Today in 1954, ABC Radio banned Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano” for what it termed “offensive lyrics” (decide for yourself):
The number one album today in 1978 was Billy Joel’s “52nd Street”:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Nov. 18
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I have the privilege of announcing today’s WIAA Division 7 football championship game between Shullsburg and Edgar from Camp Randall Stadium in Madison for WPVL (1590 AM), available online worldwide at http://www.am1590wpvl.com.
It occurs to me that for someone who does this only as a part-time thing, I’m doing pretty well. In the past four years, I have announced state football, boys basketball, girls basketball, girls volleyball and, as you know two weeks ago, boys soccer. I’ve also announced college basketball, and numerous non-state games that have been great games to announce regardless of where they are or who’s playing.
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Readers know that I voted for neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton for president.
It does appear that everyone who did vote for Trump had their reasons to vote for him (even the sole reason that Trump is not Hillary) justified by the nationwide post-election hissy fit thrown by Hillary’s supporters. (Because nothing convinces like riots.) It also appears that being a Trump backer or non-backer didn’t negatively affect that Republican’s chance of winning Nov. 8, given how well the GOP did nationwide.
But what is a right-thinking #NeverTrump to do now that Trump will be president in two months? First, there’s Jennifer Rubin:
Let’s address a few issues, keeping in mind that people in different capacities — journalist, lawmaker, activist, candidate — have different obligations.
First, tell the truth. Bret Stephens, a #NeverTrump journalist, explains:
What a columnist owes his readers isn’t a bid for their constant agreement. It’s independent judgment. Opinion journalism is still journalism, not agitprop. The elision of that distinction and the rise of malevolent propaganda outfits such as Breitbart News is one of the most baleful trends of modern life. Serious columnists must resist it. …
Many things explain Mr. Trump’s unexpected victory, but not the least of them was the ability of his core supporters to shut out the inconvenient Trump facts: the precarious foundations of his wealth, the plasticity of his convictions, the astonishing frequency of his lying. Mr. Trump attracted millions of voters thirsty to believe. That thirst may hold its own truth, but it doesn’t lessen a columnist’s responsibility to note that it won’t be slaked by another hollow slogan of redemption.
This is the distinction between cheerleaders (e.g., Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity) and actual journalists. The former’s loyalty is to a person, the latter’s to intellectual integrity and accuracy. It will be more important than ever, as Stephens says, for the latter to remain stalwart, calling it as they see it. The instinct to “give him a chance” and “pick your fights” may apply to activists, lawmakers and interest groups as part of strategic calculations; there is no similar obligation for journalists to suspend judgment or be lenient on liars.
Second, hundreds if not thousands of Republicans and center-right independents will have to wrestle with the dilemma of joining an administration that espouses — at least now — dangerous ideas and exhibits abhorrent views.
There is a difference between bad compromises and rotten compromises. Bad compromises: yes, if they are the only way to do good or mitigate harm. Rotten compromises — never.
And what is a rotten compromise? It is a compromise where you participate in assaults on fundamental human dignity. That’s a vague and porous standard, but if you are a lawyer with a conscience you know it when you see it — provided you don’t loophole-lawyer your own conscience. Mass dragnets and deportations, torture and degrading treatment, targeting policies that accept excessive civilian casualties or ignore war crimes, deliberate failure to repress anti-Muslim hate crimes: all of these are assaults on human dignity, and compromising your principles on them is a rotten compromise. When it comes to rotten compromises of your principles, exit takes precedence over voice and loyalty. Exit doesn’t necessarily mean resigning, although it may. It certainly means refusing to participate.
We suggest this formulation: If you choose to serve, know the lines you will not cross and be prepared to leave if continued service demands you cross them. Write that letter of resignation now, put one copy in your desk and give one to the person (a spouse, a child, a colleague) you could not look in the eye and justify staying under such circumstances. We all need moral watchdogs to compel us to live up to our standards.
Third, ditch partisanship and become ruthlessly pragmatic. If a Republican senator needs to collaborate with a Democrat to stop an absurd policy initiative or truly dangerous nomination, he or she should do it. The former can oppose the latter the very next day on taxes or spending or something else. Avoid the urge to game it out. (Maybe the Democrats will look more reasonable. Maybe my supporters will turn on me if things work out better than I thought.) Some strange bedfellows — the ACLU and the Federalist Society, Democratic governors and Republican congressmen, ex-presidents and Cabinet officials of both parties — will be needed to prevent the worst from happening. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” should be written on the backs of #NeverTrumpers’ hands.
