Monday, October 26, 2020

SOCIOPATH LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS SAYS TRUMPER DOES NOT HAVE THE 'COURAGE TO SPEAK THE PHRASE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND BLACK LIVES MURDER NATIONWIDE'


Kamala Harris: Trump Does Not Have ‘the Courage to Speak the Phrase ‘Black Lives Matter”

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Democratic vice presidential nominee Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) said Monday on ABC’s “The View” that President Donald Trump did not have the “courage to speak the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter.'”

Harris said, “First of all, let’s start with the fact that Joe Biden has a knowledge of America’s history on race and the courage to speak the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Donald Trump will never say that.”

She continued, “The policies that will be— that are in the Biden-Harris plan, and this is a commitment, include what we need to do to invest in HBCUs. I’m a proud graduate of an HBCU, Howard University. We understand that Black businesses, minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses have been disproportionately impacted not only by the pandemic but even before being denied access to capital. We have a commitment that we will put $150 billion into low-interest loans and access to capital for minority businesses, including Black businesses, of course. We are committed to what we need to do, recognizing that so many of our kids are unable to graduate college because they simply can’t continue to afford to pay tuition. We will commit that for any student coming out of a family that makes less than $125,000, they will go to a four-year college, including a HBCU, including a private HBCU for free. So this is some of it.”

She added, “What we also understand is that when we’re talking about racial disparities, it is in the economy, it is in health care. One of the big differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is that Joe Biden is going to continue with what he and President Obama did in expanding health coverage for people regardless of their income, and that means expanding the Affordable Care Act  knowing that we have so many racial disparities in our health care system.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN


OBAMAVILLE, CHICAGO SHOULD BE A REMINDER THAT OBOMB AND BIDEN NEVER DID A FUCKING THING FOR BLACK AMERICA DURING THE 8 YEARS THEY WERE SURRENDERING OUR BORDERS TO MEXICO!

During his run for the 1988 Democratic nomination, Biden inflated his record of activism in the civil rights movement. Biden, in particular, repeatedly claimed to have “marched” in the civil rights movement when presenting himself to audiences as a candidate for generational change.


At Least 24 Shot, 6 Fatally, over the Weekend in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot speaks during a news conference in Hall A at the COVID-19 alternate site at McCormick Place in Chicago, Friday, April 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh
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At least 24 people were shot, six fatally, over the weekend in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) Chicago.

Breitbart News reported that 14 people were shot, three fatally, Friday into Sunday morning alone. One of those 14 was a three-year-old girl who was shot in the wrist Saturday afternoon, ABC 7/Chicago Sun-Times noted.

The three-year-old was transported to a hospital in good condition.

By Monday morning, the total number of weekend shooting victims reached 24, with six fatalities, according to CBS 2.

The first fatal shooting of the weekend occurred some time around 3:15 a.m. on Saturday, when police discovered 47-year-old Roberto Morales Galindo facedown with multiple gunshot wounds. He was lying in the “1300 block of North Harding Avenue” and transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The most recent fatal shooting of the weekend was discovered at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, when “a 25-year-old man was found unresponsive under the Pink Line Chicago Transit Authority train tracks in the 1900 block of South St. Louis Avenue.” The man had been shot in the head and was pronounced dead at the scene.

The Chicago Tribune reports over 3,400 people were shot in Chicago January 1, 2020, through October 19, 2020, and that figure includes fatal and non-fatal shootings. The Tribune reports over 630 people were killed in Mayor Lightfoot’s Chicago between January 1, 2020, and October 18, 2020.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkinsa weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

10 Examples of Joe Biden’s History of Racially Charged Conduct and Comments

Joseph Biden, the newly-elected Democratic Senator from Delaware, is shown in Washington, Dec. 12, 1972. (AP Photo/Henry Griffin) Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., right, and John Kerry, D-Mass., introduced a bill on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 6, 1990, to expand public financing of presidential campaigns to congressional races as well. …
AP Photo/Henry Griffin, John Duricka, Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty
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Democratic nominee Joe Biden took great pains during his debate with President Donald Trump to paint his Republican opponent as racially insensitive and politically divisive.

The former vice president argued that the recent wave of protests and riots roiling America’s cities since the death of George Floyd in police custody has exposed Trump’s weakness as a leader. Biden, in particular, claimed that the president has done nothing in the last four years to address racial injustice or heal political divides.

“This is a president who uses everything as a dog whistle to try to generate racist hatred, racist division,” Biden said, adding that “this man has done virtually nothing for black Americans.”

Biden’s critiques struck some as odd given the former vice president’s long tenure in public office and his own problematic record on racial issues and his past racially insensitive comments. The following is an extensive, but not exhaustive, look into the Democratic nominee’s past stances and comments.

1. As recently as June of 2019, Biden praised the “civility” of the segregationist senators he worked with in Congress to pass anti-busing legislation.

In June of 2019, the former vice president engendered criticism after seeming to praise the “civility” of two arch segregationists during a high-dollar fundraiser at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. During the event, Biden told the audience assembled it was vital the next president “be able to reach consensus under our system.” To explain why he was the best candidate in that regard, the former vice president fondly cited his history of working with two of the Senate’s arch segregationists, the late-Sens. James Eastland (D-MS) and Herman Talmadge (D-GA).

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said with an attempted Southern drawl. “He never called me boy, he always called me son.”

“Well guess what?” the former vice president continued. “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

The comments provoked outrage because of the reputations that Eastland and Talmadge forged during their decades in public office.

Eastland, in particular, was known as the “voice of the white South” for his stringent opposition to civil rights and integration. The New York Times wrote in Eastland’s obituary that “he often appeared in Mississippi courthouse squares, promising the crowds that if elected he would stop blacks and whites from eating together in Washington. He often spoke of blacks as ‘an inferior race.’”

Talmadge was also a fierce opponent of integration. Before being elected to the Senate in 1957, he served as the governor of Georgia, where his tenure overlapped with the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. At the time of the ruling, Talmadge promised to do everything in his power to protect the “separation of the races.”

Biden, who joined the Senate in 1972, missed most of the early battles on school integration. He did, however, arrive just as busing to achieve school desegregation was coming to the forefront. Despite opposition from more liberal elements in the Democratic Party, especially the late-Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Biden ended up leading the charge on the issue. Eastland, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was a prominent ally in the fight against busing, according to the Delaware News Journal.

Letters exchanged between Biden and Eastland during those early years indicate the former vice president courted the pro-segregationist judiciary chairman to help pass his anti-busing measures.

“I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week’s Committee meeting in attempting to bring my antibusing legislation to a vote,” Biden wrote in one letter dated from June 1977.

The former vice president’s praise last year of his two late segregationist Senate colleagues proved controversial, even among Democrats, with Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) claiming that the former vice president had proved himself “woefully ignorant” of the “black American experience.”

Although such criticism forced Biden to apologize for giving the “impression” of praising segregationists, the former vice president has continued invoking senatorial colleagues who opposed civil rights. In February of this year, during the tenth Democratic presidential primary debate in South Carolina, Biden fondly recalled his friendship with the late Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC).

“Look, a guy who was a friend of mine down here, Fritz Hollings, used to say, ‘Don’t listen to what a man or woman say they’ll do, look at what they’ve done,’” the former vice president said, while criticizing his primary rivals.

As Breitbart News has previously reported, Hollings, who passed away last year, was a longtime fixture in South Carolina politics, serving first as the state’s governor and later as a United States senator. For much of his early career, Hollings was an opponent of integration, even running for the governorship on a platform of opposing school desegregation in 1959. Hollings kept that stance for the early portion of his term, but eventually changed course and supported integration.

In the Senate, Hollings cut a moderate-to-liberal profile by championing a national hunger policy and working to rein in the deficit. During his congressional tenure, Hollings’ views on race evolved, as exhibited by his endorsement of Jesse Jackson in the 1988 presidential race. The topic, however, continued to haunt the reformer segregationist as was evidenced in 1993 when Hollings stirred controversy by claiming that African diplomats only attended international conferences so they could get a “good square meal” rather than “eating each other.”

