Eric The Blue

Update

I see now that before I could click "Post" on yesterday's bit of 2020 handicapping, it had taken a stride toward irrelevance.  The new plea of Trump's former attorney and "fixer," Michael Cohen, boosts the chances that before long he (Trump) will be revealed as just a Russian asset dropped into the oval office by the Kremlin, with an assist from the electoral college.  In that case, 20 out of 53 Republican senators might conceivably vote to get rid of him.  Maybe, maybe not, it's hard to say--like the question of whether the Saudi Crown Prince ordered the murder of the Washington Post journalist, as the CIA seems to think.  

Trump's tweets from Argentina suggest his mind might be elsewhere.  "Never, ever talked to Russians" has morphed by steps into today's, "Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia."  Scott Shapiro translates, "There is a good chance I might have committed some light collusion."

Anyway, it's more likely than before that Trump does not serve out his term and that the Democrats then have to face Mike Pence.  I wonder whether there'd be any ads making use of the many pics of him, from his position behind Trump's shoulder, gazing reverently at the back side of the president's orangey skull all full of dollar signs and lies?

News of the world

 

There's so much going on in the world that I would not know about but for TV--and I don't mean the news or other standard programming.  For example, there's this Coravin outfit that relentlessly advertises the tiny drill they make that you use on a wine cork before pouring through the pinprick you've bored.  The point is that "wine just isn't as good" after the bottle has been opened, but there is no deterioration if you drill this little opening instead of just removing the cork.  The wine will be just as refined and full-bodied, or whatever, when you enjoy another glass tomorrow night!

So I guess it's a thing to open a bottle of wine and not drink it all down in a single episode.  I don't think the ads mention the price, which I see now is about $300. Hope they aren't counting on expanding their market into Italy and France, because in those cultures people are willing to save a buck, even if it means having another drink.

2020

With the last election past, time to look forward to the next one!  In 2020, the Senate geography favors Democrats, though not to the same degree that it favored Republicans this year.  With their net gain of two, the GOP will hold 53 senate seats headed into 2020, which means the Dems need a gain of four to win a majority.  And there are definitely prospects.

1. Maine. Republican Susan Collins was the key vote to confirm Kavanaugh, and in her speech announcing her decision, she advanced the theory that his accuser had certainly been assaulted but was confused about the identity of the perpetrator.  I guess Collins knows better than the woman who was there!  Her vote  suggests she's more fearful of losing a primary to a wingnut than the general election to a Democrat, but the Democratic candidate for president has carried Maine in the last seven elections.  She can be beaten.
2. Arizona.  The governor appointed John Kyl to fill out John McCain's term, which is up in 2020.  Consequently, there will be an open race in 2020--no incumbent--and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema just won an open race for US Senate in the state.  A different Democrat could do it again in 2020.
3. Colorado.  Republican incumbent Cory Gardner faces the voters.  Clinton carried the state, as did Obama, twice.  In the 2018 midterms, no Republican won a statewide election in Colorado.  The governor's race was not close.  The Democrats have majorities in both Houses of the state legislature.  None of this can be encouraging for Gardner.
4. Iowa. The Republican incumbent is Joni Ernst.  Trump carried Iowa by 9.5 points, and the state just elected a new Republican governor.  On the other hand, going into this year's midterms three of Iowa's four congressional seats were held by Republicans, and Democrats flipped two of them.  Team Blue needs to recruit a good candidate, because Ernst is not as formidable as Charles Grassley, the state's other Republican senator, and Grassley is pretty clearly senile.
5. North Carolina.  Republican Thom Tillis is up for reelection.  Trump won North Carolina with less than 51 percent of the vote.  It's a state that Democrats have felt was headed their way, and Obama carried it in 2008, but since then they've only come close.  Charlotte is a magnet for the kind of new residents who vote Democratic, and the Research Triangle area--Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill--is another strongly Democratic population center.  Time to get over the top!

On the other side of the ledger, Democrat Doug Jones is vulnerable in Alabama, but he's a canny politician and you just never know who those crazy Republicans will put up against him.  For the sake of argument, let's say Jones loses.  To get to 51, the Democrats would then have to avoid any upset losses and sweep the above five races, or score an upset themselves somewhere.  Of course, getting to 50 would do the trick if they also won the presidency . . . .

My sense is that, until the 2018 midterm result was in, Trump was possibly a slight favorite to win reelection, assuming no cataclysm such as might be injected by, for example, the findings of Robert Mueller.  Trump's national approval ratings are abysmal, but that's to some extent because he's at sea bottom in several of the country's largest states--think: New York, Illinois, California.  He won't get negative electoral votes for losing these states by stupendous margins.  The all-or-nothing allocation of electoral votes suggests that a better gauge might be to consider his prospects in the states he barely won or barely lost.  In this regard, the first observation is that--as you'd expect considering that Trump lost the national vote by close to 3 million--there are a lot more electoral votes that he barely won than electoral votes he barely lost.  Four states were decided by less than one percent of the vote.  They are, with their electoral vote count: New Hampshire (4), Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (16), and Wisconsin (10).  Trump lost only New Hampshire.  If all four flipped, and nothing else changed, the Democrat would pick up 42 electoral votes and land at 274, 4 more than needed to win.  It happens that the three Trump states all had midterm races for both governor and US Senate, and the Democratic candidates won all six.  Only one of the six, for the governorship of Wisconsin, was very close.  Trump probably needs to win at least one of these states and all appear headed in the other direction.

We could spread a wider net and consider, too, the states decided by more than 1 but less than 2 percent of the vote.  This brings into play Minnesota, whose 10 electoral votes were won by Clinton, and Florida, whose 29 electoral votes were won by Trump.  So if both flipped the Democratic candidate would net another 19 electoral votes.  The midterm result, however, suggests that the Democrat has a much better chance in Florida than Trump does in Minnesota.  Republicans won statewide races for governor and US Senate in Florida, but both were so close as to require recounts.  In Minnesota, Democrats swept all the statewide elections, including the governorship and two US Senate contests by double-digit margins.  

Trump's electoral fortunes appear to be dimming and, being ignorant, incurious, and corrupt, though apparently convinced of his own magnificence, he doesn't seem a likely candidate for turning things around with some midterm adjustments. 

More about Mississippi

I made it through my Mississippi analysis yesterday, wherein I mentioned that Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith's daughter graduated from a "segregation academy" in Lincoln County, without making the obvious joke about it being somewhat surprising that there is a Lincoln County in Mississippi.  You'd think they could do something about that.  Here in south Minneapolis, where I live, the local middle school was recently renamed, on the initiative of students, from Ramsey Middle School (after Alexander Ramsey, first territorial governor and renowned slaughterer of the Sioux Indians) to Justice Alan Page Middle School, Page being the first African-American state supreme court justice (and a pretty good football player for the Vikings).

I love the way that "Justice" made it into the official name, presumably to indicate that athletic excellence is beside the point.  My stepdaughter was among the activists and I remember her saying that there was some thought, too, that the inclusion of the first name and honorific would help steer clear of the unfortunate acronym for Page Middle School.  

And, of course, we no longer have Lake Calhoun, which was named after John Calhoun, the 19th-century South Carolinian known for his service as vice president, United States senator, cabinet member, member of the US House of Representatives, and indefatigable defender of slavery.  In one of his official capacities, Calhoun oversaw the first government land surveys of our area, and in this way got his name attached to the lake.  The new name, Bde Maka Ska, which is what the Sioux always called the lake, does not roll trippingly off the tongue and is sort of a bummer for local businesses that deploy in their name the neighborhood's most notable topographical feature.  To retain the currency accruing to the familiar name, they're mainly sticking with Calhoun. The past is still with us, in south Minneapolis as well as Mississippi.  