Finally, while some are dismissive of the role institutions can play in combating autocratic tendencies, that is precisely where resistance to destructive tendencies must be waged. An independent judiciary, a free press, a system of federalism and other attributes of our democratic society need all the help they can get. For too long, the question on issues such as judicial restraint and federalism (not to mention the filibuster) has amounted to “Whose ox is being gored?” Now, both sides need to defend every institution that erects barriers to abuse of power.
Consider what would happen if the administration refused to allow certain mainstream media outlets into the press pool. We should expect that: (1) Conservative outlets would protest, to the point of refusing to operate without the banned entities’ participation; (2) Conservative and liberal legal groups would explore First Amendment challenges; (3) Republican and Democratic lawmakers would hold hearings and denounce the move; and (3) former White House officials of both parties would loudly condemn the move. Devotion to democratic institutions must be cultivated and sustained.
These are strange times, and men and women of good conscience will need to be resourceful. The consequences of moral and intellectual sloth will be serious.
Journalists have the obligation to report the news without fear or favor. Journalists and columnists have the obligation to not be in the tank for a party or candidate. A lot of each group failed miserably this year and for that matter the past eight years. Of course, given journalists’ usual left-leaning, they will dump on Trump for sometimes valid reasons but sometimes for invalid reasons. (As has been written elsewhere, dissent is now patriotic again.) Journalists who utterly failed to see Trump’s appeal among voters need to get out of their social circles and, for instance, go to church.
Ross Brown added last week:
My online news feeds are fulled to their brims today with opinions ranging from “Hallelujah! America is saved!” to “This is the end of American civilization!” Your experience has probably been the same.
It all got me thinking about why we’re so wrapped up in the results of this election. Why are some people jumping for joy? Why are other bawling their eyes out? Why are some overcome with gratitude while others are overcome with terror? What is the root cause of people’s elation or sorrow today?
People’s dramatic emotional reactions to this election are caused by exactly one thing: big federal government.
As government expands in size and scope, elections matter more to us as individuals – because we (rightfully) perceive that the outcome of any given election will directly impact our individual lives to greater degrees.
Conversely, elections matter less when government is small because their ripple effects in our personal lives is likewise small.
Elections should matter less than they do today. Elections will matter less when We the People exercise political liberty to limit the size and scope of the one-size-fits-all Federal Government.
Republicans claim to be the party of small government. They will have the opportunity – and the political power – to put their legislation where their mouths are in 2017 and beyond. Will they do so with President Donald Trump leading the charge? I’m not sure. I’m not impressed with Republicans’ federal track records on this subject in the modern era, and Donald Trump doesn’t exactly seem to be the kind of guy who likes relinquishing power. Ultimately, only time will tell.
But here’s what I do know: if you’re terrified about Donald Trump being President, you should support the idea of small government so that you can limit President Trump’s impact on your individual life, and limit his impact on the lives of others you care about.
I also know that if you voted for Donald Trump yesterday, you presumably already support the idea of small government. I implore you to follow through with your support of that concept. Don’t get lazy just because there’s an “R” sitting in the White House. Republican big government is no better than Democrat big government.
Election season is over. Now is the time to unite as Americans. I suggest that no matter where you stand politically, you can support the idea of limiting the size and scope of the Federal Government. It’s the only way to simultaneously minimize AND maximize the potential impact of President Donald Trump.
It’d be a YUGE step in the right direction as we work to make America great again.
My concern is that Republicans have given up on smaller government and are perfectly fine with Govzilla as long as they hold the reins. (That certainly seems to be the case in Wisconsin, where state and local government remains far, far too large.) That is putting politics before philosophy, and is by the way wrong.
As with all politicians, I will support Trump to the extent that he does what I want him to do. (Whether he does that depends on his position on a specific issue, which as you know tends to change.) Since I do not worship politicians (and am disgusted with those weak people who do), I am not going to refer to Trump as “my president,” because no one in elective office is the boss of me.
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The number one single today in 1958:
The number one British single today in 1966:
Today in 1978, one of the most awful things ever foisted upon the American viewing public was shown by ABC-TV:
The number one British single today in 1979:
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Isthmus reports two pieces of radio news:
John “Sly” Sylvester’s daily call-in program has been booted from 93.7 WEKZ-FM.
Sylvester, a longtime liberal commentator, announced on his Facebook page that he learned of the change Friday. WEKZ is part of the southern Wisconsin/northern Illinois Big Radio regional chain of eight stations, based in Monroe. He will remain a DJ for the station.
The change comes at a bad time for Madison listeners of liberal radio. On Nov. 9, 92.1 The Mic, WXXM-FM, dropped its progressive talk format and replaced it with Christmas music.