2. Biden praised the notorious segregationist politician George Wallace, boasted about how Wallace once honored him with an award in 1973, and told a Southern audience in 1987 that “we [Delawareans] were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”

Senatorial colleagues were not the only segregationists that Biden has praised throughout his years in public office. One individual, in particular, that Biden praised repeatedly throughout his early congressional career was the late Alabama governor George Wallace.

“I think the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace — someone who’s not afraid to stand up and offend people, someone who wouldn’t pander but would say what the American people know in their gut is right,” Biden told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1975 when discussing why liberals should not “apologize for locking up criminals.”

At the time, Biden was a young-first term senator from Delaware who was developing a reputation for bucking his party, most notedly on the contentious issue of busing to desegregate public schools. Notwithstanding the antiquated racial attitudes of that time, Biden’s comments about Wallace were viewed as controversial even by the standards of the 1970s.

Wallace, who was governor of Alabama in the mid-1960s and then again throughout most of the 1970s, stood out in the national psyche for his stringent opposition to integration, even going as far to declare “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in his 1963 inaugural address. The image was reinforced only months later when Wallace faced down federal law enforcement officers at the University of Alabama while attempting to block integration efforts by then-President John F. Kennedy.

By the time Biden invoked him to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1975, Wallace was trying to rehabilitate his image by making inroads with Alabama’s black community. Even though he succeeded in that effort by some measure, Wallace remained a vehement proponent of states’ rights, especially when it came to busing and crime—two issues that defined Biden’s early political career.

The political and ideological similarities between the two men have even been acknowledged by Biden on occasion.

In 1975, during an interview with National Public Radio about his support for a constitutional amendment to stop busing, Biden suggested liberals only favored the practice because it was opposed by “racists” like Wallace.

“I think that part of the reason why much of this has not developed, much of the change has not developed, is because it has been an issue that has been in the hands of the racist,” Biden told NPR. “We liberals have out-of-hand rejected it because, if George Wallace is for it, it must be bad.”

“And so we haven’t really looked at it,” he continued. “Now there’s a confluence of streams. There is academic ferment against it — not majority, but academic ferment against it. There are young blacks and young white leaders against it.”

News clipping from an article titled “Presidential hopeful Biden faces an image problem” in The Philadelphia Inquirer on September 20, 1987, page 79

The former vice president similarly invoked Wallace during a 1981 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to explain why he and countless others supported tough-on-crime initiatives like the death penalty.

“Sometimes even George Wallace is right about some things,” Biden told the committee before claiming Americans supported the death penalty because the government did “not have the slightest idea how to rehabilitate” criminals.

Such instances in which Biden mentioned Wallace only grew through the 1980s, becoming more commonplace in the lead-up to his first presidential run in 1988. Back then, the South was still nominally Democratic but had voted overwhelmingly for President Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Biden appeared to believe his youth, moderate record, and stance on busing presented the best opportunity to bring Southern whites back into the Democratic camp.

As he traveled the South in 1986 and 1987 to build support for his first White House bid, Biden not only downplayed his support for civil rights, but also made frequent references to Wallace. In April 1987, Biden even reportedly tried to court an Alabama audience by boasting about how Wallace had honored him with an award.

“Biden talked of his sympathy for the South; bragged of an award he had received from George Wallace in 1973 and said “we [Delawareans] were on the South’s side in the Civil War,” as reported by the Inquirer on September 20, 1987. (Although Delaware was a slave-holding border state during the Civil War, it fought on the Union side.)

Apart from openly touting “his sympathy for the South” and the accolade bestowed by Wallace, Biden also bragged that the Alabama governor heaped praise on his capabilities as a politician.

“Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware … tells Southerners that the lower half of his state is culturally part of Dixie,” the Detroit Free Press reported in May 1987. “He reminds them that former Alabama Gov. George Wallace praised him as one of the outstanding young politicians of America.”

3. Biden opposed busing in the 1970s and expressed fears that it would lead to a “racial jungle.”

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Biden was seen as one of the Senate’s leading opponents of busing to desegregate public schools. The issue was particularly volatile for his constituents in Delaware, especially in the state’s largest city, Wilmington.

As a first-term senator in 1977, Biden raised concerns during a Senate committee hearing on busing that the practice would lead to a “racial jungle” with tensions pushed to their breaking point. At the time, Biden was facing tough reelection prospects.

“Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point,” Biden said shortly after making a plea for “orderly integration.”

It is unclear exactly which legislation Biden’s remarks were meant to address, as there were many busing proposals floating around in 1977. Despite the background remaining murky, Biden’s remarks at the hearing are similar to those he expressed during an interview with a local Delaware newspaper in 1975 while discussing the issue of busing.

“The real problem with busing,” Biden told the paper, after lambasting busing as an “asinine concept,” was that “you take people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school … and you’re going to fill them with hatred.”

“The unsavory part about this is when I come out against busing, as I have all along, I don’t want to be mixed up with a George Wallace,” he added.

4. Biden voted to protect the tax-exempt status of private segregated schools.

After being re-elected to his second term in 1978, Biden voted the following year against revoking a legislative provision that prevented the Internal Revenue Service from rescinding the tax-exempt status of private segregated academies. Such schools were founded in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to prevent the integration of educational institutions.

At the time, Biden’s vote put him at odds with then-President Jimmy Carter and such vaulted liberal institutions as the American Civil Liberties Union.

5. Biden told black radio host Charlamagne tha God, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

In May, while appearing on the Breakfast Club, a popular New York City-based radio show, Biden asserted that any voter unsure whether to back him or President Donald Trump this November “ain’t black.”

“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” the former vice president told one of the show’s black hosts, Charlamagne tha God.

The comments elicited immediate rebuke, including from Charlamagne. In response, Biden’s campaign attempted to playoff the awkward moment, with the vice president, himself, claiming he was being a “wise guy.”

6. Biden told the Asian and Latino Coalition of Des Moines that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”

During a town hall in August 2019 with the Asian and Latino Coalition of Des Moines, Iowa, Biden elicited controversy by claiming that “poor kids are just as bright and … talented as white kids.” The former vice president, in particular, made the comments while discussing his support for expanding educational opportunities and school funding.

“We should challenge students [with] advanced placement programs in these schools,” Biden said at the time. “We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor you cannot do it, poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”

The former vice president quickly attempted to clarify his remarks by adding “wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids” to the end of his previous sentence.

The comments raised eyebrows forcing Biden’s campaign to issue a statement saying that the former vice president “misspoke.”

7. While delivering remarks before a black audience in Delaware, Biden launched into a meandering story about a gang leader named Corn Pop and claimed that he “learned about roaches” while working at a community pool in a black neighborhood.  

In 2017, shortly after leaving the White House Biden delivered a bizarre speech before an audience in Wilmington, Delaware, at the renaming of a community pool in his honor. The event, though, quickly took a strange turn when Biden, flanked by black children from the local community, decided to recount a nearly violent altercation he had with a local gang leader named Corn Pop while working as the only white lifeguard at this pool during his teenage years.

“Corn Pop was a bad dude, and he ran a bunch of bad boys. Back in those days, to show how things have changed … if you used pomade in your hair, you had to wear a bathing cap,” Biden said. “He was up on the board and wouldn’t listen to me, so I said, ‘Hey, Esther, you, off the board or I’ll come up and drag you off.’”

Corn Pop, according to the former vice president, did not take kindly to being called “Esther” — an “emasculating” reference to the 1950s swimmer Esther Williams, as the Washington Post noted — and promised to “meet” him outside. Biden told the audience he realized that he had to take the threat seriously when he purportedly saw the gang leader waiting around for him with three other guys carrying straight razors.

According to the former vice president’s recollection, he walked outside with a “six-foot chain” and threatened to “wrap [the] chain around” Corn Pop’s head, before apologizing.

“I looked at him, but I was smart then,” Biden said, adding that he told Corn Pop, “’First of all, when I tell you to get off the board, you get off the board, and I’ll kick you out again, but I shouldn’t have called you Esther Williams.’ I apologize for that. … I apologize for what I said.”

Biden’s anecdote about Corn Pop was not the only part of the speech that drew attention. In an earlier portion of his remarks, the former vice president raised eyebrows when he described what he learned that summer while working as the only white lifeguard at a community pool in a black neighborhood.

