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You may not be out going door-to-door to fight COVID-19 in your neighborhood. Then again … you may be. People certainly are, and to great effect. But whether you’re just trying to keep safe in your local grocery, or going up against screaming meme-ers at your local school board, what the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) posted on Tuesday could come in handy. 

In a new advisory (.pdf), Surgeon General Vivek Murthy urges “all Americans to help slow the spread of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.” Murthy warns that not only does this misinformation spread confusion and distrust, it represents its own threat to public health that only compounds the effects of the disease. At a time when everyone needs to pull together in a “whole-of-society effort” misinformation—whether accidentally or deliberately spread—is tearing us apart.

As an example of the last effects of misinformation, Murthy points out how “a poorly designed study” in the 1990s lead to the false link between childhood vaccines and autism. That false claim, adopted by anti-vaxx forces and those out to victimize communities for profit, has directly led to thousands of unnecessary illnesses and to the unnecessary death of children. In another instance, false claims about the connection between HIV and AIDS both helped spread the disease and slowed potential cures.

Which makes the toolkit provided by HHS a good resource for anyone—including schools and community groups—who needs to push back against both poorly informed misinformation and deliberately spread disinformation.

There are sections of the toolkit that are more useful when working with a group, but most of the information is valuable for anyone. That includes a section on how to talk to someone who has bought into medical misinformation and may be spreading it to others. The advice provided isn’t just good for dealing with anti-vaxx or anti-mask talking points, but is good advice for talking with someone on almost any point that has become politically charged.

The best way to change someone’s mind about misinformation is to listen to their fears and why they believe what they do. Try not to focus on the content or the false claim; instead, focus on the wider issue and how they feel about that issue. While sometimes it can be tempting to pull out a ‘fact-check’ as proof someone is wrong, this approach can often shut down a conversation.

Listen to their points, empathize with their concerns, agree that there are reasons that people might be distrustful of information sources—even sources that you might find trustworthy. Then start the slow turn …

Underscore that finding accurate information can be hard, especially during events like the pandemic when the information is constantly changing (which will always happen with a new virus or disease). Emphasize the need to find credible sources, who are not in a position to personally profit or to gain power or influence when seeking information. Remind them that an expert on one topic might not be the best expert to turn to around another topic.

Don’t shame the person you’re speaking with—not if you want the chance to actually change their mind. If you’re talking in person, try to do it one on one. If you’re doing it online, try to take the conversation somewhere other than social media where you can continue to exchange points without conducting a public performance. Make it clear that you also struggle to find good sources and to understand the latest information.

Use phrases such as “I understand”, “I’ve been confused too”, “it’s so hard to know who to trust.” Use phrases that include terms like ‘our community’, ‘our families’, ‘we’ and ‘us’, so the person feels that you identify with them.

All of this may be familiar if you’ve ever been involved in a workshop on persuasive language. However, that doesn’t make it less valuable.

Another section of the toolkit includes defining some of the common types of disinformation as well as the tactics used by those spreading disinformation. That might include things like adding a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logo to false data, or starting a post with claims that it came from from someone trustworthy, like, “My sister is a nurse and she …”

Really, whether you’re trying to convince anyone about the facts on COVID-19 or not, download this toolkit and keep it handy. Consider it a very short case in spotting fraud, marshaling facts, and getting through to someone on a topic where their beliefs don’t align with the truth. That might be masks in schools, but it also might be climate change or police violence. The tactics of disinformation don’t change, and neither does good advice on how to win over someone who disagrees.

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House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy is refusing to stand up for the 13 House Republicans who voted for their districts last Friday, when they helped pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That bill was negotiated by Republican senators and passed with 19 of their votes, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s. Those members, like Michigan Rep. Fred Upton, are getting death threats. Those threats have instigated by their extremist colleagues like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, and McCarthy is still saying nothing. Worse, he’s recruiting more of the deplorables.

McCarthy announced Monday that he was endorsing candidates in Wisconsin, Texas, and Illinois with his “Young Gun” group. That’s the program he started back in 2008 with has-beens Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan. Those candidates “have met a series of rigorous goals and surpassed program benchmarks to establish a clear path to victory,” the website for the program says.

The one in Wisconsin, Derrick Van Orden, said of the 13 people who voted to repair bridges and roads in their districts, they “just voted themselves out of a job, and rightly so,” and called it socialism. “There’s absolutely no excuse for doing that,” he told Breitbart News. Texas candidate Monica De La Cruz tweeted, “I still can’t believe 13 Republicans voted for this unfundable bill, $3 trillion worth of social policy, infrastructure, and climate change programs,” clearly showing her fitness for the job by confusing BIF (hard infrastructure) with the Build Back Better bill—which hasn’t yet been voted on. Another of them, Esther Joy King in Illinois, called it a “Radical Left” bill created by Nancy Pelosi. “We have to fight this wasteful bill,” she tweeted, “with all we’ve got!”

Those are the best and brightest, McCarthy implies with his Young Guns endorsement. People who are already attacking their would-be colleagues in the GOP caucus. They’re all parroting Trump, of course, who also attacked the 13 at a “private event hosted by the House Republican campaign arm Monday night in Florida.” Just read that again. The House Republican campaign—the National Republican Congressional Committee—had an event with Trump, where Trump attacked congressional Republicans. “I love all the House Republicans. Well, actually I don’t love all of you. I don’t love the 13 that voted for Biden’s infrastructure plan,” was how one attendee remembered it in talking to the Washington Post. One of the 13 was apparently in the room:

So not only is McCarthy not telling the deplorables in the caucus to call off the crazies they’ve sicced on their colleagues, he’s trying to reinforce their ranks, because he is still in thrall to Trump. McCarthy has not provided any comment on the treats to his members or on their calls to have the 13 stripped of their committee assignments.

Meanwhile, McCarthy has also remained silent on the implied death threat one of the extremists, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, made against Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden. The 13 Republicans shouldn’t be at all surprised that McCarthy isn’t standing up for them agains the extremists, not when he won’t say a word about Gosar literally making and releasing a video playing out his homicidal fantasies against political opponents.

McCarthy’s silence is becoming an issue. He is steadfastly refusing to respond to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call for him to join in condemning the “horrific video” and supporting investigations by the House Ethics Committee and law enforcement. “Threats of violence against Members of Congress and the President of the United States must not be tolerated,” Pelosi said. The House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee also released a statement calling no him to act. “In any other job in America, if a coworker made a video killing another coworker, that person would be fired,” Reps. Matthew Cartwright (Pennsylvania), Debbie Dingell (Michigan), Ted Lieu (California) and Joe Neguse (Colorado), the group’s co-chairs, said. “Mr. McCarthy needs to decide whether he will finally stand with the American people on the side of law and order or he will continue to support violence and chaos.”

“There was a time when making light of murdering a colleague would elicit unified outrage. But not in McCarthy’s GOP. In McCarthy’s GOP they want to punish members who voted for infrastructure. That’s right, infrastructure. But condoning violence—that’s A-OK,” Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said Tuesday. “It’s sick.”

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A Kansas school district is pulling 29 books out of its school libraries based on a single parent complaint, and guess what—the books are overwhelmingly by authors of color and women authors and LGBTQ authors. Surprise, right? At least it’s not as many books as appeared on one Texas state legislator’s 16-page list.

In the Goddard school district, after a parent complained about language in Angie Thomas’ critically acclaimed young adult novel, The Hate U Give, he went on to submit a list of other books he was concerned about, and the district pulled them all from circulation while it debates whether to get rid of them permanently.