“The last two years I’ve been pulling double duty for Big Radio,” Sylvester wrote on Nov. 13. “In addition to my talk program, I’ve been hosting the morning show on sister station 105.9 The Hog [WWHG-FM, “Everything that Rocks,” based in Janesville]. Big Radio felt that in order for me to continue long-term with the company, it was best to make this change.”
Sylvester declined to comment to Isthmus about the change. Scott Thompson, owner of Big Radio, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A station official says that Sylvester’s show will return to WEKZ-FM next week, but as a music program.
“So Trump triumphs, and progressive radio gets unplugged on 92.1, and Sly gets canned? That doesn’t make any sense at all,” says Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, formerly editor and publisher of The Progressive magazine. He had been a guest on Sylvester’s program many times, as recently as Election Day.
“We need progressive voices on the airwaves now more than ever,” says Rothschild. “And there’s a real hunger for them, too. But the corporate media owners are reducing our outlets, making it more difficult for us to reach a mass audience.”
“I’m shocked to hear about Sly,” says Mitch Henck, a veteran Madison broadcaster whose program aired on The Mic until last week. The station is one of several owned by iHeartMedia, which also owns Madison’s WIBA-AM and FM, WTSO-AM, WMAD-FM and WZEE-FM (Z-104). Henck and Sylvester had previously worked together, and Sly was a frequent guest on Henck’s program.
Sylvester’s program aired from 3 to 6:30 p.m. on WEKZ since early 2013. Before that, it ran for 15 years on talk radio 1670 WTDY-AM (now WOZN sports radio, “The Zone,” owned by Mid-West Family Broadcasting). In November 2012 that station laid off its entire news and talk staff and temporarily replaced it with Christmas music. …
Does progressive radio have a future in Madison?
“It is hard to sell advertising on a lefty talk station,” says Henck. “NPR attracts millions of listeners every week. It is hard for more militant lefties to compete with that. It is rapidly becoming a podcast world. That is now my world.”
The media world is a business, which people tend to forget. If something doesn’t sell, it’s not going to survive long-term. That is particularly the case with big media companies such as iHeartMedia.
There have been numerous attempts to make liberal talk work on commercial airwaves. Almost all of them have failed, probably because there are a lot of would-be advertisers who don’t want to be on liberal programming, though many are fine being on conservative programming. The latter obviously exceeds the former given that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others are still on the air, while Air America is not.
I have difficulty believing those two decisions were made in the immediate wake of Nov. 8. I think 92.1 hadn’t been doing well financially far longer, or perhaps manage to decided to run as far as possible until the well ran dry, which was Election Day. If the problem was Sly, Sly would have been terminated, not just his show. (Perhaps his Social Dilemma will now appear afternoons.) They may have been casualties of the abomination that was the 2016 election, but the decision to end 92.1’s format and Sly’s talk show was made, I believe, well before Election Day.
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For those (like Democrats) who believe the “working class” or “blue-collar” workers resent the rich, Joan C. Williams claims that’s not correct, starting with …
My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment.
He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part-time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in 1970, many blue-collar whites followed his example. This week, their candidate won the presidency.
For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.
One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.
Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.
Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.
Manly dignity is a big deal for working-class men, and they’re not feeling that they have it. Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and women knew their place. It’s comfort food for high-school-educated guys who could have been my father-in-law if they’d been born 30 years earlier. Today they feel like losers — or did until they met Trump.
Manly dignity is a big deal for most men. So is breadwinner status: Many still measure masculinity by the size of a paycheck. White working-class men’s wages hit the skids in the 1970s and took another body blow during the Great Recession. Look, I wish manliness worked differently. But most men, like most women, seek to fulfill the ideals they’ve grown up with. For many blue-collar men, all they’re asking for is basic human dignity (male varietal). Trump promises to deliver it.
The Democrats’ solution? Last week the New York Times published an article advising men with high-school educations to take pink-collar jobs. Talk about insensitivity. Elite men, you will notice, are not flooding into traditionally feminine work. To recommend that for WWC men just fuels class anger. …
The terminology here can be confusing. When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008. That is the true “middle class,” and they call themselves either “middle class” or “working class.”
“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.
Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that’s proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise.
Progressives have lavished attention on the poor for over a century. That (combined with other factors) led to social programs targeting them. Means-tested programs that help the poor but exclude the middle may keep costs and tax rates lower, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.
J.D. Vance’s much-heralded Hillbilly Elegy captures this resentment. Hard-living families like that of Vance’s mother live alongside settled families like that of his biological father. While the hard-living succumb to despair, drugs, or alcohol, settled families keep to the straight and narrow, like my parents-in-law, who owned their home and sent both sons to college. To accomplish that, they lived a life of rigorous thrift and self-discipline. Vance’s book passes harsh judgment on his hard-living relatives, which is not uncommon among settled families who kept their nose clean through sheer force of will. This is a second source of resentment against the poor.