“By the way, you know, I sit on the stand, and it get[s] hot,” Biden said. “I got a lot, I got hairy legs that turn blonde in the sun, and the kids used to come up and reach in the pool and rub my leg down so it was straight and then watch the hair come back up again. They’d look at it.”

“So I learned about roaches, I learned about kids jumping on my lap,” the former vice president added. “And I loved kids jumping on my lap.”

Biden’s inexplicable reference to “roaches,” alongside the broader story about Corn Pop, confounded many. Without proper explanation, more than a few were left to speculate the use of the term was an allusion to the racial and economic makeup of the community frequenting the pool. Some, like the prominent conservative activist and commentator Larry Elder, went further suggesting that Biden was calling the children “jumping on my lap” roaches.

8. In 2008, Biden referred to then presidential candidate Barack Obama as “the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”

Before Biden was tapped by President Barack Obama for the number two slot on the 2008 Democratic ticket, the two men’s relationship nearly went off the rails over a racial gaffe. In February 2007 as Biden was preparing to launch his own White House bid, the then-senator from Delaware caused a flare-up while discussing his potential rivals for the Democratic nomination. Although, Biden spent a great deal of time evaluating his chances against the likes of then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and ex-Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), his remarks about the freshman senator from Illinois drew the most scrutiny.

“I mean, you’ve got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a story-book, man,” Biden said when discussing Obama.

9. In 2006, Biden told C-SPAN, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

In 2006, when first considering a second run for the presidency, Biden appeared on C-SPAN’s “Road to the White House” to discuss his deliberations. Biden told the program that one of his strengths as a candidate would be the broad base of support he’s received from immigrants in his home state of Delaware, especially Indian-Americans.

“I’ve had a great relationship. In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent,” Biden said. “I’m not joking.”

At the time, the comments were widely lambasted by members of the Indian-American community. In response, Biden’s then-Senate office tried to explain the gaffe, claiming he was only commenting about how positive it was that Indian-American “middle-class families are moving into Delaware and purchasing family-run small businesses.” That effort, however, was undercut by a subsequent appearance the senator made on CNN in which he defended his comments by suggesting that he would have said the same thing “40-years ago about walking into a delicatessen and saying an ‘Italian accent.'”

10. Biden falsely claimed to have “marched” in the civil rights movement. 

During his run for the 1988 Democratic nomination, Biden inflated his record of activism in the civil rights movement. Biden, in particular, repeatedly claimed to have “marched” in the civil rights movement when presenting himself to audiences as a candidate for generational change.

“When I marched in the civil rights movement, I did not march with a 12-point program,” Biden told a group of supporters in 1987. “I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes, and we changed attitudes.”

In reality, Biden had never marched during the civil rights movement, according to Matt Flegenheimer of the New York Times. 

“More than once, advisers had gently reminded Mr. Biden of the problem with this formulation: He had not actually marched during the civil rights movement,” wrote Flegenheimer. “And more than once, Mr. Biden assured them he understood — and kept telling the story anyway.”

The exaggeration, along with Biden’s propensity for plagiarism, would eventually force him to abandon his 1988 presidential bid before a single vote was cast.


KAMALA HARRIS LAUGHS OFF QUESTIONS ON 'SOCIALIST AGENDA' - OUR SOCIALISM IS FOR THE RICH, WALL STREET DONORS, BANKSTERS AND OUR DEM VOTING ILLEGALS!!!

Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California. 

Watch: Kamala Harris Bizarrely Laughs Off Question About Socialist Agenda

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN - SEPTEMBER 07: Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) greets supporters gathered outside following a roundtable event with Black business owners on September 7, 2020 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Earlier in the day, Harris toured an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) training facility and met with …
Scott Olson/Getty Images
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Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) broke out in laughter after CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell asked if the vice presidential hopeful would bring a socialist perspective to the table in a Biden-Harris administration.

“What I will do, and I promise you this, and this is what Joe wants me to do, this was part of our deal, I will always share with him my lived experience as it relates to any issue that we confront,” Harris told O’Donnell during a recent 60 Minutes interview.

“And I promised Joe that I would give him that perspective and always be honest with him,” she continued, prompting O’Donnell to ask what her perspective entailed.

“And is that a socialist or progressive perspective?” O’Donnell asked.

“No,” Harris said, laughing before composing herself.

“No. It is the perspective of —  of a woman who grew up — a black child in America, who was also a prosecutor, who also has a mother who arrived here at the age of 19 from India. Who also, you know, likes hip hop,” she said, laughing again.

“Like, what do you wanna know?” she continued, chuckling.

Despite Harris’s dismissal, she has embraced several radical positions in line with far-left Democrats, teaming up with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) last year to back the Green New Deal. Last year, the senator floated a ban on plastic straws and said she remained open to “changing dietary guidelines — the food pyramid” to reduce red meat consumption.

“I’ve actually worked on this issue in the past, and it’s about consumer awareness,” Harris said at the time:

Notably, her running mate has since denied supporting the Green New Deal. Similarly, during the first presidential debate, Biden waved off questions on Medicare for All, declaring himself the Democratic Party. Harris, however, originally backed the Medicare for All bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT):

In 2019, the non-partisan GovTrack.us website rated Harris the most left-wing member of the U.S. Senate — even further left than her Democratic socialist colleague Sen. Sanders — based on her record:

During last week’s campaign rally at The Villages in Florida, President Trump vowed that the country will not fall into socialism under his watch.

“Look, we’re not going to be a socialist nation,” he said. “We’re not going to have a socialist president, especially any female socialist president. We’re not going to have it. We’re not going to put up with it. It’s not going to happen.”

Harris, however, has dismissed Trump’s critiques.

“I am not gonna be confined to Donald Trump’s definition of who I or anybody else is,” Harris said during the 60 Minutes interview. “And I think America has learned that that would be a mistake.”

Harris also touted a number of falsehoods during the 60 Minutes interview, painting Trump as a racist “as shown by Birtherism; Charlottesville; ‘Mexicans’; and the ‘Muslim ban,'” as Breitbart News extensively fact-checked.


https://www.theepochtimes.com/democrats-push-for-massive-tax-cut-for-the-richest-says-brookings_3494101.html?ref=brief_News&utm_source=morningbriefnoe&utm_medium=email

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), speaks to reporters at the Capitol in Washington on Aug. 1, 2020. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo)

POLITICS

Democrats Push for Massive Tax Cut for the Richest, Brookings Says

BY EMEL AKAN

 

September 9, 2020 Updated: September 9, 2020

 

Print

WASHINGTON—Democrats are pushing to lift the cap on the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), but a Brookings Institution study says this would be a handout to the rich.

“Lifting the cap on the SALT deduction would massively favor the rich, with most of the benefit going to the top 1 percent,” Richard Reeves and Christopher Pulliam from the Brookings Institution wrote in a recent report.

House Democrats passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act in May. Buried in the 1,815-page relief bill is a provision that would eliminate the limitation on the SALT deduction for 2020 and 2021.

Democrats argue that lifting the cap would provide relief to people hit hardest by the virus, especially in devastated cities such as New York.

Under the old tax code, individuals who itemized their deductions were able to deduct all their SALT against their federal taxable income. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), however, limited individual’s deduction for SALT payments to $10,000 a year ($5,000 for a married person filing a separate return). Any state and local individual income or property tax payments in excess of that amount are no longer deductible by individual taxpayers.

Blue state Democrats believe the SALT cap is unfair to their residents. Blue states, especially those with higher individual income and property tax rates, objected to this cap and even tried to create tax maneuvers to avoid this limitation.

Republicans, on the other hand, argue that the SALT deduction mostly benefits wealthy individuals and is unfair to residents in lower-tax states. They argue that lifting the SALT cap forces people in low-tax states such as Tennessee and Texas to subsidize high-tax states such as California and New York.

“The main argument from some on the political left for the SALT deduction is that it encourages states to spend more by making it easier for them to tax more,” the Brookings report said.

“But if the goal is for the federal government to provide additional support to state and local governments, far better to do so directly, rather than by the roundabout route of offering a tax break to the rich.”

Almost all benefits of repealing the $10,000 SALT cap would go to the top quintile, with the top 1 percent getting an average tax cut of $33,100 and 0.1 percent receiving nearly $145,000, according to Tax Policy Center estimates.