“At this time, the district is not in a position to know if the books contained on this list meet our educational goals or not,” Julie Cannizzo, Goddard’s assistant superintendent for academic affairs, wrote in an email to principals and librarians. “Additionally, we need to gain a better understanding of the processes utilized to select books for our school libraries.”

The Hate U Give is a novel about the aftermath of the police killing of a Black teenager. It was a well-reviewed, massive young adult bestseller, with Kirkus Reviews calling it “necessary” and “important” in a starred review. Relevant to its inclusion in a school library, the School Library Journal also gave it a starred review. No doubt it’s a book with some difficult content, but if you want kids to 1) read and 2) be able to grapple with important issues in U.S. society, school libraries should have books like this on their shelves.

So what else is the Goddard school district “not in a position to know” if they “meet our educational goals or not”?

Fences, the August Wilson play that won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 

Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was included among the 2008 American Library Association’s Best Books for Young Adults, among other honors.

All Boys Aren’t Blue, an essay collection by journalist and LGBTQIA activist George Johnson that was included on best books of 2020 lists from Kirkus Reviews, the New York Public Library, and others.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, a classic that makes frequent appearances on Advanced Placement exams.

The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, which the College Board actually uses as an example for AP exam preparation.

The list goes on. Echo Brown’s Black Girl Unlimited, described as “just brilliant” by Kirkus. Susan Campbell Bertoletti’s They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of An American Terrorist Group, which won the American Library Association’s 2011 award for excellence in nonfiction for young adults. 

By now, it should be fairly clear that the books in Goddard’s school libraries have been chosen off of lists of award-winning books and from the most positive reviews in industry-leading review journals like Kirkus. That much jumps out within a few minutes of the most cursory research into these books. But the school district needs to form a committee to “gain a better understanding of the processes utilized to select books for our school libraries,” substituting the judgment of a parent who is obviously incensed about books about people of color, LGBTQ people, racism, and sexism being available in school libraries for the judgment of professional school librarians.

Many of the books, by the way, also appear on another list: The American Library Association’s list of most-challenged books. Because this kind of objection is all too common from parents who want their kids to live in a white, straight, male-dominated world in which none of those things are questioned and no one has to confront, even through reading fiction, the horrors that this country has visited on people who do not fit that mold. That was the theme of Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin’s ad featuring a parent upset that her high school-age son had been assigned a book containing “the most explicit material you can imagine,” a book that was nowhere in the ad revealed to be Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. It’s the theme of the entire Republican campaign against “critical race theory” in schools, by which they mean not critical race theory but the teaching of things like children’s books about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ruby Bridges.

The media keeps pretending something else is going on, talking about school COVID-19 responses that only a very small minority of people are upset about, rather than directly calling out the viciously racist—and homophobic, and transphobic, and sexist—campaign Republicans are waging against public education and against any view of history more nuanced than a U! S! A! chant. But this is a hysterical, terrified Republican fight against having their kids see people who are not like them as fully human, against having their kids learn that the history of the U.S. includes some very bad stuff—and not just in the distant past, either—and maybe possibly coming out with higher expectations or aspirations.

So, yeah. What we’re talking about is not critical race theory. We’re talking about parents wanting books that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards and appeared on multiple best-books lists and are regularly included on Advanced Placement exams pulled out of public schools. And in a lot of places, they’re succeeding, helping to ensure that their children won’t learn another way is possible.

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Jacob Chansley puffed out his chest, howled like an animal, and paraded his half-naked, horn-adorned body onto the Senate floor during the insurrection at the Capitol. For his obstruction to Congress’ efforts to certify the 2020 election, prosecutors have recommended a sentence of four years in prison.  

In a memo issued late Tuesday at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, prosecutors say Chansley, who also goes by the name Jake Angeli, effectively made himself the “public face of the Capitol riot” when he stormed into the complex wielding a six-foot-long spear-tipped flagpole, marauded through the chambers, and began hollering that then-Vice President Mike Pence was “a traitor.”

The 33-year-old was among some of the first people to breach the building on Jan. 6.  

Chansley “[riled] up other members of the mob with his screaming obscenities about our nation’s lawmakers and flouting the ‘opportunity’ to rid our government of those he has long considered to be traitors,” U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves and assistant U.S. attorney Kimberly Paschall wrote in the 28-page sentencing memo.

The recommendation of 51 months from the Justice Department, or just over four years in prison, is the harshest one yet for defendants tied to the insurrection. The only other felony Capitol riot defendant that has been sentenced so far is Paul Hodgkins. The U.S. requested 18 months for Hodgkins, but he received an eight-month sentence instead.

Hodgkins, originally from Florida, breached the Capitol with a backpack, goggles, rope, and white latex gloves on hand, and proceeded to barrel through to the floor of the Senate while hoisting a “Trump 2020” flag over his shoulder.

Incidentally, during the assault, Hodgkins stood nearby as Chansley led a group invocation, where he prayed with fellow rioters.

“Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government,” he said.

Notably, he also left an ominous note on the dais in the Senate during the attack reading, “It’s only a matter of time. Justice is coming!”

Chansley fancied himself the “QAnon Shaman” when he was an avowed zealot for the QAnon conspiracy. That belief system is one he now claims to have divorced himself from completely. His attorney, Albert Watkins released a statement on Chansley’s behalf in September to the Huffington Post saying that the “long avowed and practicing shaman has repudiated the ‘Q’ previously assigned to him.”

“The road leading up to the events of January 6 traversed years,” Watkins said in a statement this fall. “The path charted by Mr. Chansley since January 6 has been a process, one which has involved pain, depression, solitary confinement, introspection, recognition of mental health vulnerabilities, and a coming to grips with the need for more self-work.”

Watkins, in response to the recommended 51- month sentence, defended Chansley as someone suffering from “mental health vulnerabilities” as evidenced, at the very least, he argued, by the exposure of his half-nude body while the weather in Washington that morning was below 40 degrees.

“His Shamanic chants were further indicia of mental health vulnerabilities. So too was the rapid clip at which his widely published post-Capitol entry speech was uttered. So too were his gait and apparent Forrest Gump-like obliviousness too much of the activity and many of the actions of those surrounding him as he approached, entered, and traversed the Capitol,” Watkins said. “The events that led Mr. Chansley to do what he did on January 6, 2021, antedate his presence in the Capitol. He was not an organizer. He was not a planner. He was not violent. He was not destructive. He was not a thief.”

Watkins also emphasized that Chansley’s unaddressed schizophrenia should be considered by the court when rendering its final decision.

“Mr. Chansley is not a political prisoner. He does not seek to be labeled such. Rather, this case is about a frail and vulnerable human,” Watkins wrote.

Watkins did not offer a specific recommendation for sentencing, only urging that it be far less than the prosecutor’s suggestion. The Arizona native has so far spent 10 months in pre-trial detention.

Prosecutors, however, offered a far tougher position on Chansley.

“The need for the sentence to provide specific deterrence to this particular defendant also weighs heavily in favor of a lengthy term of incarceration. Although the defendant has now expressed remorse and contrition, his media statements immediately after January 6 were those of a man gloating over victory in battle,” U.S. attorneys wrote.

Chansley did not express remorse upon leaving the Capitol or when going home, they argued.

“It came when he realized he was in trouble. It came when he realized that large numbers of Americans and people worldwide were horrified at what happened that day. It came when he realized that he could go to jail for what he did,” the memo states.