Just for the record, Mississippi has, in addition to Lincoln County, a Jefferson Davis County.  Again, I like the way that the first name is in there, Davis alone being too common and thus leaving in doubt whether or not the intent is to honor a famous traitor.

The result of the election in Mississippi last night was like a good golfer making a 2-putt par.  I noted in my preview that ninety percent of sixty percent--60 for the approximate percentage of Mississippians who are white and 90 for the approximate percentage of white Mississippians who prefer the Republicans--makes fifty-four percent, and that's exactly what Hyde-Smith got.  There was a wee bit of drama early in the night.  I was watching on MSNBC, where, "at the big board," Steve Kornacki was looking a little squinty-eyed at the first returns from two counties.  Warren County, on the Mississippi River near the southwest corner of the state--Vicksburg is the biggest town--reported its complete county tally within about a half hour of the polls closing.  Espy won 53.4% of the vote there.  When trying to read the early tea leaves, an obvious strategy is to compare a complete county result to what happened in the same county in the last big statewide election.  Two years ago, Clinton lost Mississippi, 40-58 percent, and she lost Warren County by 46.6 to 51.5.  So Espy, instead of losing by about 5 points, won by about 7, and a 12-point turnaround is about two-thirds of what he needed.  Meanwhile, in the early returns from DeSoto County, Espy was trailing Hyde-Smith by 46-54.  DeSoto is in the northwest corner of Mississippi.  It's basically part of greater Memphis, Tennessee, and almost the only place in Mississippi bearing a demographic resemblance to the suburban areas in which Democrats have been making large gains in support.  Clinton had lost DeSoto County by 31-66.  Kornacki opined that if Espy could stay at 46 percent in DeSoto, a populous county by Mississippi standards, Hyde-Smith might conceivably be in trouble.  As the night wore on, however, Espy's number kept slipping, landing finally at 41 percent, still a 10-point jump from Clinton's 31 but not enough.  Clinton won 40 percent statewide, so a 10-point jump is what Espy needed across the whole state, and, as results trickled in from the interior parts of rural Mississippi, it was clear that Hyde-Smith was winning these areas by the same wide margins that Trump had--zero slippage.  In the end, the shift in Warren County, roughly midway between the shift in DeSoto County and the zero shift in lots of sparsely populated counties east of the heavily African-American Mississippi delta region, was representative.  

So maybe Mississippi isn't that different after all.  There, as almost everywhere else, the fault lines are

white/nonwhite
rural & small town/metropolitan

--and, for Democrats, there just isn't enough metropolitan in Mississippi.

Sweet home Mississippi

 

The above map shows, by county, the result of the 2016 presidential election in Mississippi.  I suspect it's a lot bluer than most people would have guessed.  Clinton carried 26 of the state's 82 counties, and in the single biggest county--Hinds, home of Jackson--she received more than 70% of the vote.  

But don't be fooled: Mississippi is a deep red state.  The preeminent theme in its voting patterns is summed up in the phrase "racial polarization."  The organizing principle of the above map is an election result but you could as well say that it depicts the state's racial demographics.  Mississippi is about 38% African-American and the "black belt" is basically the western quarter of the state. 

There are different ways of expressing the degree of racial polarization in Mississippi voting, but one of the best might be here, where an NPR table of the county results allows you to order the counties by demographic characteristics.  If you choose "race," you will see that the 39 whitest counties all went for Trump, and the 22 blackest all went for Clinton.  So that accounts for 61 of 82 counties.  Oktibbeha County, in the east central part of the state, is a bit of an outlier--the difference between Clinton's share of the vote (49%) and the African-American part of the population (37%) was wider there than in any other county except Lafayette, which is home to the town of Oxford and the University of Mississippi.  The biggest town in Oktibbeha County is Starkville, home to Mississippi State University.  Only two Mississippi counties have a higher percentage of college graduates than Oktibbeha, and Clinton eked out a 1-point win there.  If Oktibbeha had gone for Trump, he would have carried the 52 whitest counties and lost the 22 blackest.  There would then be only eight counties unaccounted for.  You might form the hypothesis that those eight counties are the ones in which African-Americans make about 45 to 50 percent of the population, so that the very few whites who vote Democratic have the potential to put the Democrat over the top.  And, indeed, the demographic data tend to confirm the hypothesis: the percentage of African-Americans in these eight counties is 47, 47, 47, 48, 48, 50, 51, and 52.  

As I type, the polls are open in Mississippi for today's runoff election for US Senate.  I've heard commentators say that the campaign has been "racialized" but it would probably be more accurate to say that the miserable campaign of the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, has only delivered the racial divide into plain sight.  When I last checked in, Hyde-Smith was prattling about her fondness for "public hangings" in a state with an ugly history of lynching, which so far as I know is the only form of public hanging ever practiced in Mississippi.  When African-Americans took offense, she for awhile said nothing, then in a debate read from her notes a perfunctory "apology" that was the functional equivalent of "I'm sorry if you are so stupid as to be offended by my harmless jests."  Pictures of her posing with Confederate paraphernalia--the flags and uniforms and "Johnny Reb" hats--then began to circulate.  "Mississippi history at its best!" she wrote in a caption for a Facebook post showing herself in the rebel hat holding a rifle.  In the past days, we've learned of her attendance, in the 1970s, at Lawrence County Academy, one of the many "segregation academies" set up in Mississippi as a work-around for court ordered integration of the public schools.  I suppose the obvious defense would be that she can't be blamed for where her parents decided to send her to school.  But then it turns out that she and her husband sent their daughter to Brookhaven Academy, which was established at the same time as Lawrence County Academy and for the same reason.  Of course, it's technically illegal to ban African-Americans from attending these schools, but, not too surprisingly given their history and purpose, a ban isn't really necessary.  During the 2015-16 school year, there were 392 students enrolled at Brookhaven Academy, and one (1) was African-American.  The school is in Lincoln County, which is 31% African-American.  Hyde-Smith's daughter graduated last year.

I guess we will see tonight what Mississipians make of all this, if anything.  Here is the math for Democrat Mike Espy.  If African-American turnout is heavy, they might be able to make themselves, at most, 40 percent of the electorate.  However, a rough-and-ready estimate of the percentage of white Mississipians who vote Democratic is ten (10)--no typo, it's 10--and ninety percent of sixty percent is fifty-four percent.  Espy needs a lot of white Republican voters to conclude that Hyde-Smith is unacceptable.  To this outsider, she appears to have tried valiantly to persuade them, but Mississippi is a different place and she likely knows her people better than I.

Robert Caro on "the passage of power": Nov. 22, 1963

 

Whenever I'm in Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis's largest independent book store, I see the lineup of Robert Caro's LBJ biography, the different thick volumes standing side by each and taking up most of a shelf, standard price for the paperbacks $9.99 and for the hardbacks $14.99, and I beat back the temptation by telling myself I'm 60, I'd have to devote to these tomes too big a share of my remaining reading time, so they're certain just to take up space besides other good intentions.  But yesterday I took in my hand The Passage of Power, which covers the years 1958 to 1964, the first six of my life, and I noticed first how $14.99 compared to the $35.00 shown on the jacket and then, in the table of contents, the simple chilling title of Part III: "Dallas."  It was 55 years almost to the day.  I bought it and, when the Vikings game was over, read in bed starting in the middle with "Dallas" and on and on till 3 in the morning.

For sustained narrative force and brilliance, I'm not sure what can match Caro's account of the events of November 22, 1963, from the perspective of Lyndon Johnson.  Of course the events themselves were dramatic, but in Caro's hand--well, you don't notice that it's gotten to be 2:40 a.m.  Particularly effective is the way he interweaves the mundane events happening in Washington, where a Senate committee was taking testimony in a matter that had the potential to catch LBJ in a minor scandal, and the editors of Life magazine were meeting to discuss and make assignments for a journalistic investigation of the vice president's affairs that might further darken his prospects, with the unfolding itinerary in Texas as it moves from early to mid-morning and dreadfully toward what you know is coming in the early afternoon.  I think it's analogous to the mysterious force of the gate-knocking scene in Macbeth, which De Quincey, in his famous essay, attributes to the way in which the reassertion of ordinariness endows the murder with a kind of suspended-in-time horror that, in the theater, can be hard to bear.