Lifting the SALT cap would give essentially no benefit to the middle class, contrary to what Democrats have argued. Only 4 percent of the benefit would go the middle class, “for an average annual tax cut of a little less than $27,” the report stated.

However, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in July that he would make it a priority to permanently remove the SALT deduction cap if Democrats win the Senate majority in 2020.

“I want to tell you this: If I become majority leader, one of the first things I will do is we will eliminate it forever,” he said during a press conference. “It will be dead, gone, and buried.”

Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Joe Biden’s presidential campaign didn’t immediately respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.

“At best, the SALT deduction is a warped way to do social policy; at worst, it is a politically-motivated handout to the richest people in the richest places,” the report stated.

“Rather than seeking to remove the cap on the deduction, policymakers would do better to consider steps towards the removal of the deduction itself.”

The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration predicted in 2019 that the SALT cap would prevent nearly 11 million taxpayers from deducting $323 billion in state and local tax payments from their federal tax returns.

“Most of the benefits of the TCJA went to the top fifth, and 20 percent went to the top 1 percent. But lifting the SALT cap would be much more favorable to the rich—with almost three times as much of the benefit going to the top one percent,” the report stated.

Follow Emel on Twitter: @mlakan

Sen Kamala Harris is a product of Silicon Valley's billionaires and will enforce their agenda in DC.

Eg, she's an author of the S.386 bill that allows the Fortune 500 to hire more white-collar workers from India for jobs needed by America's college grads https://t.co/gKCuD9DH5z

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 12, 2020

 

Kamala Harris Raked in Cash from Big Tech During Democrat Primary

Rich Polk/Getty Images for LACMA

13 Aug 2020180

1:58

During the 2020 Democrat presidential primary, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) was bestowed with the most billionaire donations of the nearly 30 candidates who ran for the nomination.

In the primary, Harris secured more donations from billionaires than any other Democrat running, according to a November 2019 analysis by Forbes. Before dropping out in early December 2019, Harris raked in donations from at least 46 billionaires.

A number of Harris’s donations came from executives and employees of big tech corporations, as Breitbart News reported at the time.

By August 2019, seven Facebook executives and employees had donated $1,000 or more to Harris’s campaign, nearly 20 Google executives and employees had donated more than $1,000, four Twitter executives and employees had donated more than $1,000, and 71 Amazon executives and employees had donated anywhere from $5 to $2,000.

Notably, Harris took donations from Impossible Foods president Dennis Woodside, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and Salesforce chairman Marc Benioff.

Despite a lack of enthusiasm and support among primary voters, Harris’s campaign was propped up by a base of elite coastal donors, with less than 40 percent of her funding coming from small-dollar donors giving $200 or less as of October 2019.

On Tuesday, Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden confirmed Harris as his vice presidential pick. In a statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called Harris a “champion for hardworking families everywhere.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.



US jobless claims fall below 1 million but remain high

AP

13 Aug 20205

The number of laid-off workers applying for unemployment aid fell below 1 million last week for the first time since the pandemic intensified five months ago, yet still remains at a high level

US jobless claims fall below 1 million but remain high
By CHRISTOPHER RUGABERAP Economics WriterThe Associated PressWASHINGTON

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment dropped below 1 million last week for the first time since the coronavirus outbreak took hold in the U.S. five months ago, but layoffs are still running extraordinarily high.

The figures show that the crisis continues to throw people out of work just as the expiration of an extra $600 a week in federal jobless benefits has deepened the hardship for many — and posed another threat to the U.S. economy.

Applications for jobless benefits declined to 963,000, the second straight drop, from 1.2 million the previous week, the government said Thursday. That signals layoffs are slowing, though the weekly figure still far exceeds the pre-outbreak record of just under 700,000, set in 1982.

The virus is blamed for more than 166,000 deaths and 5.2 million confirmed infections in the U.S. — easily the highest totals in the world. The average number of new cases per day is on the rise in eight states, and deaths per day are climbing in 26, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Worldwide, the scourge has claimed more than 750,000 lives and caused over 20 million known infections.

The virus, the shutdowns meant to fight it and the reluctance or inability of many people to shop, travel or eat out continue to undermine the economy and force companies to cut staff. Over the past few months, 23 states have paused or reversed their business re-openings because of a resurgence of the virus.

Overall, fewer people are collecting unemployment, a sign that some employers are hiring. The total declined last week to 15.5 million, from 16.1 million the previous week.

“Another larger-than-expected decline in jobless claims suggests that the jobs recovery is regaining some momentum, but … much labor market progress remains to be done,” said Lydia Boussour, senior economist at Oxford Economics.

Hiring is believed to have slowed since the spring, when states reopened and millions of workers at bars, restaurants and stores were rehired. The job gain in August will probably fall short of the 1.8 million added in July, analysts say.

For months, on top of their state benefit, unemployed Americans also collected the $600 a week in federal jobless aid. But that expired at the end of July, and negotiations in Congress to extend it, probably at a lower level, have collapsed in rancor.

Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that would provide $300 a week to replace the expired $600. But experts say it could take weeks for the states to reprogram their computers and process and dispense the payments.

A crush of benefit applications earlier in the outbreak resulted in huge backlogs that left millions of the unemployed waiting. Washington state went so far as to call in the National Guard to help process applications.

Some economists say they believe the end of the $600 has contributed to the drop in unemployment claims of late. Some of the unemployed may feel less incentive to apply.

The supplemental federal aid had enabled many jobless Americans to afford rent, food and utilities, and its expiration threatens to weaken consumer spending.

Michelle Meyer, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said the loss of the additional aid will reduce Americans’ incomes by $18 billion a week.

“That’s a big hit to purchasing power,” she said.

In addition to people who applied last week for state benefits, nearly 489,000 others sought jobless aid under a new federal program that has made self-employed and gig workers eligible for the first time. That figure isn’t adjusted for seasonal trends, so it is reported separately.

Counting those receiving aid under the new program would bring to 28.2 million — roughly 18% of the U.S. workforce — the number of Americans now receiving some form of unemployment benefits.

With confirmed virus cases still high, it’s not clear when business owners will be able to reopen or will have enough customers to rehire.

Grace Della is one of them. She opened her food tour business in Miami a decade ago with $300 from her mother. On weekends, she led the tours herself and eventually built up a business with 13 guides, averaging 10 tours a day through culinary hot spots in South Beach and Little Havana.

With scant customer demand, it has been more than four months since Miami Culinary Tours has taken out guests. Della, 46, said she hopes to reopen later this month but isn’t sure she can, given the state’s high level of confirmed infections.

Della said she tries to stay positive but confesses to moments of crippling fear. At one point, hyperventilating with anxiety, she contacted firefighters.

“There’s no money coming in,” Della said. “We’re all scared.”

___

AP writer Kelli Kennedy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this report.

Sen Kamala Harris is a product of Silicon Valley's billionaires and will enforce their agenda in DC.

Eg, she's an author of the S.386 bill that allows the Fortune 500 to hire more white-collar workers from India for jobs needed by America's college grads https://t.co/gKCuD9DH5z

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 12, 2020

2020 ElectionImmigrationPoliticsH-1B VisasJ-1L-1Mike PompeoOutsourcingU.S-India Outsourcing Economyvisa workers

  

State Dept. ‘Guts’ Donald Trump’s Curbs on Fortune 500’s Visa Workers

 

NEIL MUNRO

 

The state department is allowing Fortune 500 companies to freely import H-1B visa workers for jobs needed by American voters, despite President Donald Trump’s June 22 Executive Order barring nearly all visa workers.

“They have totally eviscerated the requirements” of Trump’s E.O., said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Reform Law Institute. “There is no doubt about it — whoever created this is thumbing their noses at President Trump,” he said, adding, “you can bet that the guys who did this are voting for [Joe] Biden.”

‘This is an insult to the President of the United States, it is an insult to working men and women of the United States,” said Kevin Lynn, the founder of U.S. Tech Workers.

There are less than 90 days to go in the election. How can he persuade Americans he’s keeping any of this 2016 promises if he allows the State Department to nullify and gut the E.O. he signed to protect Americans from [outsourcing by Fortune 500 companies]? More than that — I think it is beginning to make Trump look stupid in front of the voters. He needs to call in Pompeo and talk to him about his job prospects because [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo does not seem to give a hoot about Americans’ job prospects.