Other books that get at this are Hard Living on Clay Street (1972) and Working-Class Heroes (2003).
The best advice I’ve seen so far for Democrats is the recommendation that hipsters move to Iowa. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are unemployed or on disability, fueling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic.
Vast rural areas are withering away, leaving trails of pain. When did you hear any American politician talk about that? Never.
Jennifer Sherman’s Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t (2009) covers this well.
“The white working class is just so stupid. Don’t they realize Republicans just use them every four years, and then screw them?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the WWC agrees with, which is why they rejected the Republican establishment this year. But to them, the Democrats are no better.
Both parties have supported free-trade deals because of the net positive GDP gains, overlooking the blue-collar workers who lost work as jobs left for Mexico or Vietnam. These are precisely the voters in the crucial swing states of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that Democrats have so long ignored. Excuse me. Who’s stupid?
One key message is that trade deals are far more expensive than we’ve treated them, because sustained job development and training programs need to be counted as part of their costs.
At a deeper level, both parties need an economic program that can deliver middle-class jobs. Republicans have one: Unleash American business. Democrats? They remain obsessed with cultural issues. I fully understand why transgender bathrooms are important, but I also understand why progressives’ obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic.
Back when blue-collar voters used to be solidly Democratic (1930–1970), good jobs were at the core of the progressive agenda. A modern industrial policy would follow Germany’s path. (Want really good scissors? Buy German.) Massive funding is needed for community college programs linked with local businesses to train workers for well-paying new economy jobs. Clinton mentioned this approach, along with 600,000 other policy suggestions. She did not stress it.
Economic resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Trump supporters (and Trump himself), bleeds into open racism. But to write off WWC anger as nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous.
National debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids derided policemen as “pigs.” This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.
I do not defend police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of the police underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. I don’t. If I had to, I might make some poor decisions too.
Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.
In 2010, while on a book tour for Reshaping the Work-Family Debate, I gave a talk about all of this at the Harvard Kennedy School. The woman who ran the speaker series, a major Democratic operative, liked my talk. “You are saying exactly what the Democrats need to hear,” she mused, “and they’ll never listen.” I hope now they will.
Who gets this? Scott Walker and some Wisconsin Republicans.
Who does not get this? The Capital Times reports:
John Nichols, associate editor of the Capital Times and correspondent for The Nation, was less surprised. Last week on “UpFront with Mike Gousha,” he said that while he expected Clinton to win Wisconsin by a reasonable amount, it wasn’t unthinkable for Trump to win, citing the British Brexit vote as proof of the potential difference between pre-election polls and actual results.
Nichols suggested that several Clinton campaign missteps, including her failure to visit Wisconsin during the campaign, may have cost her the state. He suggested that visits to western Wisconsin and Milwaukee, along with a reallocation of victory party money to television advertising aimed at rural Wisconsin, would have been hugely helpful.Wisconsin state Democratic Sen. Kathleen Vinehout argued on “UpFront” that some of the reasons Republicans prevailed included a surge of working class first-time voters and ineffective Democratic campaigns.
After the election results, Vinehout called clerks and election judges in western Wisconsin to try and determine what happened. She found estimated increases in first-time voters making up as much as 10 percent of the vote, with the majority of these first time voters being what she considered “typical Trump voters,” describing them as “white men with work boots and fuzzy beards in their early 30s to mid 40s.”
“And I’m kind of frustrated with some of the Madison insiders who constantly run cookie cutter campaigns, and they don’t realize a campaign in a rural area is very different,” Vinehout said. “If you’ve got a candidate who’s really in that area, who does the parades and the chicken dinners … It’s much better than talking with wealthy people and putting a lot of money into TV ads or direct mailers.”
Looking toward the future, Vinehout said Democrats had a lot of learning and listening to do in order to fully understand where they went wrong.
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The number one single today in 1959:
The number one single today in 1963:
The number one album today in 1968 was the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Electric Ladyland”:
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Charles Schumer had a dream. With Nevada’s Harry Reid retiring, New York’s Schumer was in line to become leader of the Senate Democrats—and likely Senate majority leader, given the disarray among Republicans, what with their unelectable presidential nominee.
It did not happen. Republicans lost two seats but are assured of at least 51 in the new Congress—52 barring an upset in next month’s Louisiana run-off. And of course the unelectable Donald Trump was nominated. Schumer must feel like Charlie Brown during football season, or Charlie the Tuna: “Sorry, Charlie.” No wonder he goes by Chuck.
