Tag: politics
No Labels Is Chasing A Fantasy
“On the surface, No Labels’s argument that there’s a sizable contingent of independent, moderate voters has some merit. After all, Gallup found in 2022 that 41 percent of Americans identified as independent, on average, while only 28 percent each identified as a Democrat or a Republican. The pollster has also found a bit more than one-third of the country identifies as “moderate” when it comes to ideology.
But in reality, there isn’t a huge cohort of centrist and independent voters out there — and strong partisan forces limit its size. As FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman noted in 2019, the electorate is composed of many moderates and a smaller group of independents who don’t lean toward either party. But the share of the electorate where these traits overlap is actually small — Drutman found only about 5 percent of voters were both independent and moderate. And even if we often describe these voters as centrists, many hold inconsistent ideological positions on issues that only average out to “moderate.”
Most critically, most moderates and self-identified independents tend to identify with or lean toward one of the major parties.”
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“research suggests that independent leaners vote for the party they lean toward at nearly the same rate as openly partisan voters.”
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“the systemic pressure of the Electoral College to consolidate behind two parties2 and concerns about the other side winning — accentuated by Democratic or Republican campaign ads framing No Labels as a “spoiler” — could keep dissatisfied voters from straying to a third party if they believe doing so might make it easier for the opposition to win.”
Why Guatemala’s first-round elections were so surprising
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/6/25/23773102/guatemala-elections-giammattei-president-corruption
He’s Deeply Religious and a Democrat. He Might Be the Next Big Thing in Texas Politics.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/16/james-talarico-texas-democrats-00101231
Are Black And Hispanic Americans Abandoning Biden?
How a Staunchly Blue State Let MAGA Seep In
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/02/inside-the-republican-rebound-in-new-york-00099420
GOP candidates’ $1 T-shirt tactic: Clever fundraising ploy or desperate debate-stage bid?
“Under the new rules, candidates will be required to have at least 40,000 donors to make the Aug. 23 debate stage, including at least 200 from 20 distinct states. They will also have to garner at least 1 percent in three qualifying polls, two of them national, after July 1. And they must commit to supporting the eventual Republican nominee.”
‘Numbers Nobody Has Ever Seen’: How the GOP Lost Wisconsin
“in the April election, liberal Milwaukee County judge Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly by a whopping 11 percentage points, flipping the ideological majority of the court.
In the aftermath, even Republicans here are acknowledging that the state has now shifted leftward, and abortion has a lot to do with that. The end of Roe v. Wade last year effectively reinstated Wisconsin’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is already being challenged — and those challenges will likely be decided by the state Supreme Court. That’s why Protasiewicz campaigned heavily on protecting abortion rights, and the election turned almost entirely on the issue.”
The biggest problem with Ron DeSantis’s announcement wasn’t Twitter
““Woke derangement syndrome” is not the same as being generically “anti-woke.” There are plenty of pundits and academics who have presented cogent and reasonable criticisms of the dominant approaches to identity politics on the contemporary left — ranging from Adolph Reed Jr. on the socialist left to my former colleague Matt Yglesias on the center left to Glenn Loury on the center right. Their ideas merit serious engagement rather than dismissal.
Rather, woke derangement syndrome is an obsessive focus on the evils of wokeness that warps one’s worldview. The afflicted’s participation in the culture war has, in one shape or another, distorted their judgment and weakened their hold on reality.”
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“DeSantis’s governance of Florida has shown a similar tendency to see everything through the woke lens. Whether it’s his attempt to transform a small public college into a right-wing academy, his seemingly unconstitutional effort to punish social media companies for content regulation, or the “Don’t Say Gay” law restricting education on LGBTQ topics in primary school, the culture war has dominated DeSantis’s agenda.”
How Ron DeSantis transformed into an anti-public health crusader
“In March 2020, in the uncertain first weeks of the pandemic, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis acted and talked like most other politicians. He shut down public schools and prohibited visitors at nursing homes. He expanded testing capacity and closed parks out of what he called a need to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines on social distancing. By early April, he had issued his own version of a stay-at-home order and was urging his state’s residents to stay “spiritually together, but to remain socially distant.”
Three years later, DeSantis has transformed himself into the face of an anti-“woke,” anti-public health movement that blossomed during the pandemic — the leader of an administration that was willing to not only defy the public health consensus but to control and manipulate information in order to advance its narrative of a crisis that has killed more than 1.1 million Americans, including more than 87,000 Floridians.
A report this month from the Tampa Bay Time revealed that DeSantis’s state surgeon general had altered scientific data in order to justify his official position that young men should not receive the Covid-19 vaccine. DeSantis, who has criticized former President Donald Trump for deferring to public health officials like Anthony Fauci, has embraced conspiratorial talking points. He has suggested profits and not public health drove the Covid vaccine campaign and convened a state grand jury to investigate any “misconduct” on the part of drug manufacturers and the scientific community related to the vaccines.”
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“What’s clear is something changed, and quickly. Within a month of pleading with Floridians to remain socially distant, DeSantis had begun to reopen the state’s economy. As months went by, he became more brazen in his willingness to bend the truth around Covid and staffed his administration accordingly. Within a year, he had hired a Covid vaccine skeptic as his surgeon general, who would later be accused of altering study data to advance that agenda, and was fighting cruise ships over their plans to impose vaccine mandates for their passengers.”
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“In March and April, the governor’s approval ratings sagged. For those who wanted him to be aggressive in fighting Covid-19, he was not doing enough. For the conservative voters beginning to believe an alternative narrative of the pandemic, his response was an overreaction. As he fumbled through the first few weeks of Covid-19, DeSantis seemed to satisfy no one.
So the governor picked a lane. DeSantis sided with the Republican base upon which he would depend for his political future.
One public health expert who spoke directly with DeSantis around that time, who, like others I interviewed, did not want to be quoted by name for fear of retribution, said the governor referred specifically to senior residents in conservative areas like the Villages as “my people” and appeared preoccupied most with them when considering the response to the coronavirus. Later on, his vaccine-skeptical agenda reflected the mood of many conservative voters, who had glommed onto mischaracterizations about the risks of Covid-19 and conspiracy theories about the vaccines meant to stop it.
DeSantis’s pandemic response helped make him into a national figure, valorized among conservatives and villainized by Democrats and many public health experts.”