The exemptions are “expansive,” admitted Greg Siskind, a lawyer who is working to widen the pipelines of foreign doctors into U.S. hospital chains. “They are backing off … that could be good news for thousands of you guys,” he told his clients.

On August 3, Trump met with Lynn and several employees of the Tennesee Valley Authority to announce he would block the outsourcing of their jobs to H-1B workers imported by three staffing companies. Trump said:

It doesn’t work that way. As we speak, we’re 

finalizing H1-B regulations so that no 

American worker is replaced ever again.  H1-Bs

should be used for top, highly paid talent to 

create American jobs, not as inexpensive labor 

program to destroy American jobs.

On June 22, Trump signed another Executive Order to close down the pipeline of white-collar H-1B, J-1, and L-1 workers, as well as the pipeline of H-2B manual laborers. The E.O. is expected to temporarily bar the arrival of perhaps 80,000 H-1Bs, plus thousands of J-1s and L-1s, while hundreds of thousands of new graduates and fired professionals look for jobs. Trump also directed his agency deputies to write new regulations that would reduce the Fortune 500’s widespread use of visa workers as cheap labor replacements for American voters.

Trump’s intervention to save U.S. white collar jobs is very popular among millions of American voters whose futures are threatened by the Fortune 500’s preference for docile and cheap visa workers. The CEO’s workforce policy keeps at least 1.3 million foreign graduates in U.S. jobs, even amid the dramatic economic crash caused by China’s coronavirus.

The official unemployment rate for U.S. tech grads has jumped to 4.4 percent, according to an industry association. But the calculation does not count the many U.S. tech grads who were forced into lesser careers by the many visa workers in the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.

But the State Department’s June 12 bulletin provides a long list of many easy exemptions for Fortune 500 companies and their Indian staffing subcontractor. The document says Trump’s directions:

 … include exceptions, including an exception for individuals whose travel would be in the national interest, as determined by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or their respective designees.  The list below is a non-exclusive list of the types of travel that may be considered to be in the national interest, based on determinations made by the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, exercising the authority delegated to him by the Secretary of State.

Pompeo is the Secretary of State. Carl Risch is the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs.

The list of exemptions is very wide:

Travel by technical specialists, senior level managers, and other workers whose travel is necessary to facilitate the immediate and continued economic recovery of the United States … The petitioning employer has a continued need for the services or labor to be performed by the H-1B nonimmigrant in the United States.

Miano is an expert on visa worker laws and studied the long list of exemptions:

The first one on the list is what they needed to do to get the visas in the first place … Number 2, any of them can do that, no problem … Number 3 is totally meaningless — anyone can do that … ‘Financial Hardship’ for an employer is so loosey goosy that anyone can meet that … ‘Critical Infrastructure’ is basically anything.

Lynn was less formal;

This is effing b….. Who the f… came up with these exceptions? … You can drive a Mack truck through this …. The exemptions basically cover anyone on an H-IB or a J-1 or an L-1 …. Boom! They’re in … with all the exemptions, there is no EO — they’ve eliminated the EO through the exemptions.”

One of the most notable exemptions are for visa workers who have jobs at government agencies, usually via Indian-run staffing companies:

… individuals, identified by the Department of Defense or another U.S. government agency, performing research, providing IT support/services, or engaging other similar projects essential to a U.S. government agency.

The document also provides exemptions to foreign workers who have taken jobs from Americans in “critical infrastructure,” such as the TVA jobs blocked by Trump:

The applicant’s proposed job duties or position within the petitioning company indicate the individual will provide significant and unique contributions to an employer meeting a critical infrastructure need.  Critical infrastructure sectors are chemical, communications, dams, defense industrial base, emergency services, energy, financial services, food and agriculture, government facilities, healthcare and public health, information technology, nuclear reactors, transportation, and water systems.

“The people who are doing this are ignoring the president,” said Miano. “I can only guess at their motivations, but we can say it is Deep State acting independently.”

“In a close election, with time running out, with [2016] expectations not met … Trump needs things to go smoothly from now till November, and this list clearly he has people in the  State Department sabotaging him,” said Miano.

“When word of this gets out to the public that every E.O. he writes is not worth the paper it is written on,” said Lynn.  “Because through exceptions, they become get nullified by the Deep State, he loses the voters’ trust and confidence.”

He added: “What good is a State Department that becomes the tool of corporations that want to displace Americans, when tens of millions of Americans are under extreme financial duress?”

The State Department did not respond to emails from Breitbart News requesting comment.

Sen Kamala Harris is a product of Silicon Valley's billionaires and will enforce their agenda in DC.
Eg, she's an author of the S.386 bill that allows the Fortune 500 to hire more white-collar workers from India for jobs needed by America's college grads 
https://t.co/gKCuD9DH5z

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 12, 2020

2020 ElectionImmigrationPoliticsH-1B VisasJ-1L-1Mike PompeoOutsourcingU.S-India Outsourcing Economyvisa workers

 

Wall Street Praises Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s VP: ‘What’s Not to Like?’

AP Photo/Richard Drew

13 Aug 2020996

4:20

Wall Street executives are praising Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden’s choosing Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate against President Trump, feeling they dodged a bullet from a progressive insurgency.

In interviews with the Wall Street JournalCNBC, and Bloomberg, executives on Wall Street expressed relief that Biden picked Harris for vice president on the Democrat ticket, calling her a “normal Democrat” who is a “safe” choice for the financial industry.

Morgan Stanley Vice Chairman Tom Nides told Bloomberg that across Wall Street, Harris joining Biden “was exceptionally well-received.”

“How damn cool is it that a Black woman is considered the safe and conventional candidate,” Nides said.

Peter Soloman, the founder of a multinational investment banking firm, told Bloomberg he believes Harris is “a great pick” because she is “safe, balanced, a woman, diverse, what’s not to like?”

As the Journal notes, many on Wall Street see Harris is another conscious decision by the Democrat establishment to stave off populist priorities to reform Wall Street:

To some Wall Street executives, Ms. Harris’s selection signals a more moderate shift for the Democratic Party, which its progressive flank has pushed to the left in recent years. [Emphasis added]

“While Kamala is a forceful, passionate and eloquent standard-bearer for the aspirations of all Americans, regardless of their race, gender or age, she is not doctrinaire or rigid,” said Brad Karp, chairman of law firm Paul Weiss, who co-led a committee of lawyers across the country who supported Ms. Harris during the primary. [Emphasis added]

Marc Lasry, CEO of Avenue Capital Group, called Harris a “great” pick for Biden. “She’s going to help Joe immensely. He picked the perfect partner,” Lasry told CNBC.

Executives at Citigroup and Centerview Partners made similar comments about Harris to CNBC and the Journal, calling her a “great choice” and “direct but constructive.”

Founder of financial consulting firm Kynikos Associates Jim Chanos was elated in an interview with Bloomberg over Harris joining Biden on the Democrat ticket:

“She’s terrific,” said Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates. “She’s got force of personality in a good way. She takes over a room. She certainly has a charisma and a presence which will be an asset on the campaign.” [Emphasis added]

Harris is no stranger to praise from Wall Street executives. In the 2019 Democrat presidential primary, Harris won over a number of financial industry donors, even holding a fundraiser in Iowa that was backed by Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

While criticizing “the people who have the most” in Democrat primary debates, Harris raked in thousands in campaign cash from financial executives from firms such as the Blackstone Group, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.

This month, the New York Times admitted the “wallets of Wall Street are with Joe Biden” in a gushing headline about the financial industry’s opposition to Trump:

Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.

Harris’s views on trade and immigration, two of the most consequential issues to Wall Street, are in lockstep with financial executives’ objective to grow profit margins and add consumers to the market.

On trade, Harris has balked at Trump’s imposition of tariffs on foreign imports from China, Mexico, Canada, and Europe — using the neoliberal argument that tariffs should not be used to pressure foreign countries to buy more American-made goods and serve as only a tax on taxpayers.

Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for national immigration policy — which seeks to drive up legal and illegal immigration levels to their highest levels in decades — offers a flooded labor market with low wages for U.S. workers and increased bargaining power for big business that has long been supported by Wall Street.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT OPEN BORDERS FOR MORE CHEAP LABOR AND NO CAPS ON IMPORTING CHINESE AND INDIANS TO WORK OUR TECH JOBS CHEAP.

 

Obama’s State of Delusion ... OR JUST ANOTHER "Hope & Change" HOAX?

 

”The delusional character of Obama’s State of the Union

 

address on Tuesday—presenting an America of rising living

 

standards and a booming economy, capped by his declaration

 

that the “shadow of crisis has passed”—is perhaps matched

 

only in its presentation by the media and supporters of the

 

Democratic Party.”


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/oxfam-richest-one-percent-set-to.html

 

“The general tone was set by the New York Times in its lead editorial on Wednesday, which described the speech as a “simple, dramatic message about economic fairness, about the fact that the well-off—the top earners, the big banks, Silicon Valley—have done just great, while middle and working classes remain dead in the water.”

 

OBAMANOMICS:

 

The report observes that while the wealth of the world’s 80 richest people doubled between 2009 and 2014, the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population (3.5 billion people) was lower in 2014 than it was in 2009.

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/oxfam-richest-one-percent-set-to.html

 

In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to match the wealth of the bottom half of the earth’s population; by 2013, the figure had fallen to just 92 billionaires. It fell to 80 in 2014.

 

THE OBAMA ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS

 

“The goal of the Obama administration, working with the Republicans and local governments, is to roll back the living conditions of the vast majority of the population to levels not seen since the 19th century, prior to the advent of the eight-hour day, child labor laws, comprehensive public education, pensions, health benefits, workplace health and safety regulations, etc.”

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/oxfam-richest-one-percent-set-to.html

 

“In response to the ruthless assault of the financial oligarchy, spearheaded by Obama, the working class must advance, no less ruthlessly, its own policy.”

New Federal Reserve report

US median income has plunged, inequality has grown in Obama “recovery”

The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.

 

 

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.

http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-rigged-it-so-illegals-would-vote.html

1.     Globalism: Google VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”

 

2.     Hillary Clinton’s Democratic party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.

 

3.   Immigration: Maintaining liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the most.

 

Why the rich favor the Democrats

 

By Peter Skurkiss

 

There's little doubt that today's Democrat Party is the party of the rich.  Actually, that's an understatement.  Far more than billionaires are involved.  A better expression of reality would be to say a fundamental core of Democrat coalition is the managerial class, also known as the elite.  These are the people who run the media, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, the big corporations, the universities and schools, the investment banks, and Wall Street.  They populate the upper levels of government bureaucracies.  These are the East and West Coasters. 

The alliance of the affluent with the Democrat Party can be seen in the widely disproportionate share of hefty political donations from the well-to-do going to Democrats and a bevy of left-wing causes.  It's also why forty-one out of the fifty wealthiest congressional districts are represented by Democrats. 

BLOG: DEMS LOVE SOCIALISM FOR ILLEGALS TO KEEP THEM COMING AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE AND SOCIALISM FOR BANKS. TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF IT!

 Bernie Sanders is an exception.  But he's an anomaly viewed as dangerous to the party, which is why he's being crushed by the Democrat establishment. 

Why do the wealthy align with the Democrats?  The answer may seem counter-intuitive, but it is really quite simple.  It's surely not ideals or high-minded principles.  Nor is it ignorance.  Rather, it boils down to raw self-interest.  

In his book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, Christopher Caldwell notes that rich Americans think themselves to be as vulnerable as blacks.  They are a relatively small minority of the population.  They fear being resented for their wealth and power and of having much of that taken from them.  Accordingly, the wealthy seek to protect what is theirs by preventing strong majorities from forming by using the divide and conquer principle. 

As R.R. Reno writes when reviewing Caldwell's book: "Therefore, the richest and most powerful people in America have strong incentives to support an anti-majoritarian political system."  He goes on: "Wealthy individuals shovel donations into elite institutions that incubate identity politics, which further fragments the nation and prevents the formation of majorities."

Some of the rotten fruit of the wealthy taking this approach include multiculturalism, massive immigration of diverse people, resistance to encouraging assimilation, racial strife, trying to turn white males into pariahs, and the promotion of gender confusion.  Through it all, society is bombarded with the Orwellian mantra that "diversity is strength," as if repeating it often enough can make it so.  It is also why patriotism and a common American culture are so disparaged today.  Those from the upper strata of society project the idea that if you're a flag-waving American, you must be some kind of retrograde mouth-breathing yokel.  

The wealthy as a groups are content to dissolve the glue that holds the U.S. together.  And it is all done to enhance and preserve their power, wealth, and influence.  This is why they so hate Donald Trump.  He strives to unite people and the country, although you'd never know that that is what the president is doing  if you live in the media bubble.  Trump's MAGA agenda is an anathema to the managerial class.

To quote Reno one final time:

The next decade will not be easy.  But it will not be about what preoccupied us in the sixties, and which Caldwell describes so well.  Rather than the perils of discrimination we are increasingly concerned with the problem of disintegration — or in Charles Murray's terms, the problem of "coming apart."

Trump and the GOP he is molding are the vehicles to restore and strengthen national solidarity.  Trump said at the Daytona 500, "No matter who wins, what matters most is God, family, and country."  That is not the Democrat agenda.  As seen in Democrat politicians, their policies, and the behavior of their major contributors, the aim is to further weaken the social and national bonds in America.  There is a lot at stake here.  If solidarity wins, the Republic can survive and prosper.  If the Democrats and their wealthy cohorts do, then the middle class withers, the Republic dies, and the rich and their managerial class get to rule the roost.  That is what it comes down to.

ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT WIDER OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY AND HELL NO TO E-VERIFY!

 

In addition, establishment Republicans are no better than Democrats at stemming the flow of illegal immigration because big businesses reap the benefits of this cheap labor without incurring any of the social costs.

 

This is why the SEIU supports blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.

 

 

Democrats: The Party of Big Labor, Big Government...and Big Business

 

By Antonio R. Chaves

There is a widespread perception that the Democrat Party is the party the working class and the Republican Party is the party of big business.  Even though Republicans on average received slightly more from corporate employees prior to 2002, the overall difference between both parties from 1990 to 2020 is statistically insignificant (Table 1).  In fact, Democrat reliance on big labor gradually shifted toward big business following the involvement of solidly Democrat corporate giants in 2002, and from 2014 to 2020, Democrats consistently surpassed Republicans in corporate donations (Tables 1 & 2).

Based on data compiled by Open Secrets, Soros Fund Management, Fahr LLC (Tom Steyer), and Bloomberg LP ranked among the top ten for political contributions that gave over 90% to Democrats.  In sharp contrast, the right-leaning Koch Industries made the top ten only in 2014.  In nearly all other years, Koch ranked well below the top twenty.

Whether or not this trend is long-term, there is no denying that large corporations on average no longer lean right.  But what does it mean to be "the party of big business"? Donations are not definitive evidence.  What ultimately matters is what politicians do once they get elected.

Many liberals believe that big government is needed to "rein in" big business and that in the absence of federal intervention, corporations will "run roughshod" over the average American.  Many liberals also believe that corporations are the main beneficiaries of laissez-faire economics and that free-market conservatives who want to scale back regulations are somehow "in the pocket" of big business.

In reality, the opposite is true: big business and big government 

go hand in hand because government meddling in the economy 

encourages rent-seeking by businesses that can afford to pay 

for the lobbyists.  This crony capitalism grew exponentially as 

a result of New Deal regulations that squeezed out competitors 

during the 1930s.  Establishment politicians and well 

connected corporations are beneficiaries of the myth that big 

government and big business are adversaries because it hides 

their unholy alliance.

In all fairness, neither party has had a monopoly on the dispensation of corporate welfare: the TARP funds that propped up financial institutions deemed "too big to fail" during the Great Recession were released by the Bush administration.  In addition, establishment Republicans are no better than Democrats at stemming the flow of illegal immigration because big businesses reap the benefits of this cheap labor without incurring any of the social costs.

If both parties are playing this game, what is the basis for labeling the Democrat party "the party of big business"?  What policies from Republicans support small business?