It was not wrong to think the Republicans were in something of a state of disarray. The mistaken assumption that Trump was unelectable, combined with the no-doubt-accurate one that the GOP Senate majority was at risk encouraged a sort of every-man-for-himself mentality. “Is Split-Ticket Voting Making a Comeback?” asked a Washington Postheadline during the August Trump slump. “With Trump on the Ballot, Some Republicans Hope So.”
The New York Times scooped the Post by some 3½ months, with a story on April 29—a few days before Trump secured the nomination—titled “Wary of Trump Effect, Republicans Hope for Split Tickets”:
Republican senators like [Pennsylvania’s Pat] Toomey who are running in swing states—about six, and enough to tip the balance of power in the Senate—need voters who would reject Donald J. Trump to nonetheless pull the levers for the party’s other candidates in November. . . .
But ticket-splitting voters in federal races have become increasingly rare over the last two decades, hitting a low in 2012, when only 10 percent of [voters] divided their votes between parties. That was down sharply from 1972. The ranks of straight-ticket voters have expanded along with the rise in partisanship and its attendant rancor in Congress.
So what happened? The Daily Caller’s Blake Neff offers an interpretation favorable to Trump:
Overall, there were eight Republican-held seats and one Democrat-held seat that were competitive going into Tuesday night: Illinois, Wisconsin, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Florida, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Missouri.
Of the nine Republicans in these competitive races, six of them stood by Trump or, in the case of Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, didn’t reject him. Three of them, though, explicitly rejected Trump: Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, Mark Kirk in Illinois, and Joe Heck in Nevada.
The final results are telling: The three candidates who rejected Trump all lost, while the rest triumphed.
“False,” responds the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack:
If there had been a price to pay for ditching Trump, you would expect that these candidates would’ve lost by more than Trump, but they ran about even with him. In Nevada, Heck and Trump each lost lost [sic] by 2.4 percentage points. In Illinois, Kirk lost by 14.2 points; Trump lost by 16.0. In New Hampshire, Ayotte lost by 0.1 points; Trump lost by 0.3.
There aren’t any Senate races in which GOP candidates rejected Trump and performed worse than him, but there are examples of Republican candidates who rejected Trump and did much better than him.
In Ohio, Rob Portman announced in the wake of the Access Hollywood video, just like Kelly Ayotte, that he couldn’t vote for Trump and would write in Mike Pence. Portman won Ohio by 21.4 points; Trump won by 8.6.
In Arizona, John McCain likewise dropped Trump after the Access Hollywood video. McCain won by 12.3 points; Trump won by 4.1.
McCormack has a somewhat better argument here: Neff is cherry-picking by omitting considering only “competitive” races and omitting Portman and McCain, both of whom were thought to be endangered at various times during the campaign.
On the other hand (as McCormack acknowledges), there were successful Senate candidates who ran considerably behind Trump: Missouri’s Sen. Roy Blunt (by 15.9 percentage points) and Indiana’s Rep. Todd Young (9.6). Blunt and Young both backed Trump.
And it’s not surprising that Senate candidates, especially incumbents—i.e., all the Republicans mentioned here, except Reps. Heck and Young—would tend to run ahead of the presidential nominee, since they are free to run campaigns tailored to voters of the state. (Though a corollary of most Republican Senate candidates’ running ahead of Trump is that most Democratic Senate candidates ran behind Hillary Clinton.)
But Neff and McCormack both miss the bigger story, which FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten noticed: In all 33 Senate races decided on Election Day, the winner was from the same party as the presidential candidate who carried the state. If, as expected, Republican John Kennedy wins the Louisiana runoff, it will be 34 out of 34. That did not happen in any of the 25 previous presidential elections since the 17th Amendment established popular election to the Senate—not even in 1920.
A similar pattern holds in the House. All 30 of the states Trump carried (assuming he holds on in still-uncalled Michigan) will have majority-Republican House delegations in the new Congress. Of the 20 states Mrs. Clinton carried, 17 House delegations will be majority-Democrat. Two (Colorado and Virginia) will be majority-Republican. Maine will be evenly split, with one representative from each party, and Trump took one electoral vote there, from the Second District of Republican Bruce Poliquin.
The Senate trend does not bode well for Schumer’s hope of becoming majority leader. In 2012, Democrats won Senate races in five states Mitt Romney carried: Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia. (Republicans took one seat in a state President Obama carried, Nevada.) Those seats are up in 2018, as are Democratic seats in the Trump states of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
If 2018 is a repeat of 2012—that is, if all Trump states elect Republican senators and all Clinton states elect Democratic ones—Republicans will gain nine seats, giving them a total of 61 (or 60 in the event of a Louisiana surprise), a supermajority sufficient to stop a filibuster, assuming filibusters still exist, more on which below.
