Entrenchment versus democracy

[I am currently in a mad rush to try to get as much down as possible before the election. I am, as a result, relying heavily on my phone's dictation app which frankly is not that good. Be on the lookout for homonyms and I would appreciate it if you would cut me some slack on the prose.]

I'll come back and fill in some of the details later, but just as a quick outline...

Imagine that, Without loss of generality, you are a Randian conservative in 1980. (There are other Republican-affiliated persuasions that would work here, but let's just stick with this one for now.) You have recently had some awfully good political breaks -- favorable demographic trends, bad news for the Democrats on the foreign and domestic fronts, a major rift in their party a few years earlier, and a fantastically charismatic GOP leader -- but you are not at all optimistic about the popularity of your positions in the long term. For example, you suspect that once people have tried a generous social safety net, they will not do you want to go back.

To put it bluntly, you do not believe in a democratic process where the best ideas, after a period of open and vigorous debate, will win over the majority of the population. How do you take advantage of your current position of dominance and popularity to subvert that process?

Here's a brief an incomplete list of the measures you might take:

Campaign funding
1. Maximize your present and long-term funding advantage. (See the K Street Project.)
2. Remove rules limiting the impact of money on campaigns.

Voter suppression
Make it more and more difficult for people who are likely to vote for the opposing party to exercise their constitutional rights.

Focus on strategically important offices and elections, such as controlling the state houses in years divisible by 10.

Make big plays for single issue voters

Defund and delegitimize established sources of trustworthy, high-quality information and analysis (see "the war on data").

Co-opt and intimidate the mainstream press.

Create a media bubble for the party's base.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I am inclined to believe that we are coming to the end of this social engineering experiment, but it is worth noting that it worked disturbingly well for decades.

If Donald Trump is somehow elected president tomorrow...

... it will be partially because the mainstream press largely ignored a massive effort by the Republican Party to disenfranchise voters based on race.

More excellent work from Talking Points Memo's Tierney Sneed:

NC GOP Brags About Low Black Turnout–After Lobbying To Limit Early Voting

A state GOP press release on the state's early voting numbers highlighted that African American early voting turnout was down by 8.5 percent from 2012.

Back in August, the News and Observer reported on an email sent by North Carolina GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse to local elections officials urging them to limit early voting opportunities, including Sundays, which are used disproportionately by African Americans, and particularly those participating in black churches' "soul to poll" voter drives.

“Our Republican Board members should feel empowered to make legal changes to early voting plans, that are supported by Republicans,” Woodhouse wrote. “Republicans can and should make party line changes to early voting.”

Since then, more emails from GOP operatives making similar arguments to elections officials emerged. The county elections boards -- which are made up two-to-one of GOP appointees -- were debating their early voting plans for the extra week of voting effectively restored by an appeals court decision over the summer. More than a few of those officials took the state party's advice and proposed plans that would have severely limited early voting opportunities, particularly for black and student voters. Civil rights groups challenged many of those plans, and the state elections board ameliorated some, but not all, of the cutbacks to early voting.

While other Southern states have seen a uptick in black early turnout this cycle, North Carolina's is down, with University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald, noting that "it seems like something went awry in North Carolina.”

    Something went very wrong for African-Americans' voting in North Carolina pic.twitter.com/ZpwjyEavmd

    — Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) November 6, 2016

"Worth making" does not begin to cover it

From another essential post from Josh Marshall:

One meta-point is worth making here. We've heard a lot about both candidates being unlikeable, the election being ugly and so forth and how that means people are going to be turned off and a lot of people just won't vote at all. We don't know the total numbers yet. But all the indications from the early vote are that that is not going to be true. This should have been obvious. Everything we've seen over the last generation tells us that hard fought elections where a lot is on the line turn out a lot of people. That makes total sense. Why people stick to this other assumption is a mystery.

And part of a larger one. For more than a year now, the meta-journalism story has been one of intelligent, respected professionals, often claiming to be data-driven, clinging to theories and assumptions despite the overwhelming force of both evidence and common sense.

A post-apolitical era(?)

I suspect I could come up with more counterexamples if I were a better student of history, but, at least in recent memory, there has generally been a reluctance for certain writers, artists, directors, etc. to explicitly endorse candidates through their work. That's not to say that these people did not take partisan positions, but that they often maintained something of a firewall between what they said on their own and what they said"on the job ."

For example, Randall Munroe of XKCD was an Obama supporter, but he chose to keep politics out of the cartoon he posted the day before the 2008 election
.

You can put it down to Paul Krugman's line about Trump as clarifying shock or mine about Trump as stressor, but either way, the stark contrast in this election has caused a lot of people to abandon (at least temporarily) a number of long-held conventions.

