After Action Report on the 2022 Elections

Although all of the results are not in, it now seems obvious that it was a good night for the Democrats, Ron DeSantis, Liz Cheney, and New York State nonpartisan reapportionment (four Republican pick-ups from prior gerrymandered map), and it was a bad night for Donald Trump, election deniers and Shulmaven. Frankly we blew it in over-estimating Republican gains. We were looking for a gain of 25 seats, while as of this five minutes it looks more like a gain of 10 seats or so. The abortion and election denial issues swamped the economy has an issue. I also missed that both Oklahoma and Oregon governorships would stay true their Red and Blue forms. Nevertheless, save for Fetterman in Pennsylvania, I got all of the called Senate races correct, but I can still be wrong in both Arizona and Nevada, but I was correct in calling for a run-off in Georgia

Liz Cheney had a very good night with the two Democratic candidates she endorsed winning. Our country will benefit  from the presense of both Elisa Slotkin and Abigail Spanberger in the House. It remains to be seen whether her endorsement of  Katie Hobbs comes through in Arizona against Kari Lake.  Speaking of Lake, thus far election deniers have yet to be seen in this cycle.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis beat his opponent by a nearly 3-2 margin. In my opinion that makes hm a favorite to dethrone Trump from leadership in the Republican Party. Further the Nation and especially California, Nevada and Arizona can learn a lesson from Forida in that the state counted seven million votes in three hours.

With Kentucky turning down an anti-abortion ammendment to its constitution it now appears that future outright bans on the proceedure will fail and that many states will follow DeSantis' lead with a 15 week ban with exceptions. 

As far as governing goes, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy will have his hands full in running his presumed narrow majority in the House. It isn't even clear that his caucus will now pick him to be Speaker and if he is picked, whether or not he will last two years. 

After Action Report on the 2020 Elections

While Shulmaven got Joe Biden winning right, I largely blew it everywhere else. Like too many, I got sucked into believing that the pollsters corrected for their mistakes in the 2016 election. Never again will I make that mistake.

 

I had Biden winning the popular vote by 7 points when it now looks like he will win it by 3 points. I had Biden winning Florida and North Carolina; wrong! I had him winning Arizona and Nevada, likely. And I had him winning Georgia, still too close to call.

 

With respect to the Senate I had the Democrats gaining a net of 5 seats. As of today, the Democrats are up one seat with two seats to be determined in a January runoff in Georgia. Shulmaven would sure like to own a TV station in Atlanta. It is my guess today that the Republicans are likely to hold both seats.

 

In the House I had the Democrats picking up 8-10 seats; it now looks like they will lose 8-10 seats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will soon find out what it was like for her Republican predecessors Ryan and Boehner to run an unruly caucus. It will not be pretty for her. 

To me the big takeaways from the election are:

1.     The Trump tactic of tagging the Democrats as radical leftists worked. Defunding the police and talking about socialism might work in New York, but not too many places elsewhere. Instead of being a plus, “the Squad” turned out to be a huge negative.

 

2.     The notion of a monolithic bloc of “people of color” crashed and burned. There are more differences than commonalities among African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians. For example, it certainly did not help when Black Lives Matter protestors in Miami carried a flag with Che Guevara’s picture on it. To them it may have been a symbol of liberation, but to Miami’s Cuban and Venezuelan populations it was a symbol of totalitarian oppression.  Outside of Florida Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas shifted markedly towards Trump.

 

3.     Biden’s position on fracking cost the Democrats two rising stars in the House, Kendra Horn from Oklahoma and Xochitl Torres-Small from New Mexico. *

 

4.     California, a state which voted for Biden by a 2-1 majority rallied against liberalism in three key ballot propositions and likely a fourth one. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2020/10/some-thoughts-on-four-controversial.html) Specifically the voters opposed a measure allowing for racial preferences in university admissions and state employment, opposed a measure that would allow for stricter rent control, supported a measure that treats gig workers as contractors rather than employees and thus far the opposition to amending Proposition 13 to allow for much higher taxes on commercial property is heading for defeat.