To be sure, that’s a big if. For the past quarter-century, the president’s party has tended to do poorly in midterm elections, losing Senate seats in 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2014 and gaining them only in 2002 (1998 was a wash). But it is equally true that the DemocraticParty has done poorly in midterms, gaining seats only in 2006.
Further, the 2010 and 2014 midterm results turn out to have been strongly predictive of the 2016 presidential ones. In 2010 only three states’ Senate outcomes differed from the 2016 presidential results—Illinois and New Hampshire, the two seats the GOP lost this year, and West Virginia, a special election for the same seat Democrats held in 2012. In 2014 the total was three states, with Republicans taking seats in Colorado and Maine and a Democrat in Michigan.
Even if the trend away from Senate-presidential splits proves durable, no doubt many seats will remain competitive. Trump carried six states with less than 50% of the vote: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. On the other hand, Mrs. Clinton failed to top 50% in seven states she carried: Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia.
Demographic changes could yet move states like Arizona, Florida and North Carolina into the Democratic column. And the biggest wild card will be President Trump: If he and the Republicans overreach or fail, Democrats could come roaring back. Still, the GOP’s prospects in the Senate look much better than the Democrats’ for the simple reason that there are more Republican states. Even in 2008, the closest election to a landslide since 1988, John McCain carried 22 states.
Which raises some interesting implications for Schumer, assuming the Democrats choose him as their leader. In the past, the Senate minority leader’s job has been among the most powerful in Washington under the circumstances that will prevail next year—namely, a president and House controlled by the other party and a Senate majority short of 60 votes. By holding together, the Senate minority could block anything via filibuster—and Schumer would be able to lose as many as seven votes while doing so.
But the filibuster ain’t what it used to be. In 2013 Reid’s Democrats used what is called the “nuclear option” to abolish it for all nominations except Supreme Court justices. The Republicans could do the same if the Democrats try to block an appointment of a successor to Justice Antonin Scalia—or, for that matter, a GOP legislative initiative such as a repeal of ObamaCare.
Thus if the Democrats wish to preserve the filibuster, they will forbear from employing it. Either way, the result of Majority Leader Reid’s power play in 2013 will have been to render Minority Leader Schumer all but powerless in 2017.
The Washington Post has the Democrats’ down-ballot losses since the 2008 election in graphic form:
Before Nov. 8 there were seven states with Democratic governors and legislatures. There are now four.
Frank Bruni piles on:
Despite all the discussion of demographic forces that doomed the G.O.P., it will soon control the presidency as well as both chambers of Congress and two of every three governor’s offices. And that’s not just a function of James Comey, Julian Assange and misogyny. Democrats who believe so are dangerously mistaken.
Other factors conspired in the party’s debacle. One in particular haunts me. From the presidential race on down, Democrats adopted a strategy of inclusiveness that excluded a hefty share of Americans and consigned many to a “basket of deplorables” who aren’t all deplorable. Some are hurt. Some are confused.
Liberals miss this by being illiberal. They shame not just the racists and sexists who deserve it but all who disagree. A 64-year-old Southern woman not onboard with marriage equality finds herself characterized as a hateful boob. Never mind that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton weren’t themselves onboard just five short years ago.
Political correctness has morphed into a moral purity that may feel exhilarating but isn’t remotely tactical. It’s a handmaiden to smugness and sanctimony, undermining its own goals.
I worry about my and my colleagues’ culpability along these lines. I plan to use greater care in how I talk to and about Americans more culturally conservative than I am. That’s not a surrender of principle or passion. It’s a grown-up acknowledgment that we’re a messy, imperfect species.
Donald Trump’s victory and some of the, yes, deplorable chants that accompanied it do not mean that a majority of Americans are irredeemable bigots (though too many indeed are). Plenty of Trump voters chose him, reluctantly, to be an agent of disruption, which they craved keenly enough to overlook the rest of him.
Democrats need to understand that, and they need to move past a complacency for which the Clintons bear considerable blame.
It’s hard to overestimate the couple’s stranglehold on the party — its think tanks, its operatives, its donors — for the last two decades. Most top Democrats had vested interests in the Clintons, and energy that went into supporting and defending them didn’t go into fresh ideas and fresh faces, who were shut out as the party cleared the decks anew for Hillary in 2016.
In thrall to the Clintons, Democrats ignored the copious, glaring signs of an electorate hankering for something new and different and instead took a next-in-line approach that stopped working awhile back. Just ask Mitt Romney and John McCain and John Kerry and Al Gore and Bob Dole. They’re the five major-party nominees before her who lost, and each was someone who, like her, was more due than dazzling.