Here's today's cartoon:

Trump didn't start Trumpism

[Quick caveat: I haven't had a chance to read Chait's longer piece in the recent issue of New York Magazine which could very well undercut some of my criticisms.]

Jonathan Chait is one of the very few journalists to emerge from this campaign with his reputation enhanced and there are a lot of real insights in this post from earlier in the week (How Donald Trump Outsmarted George Will), but his central is wrong in a subtle but fundamental way.

The point is not at all to gloat at the failure of anti-Trump conservatives, but to explain the source of their error. You can’t heal an illness you’ve diagnosed improperly. Anti-Trump conservatives deluded themselves about the source of conservatism’s electoral appeal. Trump’s long list of deviations from party orthodoxy — on health care, abortion, support for the Clintons — would have destroyed a normal candidacy, the way Rick Perry’s support for humane treatment of undocumented immigrants killed his candidacy in 2012.

…

The most important analytical failure of the anti-Trump conservatives is their blindness to the centrality of white racial backlash. They simply cannot imagine how movement conservatism could result in bigoted authoritarianism, and their confusion produces absurdity. Erick Erickson, the conservative pundit who has fiercely opposed Trump, today defends Rush Limbaugh, even though Limbaugh is defending the candidate. Erickson argues that Limbaugh’s brand of conservatism is exactly what the party needed all along. “If Republicans lamenting Trump and hating on Rush had only listened to Rush and taken his counsel that he gives for free three hours a day, five days a week, the GOP would not be in this mess,” he reasons. Yes – Trump’s popularity clearly demonstrates that a racist, misogynist, conspiracy-mongering bully-entertainer has had too little influence.

...

The conservative intelligentsia is right about one thing. Trump is not a committed ideologue but a grifter who decided to use their voters for his own ends. Trump grasped from the outset that the birther issue gave him a connection to the Republican electorate. The conservative intelligentsia ignored the birthers, the freaks, and the transparent racists because they were embarrassing. It was far more flattering and heroic to imagine the whole thing was about the Constitution. The con artist swindled the perfect mark.

The anti-Trump conservatives weren't blindsided by the rise of these angry, bigoted voters; they were blindsided by their sudden inability to control those voters. The conservative movement went to great lengths to cultivate this segment of the electorate, feeding it a steady diet of misinformation, dog whistles and astroturf. The assumption (which proved sound for a long time) was that the more anger and fear you could stoke in this segment, the more you could count on their money and their votes.

This segment was not "ignored" because they were "embarrassing." They were kept at a distance in order to maintain plausible deniability. For example, by pursuing the endorsement of Donald Trump, Mitt Romney was able to court the birthers without actually associating himself with them. As for misreading the appeal of their agenda, Chait himself has often pointed out that the leaders of the conservative movement have rather openly admitted that their ideas do not have broad electoral appeal. Think of Romney's 47% comment or of any conversation you've had with an Ayn Rand acolyte.

For the record, Chait gets more right here then he does wrong, so why should we make a big deal out of this?

For starters, this narrative lets a lot of the anti-Trump conservatives off the hook far too easily. When proto-Trumpism was in a controllable and politically expedient form, very few of the conservative intelligentsia had any trouble with them. There's a fairly direct line from the redmeat, "real America" anti-intellectualism of Sarah Palin and the rise of Trump, but Bill Kristol was crazy about Palin. Even more to the point, Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump are virtually interchangeable, but anti-Trump conservatives remarkably willing to work with Limbaugh.

But there is far more at stake here than simply assigning blame. We have recently seen an appalling level of racism and sexism and every other type of bigotry imaginable. Obviously, there are social, economic, and demographic factors at play, but they have been greatly exacerbated by a massive amount of propaganda. I would argue, if you had to pick a single cause for how bad things have gotten, that would be it.

The Republican base believes things like this...

... because this is what they've been told repeatedly through endless channels.

The media is filled with people willing to condemn the anger and the bigotry that Trump has brought to the surface, but if we're serious about these condemnations, we need to be looking at the people who have been cultivating Trumpism for decades.

When different interpretations become different realities

Trump's target audience (and, to a degree, Trump himself) receive virtually all of their information in a highly filtered form and the biases of these filters are endlessly reinforced through social media. The result is that the same event will be depicted in such different ways inside and outside of the bubble that the two versions cannot be reconciled.

For example, here's how TPM described an incident at a recent Clinton rally featuring President Obama (an account supported by a video of the event).

For a couple minutes, Obama attempted in vain to gain back control of the crowd as chants of "Hillary!" drowned out the protestor.