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The Biden administration this past summer issued a policy limiting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention of pregnant individuals. Now, a group of Senate Democrats is calling on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec Alejandro Mayorkas to issue similar guidelines within the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency.

“Such a policy is vital to ensuring the dignity and health of these individuals and their newborn children, particularly during a continued global pandemic,” legislators tell Mayorkas. They note the 2020 case of one pregnant asylum-seeker forced to give birth at a border station after officials refused to take her to a hospital.

“After Border Patrol arrested her, she was sent to the Chula Vista Border Patrol station where she was forced to give birth standing up, delivering the baby into her pants, while holding onto the edge of a garbage can for support,” the 11 senators wrote. They note the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation (ACLUF) of San Diego & Imperial Counties (SDIC) and Jewish Family Service of San Diego (JFS) complaint filed last year on behalf of “Ana,” a 27-year-old asylum-seeker from Guatemala. That complaint detailed how agents extended her agony, and that of her infant, within the following days.

” For several days after the birth, Border Patrol agents and hospital staff denied Ana a shower even after she asked for one,” the complaint said. “When the hospital discharged her, instead of allowing her to reunite with her family in the United States, Border Patrol forced her to spend yet another night at the station in a cold cell with her newborn baby. There, they denied her a clean blanket for her baby.” The complaint said that only after Ana was released to a local shelter did she receive any compassionate care.

“A change in CBP policy is required to prevent what happened to the woman who was the subject of this report from ever occurring again—including CBP’s failure to ensure she was given timely medical care while she was in labor, lack of privacy during and following the traumatic birth, and a night of postpartum detention in which she was forced to sleep on a bench together with her two-day-old newborn U.S. citizen baby,” legislators tell Mayorkas (click here for a complete list of signatories). 

They point to a similar policy announced at ICE this past summer stating that federal immigration officials should not detain pregnant immigrants “unless release is prohibited by law or exceptional circumstances exist.” Advocates welcomed that move but expressed caution because, while the Obama administration had such a policy in place (the 45th president later rescinded it), on the ground, pregnant immigrants were often still detained by ICE officials. Issuing the policy is one matter; enforcing it is the other.

Civil rights complaints have noted how pregnant individuals have languished in harmful detention conditions. “Several women report being ignored by detention staff when requesting medical attention or experiencing serious delays even during health emergencies involving severe bleeding and pain,” a complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and Office of the Inspector General in 2017 said. Teresa, one woman described in the report, was four months pregnant when she suffered a miscarriage while in detention.

“No parent should ever have to endure the trauma and abuse our client suffered when she was forced to give birth in a Border Patrol station and return for a night of postpartum detention with her newborn U.S. citizen baby,” said ACLUF-SDIC immigrants’ rights staff attorney Monika Langarcia. We can prevent this kind of mistreatment from ever happening again by altogether avoiding the detention of people who are pregnant, postpartum, or nursing. We welcome the senators’ demand to change CBP policy as a step towards rebuilding our asylum system at the border into one that welcomes people with dignity and humanity.”

“Policy changes must be enacted to ensure no one is forced to give birth in custody or immediately returned to a carceral setting with a newborn baby,” said JFS senior director of immigration services Kate Clark. “By aligning these policies with those already implemented by ICE, we can help ensure pregnant people and their families are treated with dignity and compassion as they seek their legal right to asylum in the U.S.”

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Much can be said about the testimony of victims of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Women like Marissa Blair and Chelsea Alvarado, who were injured when James Fields plowed his car into protesters, bravely recounted arguably the worst weekend of their lives in front of the Nazis who had a direct hand in what is now considered a terror attack. Blair’s description during her testimony Monday of dropping to her knees upon hearing of friend Heather Heyer’s death at the hands of Fields is absolutely heart-wrenching, as is the sacrifice of her now-husband, Marcus Martin, who pushed her out of the way of Fields’ car and sustained life-altering injuries.

A photo of Martin being violently struck ultimately won a Pulitzer Prize. Martin never stopped fighting for what’s right throughout his recovery after that horrible August day. He took the stand in 2018 during the trial against Fields, who was ultimately sentenced to life in prison, and is expected to testify during the Sines vs. Kessler trial. Alvarado took the witness stand on Tuesday and identified photos showing the impact the damage had on her and a fellow plaintiff and friend, Natalie Romero. A particularly alarming photo showed Romero’s blood on the blue drum Alvarado had been carrying at the time of the attack.

There is consistent, explicit photographic evidence of the damage wrought by the many Nazi groups who terrorized the city of Charlottesville. Yet Chris “Crying Nazi” Cantwell chose to focus his questions on whether members of antifa may have been lying in wait, focusing on nonexistent details in hopes that they may somehow save him from himself. Cantwell, whose mastery extends to only being a racist waste of a courtroom’s time, is representing himself in the trial—and seemingly everyone is tired of his bullshit.

At one point on Tuesday Cantwell chose to cross-examine Matt Parrott, who co-created with Matt Heimbach the neo-Nazi Traditional Workers Party. Unsurprisingly, it did not go well.

Cantwell asked Parrott about racist jokes and memes instead of making any meaningful headway in his own defense. He described hateful slogans bashing Jews as haiku-style memes. It only got worse from there.

Cantwell gleefully gets his kicks from being reactionary, even in a courtroom setting. Yet all Cantwell seems to be reinforcing is how much he truly means to be racist and how deeply intentional his actions have consistently been across the board. There appears to be no set date for when this trial ends just yet, but one thing is clear: The jury wants it over with. Judge Norman Moon announced that jurors agreed to work through the federal holiday on Thursday. Integrity First for America, the civil rights nonprofit whose lawyers are representing the plaintiffs, is in it for the long haul, however.

Executive Director Amy Spitalnick described the trial as “four years in the making” and hopes the outcome makes clear the consequences of inciting violence through white supremacist rhetoric. “We know that civil litigation is very impactful in terms of taking down the finances, the operations of these organizations,” Spitalnick said during a phone interview. “Throughout history, there have been many cases that effectively bankrupted and dismantled hate groups and their leaders.”

History weighs heavily on this case. Spitalnick noted that Tuesday marked the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the antisemitic pogrom that led to the deaths of more than 90 Jews and the destruction of innumerable structures, including homes and schools. Spitalnick’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors so the work that she’s doing carries a deeply personal meaning, as it does for so many on the Integrity First for America legal team.

“It’s just stunning to me that we are literally as we mark this anniversary, there is a modern day neo-Nazi on the stand in our case talking about his admiration for Hitler and the ways in which he built an organization intended to mimic a lot of the Nazi infrastructure from decades ago,” Spitalnick said. “And so certainly the parallels of this moment are sadly clear. The difference is that we live in a country with a rule of law and a justice system and we can use laws like the ones we’re using in this case to seek accountability and fight for justice … At least for me, it gives me some hope and I hope for others that it does the same.”

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The first subpoenas issued by the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 back on September 24, included a large number of document requests. Included in these requests were a large block of material from the National Archive that originated in the Trump White House. Donald Trump immediately attempted to claim executive privilege over these documents, but President Joe Biden cleared them for release to Congress. 

So Trump did what Trump does—he took it to court. On October 18, Trump sued committee chair  Bennie Thompson and Keeper of the National Archives Jeff James in federal District Court. 