Free-market conservatism benefits small businesses because the government does not pick the winners and losers by means of subsidies, tax breaks, and cumbersome regulations.  You will not see policies like these coming from Washington in a major way because proposals for shrinking the federal government rarely see the light of day in Congress.

Based on data collected by Gallup and Thumbtack, red states far outscore blue states in small business friendliness (Table 3).  This may be why less affluent Americans are fleeing states that score abysmally like CaliforniaIllinoisNew York, and Hawaii.  This might also be why small business–owners are more likely to vote Republican.

The Trump administration has been good for businesses of all sizes mainly due to the unprecedented rate at which it scaled back stifling regulations.  This may be why some of the president's highest approval ratings now come from small businesses.

Donald Trump set himself apart from the ruling class when he latched onto the third-rail issue of illegal immigration and called out the corporate darling Jeb Bush (AKA "Low Energy Jeb") for his lack of grassroots support.  This may explain in part why Bain Capital, the firm co-founded by Mitt Romney, switched teams and contributed solidly Democrat in 2018.  In 2012, Democrats accused Bain Capital of destroying jobs by systematically dismantling the companies it bought off.  Times have changed...

Small businesses generate well over half of all new jobs.  Most importantly, many are family-owned, have strong ties to their communities, and provide upward mobility for millions of Americans who never attended college.  The Democrats' undermining of this quintessentially American institution is shameful and disqualifies it as the "party of the working class."  Contributions from big labor do not count toward "labor-friendliness" because mega-unions care more about recruitment than about the welfare of working Americans.  This is why the SEIU supports blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.

Democrats fed up with the corporate status quo are now choosing their own anti-establishment candidate, not realizing that socialism is just a more impoverished version of the crony capitalism they are rejecting.  Many Sanders-supporters are also morally shallow because they want to harness the power of the state to muscle in on the wealth of Americans who borrowed responsibly and worked hard to pay their bills.

After the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin said, "This Constitution ... is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism ... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government."  If Democrats implement the dystopian policies of California on a national level, their corporate allies will do fine.  It is small business–owners and working-class Americans with nowhere to flee who have the most to lose. Be careful what you wish for.


To view the tables below, click the links.

Table 1: Top contributors to Democrats and Republicans as compiled by Open Secrets.

*The red lettering highlights a funding advantage for Republicans.  The blue lettering highlights a funding disadvantage for Republicans.

**Based on a T-test, the difference is insignificant at P = 0.46

Table 2: Top ten contributors to Democrats and Republicans by category (union, corporate, and ideological) as compiled by Open Secrets:

*In 2008 Goldman Sachs donated 74% to Democrats.  All other groups in this column donated between 40 and 69% to both parties.  This column does not differentiate between giving equally to both parties and giving 70–79% to Democrats or Republicans.

**This number includes the "City of New York."  Although it is officially listed as "other" by Open Secrets (not corporate, union, or ideological), I was personally informed by someone from the organization that Michael Bloomberg was the main source of this funding.

Table 3: Small business scores states scored by Thumbtack ranked according to their Democratic advantage by Gallup:

*GPA scores are based on the following numerical equivalents: A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, D = 1, F = 0, A+ = 4.3, A- = 3.7, etc.

** Not scored.

***Mean GPA ± standard error. Based on a T-test, the difference is significant at P = 0.00001.

 

Grim Reaper Mitch to Pelosi: I'm Going to Kill Your Stimulus Plan

 

Matt Vespa

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just got some bad news from Mitch McConnell. Any talk about another stimulus isn’t going to happen. She may draft a bill, but it’ll meet a swift death in the Republican-controlled Senate. Mitch is the legislative grim reaper for most of what the Democratic House sends his way (via The Hill):

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hit the brakes Tuesday on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) plan to move ahead with a fourth stimulus package that would include major infrastructure spending and other Democratic priorities.

“I think we need to wait a few days here, a few weeks, and see how things are working out,” McConnell said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”

“Let’s see how things are going and respond accordingly,” he added. “I’m not going to allow this to be an opportunity for the Democrats to achieve unrelated policy items that they would not otherwise be able to pass.”

McConnell's remarks came the same day that President Trump encouraged Congress to pass a $2 trillion infrastructure bill as the next piece of coronavirus legislation.

Pelosi is also mulling a rollback of the SALT taxes, which would be nothing short of a giveaway to millionaires. And by the giveaway, it would be something of a $620 billion tax cut for them. Remember, this is the party of the working people, or so they say, and a part of me hopes she goes aggressive on this, so we can see Bernie Sanders gum up the Democratic works for a bit. There is no way a hardcore lefty would back this nonsense. Yet, there’s another reason why Mitch isn’t rushing on the House Democrats’ stimulus reloaded plans. They’re off. They won’t be back to work until April 20. And The Hill added that Mitch hasn’t forgotten about judges, adding that the Kentucky Republican’s motto is “leave no vacancy behind.”

 

 

 

 

THE OBAMA – BIDEN BANKSTERS CON JOB STARTED BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE!

 

GET THIS BOOK!

Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses

 

BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY

Editorial Reviews

Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?

 

Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.

 

Congressman Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market conservative needs to read Obamanomics.” And Johan Goldberg, columnist and bestselling author says, “Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best and an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”

If you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.

Investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:

* The Great Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell corporate profits and more government control

 

* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda

 

* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)

 

* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists

* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics

 

Praise for Obamanomics

“The notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free market is one of progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to demonize corporations by day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is exploiting the big business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it to entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”

—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author

 

“‘Every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich.’ With this astute observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare the Obama administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the president’s populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Washington really works.”

—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama

 

“Every libertarian and free-market conservative who still believes that large corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic liberty needs to read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who believes that expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit the common people.”

—Congressman Ron Paul

 

“It’s understandable for critics to condemn President Obama for his ‘socialism.’ But as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once more subtle and more sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while disproportionately punishing everyone else. So-called progressives are too clueless to notice, as usual, which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.”

—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History

 

*

 

         Hardcover: 256 pages

 

         Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30, 2009)

 

         Language: English

 

         ISBN-10: 1596986123

 

         ISBN-13: 978-1596986121

 

Chuck Schumer Pushes Tax Cut for Richest 1% in Coronavirus Relief Bill

AP Photo/Matt Rourke

16 Jul 202034

4:32

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is pushing for a repeal of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap in the next round of coronavirus relief — giving a tax cut to the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers, especially in “blue” states.

In his landmark tax reform law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, President Donald Trump and the Republicans offset some of the revenue losses from low tax rates by restricting deductions. The law capped the SALT deduction at $10,000.

Previously, those taxpayers wealthy enough to file a list of itemized deductions could count all of the taxes they paid to state and local governments toward a deduction in their federal tax liability. That meant wealthy taxpayers in the most heavily taxed states — primarily run by Democrats — benefited most. The SALT deduction also gave Democrats political room to raise taxes higher, because it made rich taxpayers less likely to resist: they could claim some of the money back.

Trump ended the deduction — at some political cost to himself. Republicans went on to lose congressional seats in wealthy suburbs in high-tax Democrat-run states. Orange County, California, for example, flipped entirely to Democrats.

But Democrats still want to repeal the SALT cap, regardless, because they want their state and local governments to avoid tax cut — and because their wealthy campaign contributors want to be subsidized, once again, by the rest of the country.

Even Seth Hanlon, a former Obama administration official who is now a senior fellow at the left-wing Center for American Progress, has protested against Schumer’s idea, noting that repealing the SALT cap would help “the top 1%.”

Come on, not this again.

Repealing the SALT cap for 2020-21 would be a $137 billion tax cut, with about 63% going to the top 1%.

It does nothing for states and localities except potentially crowd out the actual fiscal relief they urgently need. https://t.co/jlSjIhnzpq

— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020

Here is the national distribution of the tax cut from repealing the SALT cap, via @iteptweets.

A tiny percentage of middle-income people get any benefit.

The top 1% gets 63%: an avg. $35k tax cut for them.

The top 5% gets 87%.