 

What the election seems to represent is that 2016 was not a fluke. America remains a very divided country and with Donald Trump acting like the world’s worst sore loser is certainly not helping things. We are  a country in a great need of spiritual healing. We must listen to one another, and I pray that Joe Biden will find the strength in him to lead us in that task.

 

*I financially supported her re-election efforts.

2020 Elections: A Good Night for Biden and the Democrats, a Bad Night for Trump

 

At last the election is just two days away. The way it looks to me, consistent with the recent polling data, is that Joe Biden will win the popular vote by a margin of 52-45-3 percent and it now looks like he will decisively win the battle for the electoral college by a margin of 350-188. I have Biden winning all the Clinton states of 2016 and adding Arizona, Florida, Georgia (yes), North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska’s 2^nd congressional district. His majority will be based on the votes of suburban women with the biggest gender gap ever, Blacks, seniors and the young. In House races, the Democrats are likely to pick up a net of between 8-10 seats. This will largely replicate the strength in the suburbs that occurred 2018 with a few seats coming from North Carolina’s redistricting.

 

The call for the Senate is much trickier. Put bluntly there are way too many extremely close races that can go either way. My best guess is that will pick up a net gain of five seats bringing their majority to 52-47 with one seat awaiting a Georgia runoff in January. I have the Democrats losing the Jones seat in Alabama while picking up Cunningham in North Carolina, Kelly in Arizona, Ossoff in Georgia, Bullock in Montana (an upset), Hickenlooper in Colorado and Gideon in Maine. In case of Gideon we probably will not know until next week to allow for Maine’s ranked choice voting tabulation.

 

HEALTH WARNING: The Senate races will be really close and as result there will be a high margin of error. If I am roughly right on the presidential race and if the Republicans do much better than I have predicted my explanation would be that enough Republican crossover voters and independents voted Republican fearing that a Democratic Senate would lead to packing the Supreme Court and runaway liberal legislation.

The Sexual Harassment Purge Trials of 2017 - ?

The very serious and likely criminal allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein have opened the floodgates for all sorts of sexual harassment charges in Hollywood, the media and politics. The charges range from child molestation in the case of Senate Candidate Roy Moore to groping in the case of Senator Al Franken. But given the mob mentality and the media firestorm most of the charges are being conflated.

However there are real differences and they range from what I would call petty infractions (boorish behavior) all the way up to felony rape. I am afraid that over the near term the very real distinctions are not going to matter. Thus the near innocent will be punished along with the really guilty.

In the case of the Congress, hypocrisy reigns; no surprise here. Pro-choice Democrats shouldn’t get a pass because they line up on the feminist side issues. If they do it would be akin the middle age practice of the Catholic Church where indulgences were sold to the highest bidder. Similarly conservative Republicans shouldn’t get a pass because they vote for tax cuts and support right leaning judges.  Simply put, sexual predators know no party labels.

Indeed my guess is that once we find out, and we will find out, where the $15 million paid out by Congress to settle employee disputes went, heads will really roll. Further it is my educated guess that both Speaker Paul Ryan and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi were informed. Both of them know where the bodies are buried.   What will happen to them? Instead of passing bipartisan legislation we are now witnessing a bipartisan scandal. All the while the head “pussy grabber” is still the president.

My fear is that a short run unintended consequence of the enveloping scandals is that many men will become reluctant to mentor women. As a professor, a leader in a mentoring program and as a managing director I have had the occasions to mentor many women who have gone on to do great things. However with the temperature rising the simple solution for too many men might be to adopt the Mike Pence and Orthodox Jewish rule of never being alone with a woman not their wife. As a result the mentoring of women by men would likely decline. That would hardly be a consequence that even most feminists would desire.