Things weren't looking good for Johnson that morning.  He'd been the majority leader in the US Senate, arguably the second most powerful person in the American government, but now for a couple of years he'd been vice president, a position one of his predecessors had described with a joke:

Once there were two brothers.  One ran away to sea, the other was elected vice president of the United States.  And nothing was heard from either of them again.

That was Johnson's view, too.  Moreover, he well knew what was going on in Washington that day and how it could cloud his political future.  He deemed it not just possible, but likely, that he would be dropped from the Kennedy ticket in 1964.  After all, the whole purpose of his selection had been to provide geographic balance and to deliver the electoral votes of Texas.  Now, notwithstanding the identity of his vice president, Kennedy found it necessary to travel to Texas to heal a rift in the Democratic party.  The president even had to order the state's Democratic senator, Ralph Yarborough, to drive in a car with Johnson--the senator's impulse being to "snub" Johnson, the word in quotes being the one deployed that morning in a headline in the Dallas News to describe Yarborough's desire to avoid being associated with Johnson.  (More of the intermingling of the ordinary in-fighting and maneuvering--pettiness--with the looming cataclysm.)  The vice president was an ambitious man but the door was closing.  Kennedy would be reelected in 1964.  By 1968, his brother, Robert, the attorney general, would be four years older with four more years of experience, possibly in a different cabinet post, and he'd be a Kennedy, from Massachusetts and Harvard, whereas Johnson, 55 years old that morning, was from the hill country of Texas and a graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers College.  He resented the Kennedys, and Robert, in particular, hated him.

In the motorcade, the vice president's car, by protocol, followed the armored car trailing the president's car at a prescribed distance.  Johnson's wife, Lady Bird, tried making small talk with Yarborough but failed.  When shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service agent sitting beside the driver, whirled and grabbed Johnson by the shoulder, shouting "Get down, get down" as he hurdled over the seat, forcing the vice president to the floor and covering him with his own body.  The car accelerated to keep up with the president's, which as everyone now knows was racing to Parkland Hospital.  Johnson spent the time on the floor of the back seat, uncomfortably smothered by Youngblood's body.  Sometimes, what an author doesn't say, but shows, can be highly effective, and in this case Caro is able to convey, without explicitly saying, that lying uncomfortably on the floor of the vehicle, smothered by Youngblood and racing to Parkland, Lyndon Johnson was not in shock, not overwhelmed, but almost certainly thinking--very clearly thinking, calculating, seeing ahead, coming to conclusions about how to proceed.  He knew the score and inning.  At the hospital emergency entrance, he was hustled from the car and into the interior of the building, turning first down one corridor and then another as agents looked for a suitable room that could be made secure. 

Caro describes the room they settled on--sterile, haphazard, artificial light, a drawn curtain to form a cubicle, hospital standard-issue.  Someone got two folding chairs.  Lady Bird sat in one, Johnson remained standing, his face set, body still.  They waited for news.  After around a quarter hour, a Kennedy aide came to the door, in tears, and said, "He's gone."  The reason you know Johnson had been thinking is that he quietly began rejecting the advice of the Secret Service, which, fearing a conspiracy and possible general assault on the US Government, wanted to return immediately to the airport and get up in the air on Air Force One.  But Johnson asked simply, "What about Mrs Kennedy?"  Told that she would not leave without her husband's body, Johnson said they'd travel to the airport but would wait aboard Air Force One for the coffin and Jackie Kennedy.  It may have seemed to some a magnanimous act, and maybe there was some of that, but, as Caro unwinds the story of the day, it becomes clear that there was a very large admixture of statecraft under pressure as well as political calculation. 

Johnson became president upon the death of Kennedy.  But there was also the matter of the oath of office, an event of considerable symbolic import.  Where would it be administered?  He didn't want to wait to get back to Washington.  He wanted to take the oath in Dallas. He may very well have come to that conclusion as Rufus Youngblood lay atop him on the floor of the vice presidential car.  He wanted everyone possible associated with President Kennedy, and preeminently his widow, to be beside him as he took the oath.  From Air Force One, he telephoned Robert Kennedy, who had been eating lunch at his Virginia home, to inquire about the wording of the oath, who could administer it, and whether it was permissible to do it in Dallas.  Anyone could have supplied the answers, but Johnson chose to call grief-stricken Robert Kennedy, probably because he wanted it reported in the press that the dead president's brother was onboard with what he, Johnson, caused to happen.  A photographer was secured, because Johnson wanted the oath-taking to be disseminated as well, and when Mrs Kennedy had boarded with the coffin and a federal judge had arrived to administer the oath, the famous picture was taken and Johnson's goal achieved--the world and all Americans would see, at the earliest possible moment, that the necessary and constitutional succession of power had occurred, that the government of the United States was functioning, and that Lyndon Johnson, with the consent and assistance of the Kennedy family and administration, now stood at its head.  Here is a sample from Caro's narration:

The man underneath Rufus Youngblood was lying very quietly, seemingly calm, except when his body was jolted forward or back as the car braked or accelerated or swerved.  His composure would have surprised most people who knew Lyndon Johnson, but not the few who had seen him in other moments of physical danger, including moments when he was under gunfire.  Johnson's customary reaction to physical danger, real or imagined, was so dramatic, almost panicky, that at college he had the reputation of being "an absolute physical coward."  All during World War II he had done everything he could to avoid combat.  Realizing, however, that, "for the sake of political future," as one of President Roosevelt's aides wrote, he had to be able to say he had at least been in a combat zone, he went to the South Pacific and flew as an observer on a bomber that was attacked by Japanese Zeroes.  And as the Zeroes were heading straight for the bomber, firing as they came, its crew saw Lyndon Johnson climb into the navigator's bubble so that he could get a better view, and stand there staring right at the oncoming planes, "just as calm," in the words of one crew member, "as if he were on a sight-seeing tour."  Although his customary reaction to minor pain or illness was "frantic," "hysterical"--he would, says Posh Oltorf, "complain so often, and so loudly" about indigestion that  "you thought he might be dying"--when in 1955, in Middleburg, Virginia, a doctor told Johnson that this time the "indigestion" was the heart attack he had always feared, Johnson's demeanor changed.  Lying on the floor of Middleburg's ambulance--it was actually a hearse--as it was speeding to Washington, he was composed and cool as he made decisions: telling the doctor and Oltorf, who were riding in the ambulance, what hospital he was to be taken to, which members of his staff should be there when he  arrived; telling Oltorf where his will was, and how he wanted its provisions carried out.  It was a major heart attack--when he arrived at the hospital, doctors game him only a fifty-fifty chance of survival--and at one point during the trip Johnson told the doctor that he couldn't stand the pain.  But when the doctor told him that giving him an injection to dull it would require stopping for a few minutes, and that "time means a lot to you," Johnson said, "If time means a lot, don't stop."  There were even wry remarks; when the doctor told him that if he recovered, he would never be able to smoke again, he said, "I'd rather have my pecker cut off."  Lady Bird was always saying that her husband was "a good man in a tight spot."  Oltorf had never believed her--until that ambulance ride.  He had thought he knew Johnson so well, he was to say; he had realized on that ride that he didn't know him at all.  This, in Dallas, was a tight spot.  Lying on the floor of the back seat with Youngblood still on top of him, Johnson asked the Secret Service man what had happened.  Youngblood said that "the President must have been shot or wounded," that they were heading for a hospital, that he didn't know anything, and that he wanted everyone to stay down--Johnson down on the floor--until he found out.