While the protester's identity and motives weren't clear, from Obama's remarks after he finally gained control of the crowd back, the protester appeared to be an older war veteran.

"This is what I mean about folks not being focused," Obama said. "Hold up. Hold up. First of all, we live in a country that respects free speech. Second of all, it looks like maybe he might have served in our military and we have to respect that. Third of all, he was elderly and we have had to respect our elders. And fourth of all, don't boo, vote!"

And here's how Donald Trump described the incident at one of his rallies.

“You saw it today on television, right? He was talking to the protester, screaming at him, really screaming at him. By the way, if I spoke the way Obama spoke to that protester, they would say, 'He became unhinged! He became – ' … And he spent so much time screaming at this protester, and frankly, it was a disgrace.”

Along similar lines (also from TPM), read how a protester trying to pull out a sign morphed into Teddy Roosevelt shrugging off an assassin’s bullet. 

The essential details are these. Not long after Trump claimed that a surge in Latino voting in Nevada was evidence of voter fraud, a man named Austyn Crites (later self-identified as a registered Republican who opposes Donald Trump) was in the arena, relatively near the front of the audience. There was some commotion. Trump noticed the commotion, accused Crites of "being from the Hillary Clinton campaign."

From the stage he asked Crites, "How much are you being paid? Fifteen hundred dollars?" and then called for security to "take him out."

(The idea that the Clinton campaign sends people to Trump rallies to instigate violent disruptions is an urban legend growing out of the latest James O'Keefe tape dump. There is zero evidence to support this. It is a sort of mass psychology version of projection.)

At this point Crites was apparently in the process of pulling out a sign of some sort which someone nearby thought was a gun. That person yelled "gun!" This tripped off a melee in which Trump supporters beat Crites fairly severely. Secret Service agents, seeing the melee and possibly hearing the cry of "gun", rushed Trump off the stage and took Crites into custody.


...


 It made perfect sense for the Secret Service to escort Trump off the stage until they were confident there was no threat and that the area was secure. We should also bear that history in mind if we find ourselves chiding people for jumping to conclusions in the heat of the moment.

In any case, it was clear very quickly that there was no gun and that there was no threat. How do we know that? Because they allowed Trump to return to the stage very quickly. If there had been a gun or if they were not close to certain there hadn't been one, that would not have happened. The presence of a gun would have meant security had been breached and that likely would have been the end of the event. One gun can mean another gun. There are many examples of assassinations and assassination attempts were an initial commotion is used to distract from a subsequent attack etc. Letting Trump back on the stage only a few minutes later essential confirms the Secret Service knew very quickly that there had been no threat.

…

As I said, it was determined very quickly that nothing had happened. No attempt. No nothing. But this didn't stop the campaign from pushing out a storyline about an "assassination attempt"  and a tale of Trump's bravery in immediately returning to the stage.

Next a CNN journalist went out from the press pen into the area where the incident had occurred to find out what happened. He was promptly verbally abused and physically assaulted, though seemingly to no great physical harm, mainly just shoved around.

…

Things got darker still when Trump arrived a short time later in Colorado. In Denver, Trump was introduced by Father Andre Y-Sebastian Mahanna, a Maronite Catholic priest who said Trump had just survived "an attempt of murder against Mr Trump."

He then blamed the press for incitement the non-existent assassination attempt.

The Trump campaign allowed this to happen and made no effort to correct the record. This was followed by another warm up speaker who joked about Clinton being a 'bitch.'

Normally the challenge for a political party is to craft messages that resonate with the general public and the party faithful. Over the next few cycles, the challenge for the Republicans will be to come up with messages that make any sense at all both inside and outside the bubble.

I never thought the “Seven Days in May” joke would become a thread…

But the thought of a rogue faction in the government trying to influence the election seems less like a joke.

From a long but very good piece in Vox by Yochi Dreazen

It’s come to this: The FBI, America’s premier law enforcement agency, just had to decide whether to investigate one of its own Twitter accounts to see if it had an anti-Hillary Clinton bias.

The account in question, @FBIRecordsVault, burst into the news earlier this week after abruptly posting records related to Bill Clinton’s last-minute — and deeply controversial — pardon of financier Marc Rich. An FBI official said in an interview that the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility referred the matter to its Inspection Division for a possible investigation into whether anyone in the FBI had intentionally released the documents to hurt Hillary Clinton.

…

Comey has since come under sustained criticism from law enforcement veterans and lawmakers from both parties who believe he broke with longstanding Justice Department policies by directly intruding into the presidential race — and potentially impacting its outcome.