On Tuesday evening, The Washington Post reports that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled against Trump saying that she agreed with the House committee’s contention that these documents, involve “a matter of unsurpassed public importance.” Judge Chutkan’s opinion denies Trump’s claim and explicitly acknowledges the House request meets all the Constitutional provisions by holding a potential legislative purpose.

The court holds that the public interest lies in permitting—not enjoining—the combined will of the legislative and executive branches to study the events that led to and occurred on January 6, and to consider legislation to prevent such events from ever occurring again.

In response, Trump has done exactly as expected and immediately appealed the ruling to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Judge Chutkan’s ruling has some very blunt things to say about Trump’s claims and his position.

[Trump’s] position that he may override the express will of the executive branch appears to be premised on the notion that his executive power “exists in perpetuity.” But Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President. He retains the right to assert that his records are privileged, but the incumbent President “is not constitutionally obliged to honor” that assertion. 

All of this seems like a very cut-and-dry position from Judge Chutkin: Congress has an express right to request these documents, the request deals with a matter of national importance that could be the subject of future legislation, and Trump is most definitely not president, despite what many of this supporters may believe. Judge Chukin also states that she does not believe that Trump is likely to succeed based on claims that he will suffer irreparable harm, or that he somehow retains a “residual” executive power.

But Trump doesn’t have to win. As with the battle over subpoenas, what Trump is mainly trying to accomplish is simply stalling. How long it will take for the appeals court to hear the case isn’t clear. And if that court rules against Trump—which is almost certain—then comes the wait for the Supreme Court, which is unlikely to hurry in hearing this case. 

Should Trump manage to drag this out until January of 2023, he stands a good chance of laughing as the whole case dissolves under a Republican majority. Even if he is unable to delay for that long, every month extracted from the calendar is another month in which the select committee is unable to examine the documents or act on the information they contain.

And there’s another possibility. The conservative-heavy Supreme Court might grant a Republican wish by placing an extreme limit on Congressional power. For example, they might rule that Congress’ ability to subpoena information related to legislation only extends to current legislation already drafted and waiting for a vote. Such a ruling would effectively end Congress’ ability to conduct meaningful oversight of the executive—a power that’s already been badly eroded in the last five years through Trump’s constant refusals to cooperate, which forced Congress to go to court for every request.

Trump’s tax returns, requested in April of 2019, are still not in the hands of the Ways and Means Committee, 

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The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● NH-Sen, NH-Gov: In a move that deprives Senate Republican leaders of one of their most sought-after Senate recruits, Republican Chris Sununu announced Tuesday that he would seek a fourth two-year term as governor of New Hampshire rather than challenge Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan next year. Speculation immediately swirled that former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who lost an extremely tight 2016 race to Hassan, would be the Senate GOP’s backup choice, but unnamed sources close to Ayotte soon told WMUR’s John DiStaso that she “​​will NOT be a candidate for any office in 2022.”  

We’re not sure if Ayotte tipped off Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell or NRSC chair Rick Scott about her reported decision to sit out the race, but according to Sununu, they learned about his plans at the same time as the rest of us: The governor revealed he didn’t give any advance notice to McConnell or Scott, saying, “I guess you’ll have to let them know. I haven’t talked to them.”

They sure know now (with McConnell advisor Josh Holmes responded to the Sununu news by tweeting, “Unbelievable”), and it will be up to Team Red to find a new candidate to take on Hassan. However, while the senator will avoid going up against Sununu, who won re-election 65-33 even as Joe Biden was taking New Hampshire 53-45, she’ll still be a top GOP target in a state that can swing wildly from cycle to cycle. There are plenty of Granite State politicians who may now take a look, including some politicians who may have campaigned for governor if he’d decided to take on Hassan.

Campaign Action

The only notable Republican currently running for Senate is retired Army Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who got into the race a year ago at a time when Sununu all but froze the party’s field, but he’s unlikely to scare anyone off: Bolduc lost the 2020 primary for the Granite State’s other Senate seat 50-42, and he ended September with a mere $58,000 in the bank.

One person who seems uninterested, though, is Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator who moved north to unsuccessfully run for the Senate here in 2014. Brown said he was focused on helping his wife, ​​Gail Huff Brown, win the 1st Congressional District, and said of another Senate run, “I don’t think so unless something traumatic happens.” (We have no idea what Brown considers “traumatic” for this race.)

Several potential Senate names surfaced following the Sununu/Ayotte news, though some looked far more formidable than others. In the latter column is 2020 nominee Corky Messner, who defeated Bolduc before losing to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen 57-41; Messner said Tuesday that he wasn’t ruling out another campaign for the upper chamber

DiStaso also tweets that former Rep. Frank Guinta also hasn’t said no and “is calling around to donors & supporters to gauge interest,” though we’re guessing the interest will not be overwhelming. Guinta unseated Democratic Rep. Carol Shea Porter in the swingy 1st District in 2010, lost their 2012 rematch, and defeated her again in 2014, but things started going wrong for him soon afterwards.

Guinta earned embarrassing headlines when he paid an FEC fine for an illegal 2010 six-figure donation from his parents, and he resisted calls from Ayotte and other prominent Republicans to retire or even resign. The congressman won renomination just 46-45 and lost his fourth and final contest with Shea Porter 44-43 as Donald Trump was narrowly carrying his seat.

A stronger candidate might be Matt Mowers, who is currently campaigning for the 1st District again after losing a tight 2020 race there to Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas. Politico reports that national and local Republicans have been talking to Mowers about possibly switching races, though it remains to be seen if he’s interested. (Huff Brown quickly said she was staying in the House contest.) Multiple media outlets also mentioned state Senate President Chuck Morse and Commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Education Frank Edelblut as possibilities.

Sununu, for his part, will likely be the clear favorite to win a fourth term as governor. A recent Saint Anselm College poll gave him a 56-42 job approval, which, while considerably smaller than his 64-34 score back in August, still puts him well above water. No notable Democrats have launched a campaign for governor yet, though it’s unlikely Team Blue will give him a free pass especially if more polls show his numbers in decline.

Redistricting

● AK Redistricting: Alaska’s Redistricting Board, a five-member body made up of three Republicans and two independents, has settled on a new map for the state House, though work continues on a plan for the state Senate. Each district in the upper chamber is made up of two “nested” lower-chamber districts, so it’s a matter of the commissioners deciding which pairs of districts to link together. The panel must complete its work by Wednesday, at which point its maps can be challenged in court. As the Anchorage Daily News‘ James Brooks notes, “Every redistricting process since statehood has involved a lawsuit.”

● GA Redistricting: Georgia’s Republican-run Senate passed the GOP’s new map for the chamber on a strictly party-line vote on Tuesday, while a committee in the state House, which is also controlled by Republicans, did the same thing with a new redistricting plan for its own districts.

● NV Redistricting: Leaders in Nevada’s Democratic-run legislature unveiled draft maps for Congress, the state House, and the state Senate on Tuesday, which lawmakers will take up when they convene for a special session likely to start later this week. The congressional plan would make the 3rd and 4th Districts bluer at the expense of the 1st District; under these boundaries, all would have supported Joe Biden by about 7-8 points. The 2nd, meanwhile, would remain solidly Republican.

● UT Redistricting: Republican lawmakers in Utah unveiled and passed a new congressional map in committee on Monday that would ensure GOP control of the state’s entire House delegation by dividing Salt Lake County four ways. Salt Lake is the state’s most populous county and its one sizable bastion of Democratic voters, so by quartering it and pairing each sub-section with dark-red rural areas, all four districts will remain safely Republican.