"All right, Rufus," Lyndon Johnson said.  A reporter who later asked Youngblood to describe the tone of Johnson's voice as he said this summarized the agent's response in a single word: "calm."

A moment later, the voice on the shortwave radio told Youngblood that they were heading for Parkland Hospital, and the agent, shouting, he was to recall, against the noise of the wind and the wail of police sirens, told Johnson what to do when they arrived: to get out of the car and into some area the Secret Service could make secure without stopping for anything, even to find out what had happened to the President.  "I want you and Mrs Johnson to stick with me and the other agents as close as you can.  We are going into the hospital and we aren't gonna stop for anything or anybody.  Do you understand?"

"Okay, pardner, I understand," Lyndon Johnson said.

That was just about exactly 55 years ago now.  I was in kindergarten, it was the Friday before Thanksgiving--Thanksgiving was as late as it can be that year--and when I got home the house smelled of baking bread, because that's what my mom did on Fridays in the cold-weather months: she baked dinner rolls and cinnamon rolls.  You don't consider smell your most important sense but I don't think there's any that makes a stronger imprint on the memory, or maybe it's especially the smell of baking bread that can do that.  To me it all seems somehow mixed up now with a sensation of lost innocence.  Never smell baking bread anymore and for sure presidents don't travel in open motorcades either.

 

Viagra, climate change, Gopher football

 

Since I watch a lot of sports on TV, I've seen the ad for the service that permits members of my demographic group to arrange for their Viagra to be discreetly delivered to them through the US mail, thereby avoiding unwanted face-to-face interactions at a pharmacy, and around the 74th time I saw it I wondered whether, somewhere in America, there might be one or four young women who watch televised football and are wondering why they need the permission of eight strangers to secure their preferred form of contraception.  

Everyone knows about the strategy of a presidential administration dropping bad news late Friday afternoon, about the time happy hour specials start.  But how about the Trump administration releasing the federal government's latest climate change report late in the afternoon of the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend?  Let's see, what don't they want us to hear?  The opening grafs of the New York Times article:

A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century's end.

The report . . . is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump's agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth.

Mr. Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks, and has vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, under which nearly every country in the world pledged to cut carbon emissions. Just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snap in the Northeast, tweeting, "Whatever happened to Global Warming?"

But in direct language, the 1,656 page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds.

It's encouraging, I guess, to learn that some people who work in government--career professionals, the despised and faceless "federal bureaucrats"--have their noses to the grindstone and are turning out work in the public interest.  The president, however, would no doubt like to fire them.  Since he so far hasn't been able to do that, it will have to suffice to release their work product on Black Friday.  He thinks that climate change is a hoax.  Asked about the scientific consensus on the other side of the question, he recently claimed to possess "a natural instinct for science" and assured his interviewer that climate change was cyclical: things would soon swing back in the other direction, he has a natural instinct for these things!

If Trump were God, and around a third of Americans seem to think he is, then this gambit would qualify as faith-based science of the kind that our MAGA friends think should be taught in school science class.  The whole business about forming hypotheses, collecting data, forming tentative conclusions that are then tested further, subjecting findings to the review of peers--wasted effort, Trump has a natural instinct!  It works similarly with (for example) the CIA's conclusions regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election and the culpability of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince for the murder of the Washington Post journalist.

The way in which the federal government's elected officials are currently working against the efforts of the federal government's career professionals reminds me, vaguely, of a recent misadventure within the Detroit police department.  Some cops, pretending to be drug buyers, approached some other cops, who were pretending to be drug sellers, and soon the two sides of cops were trying to arrest one another and brawling when the "bad guys" resisted.  Honest!  Probably lucky no one was shot, and a gift from God to Motor City's criminal defense bar.  You going to believe these guys' testimony about what went down?  Then you must be from MAGA land.  

For me, probably the most attractive aspect of what I used to think of as "the conservative temperament" related to the inclination, or determination, to abjure immediate gratification in order to pursue long-term interests.  That is precisely what today's American "conservatives" never do.  Let's cut taxes, growth will wipe out deficits!  Don't think about whether that worked in the past!  Look at  that environmental terrorist in the Prius!  Probably has solar panels on his house!  It's a lot worse to be a "socialist" than to have a plan to protect people with preexisting medical conditions!  It's cold out today so shut up with your lectures about our wishful thinking!

They wouldn't recognize their former creed if a tree-hugger hit them between the eyes with it.

My neighbor is flying his big Gopher banner today but I don't remember seeing it yesterday morning. The Badgers' quarterback should probably not make any major purchases for awhile because from Superior to Racine people must already suspect that he got his price.  It's really fun for once to think up smart-ass insults to fling at the opponent, since we're so used to aiming them at our own guys.

One more election

 

So I guess there is one more election, the Mississippi runoff for US Senate, and, being Mississippi, it shouldn't be interesting, but the incumbent Republican, Cindy Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the office when her ill predecessor resigned before his term ended, is so vacant that it's attracting my attention even though I assume the outcome isn't in doubt.  I wrote here about the difference between Alabama and Mississippi, making the point that Mississippi has way fewer persuadable Republicans such as reside in places like Huntsville, Alabama, where there is a thriving aerospace industry that employs people who are conservative but not crazy, and, anyway, Hyde-Smith probably isn't any dumber than Judge Roy Moore and presumably without certain distasteful tendencies.  Can't see her losing.

But boy is she dumb.  I thought at first that the snafu concerning her avidity for public hangings was just a slip of the tongue.  I guess I still think that, sort of.  There's arguably a difference between a "public hanging" and a lynching, and she should have made that point immediately, then begged forgiveness for having unintentionally given offense.  Instead, she allowed herself to be filmed while repeatedly stonewalling questions about the matter, until finally she retreated and some handler took the mic to ask: What about all the African-American babies who've been aborted?  (This is what people say to indicate that their opposition to abortion rights trumps even their benighted  racial views.)  If her goal was to keep her flubs front and center, A+ work Cindy!  Then while people were beginning to wonder whether she's a bigot or just politically all thumbs, out come the pictures of her aiming a musket while dressed up in Confederate garb, with the result that her being a moron is now the charitable interpretation.

Last night she debated her Democratic opponent, Mike Espy.  Uff-da. She had on the lectern in front of her a high pile of notes that looked like it might be the lost manuscript of Dostoevski's longest novel.  Of course it's hard in all that mass to find what you're looking for in order to answer a particular question, but apparently she was comforted by the knowledge that what she was supposed to say was there, somewhere, if only she could put her finger on it.  Her notes did not prevent her from saying, in her prepared conclusion:

Tonight, you have heard two clearly different opposite differences between me and my opponent.

Which raises the question: How were her notes supposed to help her, considering that she has trouble reading?

It's fashionable, though possibly unfair, to run down our own times and glorify an idealized past that didn't exist.  Nevertheless I can't suppress the thought that around 250 years ago there were only about 2.5 million people living between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains, and they included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, &c.  Nowadays, we are a transcontinental nation of well over 300 million souls and one of the 100 seats in the Senate created by the aforementioned founders is occupied by Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Well, African-Americans make about 38 percent of the voting-age population of Mississippi, and if they all turn out Hyde-Smith will probably only win by about 10 points.

Gerrymandering in East Minnesota

 

In yesterday's rundown of the gerrymandering effect in the midterm election I somehow overlooked what happened in my second favorite state, Wisconsin, first of fifty in the category of roadside signs.

Cigarettes! Liquor! Fireworks! Cheese!
 Next Exit!

I know, I know: white-coated professionals warn against the over consumption of cheese, but just the other three are enough for a full life, and all are for sale--including on Sunday, Minnesotans!--at the top of the ramp.  