“There’s a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election,” George J. Terwilliger III, a deputy attorney general under President George Bush, told the New York Times. “Those guidelines exist for a reason. Sometimes, that makes for hard decisions. But bypassing them has consequences.”

But Comey isn’t the only member of the FBI stepping into the election. Earlier this week, unnamed sources within the bureau told the Wall Street Journal that some FBI agents believed they had enough evidence to begin an aggressive investigation into a potential pay-to-play scheme at the Clinton Foundation, but were overruled by more senior officials.

Another anti-Clinton leak came Thursday, when sources thought to be disgruntled FBI officials told Fox News that an indictment was coming in the Clinton Foundation case. The story gave Trump a new talking point, dominated Fox’s primetime news programming, and rocketed across the conservative media before being debunked by an array of other media outlets. By that point, though, the damage had already been done.

Taken together, it’s easy to come away with the conclusion that the FBI is out to get Hillary Clinton. The truth, though, is far more complicated. The FBI isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t the bureau as a whole that is targeting Clinton. Experts who study the FBI believe the leaks are coming from a small clique of agents who profoundly distrust Clinton and believe she deserves to be punished for what they see as a long record of ethically dubious behavior.

…

The recent series of FBI leaks are particularly worrisome because they raise the prospect of a state security agency equipped with the full resources and investigative might of the federal government working to interfere in the elections. The FBI is so powerful — it can, with court approval, issue subpoenas, tap phones, intercept emails and conduct round-the-clock surveillance — that even a small coterie of its agents can find ways of influencing the political process. That’s the kind of thing we normally see in autocracies like Egypt or Turkey, not here in the United States.

It’s impossible to know how many agents support Trump, and the anti-Clinton leaks are likely the result of only a tiny minority of the bureau. Still, the fact that a small fraction of the FBI’s workforce has felt free to take steps that could impact the election is profoundly alarming. Comey stumbled by personally entering the political fray. His bigger mistake may have come from signaling to other agents that they could do the same.

…

Two of Holder’s most recent Republican predecessors, Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey, have also accused the FBI chief of making a serious error in judgement.

…

Outside experts on the FBI say Comey has made a serious and perhaps irreparable mistake.

“His actions were unprecedented, unethical, shocking, and have apparently led to chaos within the bureau, an unprecedented number of leaks, and chaos in our election cycle,” said Douglas Charles, a history professor at Penn State.

Charles, the author of a book about J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, said Comey has a long history with the Clintons that may have left him with a “personal grudge or underlying or subsumed political motive” to try to derail Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

When the meta-dialogue about the campaign starts to sound like the f**king campaign

Things are getting a little heated...

Nate Silver unloaded Saturday on the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim, who accused the polling guru and founder of the prediction website fivethirtyeight.com of “changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them.”

...
 
According to Grim, however, Silver is “just guessing” and his “trend line adjustment” technique is “merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical modeling.” Grim also noted that FiveThirtyEight’s model -- due to his adjustments -- shows Trump more likely than not to win Florida, while the Huffington Post’s calculates her victory there as more likely.

And that, apparently, enraged Silver, whose track record of correctly predicting elections -- and explaining how he does it in painstaking, but accessible detail -- has made him a celebrity whose very name is synonymous with the art of data-driven prognostication, and whose model is widely considered the gold standard in election forecasting.

After dropping his initial f-bomb, Silver went on to argue why his model -- which, in its polls-only version, puts the odds of Hillary Clinton winning the presidential race at 64.7 percent -- is superior to those like the Huffington Post, which rates her election a near-certainty, at 98.3 percent.

Four from Talking Points Memo I'll want to get back to

This account of how sensible formerly anti-Trump conservatives get sucked in is essential reading (and mirrors some of my personal encounters).

Josh Marshall addresses the none-too-subtle antisemitism of Trump's latest commercial.

One of these days I'm going to run a post called "meta-inference." I don't really have anything other than the title and the fact that I'll be quoting extensively from this Marshall piece.

If Trump manages a narrow victory in North Carolina, this will be part of the reason.

Five hour lines and the tell-your-grandchildren effect

A few quick thoughts on waiting five hours to vote

1. That's right... FIVE

2. The line circled around the library building then snaked back and forth through the park. It's difficult to say how long it was but five to ten blocks seems conservative.

3. This was LA, None of the major races have any chance of being close in the state.

4. People were there because they really wanted to vote in this election. The mood was cheerful and there was a sense democratic participation.

Which leads us to...

5.This was always going to be a big, historic race, the kind people wanted to be a part of. This tell-your-grandchildren effect is not limited to either party but I suspect it plays more to Clinton's advantage and it certainly should give those arguing for a low turnout election reason to question their assumptions.