By contrast, the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission proposed maps that would have established a district centered on Salt Lake City and its suburbs by making fewer splits in the surrounding county. That, however, would have yielded a solidly Democratic seat—which is precisely why Republicans ignored the commission’s work.

The GOP’s proposal represents an exacerbation of the previous decade’s gerrymander, which had split Salt Lake County among three districts. But despite Republican efforts to juke the map in their own favor, Democrats managed to win the 4th District in both 2012 and 2018, and only narrowly lost in 2014 and 2020. For that reason, the latest map would protect freshman GOP Rep. Burgess Owens by moving the 4th from a 52-43 win for Donald Trump to a rock solid 60-34 Trump margin, according to Dave’s Redistricting App.

The other three districts all would have supported Trump with 56-57% of the vote, though that actually understates the GOP’s advantage, given the large numbers of Trump-skeptical conservative voters (including many Mormons) who eagerly vote Republican further down the ballot.

Republicans have proposed this extreme gerrymander in spite of a 2018 ballot initiative that voters passed in an attempt to end gerrymandering by creating a new redistricting commission. In response, however, Republicans passed a 2020 law that gutted the commission and made its role purely advisory, allowing lawmakers to treat it as though it doesn’t exist.

Senate

● CO-Sen: The Democratic firm Global Strategy Group’s survey for the liberal organization ProgressNow Colorado finds Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet defeating two Republican foes, Air Force veteran Eli Bremer and state Rep. ​​Ron Hanks, by margins of 48-35 and 52-34, respectively.

● PA-Sen: The conservative Free Beacon’ Eliana Johnson reports that Mehmet Oz, a TV personality who has a long history of dispensing what medical experts have warned is false advice, “is preparing” to run for this open seat as a Republican. Oz’s spokesperson didn’t deny it, saying, “Since last year, Dr. Oz has lived and voted in Pennsylvania where he attended school and has deep family ties. Dr. Oz has received encouragement to run for the U.S. Senate, but is currently focused on our show and has no announcement at this time.”

Johnson writes that Oz is registered to vote in neighboring New Jersey. She adds, “Oz has a non-permanent voter registration in Pennsylvania connected to a Montgomery County address that appears to belong to his mother-in-law.”

● WA-Sen: SurveyUSA’s poll for KING5 finds Democratic Sen. Patty Murray with a 49-31 lead over her best-funded Republican foe, motivational speaker Tiffany Smiley.

Governors

● CT-Gov: Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont confirmed Tuesday that he would seek a second term next year. His move came about a month after Lamont said he hadn’t decided if he’d run for re-election, though there was little indication he was seriously thinking about retiring.

● IL-Gov: Chicago Cubs co-owner Todd Ricketts said Thursday that he was stepping down as Republican National Committee finance chair with more than a year left on his term, a move that reignited media speculation that the ultra-wealthy businessman could campaign for governor. Back in December, Politico reported that Ricketts was ​​not “ruling out a run” against Democratic incumbent J.B. Pritzker, but we’ve heard nothing new since then.

● LA-Gov: Democratic incumbent John Bel Edwards will be termed-out of office in two years, and LaPolitics Weekly’s Jeremy Alford takes a look at the many Republicans who could compete in the 2023 all-party primary to succeed the governor in this very red state.

Political observers have long anticipated that Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser and Attorney General Jeff Landry will each run, and recent events have only intensified that speculation. Last month, Nungesser confirmed his interest and said that “we’ll make a decision sometime next year.” Days later, one of Landry’s top aides, Liz Murrill, filed paperwork to campaign for attorney general, and her team added that she “plans to run and she intends to run if Jeff Landry does not run for re-election.” Landry himself soon used his appearance at a party meeting to make it clear he was mulling a run for governor.

Nungesser and Landry are two of the most prominent Republicans in Pelican State politics, but they would likely run very different campaigns if they both got in. Landry, an ultra-conservative who has advised employees how they can avoid COVID vaccination requirements, was one of several prominent Republicans who led the drive earlier this year to do away with the all-party primary system and replace it with a traditional partisan primary.

Nungesser, however, successfully fought to keep the status quo in place, arguing the proposed change would produce “extreme candidates.” The lieutenant governor has been willing to work with Edwards at times, and he’d almost certainly be better positioned to pick up Democratic voters if he and Landry both advanced to an all-GOP general election.

That Nungesser-Landry duel is far from a certainty though, especially since plenty of other Republicans could also get in. State Treasurer John Schroder said back in May that he was thinking about seeking the governor’s office, while state Sen. Rick Ward himself expressed interest in October. State Rep. Richard Nelson also added his name to the list just last week, telling Alford, “The bigger boys have the kind of money that scares people away, but I don’t think the field is settled.”

As for the Democrats, Alford writes, “So far no reliable names have surfaced, but party leaders insist they will have a marketable candidate.” Donald Trump carried Louisiana 58-40, and Edwards is the only Democrat to win statewide in over a decade.

● TX-Gov: Democrat ​​Beto O’Rourke’s PAC posted online Tuesday, “We’ve got something big to announce, and we want you to be a part of it.” The former congressman has spent months thinking about challenging Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, and no other notable Democrat has gotten in during this time.

House

● CA-10: Politico reports that former Trump official Ricky Gill is thinking of taking on Democratic Rep. Josh Harder in what is currently a competitive seat in the Modesto area.

Gill was on the ballot almost a decade ago at the age of 25 when he challenged another Democratic congressman, Jerry McNerney, in the neighboring 9th District. Gill raised $3 million for a campaign that attracted national attention, but McNerney beat him 56-44 as Barack Obama was carrying that constituency by a 58-40 spread.

● MD-04: Former Del. Angela Angel has filed paperwork for a potential campaign to succeed Rep. Anthony Brown, a fellow Democrat who is leaving to run for state attorney general, in a safely blue seat in the D.C. suburbs. Angel was elected to her only term in 2014, and she earned headlines two years later when she launched a high-profile, but unsuccessful, attempt to pressure legislative leaders to act on her domestic violence bill. She ran for the state Senate in 2018 but lost the primary 55-37 to a fellow delegate.

Meanwhile, Del. Jazz Lewis earned an endorsement Monday from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who is his old boss and the congressman from the neighboring 5th District.

● NC-06: While Hillsborough Town Commissioner Matt Hughes, who is an official in the state Democratic Party, expressed interest last month in running to succeed retiring Rep. David Price, sounds like he’s now ruled it out. Hughes responded to Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam’s campaign kickoff on Monday by tweeting, “I’m so proud of @NidaAllam as she begins her next phase of public service.”

Another Democrat we hadn’t previously mentioned is former Wake County Commissioner Jessica Holmes, who also said she was interested last month before the Republican-dominated legislature passed its new gerrymander. Holmes ran statewide last year for the open post of commissioner of labor and lost the general election by a close 51-49 margin.

North Carolina’s candidate filing deadline is Dec. 17, so we’ll have a full candidate lineup before too long.

● NC-07, NC-Sen: Former Rep. Mark Walker last week told Dallas Woodhouse, the infamous former executive director of the state GOP, that he was considering campaigning to return to the House, though the Republican said he was still going forward with his Senate bid for now. Walker announced his involuntary retirement from the lower chamber in 2019 after court-supervised redistricting left him without a winnable seat to run for, but the GOP’s newest gerrymander may belatedly solve that problem for 2022.

