools and also insisted that the whole controversy was a racist dog whistle.

The problem with the McAuliffe strategy is that it fell back on technicalities — as in, yes, fourth graders in the Commonwealth of Virginia are presumably not being assigned the academic works of Derrick Bell — while evading the context that has made this issue part of a polarizing national debate.

That context, obvious to any sentient person who lived through the past few years, is an ideological revolution in elite spaces in American culture, in which concepts heretofore associated with academic progressivism have permeated the language of many important institutions, from professional guilds and major foundations to elite private schools and corporate H.R. departments.

Critical race theory is an imperfect term for this movement, too narrow and specialized to capture its full complexity. But a new form of racecraft clearly lies close to the heart of the new progressivism, with the somewhat different, somewhat overlapping ideas of figures like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo enjoying particular influence. And that influence extends into schools and public-education bureaucracies, where Kendi and DiAngelo and their epigones often show up on resources recommended to educators — like the racial-equity reading list sent around in 2019 by one state educational superintendent, for instance, which recommended both DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and an academic treatise titled “Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education.”

That superintendent was responsible for Virginia’s public schools.

Now progressives will counter that the backlash that may have helped carry Youngkin to victory (and it’s certainly only one factor among many) isn’t just about these texts and ideologies but about a broader discomfort with any tough truth-telling about America’s racist past, whether it takes the form of Toni Morrison novels or Norman Rockwell paintings. And they’re right that the anti-C.R.T. movement has combined a set of moderate and even liberal objections to the new progressivism — objections that show up in superliberal New York as well as suburban Loudoun County, Virginia — with an older style of objections to talking about slavery and segregation at all.

But progressives can’t isolate and attack the second kind of objection unless they find a way to address the first kind as well, especially when it comes from voters (including minority voters) who may have supported Hillary Clinton or Biden but feel unsettled by the ideas filtering down into their kids’ classrooms in the past few years. And the McAuliffe approach isn’t going to cut it: You can tell people that C.R.T. is a right-wing fantasy all you want, but this debate was actually instigated not by right-wing parents but by an ideological transformation on the left.

So Democratic politicians may need to decide what they actually think about the ideas that have swept elite cultural institutions in the past few years. Maybe those ideas are worth defending. Maybe Kendi and DiAngelo are worth celebrating. Maybe school superintendents who recommend their work should be praised for doing so.

If so, Democrats should say so, and fight boldly on that line. But if not, then Democratic politicians in contested states, facing Republican attacks on education policy and looking at the unhappy example of Virginia, should strongly consider acknowledging what I suspect a lot of them (and a lot of liberal pundits) really think: That the immediate future of the Democratic Party depends on its leaders separating themselves, to some extent, from academic jargon and progressive zeal.

As for what Republicans might learn from their Virginian triumph, the short version is this: The combination of a struggling Democratic administration and an overreaching cultural progressivism has created an immense political opportunity, and under current conditions you don’t actually need a Trump-like figure at the top of the ticket to mobilize Donald Trump’s core voters. Instead, with the right candidate and circumstances, you can hold your Trumpist base and win back suburbanites as well.

The problem is that the core Trumpian constituency still wants Trump to lead the party, on pure own-the-liberals grounds, if nothing else. But maybe, just maybe, the solution is for the party’s less-Trumpy constituencies to rally around an alternative whose electoral lib-owning just put Trump’s 2020 showing to shame.

Yes, that’s probably a fantasy, but at the very least, a certain kind of Republican donor and consultant will wake up this morning from a very pleasant dream — of Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 campaign, run as a presidential race in 2024.

[kenberg]

There was also a ballot question about the police in Minneapolis that failed. Part of the proposal was to eliminate a requirement that the size of police force needed to be at a specified level based on the population. I'll quote part of the WaPo article.

quote]
The measure also would have removed decades-old language from the city charter requiring a minimum number of police officers based on its population. The new department “could include” police officers “if necessary” — wording that potentially doomed the measure among residents concerned about rising violent crime in the city, even as supporters argued the city would still have armed police because state law requires them to respond in certain circumstances.
People on both sides of the fight had predicted results would be close, but with 99 percent of precincts reporting late Tuesday, 56 percent of voters had rejected the measure — a disappointing result for supporters of the initiative, who blamed “disinformation” and “fearmongering” for the loss.
[/quote]


Let's consider Ordinary Joe. It is not hard to imagine him thinking "Yes, even suburbs such as Minnetonka need some police protection and no doubt the State insists that they have it. But we need more police protection in Minneapolis than they need in Minnetonka, so changing the rules to assure us that we will have as much police protection here, but no more, as they do in Minnetonka doesn't sound so good to me".