Nevada, either leaning slightly Trump or in the bag for Hillary

From FiveThirtyEight a few minutes ago:

And since timing is important

From Jon Ralston [UPDATED, 11/5/16, 5 PM]

Let me remind you of the math: Trump would need to be holding 90 percent of the GOP base and Clinton would have to be losing 15-20 percent of hers and he would have to be winning indies for him to be competitive. Let me be clear: None of those things are likely.

The Reid machine and the Hillary campaign did not spend two weeks turning out crossover voters. They know what they are doing. Trump is probably down 12-15 points in Clark County and 65-70,000 votes. You can't make that up unless Election Day turnout is so large and so GOP-heavy that he could. And with two-thirds of the vote in, and with Democrats not simply willing to roll over and not rev up the machine on Election Day, that ain't happening.

Proof = hearing about things

 Following up on "In retrospect, it's surprising we don't use more sewage metaphors,

 From TPM:

[Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC)], a Donald Trump surrogate and the first congressional candidate endorsed by the Republican nominee, was interviewed about FBI investigations into Clinton’s private email server and the Clinton Foundation on CNN’s “New Day.”

“She is under—facing indictment,” Ellmers told host Chris Cuomo. “We’re in a situation where the Clinton Foundation—”

“No proof she's facing indictment,” Cuomo replied.

“There is proof,” she insisted.

“There isn't any proof,” Cuomo pushed back.

“There is.”

“What's the proof?” he asked.

“The proof is the FBI investigators,” Ellmers said. “This is coming out everywhere. I'm hearing about it. I don't really have all that many connections and yet I'm hearing about the investigation.”

A widely-circulated Fox News report that Trump himself pushed on the stump cited two anonymous “sources with intimate knowledge” into the Clinton Foundation probe who said Clinton would “likely” be indicted. Fox later walked the report back, noting that a prosecutor must decide whether to bring an indictment against a potential defendant.

When Cuomo pointed that out, Ellmers remained defiant.

“You know what, people are talking,” she said. “So, the investigation is moving forward. Now, I do agree with you, there is someone who is trying to put a cover up in place here. And it's at the Justice Department level. That's where it is.”


“That's a conspiracy theory and that's fine for you to believe it. But you said she's facing indictment,” Cuomo said, adding that that implies “you know something that the FBI is about to do.”

“We have no basis of proof that that is about to happen. You may want it to happen, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen,” he went on.

,,,

Ellmers lost her reelection bid in North Carolina's Republican primary this June.

Ellmers is both a surrogate and a member of Congress (albeit a lame duck), but she's apparently operating on the same news stream that was intended for the party-faithful cannon fodder.

And on a related note: Fox Host: Report On 'Likely' Clinton Foundation Indictment ‘Was A Mistake’

However, the real candidate is not filled with tasty treats

Another thing I should have been blogging about earlier.

Living in Los Angeles, I've been hearing about Donald Trump pinatas for well over a year. If you go to a quinceañera, there's a very good chance that you will see the Republican candidate for president hung in effigy and beaten to smithereens by a group of young people. Given the conventional wisdom of as recently as 2013 that the GOP absolutely had to extend its appeal to Hispanics and younger voters, pummeling is not a good sign.

This is another instance where we need to be talking about range of data. Obviously, major parties have alienated various demographic groups, but I'd argue that Trump has done this in a unique way and to an unprecedented level. While it would be reckless to try to predict what this will lead to, it's important to be prepared for at least the possibility of something big.

On a related note, from Talking Points Memo:

Latino voters are already showing up to vote this election and could cast ballots in larger numbers than Democrats saw in recent elections.

On a call with reporters Friday, Latino Decisions– a polling group focused on Hispanic voting patters– said that Latino turnout is on track to make history next week.

On the call, Gabriel Sanchez, a principal at Latino Decisions, pointed to early voting trends that show Latino early voting is up 100 percent in Florida, 60 percent in North Carolina and up 25 percent in Colorado and Nevada.

Sanchez said at this point, Latino Decisions is projecting that between 13.1 million and 14.7 million Latinos will vote on or before Tuesday– a major increase from 2012 numbers when the group estimated 11.2 million voted.

I was joking about the Seven Days in May reference

But this summary by Josh Marshall of what we've learned about the role of the FBI's New York field office in this really is starting to read like the first chapter of a rather outlandish novel.

It's like a weird mash-up of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May

Where's John Frankenheimer when you need him?







We've got covert Kremlin operatives trying to rig the presidential election...





With the assistance of rogue FBI agents (from the Guardian).

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

For me, though, the strangest thing about all this is how unfreaked-out everyone seems to be by all this.