The accompanying graphic, even with the right margin chopped, pretty much tells the tale of what happened a couple weeks ago in the Wisconsin election for its State Assembly.  Across Wisconsin, Democratic candidates received about 1,310,000 votes to 1,100,000 for Republicans, or 54-46 in percentage terms.  Yet this near landslide in the popular vote did not hand to the Dems control of the Assembly.  Not even close: Republicans won 63 of the 99 races despite being outpolled across the state by more than 200,000 votes.  I don't know what the rules are in Wisconsin, but if their State Assembly were like the US Senate, the party preferred by a minority of voters would enjoy a filibuster-proof majority in the legislative body.

Some people argue that "there is no such thing as a statewide popular vote for State Assembly"--which is true in the sense that there are no at-large representatives: each member represents a particular district.  But of course it's still possible to add up the statewide votes, notice the partisan composition of the Assembly, and make a judgment about whether people are getting what they vote for.  They're not.  A Democratic voter in Madison is getting her Democratic assemblywoman (or -man), but presumably she voted for the Democrat because she prefers Democratic policies, and she's getting Republican policies crammed down her throat.  So she's told that the solution for that is voting.  But she did!  And her side got more votes!  Nevertheless, the other side is calling the shots.

It's also pointed out that the Democratic vote in Wisconsin is heavily concentrated in Milwaukee and Dane (home of Madison) Counties.  I guess the idea is that the overwhelming Democratic vote in these population centers accounts for the disparity in outcomes between the statewide vote and the partisan composition of the Assembly.  Even if it were true, I don't think that's much of a defense, inasmuch as it's just a way of admitting that rural votes have more weight than metropolitan ones in determining statewide policy.  But it's not even true.  The disparity in outcomes is too great.  In court challenges, gerrymandering foes have advanced their cause by calling mathematicians and computer scientists as witnesses.  There are a finite number of ways of carving a defined region into a certain number of districts of equal population.  With respect to Wisconsin, for instance, there are only so many ways to divide the state's area into 99 districts, each with the same number of residents.  We also know the vote count down to the precinct level.  The task is then to determine, by superimposing the election outcome over all the possible district arrangements, the probability that the vote pattern results in the side with 46% having at least 50% in a majority of the 99 districts.  An ancillary task would be to determine the likelihood of the side with 46% having at least 50% in more than 60 districts.  Yet another task might be to impose the requirement that the 99 districts be of "regular shape"--whatever reasonable definition of "regular shape" you might care to adopt--and then determine the likelihood that the side with 46% gets at least 50% in a majority of 99 regularly shaped districts.  With the aid of computer modeling, it's possible to calculate all these probabilities, and the upshot is that they are vanishingly small.  Achieving a 63-36 majority in the State Assembly with a 46-54 deficit in the statewide vote requires not luck but human engineering--in other words, Republican work groups wielding sophisticated mapping software to ensure that a majority, once won, is never relinquished.

Actually, it's all sort of a silly exercise, because you can believe the mathematicians or you can just believe the Republicans themselves.  They're not really secretive about it.  They regard the redistricting authority as part of an electoral spoils system and fully expect to get screwed over themselves in the event that Democrats should somehow win a majority in a census year.  In their view, now Democrats and later Republicans will be losers, and the only eternal loser is democratic ideals. 

Here's a radical idea: take away from state legislatures the redistricting authority and grant it instead to nonpartisan commissions.  Fight over details concerning the composition of the commissions.  It's impossible that the result of the fight would be a system worse than the one we have.

Miscellany

Here's an instance of what Freud called "the psychopathology of everyday life."  Last night, I'm at home, TV turned to the Vikings game, scrolling deliriously through Twitter and following links down rabbit holes until suddenly it was the third quarter and, taking note of the score, I set down my phone because I realized we'd lose for sure if I didn't get serious about watching.  

Kill that rat before it dies!

One of the tweets I read was from possibly my favorite tweeter, Scott Shapiro, who observed ("tweeted"): "One of the cool things about books is that you can read them even without a good WiFi signal."  Sort of amusing to think of him setting aside his book to lob that into the ether.  My youngest just turned 8.  Her aunt gave her a book and I was relieved when she did not try tapping the title or dragging her finger across the cover.

Following up from yesterday, the final result of the recount in the Florida Senate race showed Republican Rick Scott defeating Democrat Bill Nelson by 10,033 votes--33 more than my rough-and-ready estimate of the number of votes Nelson lost due to poor ballot design in Broward County.  Disappointing for us Democrats but at least no Republican ever again will say, "Democrats can always find the extra votes if they need them to win a close one."  (Until the next time a Democrat wins a close one.)  The topic of election administration and incompetence reminds me that the most disappointing election result may have been Stacey Abrams's loss in the Georgia governor's race.  Her opponent, Brian Kemp, a manifest creep and suppressor of African-American voting rights, was also the current secretary of state in Georgia.  Media coverage focused on the obvious conflict between his role as candidate for governor and official overseer of state elections, which tended to obscure his generalized incompetence.  It's outrageous, for example, that Georgia has no paper backup system for its machine voting and is therefore totally screwed in the event of a successful hack.  What's he been doing as secretary of state, pleasuring himself in the men's room?  Abrams was the superior candidate by 3.6 astronomical units and I regret to say that she lost on account of her race--would have had a better chance if she could have traded in her Yale law degree for tawnier skin.  White women voted for Kemp by 3-to-1, same as white men:  no gender gap when the candidates are of different hues.  I've been looking for a new demographic to join and apparently will have to change more than my gender.

[Mounts hobby horse for conclusion.]

In the midterm races for Ohio's state legislature, the statewide vote was evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, yet Republican candidates won 73 of 116 races: so, half the vote, 63% of the representation.  This result mirrored the outcome of the races for US House, in which Ohio Republicans won only 52% of the statewide vote but 12 of the 16 congressional seats.  Meanwhile, in North Carolina, the congressional delegation will remain 10-3 Republican despite the fact that half the state's voters pulled the lever for the Democrat in the House race on their ballot.  More details here. Raise barriers to voting and cram all the Democrats into just a few districts--I think that will be the Republican strategy going forward because the caravan seems to have dropped off the face of the earth soon as the polls closed on Election Day.

Ballot designs in south Florida

 

Criticism of election administration in south Florida has it all wrong.  The problem isn't with security or counting.  The problem is with ballot design.  The above is an image of a Broward county ballot from the recent midterm election.  Notice how the ballot instructions are entirely contained within the first of the ballot's three columns.  At the top of the middle column, where it can't be missed, is the high-profile governor's race.  The US Senate race is squirreled away in the first column beneath the instructions, where it can be easily overlooked by someone whose eye is attracted first to the gubernatorial choice.  The ballot instructions should go all the way across the top of the ballot, and there should never ever be, in the same column, both instructions and a space for voting.  It's especially bad if the instructions take up most of the column and then, at the very bottom, there are just one or two ballot choices to be made.  This detail of the Broward County ballot is expressly condemned by commissions that study election administration and issue recommendations on "best practices" to election officials.

Does it matter?  Well, all over Florida, from the panhandle down the Gulf side, around Miami-Dade, but skipping Broward County, then up the rest of the Atlantic coast to Georgia, including also the interior--Orlando, Gainseville--the number of votes for governor and US senator were a near match.  Which makes sense: who would trouble themselves to vote but skip the election for either governor or US Senate, the two marquee races?  In Broward County, however, about 26,000 ballots--3.7%, or about 1-out-of-every-27--indicated a choice for governor but no vote in the senate race.  It's because of the ballot design!  Broward is a heavily Democratic county and the most populous in Florida.  The Democratic Senate candidate, Bill Nelson, got more than twice as many votes in Broward as Republican Rick Scott.  Had there been an additional 26,000 votes, distributed between the candidates in the same proportion, Nelson would have gained about 10,000 votes in that one county.  It appears right now that Scott is going to be declared the winner of the statewide race by about 12,000 votes.