If you read the article, it seems that something like that was the view of many. And this view might well be the result of a realistic assessment rather than fear-mongering or disinformation. Certainly, it would be realistic to expect passage of the measure to lead to a reduction in police presence. If not, what was the point?

Of course, politicians distort information. No one disagrees with that. But that is a very different statement than saying that anytime things don't go our way then disinformation was clearly the cause. It's part of the cause, just as disinformation can be part of the cause when things do go our way. At any rate, the measure failed. And there are a lot of Democrats in Minneapolis.

Realism requires accepting the possibility that maybe some mistakes were made. In Minneapolis and elsewhere.

[Winstonm]

Once you have an 800 lb. gorilla sitting on one end of the seesaw, it is probably too late for corrections.

Lies, disinformation, propaganda, hysteria, and gaslighting,... all these now travel at the speed of bytes on devices the size of a hand. It is impossible to debunk all the lies fast enough to make an impact. Therefore, there is no genuine attempt to do so. CRT is a classic example.

There is no controversy about CRT - only an imagined "threat" to "white" way of life, i.e., the imagined white way of life that whites are being led to believe is being threatened by an equally imaginary beast - public education; however, because this "threat" has been tweeted, posted, Googled, Liked, deleted, forwarded, copied, and retweeted - and that's before the megaphone of the media picks up the story simply for the fact that it is getting the most "hits" on social media - the next thing you know CRT has been caught in the lightening that is the informal information highway and like Frankenstein's monster this boogeyman has been electrified into life. And to save ourselves, we must all grab our torches and our pitchforks and vote this once-imaginary monster out.

All we need now is the ghost of Boris Karloff to run for office.

[pilowsky]

Winstonm, on 2021-November-03, 13:07, said:

Once you have an 800 lb. gorilla sitting on one end of the seesaw, it is probably too late for corrections.

Lies, disinformation, propaganda, hysteria, and gaslighting,... all these now travel at the speed of bytes on devices the size of a hand. It is impossible to debunk all the lies fast enough to make an impact. Therefore, there is no genuine attempt to do so. CRT is a classic example.

There is no controversy about CRT - only an imagined "threat" to "white" way of life, i.e., the imagined white way of life that whites are being led to believe is being threatened by an equally imaginary beast - public education; however, because this "threat" has been tweeted, posted, Googled, Liked, deleted, forwarded, copied, and retweeted - and that's before the megaphone of the media picks up the story simply for the fact that it is getting the most "hits" on social media - the next thing you know CRT has been caught in the lightening that is the informal information highway and like Frankenstein's monster this boogeyman has been electrified into life. And to save ourselves, we must all grab our torches and our pitchforks and vote this once-imaginary monster out.

All we need now is the ghost of Boris Karloff to run for office.

Now there's an interesting proposition: the debunking of lies.
The fact-checking and debunking industry only operates effectively on people with a satisfactory level of gruntlement.
The disgruntled don't care if what you say is true or a lie.
They only care whether or not a proposition supports their worldview.

People whose opinions or worldviews can be affected by new information operate in a completely different universe of thought.

As Dr Suess pointed out it is obviously better to have a star on your belly if you are a Sneetch.
Some things are obvious. They are just part of the 'natural law'.

What these people have is God on their side.
Quite a few people not only believe in God but also try to convince other people that God exists.
A core tenet of the American political experiment is the ability to believe - unquestioningly - that some 'beliefs' are better than others.
It's a very short walk into Wonderland to then believe that some people are better than others if they hold these beliefs.

Bridge is a synecdoche of the social order. When a pair wins, they will commonly believe it was because they are intrinsically better at the game than the other pair.
Not better over that specific set of boards on the day, but better. Winning, doing well validates everything about them as a person.
That this is obviously silly can be proven by setting up a table with four robots and letting them play at an IMP's table.
Eventually, one pair will 'win'. Does this mean that North and South GIB were smarter, more hard-working, better informed or had God on their side?
Maybe the East and West GIB should pay them for lessons?