Walker didn’t say which constituency he was interested in, though Woodhouse believes that if he ran anywhere, it would be in the new and open 7th District. This seat, which includes areas between Greensboro and Raleigh, supported Donald Trump 57-41 according to data from Dave’s Redistricting App, and it includes much of the turf held by one of Walker’s Senate primary rivals, Rep. Ted Budd.

Walker, though, wouldn’t have the primary to himself if he made the switch. Law student Bo Hines, a former North Carolina State University football player who announced a bid to succeed Budd in the current 13th District, has made it clear he’s now seeking the new 7th. Hines, who has self-funded part of his campaign, ended September with $371,000 on-hand, though Walker had a larger $613,000 Senate war chest he could use here instead.

State Rep. Jon Hardister also says he’s thinking about running for the House, though Woodhouse added that he “indicated he is unlikely to enter a primary against Walker.”

● NV-04: Boxer Jessie Vargas said Monday that he would seek the Republican nomination to take on Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford in Las Vegas’ northern suburbs. The candidate indicated he could do some self-funding, saying he did “very well” in his career in the ring.

Vargas, whose parents immigrated from Mexico, was on Mexico’s 2008 ​​Olympic team, and he was the 2016 world champion welterweight. He gave up the title later that year when he badly lost to Philippines Sen. Manny Pacquiao (who, coincidently, is running next year for president of his country), though Vargas received a $2.8 million guaranteed payout for that fight.

● NY-22: Democrat Josh Riley, an attorney who is a former counsel on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, has announced a bid against Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney. The current version of this Utica-area seat backed Donald Trump 55-43, though it could look very different once redistricting is complete.

● NY-24: Physician assistant Tim Ko said this week that he would launch a primary challenge against Rep. John Katko, who is one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump. Ko is a first-time candidate, but he could have a prominent ally in his corner soon. The Conservative Party, which is often aligned with the state GOP, is set to endorse a candidate on Nov. 16, and Onondaga County chair Bernie Ment said he’d advocate for Ko next week.

The current version of the 24th District went for Joe Biden 53-44, which makes Katko one of just nine Republicans in a Biden constituency. There’s some speculation, though, that redistricting could lead to a primary between Katko and hard-right Rep. Claudia Tenney, and Ko says he would drop out and support the 22nd District congresswoman if that happened.  

● OR-06: Democratic state Rep. Andrea Salinas on Tuesday kicked off her long-anticipated campaign for the new 6th District, a 55-42 Biden seat that includes the state capital of Salem and other parts of the mid-Willamette Valley. Salinas, who co-chaired the state’s congressional and legislative redistricting committees, is the daughter of an immigrant from Mexico, and she would be the first Latina to represent Oregon in Congress.

On the GOP side, fellow state Rep. Ron Noble told Oregon Public Broadcasting last month that he was getting ready to run, though he hasn’t announced yet.

● TX-01, TX-AG: Democrats and House Republicans leaders may finally be rid of Rep. Louie Gohmert because the legendary far-right bomb thrower threw up a website Tuesday saying he was thinking about challenging scandal-ridden Attorney General Ken Paxton in the GOP primary.

Of course, this being Gohmert, the revelation came after a complete train wreck: The Texas Tribune’s Patrick Svitek tweeted, “He was supposed to have an announcement at 11:30 in Tyler, [but] tweeted a livestream around noon that didn’t work.” (The Houston Chronicle‘s Taylor Goldenstein later said that he was felled by a “wifi problem.”)

Gohmert’s new site went up, though it could have benefited from some extra proofing: It declared that the congressman “needs 100,000 citizens to send $100 each (or any other amount to get to $1,000,000) by November 19,” which actually adds up to $10 million. He may struggle to reach either number, as his congressional campaign ended September with a mere $83,000 on-hand.

No matter what he raises, though, Gohmert would be in for a very uphill primary if he did decide to challenge Paxton. Donald Trump endorsed the attorney general earlier this year despite (or maybe perhaps because of) the myriad of scandals surrounding him, and a recent YouGov poll gave Paxton a 54-18 lead over his main primary foe, Land Commissioner George P. Bush.

If Gohmert did decide to take his chances statewide, there’s no question that Republicans would have no trouble holding on to his dark red 1st District in East Texas. However, few House Democrats would be sad to part ways with Gohmert, who said of the Jan. 6 attack, “It’s absolutely dishonest to say ‘insurrection’ when not a single person has been charged with insurrection.”

● TX-35: Democratic state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer said Tuesday that he would seek re-election rather than run for the open 35th Congressional District, adding that he’d be involved in fighting the new gerrymander in court.

That announcement came weeks after the Republican legislature made a last-minute change to the congressional map that placed Martinez Fischer’s home in the 35th, a move he acknowledged was done at his request. However, a fellow state representative may have deterred him from running after all: Primary School writes that Martinez Fischer is an ally of Eddie Rodriguez, a fellow state representative who has filed paperwork for a campaign and has an announcement set for Wednesday morning.

● VA-07: Republican state Sen. Amanda Chase filed paperwork last week for a potential congressional bid, but the far-right legislator now says, “I’ve not officially announced and we won’t announce that until after the lines have been officially drawn because we don’t know where we’re going to land.”

● WI-03: Former CIA officer Deb McGrath said Tuesday that she was competing in the primary to succeed her fellow Democrat, retiring Rep. Ron Kind, in what is currently a swingy seat in southwestern Wisconsin. McGrath is the daughter of Al Baldus, a Democrat who was elected to a previous version of this district in 1974 and narrowly lost it six years later.

Legislatures

● NJ State Senate, Where Are They Now?: Democratic Assemblyman Andrew Zwicker has flipped a long-held GOP state Senate seat by defeating former Republican Rep. Michael Pappas 53-47 in the 16th Legislative District, which supported Joe Biden 60-38. This marks the latest defeat for Pappas, a one-term congressman whose brief moment in the political spotlight came in 1998 when he took to the House floor to deliver an ode to the special prosecutor probing the Clinton White House that began, “Twinkle, twinkle, Kenneth Starr / Now we see how brave you are.”

Mayors

● Atlanta, GA Mayor: Attorney Sharon Gay, who finished fourth in last week’s race for mayor with 7% of the vote, has endorsed City Councilman Andre Dickens in the Nov. 30 runoff.

Other Races

● Nassau County, NY Executive: Nassau County election officials have announced that they will start counting the nearly 20,000 absentees and 1,200 affidavit ballots on Monday. Republican Bruce Blakeman leads Democratic incumbent Laura Curran by about 12,000 votes, a margin of 52-48.

Obituaries

● Georgia Democrat Max Cleland, a triple amputee Vietnam veteran whose long career in politics concluded with his 2002 loss after serving a single term in the Senate, died on Tuesday at the age of 79. We’ll bring you a detailed look at Cleland’s electoral history, including the notorious campaign Republican Saxby Chambliss waged against him in his final race, in the next Digest.

This post was originally published on this site

This week’s episodeThe Brief focused on dissecting lessons learned from last week’s elections, Biden’s falling approval ratings, and what Democrats can do to ensure they’re prepared for 2022 elections. Featured guests included Drew Linzer, director and chief scientist at Civiqs, and Daily Kos political director David Nir.