After Election Day, one Clinton-weary Democratic insider told me: “I’m obviously not happy and I hate to admit this, but a part of me feels liberated. If she’d won, we’d already be talking about Chelsea’s first campaign. Now we can do what we really need to and start over.”
Obama, too, contributed to the party’s marginalization. While he threw himself into Hillary Clinton’s campaign, he was, for much of his presidency, politically selfish, devoting less thought and time to the cultivation of the party than he could — and should — have. By design, his brand was not its. Small wonder, then, that its fate diverged from his.
He anointed Clinton over Joe Biden, though Biden had more charisma and a better connection with the white voters who ultimately supported Trump. Had Biden been the nominee, he probably would have won the Electoral College as well as the popular vote (which Clinton indeed got).
And had Bernie Sanders been? Michael Bloomberg would almost certainly have jumped into the fray, sensing unoccupied territory in the political center, and an infinitely saner and more capable billionaire might well be our president-elect.
Democrats bungled a terrific opportunity to retake the Senate majority by ignoring the national mood as they picked their candidates. A party that prides itself on looking out for the little guy went with the biggest names it could find.
That happened in Wisconsin with Russ Feingold, in Indiana with Evan Bayh and in Ohio with Ted Strickland, all of whom were defeated by Republicans who couldn’t be tarred as insiders or as emblems of the status quo because the Democrats had just as much mileage on them.
Senator Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican, campaigned as the outsider and the underdog, and he ended up beating Strickland, the state’s former governor, by more than 20 points. Like Feingold and Bayh, Strickland could hardly claim the mantle of revolution.
In contrast, Democrats had success in a House district in Central Florida that didn’t initially appear to be promising turf by running Stephanie Murphy, a 37-year-old first-timer, against John Mica, 73, who had been in Congress for nearly a quarter-century. “Change” was Murphy’s mantra, and, like Trump, she used it to turn inexperience into an asset.
A party that keeps the White House for eight years customarily suffers losses elsewhere, as if the electorate insists on some kind of equilibrium. That happened under Bill Clinton and again under George W. Bush — but not to the extent that it has happened under Obama.
His presidency will end with Democrats in possession of 11 fewer Senate seats (depending on how you count), more than 60 fewer House seats, at least 14 fewer governorships and more than 900 fewer seats in state legislatures than when it began. That’s a staggering toll.
While the 2016 race for governor in North Carolina remains undecided, the settled contests guarantee the G.O.P. the governor’s office in 33 states: its most bountiful harvest since 1922.
If Democrats don’t quickly figure out how to sturdy themselves — a process larger than the selection of the right new party chairman — they could wind up in even worse shape. They’re defending more than twice the number of Senate seats in 2018 that Republicans are, a situation that gives the G.O.P. a shot at a filibuster-proof majority.
Meantime, the perpetuation of Republican dominance at the state level through 2020 would grant the G.O.P. the upper hand in redrawing congressional districts after the next census.
But new presidents typically get an electoral whupping after their first two years, and there’s every reason to believe that Trump will govern — or fail to — in a fashion that prompts one. Will Democrats respond in a way that puts them in the best possible position to deliver it?
That hinges on whether they can look as hard at the errors in their party as at the ugliness in America.
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Today in 1925, RCA took over the 25-station AT&T network plus WEAF radio in New York, making today the birthday of the original NBC radio network:
Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones made their U.S. TV debut on ABC’s “Hullabaloo”:
Today in 1966, the Doors agreed to release “Break on Through” as their first single, removing the word “high” to get radio airplay:
The number one single today in 1980:
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US News reports:
On Thursday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, held a conference call with devastated staffers that put the rosiest possible frame on a calamitous picture.
The message to the dozens of mostly young, sleep-deprived and shell-shocked aides: We did everything we could have. We wouldn’t have changed a thing. You should still be proud.Inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which sits half a mile south of the U.S. Capitol, eyes rolled and heads shook in frustration and disbelief.
Clinton’s loss at the hands of Donald Trump amounted to the most surprising outcome in the history of modern electoral politics. Of course things could’ve been done differently. And ignoring that fact wasn’t going to make the searing defeat any easier.
“We are pissed at them and state parties are pissed at them because they lost due to arrogance,” a top DNC staffer tells U.S. News, sharing the candid sentiment suffusing the high levels of the committee in exchange for anonymity.
It’s no surprise that the hierarchy of the Clinton campaign leadership was insular and self-assured. But DNC staffers say the team’s presumptuous, know-it-all attitude caused it to ignore early warning signs of electoral trouble inside the states, and demoralized DNC staff who felt largely marginalized or altogether neglected for most of the campaign.