So, when a white middle-class mom and pop sitting in their house built of ticky-tacky in the suburbs of Hotzeplotz South-East Expectora, encounter a person less well off (in their opinion) than themselves do they say "that's no good" I better do something to help them, maybe loan them the star on my belly?". They do not. They say: "sad, but Gods will", or "why doesn't that layabout get a job?" and that's if the person is the same (skin colour etc) as they are.
If the person has different skin colour or another obvious attribute, well, that must be the reason.

The average person is not John-Paul Sartre (maybe a good thing) they're just looking to get on with their lives.

An unshakeable belief that if you believe in God and Country then you will succeed is rapidly internalised into the bizarre belief that with a little effort and self-belief, you can do or become whatever you want.
The lie is not a lie if it's a belief; which is much more dangerous and difficult to shake.

Actually, I think Boris Karloff's ghost would be an excellent choice for President.
Maybe better than many of the most recent incumbents.

[Winstonm]

PS: I've been reading a book copyrighted in 2012 titled It's Even Worse Than It Looks by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that brings up things that I have noticed as most likely causative to our political alienation - and media is a big part of it.

[awm]

Much as I’d prefer otherwise, I have to admit that things haven’t gone well for the Biden presidency. He promised to get rid of Covid by July and failed (due to some combination of Delta variant and Republican vaccine refusal). The Afghanistan withdrawal looked inept (sure, we can blame the previous three presidents for part of that but it still looked terrible), and the continuing wrangling over Biden’s infrastructure plan doesn’t make the administration look super competent. We haven’t seen action on police reform or voting rights, and attempts to improve border and immigration policy haven’t succeeded.

Obviously I’d rather have Biden than Trump but I can see where some Democratic voters get demoralized. Youngkin was able to run a campaign in Virginia that was Trumpy enough to get the Trump voters while not being so Trumpy that it turned off suburban white voters who voted Biden in 2020. The party of an unpopular president usually does badly in off-cycle and mid-term elections. I wouldn’t read much into this being about monuments or critical race theory or defund the police — it’s a pretty consistent pattern for decades.

The question is whether the Biden administration can get its act together before next year’s midterms. It’s possible that vaccines for kids and the corporate mandates make Covid an afterthought by then, that the Democrats in Congress pass some compromise infrastructure plan, and that some good news comes out of world events. Or the opposite could happen, guess we will find out soon!

[Chas_P]

awm, on 2021-November-03, 16:20, said:

The question is whether the Biden administration can get its act together before next year’s midterms.

Interesting question. But at this point Biden and all his acolytes seem to be like chickens running around with their heads cut off. I wish the best for my country and all it's legal citizens...red, yellow, black, or white...but at this point, in my opinion, it's headed down the rabbit hole.

[kenberg]

I was watching PBS Newshour, I figured the discussion might be interesting, and good God, there was James Carville as part of an analysis group. And it all was interesting.

https://www.pbs.org/...ipped-the-state

Carville is younger than I am (this surprised me). He sarted off his analysis with

Quote

Well, what went wrong is this stupid wokeness.

His closing thoughts, on the same issue:

Quote

But we have got to stop. We have got to get off of this. These people have got to understand they're not popular around the country. People don't like them. And they're voting because that's the only way that they can express themselves and how much they disagree with this.

And, again, I go back. And it's not just Virginia and New Jersey. It's literally everywhere, up to and including Seattle. And there's a real lesson here. And it can be corrected. But they have got — these people have to understand, no one — you're not popular. People don't want to ride in the car with you. They don't want to ride next to you in the subway.

You're annoying people. And they got to understand that. It's very important

Barbara Comstock was also part of the analyzing crew. Her closing comment was directed toward Carville.

Quote

Say hi to Mary, James.

It was all very nostalgic. The world has changed.

[Chas_P]

Quote

But we have got to stop. We have got to get off of this. These people have got to understand they're not popular around the country. People don't like them.

I've seldom been a fan of James Carville but I think he hit the head of the nail with this. I think the average American is fed up with bullshit. I know I am.

[kenberg]

Carville could be seen as Cassius: "The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves." It's better to look for our own errors than to rage against something we cannot control. Of course, that didn't work out all that well for Cassius, or for Brutus either, but it is still good advice. I think wokeness has been a serious vote destroyer for Dems but the main point is very broad: If things go wrong, the first place to look is for one's own errors.