The Lawless Law Professor

The online edition of The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that President Obama will announce his recently promised defacto legalization program for approximately four million undocumented/illegal residents on Friday at an event in Las Vegas. This is a far cry from his 2011 statement noting that going it alone (i,e, without Congress) is "not how our democracy functions." What the president is doing, under the guise of prosecutorial  discretion, is that he is refusing to enforce the existing body of immigration law.

The issue here is not immigration reform which is something I support, but rather an unprecedented reach of executive power. Instead of being the cautious law professor he once was, I guess President Obama is channeling his inner Richard Nixon or his inner Dick Cheney. As others have noted the day will come when a future Republican president refuses to enforce environmental protection and income tax laws using the same lame excuse. Simply put if he wants to change the immigration law he needs the Congress. That is how the system works.

I close by noting that when/if fascism comes to the United States it won't come from jack-booted thugs marching in the streets , but rather it will come in on the cat feet of well intentioned liberals who have grown impatient with the more orderly processes of democracy.  

My Amazon Review of Rick Perlstein's, "The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan"

Rick Perlstein has written a long book, perhaps too long. “The Invisible Bridge…” is really three books: a biography of Ronald Reagan, a political history with an emphasis on the continued rise of the Republican Right and a social history of the mid-1970s. This book follows his two prior books, “Before the Storm…” and “Nixonland…” on the emergence of the Republican Right. Perlstein is a man of the Left, but he tries to understand the motivations behind the success of the Right. In some respects he succeeds, but in others he doesn’t fully emphasize that the period he discusses was one of retreat abroad and recession at home. With the latter along with virulent inflation ends the Keynesian consensus that ruled economics in the postwar period up to that time. Thus the way was open for a politician who offered hope to a nation where it seemed there was only despair. That politician was Ronald Reagan.

Pearlstein enabled me to relive the period that I remember all too well. It seemed that the wheels were falling off the train of history. For example the 1973-76 period encompassed the following:

   *Watergate

   * Defeat in Vietnam

   * CIA scandals

   * The rise of OPEC which triples gasoline prices

   * Assassination attempts on Jerry Ford

   * Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army

   * The widespread distribution of porn

   * The bankruptcy of New York City

   * The growth of weird self-improvement groups like est.

Into this milieu comes the former actor and former governor of California who offers what appears to be simplistic solutions to the liberal elite, but to a yearning public he offers hope and a return to the greatness of America that as Perlstein notes resonates with the 1976 Bi-Centennial. Always under-rated by the pundits Ronald Reagan was far smarter and cannier a politician than his critics realized. And boy did he know how to give a speech.

Perlstein spends a great deal of time on the 1976 Republican convention where Reagan almost rests the nomination from Jerry Ford. Much of this ground was covered by Craig Shirley’s very pro-Reagan, “Reagan’s Revolution.” In fact Shirley has sued Pearlstein for infringing on his material. Shirley’s book is a good read and I recommend it.

What Perlstein gets wrong is his treatment of Reagan’s failed attempt to pass Proposition 1 his tax and spending limitation initiative in 1973. He highlights what he perceives to be its radical nature. In my opinion had Proposition 1 passed the far more “radical” Proposition 13 of 1978 might never have seen the light of day. Pearlstein also get wrong the notion that California coastal development was banned in 1973; not true. What actually happened was new permitting regime under Proposition 20.

Although he opens his book the the return of the Vietnam POWs, he doesn't really deal with the moral crisis associated with the treatment of the returning veterans. To the Right they were drug crazed losers and to the Left they were war criminals. The resentment that this engenders adds fodder to the growth of the Right later in the decade.

One last point Perlstein should remember Eric Ambler’s maxim in “A Coffin for Demitrios,”  “In a dying (although I would use “threatened”) civilization political prestige is the reward goes not to the shrewdest diagnostician, but to the man with the best bedside manner.” Most dour liberals fail to understand this while an optimistic liberal like Bill Clinton knows this in his guts.

All told for readers who have the time for this very long book, it very well worth the read.

The Amazon review appears at the following url:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R5X8PKXC2JNGO