There is always some level of tension between the sprawling bureaucracy of the party committee and the nominee’s campaign apparatus. But in the wake of Clinton’s loss, when intraparty finger-pointing is inevitable, some DNC staffers describe the relationship between the two entities as uniquely ineffectual, even after the displacement of unpopular chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And they attribute it to one fundamental reason: Clinton’s campaign leaders always thought they knew best. The DNC was to do what it was told: Essentially, be seen and not heard.
On election night, DNC number crunchers’ first saw signs of trouble when tallies from Virginia began to roll in. Here was a state the Clinton camp expected to carry by nearly 10 points, and the early returns showed that wasn’t going to happen. She won it by 5, but the slimmer-than-expected margin made DNC staffers nervous, especially because they had warned the Clinton camp not to pull staff and resources from there. The campaign did anyway, slashing its advertising investment in August. Sure, they survived inside the commonwealth, but inside the DNC, the late call of Virginia for Clinton was a distressing warning of things to come.
If their projected margin in Virginia was cut in half, where else was their forecast wrong?
Florida was always expected to be a slog. But a shiver went down the DNC’s collective spine when a call came in from Scott Arceneaux, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party, saying, “We’ve got a problem.”
The Clinton campaign was exceeding President Barack Obama’s margins in Democratic counties near Miami. But everything north and west of that showed signs of trouble. Trump’s margins outside South Florida shocked Democrats, in that he outperformed 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney.
“It turns out this was not a turnout problem for Clinton,” one Democratic strategist says. “This was a turnout dream for Trump.”
Taking deep breaths at the DNC, staffers attempted to calm themselves by noting Clinton didn’t have to have Florida, while Trump did. Still, the night was moving in the wrong direction.
The staggering moment top DNC staff knew it was over for Clinton was not due to a presidential call, but a down-ballot contest. It was 11:22 p.m. Eastern time when The Associated Press projected the Wisconsin Senate race, a seat deemed a safe pickup for Democrats for most of the year.
Instead, first-term incumbent Ron Johnson had not only survived, he won with a more than 3-point margin over Democratic challenger Russ Feingold.
“That’s the moment we knew it was over,” the DNC source says.
Kory Kozloski, executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, had phoned DNC Chief Operating Officer Lindsey Reynolds to assure her, “Don’t worry, we’ll be your firewall.”
But when Feingold fell, Reynolds became exasperated, blurting out an expletive, according to a source.
“Really, f—–? Where’s our firewall now?” she said.
Clinton’s high command – led by Podesta, campaign manager Robby Mook and director of state campaigns Marlon Marshall – knew it was over before midnight Tuesday, even though Wisconsin wasn’t called for Trump by The Associated Press until 2:30 a.m. Eastern time and Clinton wouldn’t concede until shortly thereafter.
They released astounded staff from their positions at campaign headquarters in Brooklyn to head over to the Javits Convention Center at 11:55 p.m. In a sense, they were sending them to the mourning site with the rest of Clinton’s hard-core supporters.
Back at DNC headquarters, staffers were equally as depressed, but they also became angry, reeling through times they were not valued or downright insulted.
There was the time a state party executive director asked to speak directly to Marshall, and a reply came back from a junior staffer that the state party member wasn’t senior enough to merit that level of interaction.
There were the numerous pleas from state party leaders to get Clinton to specific states – like Michigan – earlier, and to devote more resources to state party operations, which provide the oil and expertise to get out the vote.
“But it was all about analytics with them,” the DNC source says. “They were too reliant on analytics and not enough on instinct and human intel from the ground.”
And there were the multiple factions of power swirling around Clinton: from Huma Abedin, her longtime aide, to Mook and Marshall, whom sources say lost some of Clinton’s trust through the grueling primary with Sen. Bernie Sanders, to older Clinton hands like Minyon Moore and Charlie Baker.
Adam Parkhomenko, the DNC’s national field director and a co-founder of the Ready for Hillary super PAC, served as a helpful intermediary between these different groups of aides and the DNC. But on many days, even near the end of the campaign, it was difficult to get a read on who held the real power with the candidate.
By early next year, there will be an entirely new set of Democratic National Committee leaders with many new staff. Former DNC chairman Howard Dean, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm have emerged as early prospects for the job to succeed Donna Brazile, who is set to step down from her interim role in early 2017.
It’s a chance at a fresh start, and ironically, the loss of the presidency will give the entity new life and relevance.
First, the DNC is tasked with mining the reams of data from the states they lost and drawing some difficult conclusions about the best path forward.
In the meantime, Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn is seeking those answers as well, and will want to see the DNC’s data.
But the DNC staffer says his boss has told him, “With the way they treated us, don’t feel like you need to respond to anything Brooklyn wants quickly.”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 