And, this being a lazy morning, I quote from the Wikipedia about Cassius:

Quote

"Among that select band of philosophers who have managed to change the world," writes David Sedley, "it would be hard to find a pair with a higher public profile than Brutus and Cassius — brothers-in-law, fellow-assassins, and Shakespearian heroes," adding that "it may not even be widely known that they were philosophers."^[22]

Like Brutus, whose Stoic proclivities are widely assumed but who is more accurately described as an Antiochean Platonist, Cassius exercised a long and serious interest in philosophy. His early philosophical commitments are hazy, though D.R. Shackleton Bailey thought that a remark by Cicero^[23] indicates a youthful adherence to the Academy.^[24] Sometime between 48 and 45 BC, however, Cassius famously converted to the school of thought founded by Epicurus. Although Epicurus advocated a withdrawal from politics, at Rome his philosophy was made to accommodate the careers of many prominent men in public life, among them Caesar's father-in-law, Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus.^[25] Arnaldo Momigliano called Cassius' conversion a "conspicuous date in the history of Roman Epicureanism," a choice made not to enjoy the pleasures of the Garden, but to provide a philosophical justification for assassinating a tyrant.^[26]

Ah yes, philosophers. Just like Carville. But who is Brutus. Gotta watch out for those philosopher types.



Ok, time for more coffee.

Added: Also defund the police cost the Ds a lot of votes. But the main point is to look for errors rather than to wail about how unfair it all is.

[y66]

kenberg, on 2021-November-04, 06:32, said:

Carville could be seen as Cassius: "The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves." It's better to look for our own errors than to rage against something we cannot control. Of course, that didn't work out all that well for Cassius, or for Brutus either, but it is still good advice. I think wokeness has been a serious vote destroyer for Dems but the main point is very broad: If things go wrong, the first place to look is for one's own errors.

For some reason, Cato the Elder also comes to mind, especially when reading kenberg's posts. He's the guy who, in 157 BC, after returning from a mission to Carthage, concluded that Carthage's increasing prosperity was a threat to Rome, and began ending all of his Senate speeches with "Carthago delenda est" (Carthage must be destroyed). No doubt, if he were posting here, he would end his posts with "nolite dicere stultus supellectilem" (stop saying stupid stuff).

Personally, I think wokeness is highy desirable. But making wokeness a center of your political messaging campaign, when all your opponent has to do to juice their base is put out some coded version of "the niggers are coming", is not a good strategy for winning elections.

According to my estimates, Youngkin won the votes of > 65% of white voters in Virginia who account for > 66% of all Virginia voters. That works out to 1.4 million white votes for Youngkin vs .76 million for McAuliffe. Wake up to that Dems.

[y66]

Some late night takes:

“But the bigger loss was in Virginia, or as it’s known by its full name ‘East West Virginia.’ Because Virginia has been becoming more and more Democratic for years now. They voted for the first Black president and the first blackface governor.” — TREVOR NOAH

“Republicans figured out that they could use a twin strategy of keeping Trump’s MAGA base motivated by using the right-wing propaganda network to feed the red meat on the one hand, while also running a candidate who looks like the dentist who gives you the gas for a cleaning.”— SETH MEYERS

“Here’s the thing — and maybe I’m alone — but I’m not that upset. I’ve already endured the worst election in American history, live on TV, sitting over there, drinking a cocktail of bourbon and my own tears. This one just seems like another election: ‘Oh no, Terry McAuliffe didn’t win? Will the republic survive our post-Terry future?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT

[Chas_P]

y66, on 2021-November-04, 08:29, said:

Personally, I think wokeness is highy desirable.

Quote

"What went wrong is stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools, people see that. And it really has a suppressive effect on all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something," Carville said.

[y66]

Who said this in November 2020?

Quote

If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get f#cking torn apart in 2022. That's the reality.

The number one concern in things that people brought to me in my [district] that I barely re-won, was defunding the police. And I've heard from colleagues who have said 'Oh, it's the language of the streets. We should respect that.' We're in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we're talking about. If we don't mean we should defund the police, we shouldn't say that.

We want to talk about funding social services, and ensuring good engagement in community policing, let's talk about what we are for. And we need to not ever use the words 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again. Because while people think it doesn't matter, it does matter. And we lost good members because of it.

Hint: her last name contains "berg"