So, yes, it matters.

The astounding aspect of this misadventure is to me the way in which education did not occur.  Palm Beach County is just to the north of Broward County.  In the 2000 presidential election, the vote for wingnut Pat Buchanan tracked the Bush vote all over Florida: that is, Buchanan got his highest vote shares in the counties that went heavily for Bush and he did his worst in the counties carried by Gore.  (Skeptics can satisfy themselves of this fact by clicking around on this interactive map.) The exception was Palm Beach County, which was one of Buchanan's best results in the state despite going for Gore by 62-35 percent.  What could account for that?  The terrible design of the Palm Beach County ballot!  In that case, it was the notorious "butterfly ballot" that placed candidates for the same office not in a single vertical array but in separate columns, so that some names were opposite others.  It happened that Gore's name was opposite Buchanan's, and the result was almost certainly that a lot of people (especially the sight-impaired elderly among south Florida's population), meaning to vote for Gore, inadvertently marked their ballots for Buchanan.  In the certified final result, Buchanan received 3,411 votes in the Democratic stronghold of Palm Beach, and Bush carried the state by 537 votes.

The point is not about partisan advantage but just basic competence.  (The consequences of the incompetence fall by chance hither or thither.)  What happened in Palm Beach County in 2000 should have alerted election officials from sea to shining sea about the perils of poor ballot design.  But apparently officials in the county next to Palm Beach weren't paying attention.  I'm sure they weren't the only ones, but by bad luck Florida's close elections are directing attention to their incompetence.  Administering elections is what election officials do for a living.  Why aren't they better at it?  I have to laugh every time I see on the news an item about some fledgling democracy conducting an election "with the assistance of American advisers."  Like we're the great experts!  Our charity should begin at home, in Florida.

O O O O that Shakespeherian rag

The place of A.C. Bradley in the history of Shakespeare criticism may be judged by the following lines from the pen of some forgotten wag of the 1920s, which places it a couple of decades after the publication of Shakespearean Tragedy and a decade before Bradley's death, in 1935:

I dreamt last night that Shakespeare's Ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper for that year
Had several questions on King Lear--
Which Shakespeare answered very badly,
Because he hadn't read his Bradley.

The most interesting droppings from the Wikipedia entry for Bradley concern how he was the youngest of 21 [sic] children born to the preacher Charles Bradley and his second wife, a circumstance that may account for Bradley never marrying and living for much of his adult life with one of his many sisters: I imagine each of them, at some point in their young lives, separately considering the crowded conditions in the parsonage and concluding that there must be a better way to live.  

Shakespearean Tragedy is largely a commentary on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, which are taken up in turn and in the order of probable composition.  For the general reader, the attraction is accessibility.  Over and over again, you read something and think it's exactly right and would have occurred to you, too, if only you were as smart and careful a reader as Bradley.  For example:

Imagine Goneril uttering the famous words [of Lady Macbeth, explaining why she had not herself killed Duncan], Had he not resembled/My father as he slept, I had done 't.  They are spoken, I think, without any sentiment--impatiently, as though she regretted her weakness: but it was there.

I wonder whether Bradley's choice of plays to discuss elevated them above the others (so strong has been his influence), or whether he chose them because they were already regarded as preeminent.  It does seem that Hamlet, the first of them, likely written in 1600, the year Shakespeare turned 36, represents a new phase: it's about half again as long as any of its approximately twenty predecessors in the drama and contains more than 600 words that Shakespeare had not till then deployed in any play or poem.  He also for the first time abandons plot plausibility in order to create swirling effects of psychological disturbance, despair, savagery, and nihilism--effects that carry through in Othello (1603?), King Lear (1605?), and Macbeth (1606?).  The implications for Shakespeare's biography are intriguing but Bradley's focus is on these four plays, especially the characters.  One learns to keep one's guard up and not be knocked out by famous, soaring passages that are frequently turned in some way by a terse and regrettably forgotten reply.  

Macbeth:
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

And from The Tempest:

Miranda:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in 't!

Prospero:
'Tis new to thee.

Trump: "This is what I've been saying"

It happens that yesterday, while I was typing up my opus on Trump's bogus claims of voter fraud, the president was himself sitting for an oval office interview with The Daily Caller.  One of the questions related to the ongoing vote count in Broward County, Florida.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States:

Look, you know, the bottom line--it's, she's [Broward County election commissioner Brenda Snipes] a disaster.  You look at her past, she's a disaster.  Even with me.  I won Florida and, you remember?  That area, Broward, didn't come in.  It didn't come in.  I think Palm Beach was like--they wouldn't call Florida, I won.  Then it got to a point where I won by enough that all the votes of the people that lived there would, you know, in other words--you can only put in so many votes, although she may change that system.  

You can only put in a number of people that are registered voters or live there.  Now they're, I guess they were trying to take illegal voters but these are--I've been saying, this is a problem all over the country, by the way.  This is what I've been saying.

This is a problem in California that's so bad of illegals voting.  This is a California problem and if you notice, almost every race--I was watching today--out of like 11 races that are in question they're gonna win all of them.

The Republicans don't win and that's because of potentially illegal votes, which is what I've been saying for a long time.  I have no doubt about it.  And I've seen it, I've had friends talk about it when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles.  Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.  Nobody takes anything.  It's really a disgrace what's going on.

The disgrace is that, voter ID.  If you buy, you know, a box of cereal, if you do anything, you have a voter ID.

Well, over here, the only thing you don't is if you're a voter of the United States.  A voter in the United States of America.  I think it's a disgrace what's going on.   Really a disgrace.  And they try to shame everybody by calling them racist or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID.  But voter ID is a very important thing.

If you look at what happened in New Hampshire, where thousands of people came up and voted from a very liberal part of Massachusetts and they came up in buses and they voted.  I said, 'what's going on over here,' my people said, 'you won New Hampshire easily except they have tremendous numbers of buses coming up.'  They're pouring up by the hundreds, buses of people getting out, voting.  Then they're supposed to go back within 90 days.  And of the people that are supposed to go back, almost none of them do.  In other words, they go back after the vote is over.  They go back--and I think it's like three percent--I mean, almost nobody goes back to show that, you know, that they were allowed to vote.  And so what do you do?  Recall the election.  I mean, there, you should be able to recall the election.

Whew.  I think I got that right.  The full transcript is here, if anyone wants to check my work.  It's sort of hard to transcribe, toggling back and forth between screens.  Usually you can read a sentence on one screen and memorize it long enough to type it into another screen, because the sentence is a sentence and makes sense, but that is not an advantage bestowed upon stenographers of our president's speech acts.

Massive fraud? No, just counting votes

It's pretty clear by now that the eternal Republican cry--"Voter fraud!"--every time they lose a close election is an automatic reflex unconnected to reality.  They disbanded their "voter fraud commission" without discovering a thing, yet here is the president:

Trying to STEAL two big elections in Florida! We are watching closely!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2018

It's a serious charge.  What is the evidence?  The elections are close, and as more ballots are counted, the Democratic candidates gain; therefore, the votes are being "discovered" "out of nowhere" and there is "massive fraud" (Trump's words from other tweets).  I think that's a fair summary of the unspecified "evidence." 