Coming off of a difficult election week in which Democrats lost the Virginia gubernatorial race and had a close call in the New Jersey gubernatorial race, the race to analyze what went wrong is at full tilt. Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas believes it could have something to do with turnout from the Democratic base. As he said, “We don’t have enough information to indicate whether those constituencies [that include people of color and suburban white voters] actually did turn out and vote at the same rate in 2020,” though he suspects they did not. Democrats will need strong turnout from their base to do well in 2022.

Daily Kos senior political writer Kerry Eleveld pushed back on this idea a little, explaining that “the idea that we’re going to be able to recreate Biden’s numbers in next year’s midterms [is not realistic] … I don’t know if it’s fair to compare a presidential election that included Donald Trump and turnout in that election … I don’t know that we can judge whether or not we had terrible turnout in an election where we at least improved by 200,000 more votes.”

Nir said that these results were to be expected and cautioned against jumping to too many conclusions about what they say about the strength of each party’s platform:

I have yet to see an election where partisans of all stripes don’t say that the results reinforce their preferred narrative. I think that the most likely answer is probably the most boring one and the most frustrating one, which is: We have seen time and time again, going back many decades, that the electorate turns against the party in power—and that’s defined as whoever holds the White House, because it’s the most visible symbol of power in this country—during off year elections … it’s a very predictable pattern; we’ve seen it in Virginia over and over again, and it’s almost certainly what happened here.

The reason it’s frustrating is … political scientists, researchers of all kinds don’t have a really good idea of what happens. They call it thermostatic opinion … going up and down. No one is quite sure why this happens. There are some vague theories, we can always imagine the grass always being greener. But it is simply a reality, and you ask, ‘What does it mean for 2022?’ And I say, ‘We can’t be naive, it’s not a good thing. But it’s also not a surprise. It’s not just in Virginia. We can look at midterms … there have been very few exceptions where the party in power has gained seats—that party almost always loses seats.’ So I don’t think Virginia told us anything we didn’t already know.

Eleveld asked Nir if he thought the outcome was any worse than usual.

“I do not think that it was any worse than usual, and I want to point to one particular result, which is that a third state had a statewide election [last] Tuesday. Pennsylvania had a race for the state Supreme Court … and Republicans won that race, but they won it by 1.5 points,” Nir said. “So the swing was really, really small in Pennsylvania … the Pennsylvania results tell me that things weren’t good, but they weren’t nightmarishly terrible.”

The group then turned to discuss the downward trend in Biden’s approval ratings.

Linzer noted that Biden’s low numbers should be an area of particular concern for Democrats, since if the president’s lackluster approval ratings continue, it could spell disaster for next year:

One week after another, it just keeps dropping bit by bit. And the lower it goes, the worse Democrats are poised to do in the next election. We have seen Independents moving away from Joe Biden … and young people are really moving away from Joe Biden, as are, to a certain extent now, voters of color. This doesn’t have to happen—there are reasons for it, and we’ve been doing polling on it—it does not mean good things for Democrats’ 2022 election chances.

Civiqs specifically polled registered voters recently to find out what they are satisfied with or dissatisfied with in their daily lives, with the idea to take the focus off of politicians and spotlight what everyday Americans are experiencing and feeling and thinking. In all, Linzer said, the poll included 16 aspects of American life—everything from gas prices to access to health care, race relations, and the state of our democracy. A few interesting patterns emerged:

Overwhelmingly, the most widespread problem and [biggest] source of dissatisfaction among Americans is the state of our democracy. Democrats, Republicans. Everyone feels that our democracy is not in the state it’s supposed to be. The cost of gasoline, consumer goods, healthcare. People are very dissatisfied with their savings and wealth inequality. These economic issues are peoples’ top issues right now. The lowest areas of concern … their jobs, their housing situation, even the direction of the pandemic. People are saying they’re satisfied with that stuff. But what they’re dissatisfied with now is prices, the costs, inequality, savings. And it’s driving discontentment.

“I wonder how much of that is Republicans’ ability to weaponize the economy?” Moulitsas wondered, noting how many conservatives are in a frenzy about oil prices even though they are currently similar to what they were when Trump was in office. “How much is that Republicans being better able to tap into consumer angst … or [is it just that] the party in power [gets] more blame? Is there something inherently better about conservatives’ ability to tap into economic anxiety?”

Nir offered a perspective on the importance of the progressive movement and its messaging to push back against false narratives coming from the right:

I think the real question is, why are Republicans so good at exploiting that and what can Democrats do to counter it? I think that this, frankly, gets to the core of the issue of why the progressive movement exists at all, and why sites like Daily Kos exist in the first place … We need our own progressive infrastructure to bring issues of importance to the American public … After the election results, my strong feeling was, ‘Democrats need to place the blame where it belongs on Republicans for prolonging the pandemic.’ … the answer to things like Republicans ginning people up over gas prices has to be that we create our own system of really putting the right issues in front of the American people and making them feel that it’s okay to be angry or upset about these things, and that there are things that should motivate them at the polls.

Americans’ dissatisfaction manifests in attitudes around race, the state of democracy in America right now, and how people are unhappy about that, Linzer added. “Your freedom to live your life how you want—a majority of Americans are dissatisfied … There is something about the cultural mindset right now. Maybe it’s about race, freedom, education, I’m not sure what it is. But people are feeling it, and it’s coming out in some of their more pessimistic views of politics right now.”

Nir also voiced concerns about the right’s use of critical race theory as a boogeyman to stoke fear and racial tensions among their base, pointing out that Democrats have yet to figure out a strong way to push back against the misinformation surrounding CRT: “I think what’s been so frustrating for Democratic activists is this term ‘critical race theory’ … The right is very good at coming up with code, and they’ve used this code word as something it doesn’t mean. It’s a more sophisticated code for ‘Let’s go, Brandon.’ … Democrats need to figure out something deeper than that to figure out why this particular weaponizing of racial fears is working so well.”

Eleveld noted that it was important to focus not only on critical race theory, as there was also a lot of anger about kids not being able to receive in-person instruction during the school year over the past 18 months. Moulitsas agreed, noting that critical race theory remains a dog-whistle issue.

Linzer noted that the fall in Biden’s approval ratings indicate a more general dissatisfaction with his approach:

A large number of people who were willing to vote for Joe Biden because they didn’t like Trump … and when Biden won that election, their support was still with him. I think that whatever hopes or expectations those voters have placed on Biden, I think that just, in a very gradual way, their withdrawal of support from him in our polling reflects them not having their expectations met. And the reason I focus on that is because there has not been any point in the polling where there’s been a sharp drop.

So people under 35 who voted for Biden initially supported him and are now unhappy, or at least indifferent, not willing to commit to saying they’re unhappy but just unsatisfied, and voters of color. My understanding of public opinion is that they expected more … more and more of them are not approving of the job that Biden is doing. The way to put a positive spin on this is that since the trend is gradual, Biden and congressional Democrats can change course, put focus on what peoples’ needs are right now.

Nir agreed, adding that “we need to focus on making sure our regular base voters turn out” and that Democrats’ messaging needs to extend beyond Trump, especially since one of the criticisms of Terry McAuliffe was that he was too focused on tying his GOP opponent, Glenn Youngkin, to the former president.

Looking toward potential solutions, Moulitsas asked Linzer and Nir for their thoughts on what Democrats can do to turn things around and retain control of Congress next year.

“Look at who supported Biden and Democrats last January and do things that those people want!” Linzer said.

Nir thinks Democrats need to go on the offensive: “Democrats just suck at keeping people angry and engaged over the issues that they should be. I would just like to see more relentless messaging like I said—go on the attack on COVID, but just go on the attack in general, and when they do pass Build Back Better, then they just have to relentlessly, relentlessly sell it.”