But of course the votes aren't being discovered out of nowhere.  There are mailed ballots, provisional ballots, overseas ballots, military ballots.  All require special processing, the mailed ballots are by far the most numerous, and all but the military ballots trend Democratic.  We know this from past experience and it's not that hard to understand why.  People who vote on Election Day self-select for being older and more traditional in outlook--the selfsame traits that incline one toward voting Republican.  They include most retired people, who do not find it inconvenient to show up at their polling place on a particular Tuesday at 10 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon.  People who request a ballot beforehand and mail it in so that it's received by Election Day--they're a different group: younger, impatient with tradition (and lines), many with jobs (or hustles) that require travel, so that on October 1 they don't know where they'll be on a particular Tuesday five weeks hence.  It's their envelopes that are now being opened, signatures compared, ballots smoothed for the scanner, the results added to the Election Day tally.  And these voters prefer the Democrats.  It's all familiar to anyone interested in elections and explains, for example, why two years ago Hillary Clinton's margin in the national popular vote kept increasing as more and more ballots were counted after Election Day.  There was no controversy about it then because there was no prospect of the mailed ballots affecting the electoral college result.  Now, however, the Democrat passed the Republican in the Arizona Senate race, more and more Democratic candidates are being declared the winner in California congressional races, and the high-profile races for Senate and governor in Florida are tightening.  Massive fraud!

President Trump may or may not be ignorant of these widely known facts but it is certainly true that he enjoys fomenting anger, suspicion, division, and doubt.  He hasn't quite said so, but his view seems to be that any narrow Democratic victory is illegitimate, and his camp followers concur.  Here is John Hinderaker, of the Power Line blog, on the day after the election:

The midterm elections are turning out just about exactly as most observers expected.  By historical standards, the Democrats underperformed.  They stand to net somewhere between 25 and 35 House seats, a mediocre performance for a new president's first midterms.  Meanwhile, the GOP will gain two to four Senate seats, depending on how Arizona and Montana turn out.  Republicans Martha McSally and Matt Rosendale currently lead in those races, which will test the theory that Republicans can't win close elections because the Democrats can always find a few extra votes if they need them.

I love how lightly this is tossed off.  The "evidence" will be if the Democrat wins (which they did).  What could possibly rebut the (very serious) charge?  The result of the 2000 presidential election?  The Republicans ultimately prevailing this year in Florida's gubernatorial and senate races?  A long list of  elections between these bookends in which the Republican was declared the winner of a very close race?  I'm not going to bother compiling such a list, because the claim cannot be falsified.  It's put out there without evidence and there is no evidence that would cause it to be withdrawn.

Pollsters outperform my new ISP

Oh boy, I have switched internet service providers and no wonder I'm saving money with the new guys: so far, all they've done is zinged my credit card for the first month's payment and expressed puzzlement about why I can't connect.  The upside is I am discovering how pleasant it is to sit inside this neighborhood café with a plate full of pancakes, a cup of coffee, complimentary WiFi, and the sun streaming in the tall windows.  Hope I don't spill syrup on my keyboard.  

This being south Minneapolis, the young woman in front of me, way more chic than I (honest!), also has her laptop open, and is either remotely prosecuting her employer's business or maybe working on her screen play, the Diablo Cody of 2018.  The young man over my right shoulder is running down Trump, and his female companion, during a brief interlude, finally has a chance to mention that her relative once worked for Walter Mondale.  I have enough snark to cover my fellow travelers with the left-overs.

I've been a little worried about committing a 21st century social gaffe, appearing standoffish when it's really just my bumbling new ISP.  Sue, I do follow Andy Borowitz--or did, until this past weekend, when I started saving a few dollars a month on home internet.  I just got up for a coffee refill and noticed that the Trump-hater is wearing a t-shirt that says "Shakespeare Downtown."  I don't know what that means but for some reason am reminded of all the times I've thought to myself that what the MAGA crowd calls "virtue signaling" is almost always just plain virtuous.  What can you say about people who try to make a virtue of their sneering contempt for people doing good things?  You volunteer at the shelter?  Weak!

The result of the midterm elections is moving me toward the conclusion that pollsters get an undeserved bad reputation in just the same way that weathermen do: only their failures are remembered.  It's cold today, just as the guy on the radio said it would be yesterday, and the Democrats will take control of the House, with a net gain of 35-40 seats, though the Republicans might gain a couple of Senate seats, also all as predicted.  Moreover, supposed errors are exaggerated.  For example, at the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, an average of the polls indicated Clinton had about a 3-point lead, and she won the national popular vote by just over 2 percent.  Were the polls off by 0.9%?  Horrors!  (It's more likely that there was a bit of movement toward Trump in the final hours.)  On Election Eve 2016, Nate Silver, a card-carrying member of the despised media elite, gave Trump a 30 percent chance of prevailing in the electoral college.  A couple days later, Trumpists gleefully noted his "error" but all that happened is that Jose Altuve's grounder made it through the infield. The pollsters did a lot better than Trump has.

Pitching a new game show

Idea for a game show:

Contestants are shown clips of actual American nutbag political types holding forth and also satiric send-ups of them such as might be performed on SNL or a Comedy Central program.  The contestants get points for correctly identifying the clip as "satire" or "real life."  For example:

 

Last night, God answered Michele Bachmann’s prayer that Democrats hadn’t taken the House by giving the Dems a few more seats. #ElectionResults2018 pic.twitter.com/6CUsLwtaey

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) November 7, 2018

Winning answer for this one would be "real life."  It's hard to lampoon some people, they are so good at it themselves.  

 

Election notes

 

Scrolling through election results last night, I noticed the above ballot initiative from the state of Nevada.  When I first saw it, the ayes and nays were evenly split, which seemed predictable, but, as the night wore on, woke men weighed in and the initiative is going to pass.  If MAGA men were smarter, they'd realize that the tax burden is being shifted onto their broad shoulders.  Maybe the next ballot initiative will relate to sales tax on chewing tobacco.

It was a rough night for Democrats in the Senate races, but I have hopes for Tester pulling through in Montana.  As of a couple hours ago, the Republican, Rosendale, was leading by fewer than 3,000 votes.  The results from 106 precincts (out of 669 total) remain to be tabulated, and they are mainly from counties carried by Tester.  The New York Times is currently projecting that when all ballots are counted there is an 89% chance that Tester will win.  In the Arizona Senate race, which is also still too close to call, the Times thinks the Republican, McSally, has a 60% chance of prevailing over Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.

No one took me up on the bet I offered regarding the US Senate and governor races in five states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  These were the key states in Trump's electoral college win, and I thought his support had eroded sufficiently that it would be safe to bet that the Democrats would win a majority--at least six--of the high-profile statewide races in these swing states.  And it turned out that, despite narrowly losing both Florida contests, the Democrats went 7-for-10, including 6-for-6 in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  Of the Democrats' seven wins, only the gubernatorial result in Wisconsin was close.  So, even if it was only because you weren't aware of the offer, congratulations on not taking the bait.  

The national result was bifurcated: a Democratic surge in the suburbs around the country's urban centers gave the Democrats their new House majority, while Republicans did very well in the Senate races, which by chance this year were contested mainly in smaller, more rural states.  The local results here in Minnesota exhibit what's happening in the country as a whole.  When I first started working in local government, the director of Hennepin County's election division knew I was interested in politics, and he loved lecturing me on election lore.  One of his maxims concerned household income, which he deemed the most reliable indicator of voting behavior--the higher your income, he said, the more likely you were to be a voter, and the more likely you were to prefer the Republicans.  Maybe it was true then.  It's not anymore.  The Republican incumbent representing a band of mostly affluent suburbs west of Minneapolis was trounced, and a second Republican incumbent was defeated in his south suburban-exurban district.  Meanwhile, Republicans picked up at least one, and probably two, seats in the more rural and hardscrabble first and eighth congressional districts.  If I still worked with that guy I'd tell him that, nowadays, there's a good chance all your representatives are Democrats if you live within ten minutes of a Whole Foods store.  