Before closing the show, Eleveld asked, “There’s plenty of misreporting and everybody’s got a narrative they’re trying to sell … what do you think is a thing that is either misunderstood or not focused on enough?”

Linzer thinks that there is an obvious, clear-cut solution that Democrats are not focusing on enough:

I think that the conventional wisdom doesn’t realize how bad things are for the Democrats right now, but I think that the conventional wisdom also doesn’t realize how much time is left and how much opportunity there is to turn things around … they think this country is on the wrong track, they think the economy is moving in the wrong direction … [hard times are] falling harder on young people, they’re falling harder on communities of color, they’re falling harder on independents—who are really up for grabs here. If the Democratic leadership can focus on these issues, then they can really do something.

You can watch the full episode here:

You can also listen to The Brief on the following platforms:

• Apple Podcast
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• Google Podcast

This post was originally published on this site

Reuters:

Reuters unmasks Trump supporters terrifying U.S. election officials

For this report, Reuters set out to identify the people behind these attacks on election workers and understand their motivations. Reporters submitted public-records requests and interviewed dozens of election officials in 12 states, obtaining phone numbers and email addresses for two dozen of the threateners.

Reuters was able to interview nine of them. All admitted they were behind the threats or other hostile messages. Eight did so on the record, identifying themselves by name.

In those seven cases, law enforcement agencies were alerted by election officials to six of them. The people who made those threats told Reuters they never heard from police

Max Boot/WaPo:

Democrats can win the debate over critical race theory. Here’s how.

The absolute worst thing you can say is what McAuliffe said: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” At some level, he was right; there would be chaos if every teacher had to run every lesson plan by the parents of every student. But his comment came across as tone-deaf after parents had spent 18 months supervising their kids’ education at home — and stewing about shuttered classrooms. McAuliffe paid the price for not feeling parents’ pain.

It’s also not productive to argue, as many on the left have, that critical race theory, or CRT, isn’t being taught and that raising the issue is nothing but a dog whistle to racists. It’s true that “parental control” has become the new “states’ rights” — a deceptively anodyne slogan for tapping racist fears. It’s also true that even those who are most hysterical about CRT have trouble defining it. Fox News host Tucker Carlson just admitted: “I’ve never figured out what ‘critical race theory’ is, to be totally honest, after a year of talking about it.”

But as a practical, political issue, none of that matters. CRT might have started off as an esoteric academic theory about structural racism. But it has now become a generic term for widely publicized excesses in diversity education, such as disparaging “individualism” and “objectivity” as examples of “white supremacy culture” or teaching first-graders about microaggressions and structural racism. You don’t have to be a Republican to be put off by the incessant attention on race in so many classrooms.

Danny Barefoot/Twitter:

We’re starting out with some temperature checks to see where these voters are more generally before we dig into what drove them to Youngkin. 64% disapprove of Biden. 86% don’t want Trump to run again. 79% agree with the statement “Trump is a racist” 

We start out by asking what the most pressing issue is facing these women. One volunteers gas prices. Everyone shakes their heads in agreement. 

We ask who here would describe gas prices as negatively impacting their finances. 76% say gas prices are. 

This sorta naturally brings us to inflation. One of the Black women says her grocery bills have doubled (no way to fact check this and seems dubious but still her impression). 70% of participants say their grocery bills have gone up “significantly”

David Leonhardt/NY Times:

What Moves Swing Voters

A creative new poll tries to understand.

Political pundits often talk about swing voters as if they were upscale suburbanites, like “soccer moms” or “office-park dads.” And some are. But many are blue-collar. They are the successors to the so-called Reagan Democrats, who let Republicans win the White House in the 1980s and Democrats retake it in the 1990s.

This century, blue-collar swing voters helped elect Barack Obama twice, Donald Trump once and Joe Biden in 2020. They have also played a deciding role in congressional and state elections, including in Virginia last week.

In the current polarized political atmosphere, many college graduates follow politics obsessively — almost as if it were a sport — and identify with one of the two parties. Many working-class voters, on the other hand, vote for both parties and sit out some elections.

Figuring out what moves these swing voters is a crucial question in American politics. It has become an urgent question for the Democratic Party, which is struggling to win working-class votes in many places, including some Asian and Latino communities.

Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:

Blame Virus and Economy for Biden Popularity Slump

The president’s approval rating keeps falling in polls, though not yet to historical levels. The reasons are hard to pinpoint, but timing provides clues.

Why has Biden’s popularity fallen? It’s hard to prove anything about such things; there are too many possibilities at play. But it’s certainly suggestive that the pandemic case count bottomed out in the first week of July, so Biden’s slide began right around the time that people started noticing that things were, once again, getting worse. And it continued as economic numbers deteriorated throughout the third quarter…

If the current plateau in Covid-19 case counts turns  out to be a blip on the way down, and if there is no significant winter wave, and if the recent jobs news and other economic indicators are evidence of a revived economy, we’ll have a test of this soon. The one thing I’d still doubt would be any conclusion that voters have already made up their minds against Biden for good. That’s one thing that the historical record strongly suggests doesn’t happen. Instead, the history of approval ratings says that Biden could recover all he’s lost, and more, if perceptions of the economy improve dramatically — or fall quite a bit more if they don’t.

Axios:

Why it matters: Republicans are weaponizing dissatisfaction around schools to shape elections. But when it comes to COVID issues specifically, the survey finds discontent is being driven by a vocal but small minority. Fewer than one in 10 parents said schools have done a “very poor job.”

Murad Antia/Tampa Bay Times:

Huh, so the economy performs better under Democratic presidents

Should pro-business Republicans consider changing their party?

What is clear is that there is zero evidence that tax cuts, deregulation, trickle-down economics — or whatever Republican policies were prior to Ronald Reagan — has led to superior economic growth. Republicans talk a good game, but as the old Wendy’s commercials asked, Where’s the Beef? Their pro-business, lower taxes, fewer regulations, or any of their prior policies have not translated into superior economic numbers. The proof of the pudding is in the data.

Lastly, the trade deficit was worse over the past four years (Trump) compared to the prior four years (Obama). What happened? The greatest dealmaker in history was going to win-win-win on trade deals. Didn’t happen. Given all these measures, I hope attendees at this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference switch their party affiliation. Pronto.

Sarah Binder/WaPo:

Three reasons Congress finally passed an infrastructure bill

And what happened to Build Back Better, the social and climate infrastructure bill?

So what led the House to pass the infrastructure bill at last? A cocktail of election surprises, lawmakers trying to avoid blame, and vexing Senate budget rules.

Magdi Semrau/WaPo:

Think Democrats can’t talk about race effectively? Biden shows why that’s wrong.

In 2020, Biden spoke candidly about systemic racism and grim episodes in American history — while also attracting swing voters. There’s a lesson there.

The presumption that frank discussions of racial inequity will backfire on Democrats neglects one recent, prominent example: President Biden, who during his campaign and since then has spoken with candor about the challenging topic. Given his electoral success, he offers an example other Democrats might consider emulating.

[examples from Biden speeches]

Democrats can do better — in part by learning from Biden. It’s easy to imagine, for example, how Biden would handle the issue of critical race theory — which was devised as a tactic for misleading voters about Democrats’ agenda and leaving a fog of negative connotations. He might dismiss it as “malarkey,” before moving on to more important issues.