The local Democrats' statewide victories were fueled by landslides in the Twin Cities metro area, where the huge Democratic vote in the central cities is no longer offset by Republican gains in the suburbs.  In the state legislature, the House of Representatives flipped from Republican to Democratic control, the pickups being almost entirely in the Twin Cities suburbs.  Democrats won the open race for governor by a double-digit margin; likewise, both races for US Senate.  The trend isn't a bad one for Democrats but the name of our local party--the DFL, for Democratic-Farmer-Labor party--is about as apt as that of the NBA's Utah Jazz.  The farmers and laborers are Republicans.  The DFL's winning coalition is made of nonwhites, urban hipsters of assorted stripes, suburban moms, and the young, earnest, educated, highly caffeinated teachers, lawyers, and high-tech types who live in my neighborhood with refrigerators full of craft beer.  In the 1850s, the divide was regional, and the country almost fell apart.  I don't know what happens when the divide is intra-state.

Just a couple more notes about obsessions of mine.  In the US House, the Democrats got control despite the fact that the Republicans' gerrymander probably prevented a "wave."  Remember the "tea-party midterm" of 2010, when Republicans gained 63 seats in what was considered a Democratic meltdown?  Well, the aggregate vote for US House in that election favored Republicans by 6.7 percent, whereas the Democrats' seemingly more modest victory last night is going to clock in at right around 7.0 percent when all the votes are tabulated.  After the next census, we Democrats have to do whatever we can to keep from getting ratfucked for another decade by Republican mapmakers. 

I described here and here the criminal misadventures of the first two congressional endorsers of Donald Trump for president.  One, Chris Collins, who represents New York's 27th congressional district, is under federal indictment for insider trading.  The other, Duncan Hunter, who represents California's 50th congressional district, has been indicted for over 60 financial offenses connected to using campaign donations to bankroll his expensive personal habits.  Both were reelected last night, raising the question of what happens assuming they are convicted before their terms are up.  I'm trying to think of a clever acronym for GOP wherein G stands for Grifter.

Election Eve

 

Are you wondering what I accomplished on my 25-hour Sunday?  Well, I raked leaves, and then noticed, about an hour later, while I was obsessing about the election, that it maybe would have made more sense to climb the tree and pluck the remaining leaves from the branches, because the green of the grass was already covered again by the brownish orange leaves of the big maple tree in my front yard.  Actually, I sort of knew that was going to happen, but I needed an excuse to be outside doing something on a nice fall day, and now if Mother Nature has any more of them I'll have the same excuse again.

About the election obsessing:  my favorite website these days is FiveThirtyEight, which provides a percentage estimate of how each race in House and Senate will turn out.  Here are the most recent numbers representing the fractional chance the Democratic candidate wins the US Senate race in the named state:

Florida--------5/7
Indiana--------5/7
Missouri-------4/7
Nevada--------5/9
Arizona--------3/5

That in the world according to Nate Silver &c the Democratic candidate is at least a modest favorite in each of these purple to red states is cause for nervous delight.  If the Democrat were to prevail in all of them, the Blue Team would likely be only an upset away--Tennessee? Texas?--from winning a majority in the Senate, and their chances of winning a House majority are in the range of 7-in-8 (FiveThirtyEight's estimate, again).  But, assuming I remember my lessons from Probability and Statistics, the chance the Democrats run the table in those races is the product of the five fractions, and

5/7 x 5/7 x 4/7 x 5/9 x 3/5 < 0.1.

In other words, just under a 1-in-10 chance.  But that's if the outcomes are independent of each other.  Most likely they aren't.  It often happens that "something's in the air"--up the butt of the electorate--so that all or almost all of the close ones break in the same direction, either Democratic or Republican.  There are signs that if that's the case they are more apt to break toward the Dems.  For example, a Quinnipiac poll released this morning showed both Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson ahead by high single digits in their Florida races for governor and senate, respectively.  Most other polling had shown them ahead but by just a point or two, three at the most--all well within the poll's margin of error.  So in one big state--possible movement toward the Dems detected on Election Eve. Also, the 7-in-8 chance of Democrats winning the House is as high as FiveThirtyEight has pegged it through the entire campaign season.

On the other hand, if the toss-ups break heavily toward the Republicans, they would gain a few seats in the Senate and have a shot at holding the House as well. Trump would then in 2019 push the accelerator to the floor, possibly put out a contract on the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

This is what I mean about obsessing.

My TV crush, former Republican Nicolle Wallace, said on MSNBC last night that the turnout war is all about love and hate.  You need a reason to vote, and loving your candidate or hating the other side's are the best motivators. You need one of the two, and she indicated that Democrats were poised to win on account of having both.  We hate Trump, yes.  But the Democrats also have a lot of really good candidates, many of them running neck-and-neck against a Republican in unfriendly territory.  Wallace didn't have time to name them, but I imagine she's thinking, at a minimum, of Beto O'Rourke, Stacey Abrams (the African American woman in an apparent dead heat with the Republican in Georgia's gubernatorial race), and the aforementioned Gillum, who in a debate with his Trumpean opponent landed possibly the season's heaviest body blow (see video above).  It was only two years ago that pundits were wailing about the Democrats' lack of a bench and generalized geriatric malaise--Hillary, Bernie, Joe Biden &c.  I think that problem suddenly cured itself.  

FiveThirtyEight has a guide to watching election returns--what to look for early and late--here.  I'll be looking, too, at the top-of-the-ticket races in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  These were the five states that fueled Trump's electoral college win, and by chance it happens that each of them has both a US Senate race and a governor's race this year--ten statewide contests in the battlegrounds that two years ago put Trump in the White House.  Of course I don't know what's going to happen, but if anyone wants to bet that the Republicans win half or more of those races, I'm in for as much as you want to be.

 

Snowflakes keep falling in the news

 

Here's an election note that an underinformed voter might want to become educated about.  (Just kidding, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway.)  Jeff Fortenberry, a Republican, represents Nebraska's first congressional district in the US House.  As you might guess, the district is overwhelmingly Republican: according to the 538 website, it's 20 percentage points more Republican than the country as a whole, and the chance of Fortenberry losing his seat on Tuesday is currently pegged at one-fifth of one percent, or 1-in-500.  It's not a "hot race."  Nevertheless, Fortenberry has some billboards up in the district, and one of them was redrawn, some would say "vandalized," by pranksters.  The finished product is shown above.  As you can see, the distinguished member of the House was given googly eyes, a new name, and a new motto.  Ho ho ho, hilarious.

What is actually sort of hilarious is the reaction of Rep. Fortenberry, who has represented the district for seven terms without, apparently, developing a thick skin.  On October 24, he tweeted an image of the altered billboard and suggested it was an instance of "political violence" of the kind represented by the pipe bombs addressed to prominent Democrats that were then being discovered by postal inspectors.  I want to get the congressman's words right, because this is important:

Political violence, including the vandalism we see right here in Lincoln, is a threat to good citizenry and free expression in our republic.  It is not funny.  It is never acceptable.

I wish I could report that was the end of the Fartenberry scandal, but an image of the billboard, post-violence, circulated on Facebook, where it was "liked" by, among others, Ari Kohen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, which is in the district.  Professor Kohen soon received a phone call from Rep. Fortenberry's chief of staff.  Speaking to a local newspaper, Kohen described their conversation:

It wasn't clear at all what he wanted from me, if he wanted me to unlike it or retract it.  He told me that they could put this out publicly, that I liked vandalism, and essentially that that would be bad for me.

The chief of staff--his name is William "Reyn" Archer III, which sounds appropriately uptight and authoritarian--was alarmed enough to go up the chain of command, e-mailing Kohen's department chair, the dean of his college, and the chancellor of the University to inquire whether they knowingly employed a supporter of political vandalism.  For more details, including an audio of the phone conversation between Archer and Kohen, go here.  I think the upshot is, to avoid unwanted interactions with members of the United States Congress, be careful what you like on Facebook.  Also, do not be so quick to condemn the jejune disputes and hijinks of middle-schoolers as they may just be preparing themselves for a career in service to the People of America.