The bottom 80% get literally 1% of the benefit. pic.twitter.com/8EIav7wgcJ

— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020

Here is the distribution just for New York. Largely the same story. A few more middle-income people benefit a little compared to nationwide, but still, the tax cut goes overwhelmingly to top one-percenters. Not the people most affected by COVID!!! pic.twitter.com/Dp0evxq3P7

— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020

The basic story is the same in every state. State by state estimates are here. https://t.co/1KREhnb6et

— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020

The Democrat-run House of Representatives has already passed a repeal on the SALT cap that would be effective for two years.

According to The Hill, “Schumer urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) [on Tuesday] to ‘join the House, and join the Democrats in the Senate, and get rid of that cap.'”

Schumer also vowed to make the SALT deduction — the effective tax cut for the 1% — permanent: “If I become majority leader, one of the first things I will do is we will eliminate it forever,” he added, according to The Hill. “It will be dead, gone and buried.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

 

 

David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics

Eric Levitz

David Shor got famous by getting fired. In late May, amid widespread protests over George Floyd’s murder, the 28-year-old data scientist tweeted out a study that found nonviolent demonstrations were more effective than “riots” at pushing public opinion and voter behavior leftward in 1968. Many Twitter users — and (reportedly) some of Shor’s colleagues and clients at the data firm Civis Analytics — found this post insensitive. A day later, Shor publicly apologized for his tweet. Two weeks after that, he’d lost his job as Civis’s head of political data science — and become a byword for the excesses of so-called cancel culture. (Shor has not discussed his firing publicly due to a nondisclosure agreement, and the details of his termination remain undisclosed).

But before Shor’s improbable transformation into a cause célèbre, he was among the most influential data gurus in Democratic politics — a whiz kid who, at age 20, served as the 2012 Obama campaign’s in-house Nate Silver, authoring the forecasting model that the White House used to determine where the race really stood.

And before that, he was a college Marxist.

This idiosyncratic combination of ideological background, employment experience, and expertise has lent Shor a unique perspective on American politics. He is a self-avowed socialist who insists that big-dollar donors pull the Democratic Party left. He is an adherent of Leninist vanguardism and the median voter theorem. And in the three years I’ve known him, I don’t think I’ve found a single question about U.S. politics that he could not answer with reference to at least three peer-reviewed studies.

Shor is still consulting in Democratic politics, but he is no longer working for a firm that restricts his freedom to publicly opine. Intelligencer recently spoke with him about how the Democratic Party really operates, why the coming decade could be a great one for the American right, how protests shape public opinion, what the left gets wrong about electoral politics, and whether Donald Trump will be reelected, among other things.

What is it like to have your name become shorthand for a culture war controversy? 
I cannot comment on any of the stuff around all of that.

All right. That line of questioning is canceled
Sorry!

I feel silenced, but it’s okay. Let’s start here then: What are the biggest revisions you’ve made to your conception of how electoral politics works since you first took a job on the Obama campaign?

I think going into politics, I overestimated the importance of the personal ideology of people who worked in campaigns for making decisions — which was part of a broader phenomenon of overestimating the extent to which people were making decisions. In 2012, I would see progressive blogs* publish stories like, “The White House is doing a Climate Week. This must be because they have polling showing that climate is a vulnerability for Republicans.” And once you know the people who are in that office, you realize that actually no; they were just at an awkward office meeting and were like, “Oh man, what are we going to do this week? Well, we could do climate.” There’s very little long-term, strategic planning happening anywhere in the party because no one has an incentive to do it. So, campaigns’ actions, while not random, are more random than I realized.

I’ve also fallen toward a consultant theory of change — or like, a process theory of change. So a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material interests of her donors.

But that’s not what happened. The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes. But the problem was mechanical, and less about the vulgar Marxist interests of all of the actors involved.

A tasteful Marxist (or whatever the opposite of a “vulgar” one is) might counter that class biases were implicated in that mechanical error — that cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class pollsters and operatives’ eagerness to see their worldview affirmed led them to ignore the possibility that their surveys suffered from a systematic sampling error.

That’s exactly right. Campaigns do want to win. But the people who work in campaigns tend to be highly ideologically motivated and thus, super-prone to convincing themselves to do things that are strategically dumb. Nothing that I tell people — or that my team [at Civis] told people — is actually that smart. You know, we’d do all this math, and some of it’s pretty cool, but at a high level, what we’re saying is: “You should put your money in cheap media markets in close states close to the election, and you should talk about popular issues, and not talk about unpopular issues.” And we’d use machine learning to operationalize that at scale.

The right strategies for politics aren’t actually unclear. But a lot of people on the Clinton campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the social views of racist white people.

What is the definition of racist in this context?

Ah, right. People yell at me on Twitter about this. So working-class white people have an enormous amount of political power and they’re trending towards the Republican Party. It would be really ideologically convenient if the reason they’re doing that was because Democrats embraced neoliberalism. But it’s pretty clear that that isn’t true.

I think that winning back these voters is important. So if I was running for office, I would definitely say that the reason these voters turned against us is because Democrats failed to embrace economic populism. I think that’s sound political messaging. But in terms of what actually drove it, the numbers are pretty clear. It’s like theoretically possible to imagine a voter who voted for Democrats their whole life and then voted for Trump out of frustration with Obamacare or trade or whatever. And I’m sure that tons of those voters exist, but they’re not representative.

When you take the results of the 2012 and 2016 elections, and model changes in Democratic vote share, you see the biggest individual-level predictor for vote switching was education; college-educated people swung toward Democrats and non-college-educated people swung toward Republicans. But, if you ask a battery of “racial resentment” questions — stuff like, “Do you think that there are a lot of white people who are having trouble finding a job because nonwhite people are getting them instead?” or, “Do you think that white people don’t have enough influence in how this country is run?” — and then control for the propensity to answer those questions in a racially resentful way, education ceases to be the relevant variable: Non-college-educated white people with low levels of racial resentment trended towards us in 2016, and college-educated white people with high levels of racial resentments turned against us.

You can say, “Oh, you know, the way that political scientists measure racial resentment is a class marker because college-educated people know that they’re not supposed to say politically incorrect things.” But when you look at Trump’s support in the Republican primary, it correlated pretty highly with, uh … racially charged … Google search words. So you had this politician who campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti–political correctness platform. And then he won the votes of a large group of swing voters, and vote switching was highly correlated with various individual level measures of racial resentment — and, on a geographic level, was correlated with racist search terms. At some point, you have to be like, oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just an important fact of the world.

I think people take the wrong conclusions from it. The fight I saw on Twitter after the 2016 election was one group of people saying the Obama-to-Trump voters are racist and irredeemable, and that’s why we need to focus on the suburbs. And then you had leftists saying, “Actually these working-class white people were betrayed by decades of neoliberalism and we just need to embrace socialism and win them back, we can’t trust people in the suburbs.” And I think the real synthesis of these views is that Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them to vote for us.

How should Democrats do that?

So there’s a big constellation of issues. The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.

If you decided to create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions, health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of two policy options, and then had 1,000 Americans fill it out, you would find that Democratic elected officials are to the left of 90 to 95 percent of people.

And the reason is that while voters may have more left-wing views than Joe Biden on a few issues, they don’t have the same consistency across their views. There are like tons of pro-life people who want higher taxes, etc. There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones. Some people responded to media coverage of that paper by saying, “Oh, people are just answering these surveys randomly, issues don’t matter.” But that’s not actually what the paper showed. In a separate section, they tested the relevance of issues by presenting voters with hypothetical candidate matchups — here’s a politician running on this position, and another politician running on the opposite — and they found that issue congruence was actually very important for predicting who people voted for.

So this suggests there’s a big mass of voters who agree with us on some issues, and disagree with us on others. And whenever we talk about a given issue, that increases the extent to which voters will cast their ballots on the basis of that issue.

Mitt Romney and Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people changed their votes. And the reason that happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked a lot more about immigration, and because of that, correlation between preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went up. In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for went down.

So this means that every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters. But this is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they talk about.

Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.

It sounds like you’re saying that public opinion is a fixed entity, which campaigns have little power to reshape. I think many progressives dispute that notion. In their view, the “social views of racist white people” aren’t a given. Right-wing media has fed the public a story that pits their interests against those of immigrants. But if Democrats offer a counter-narrative about how corporate interests use ethnic divisions to divide and conquer working people, maybe they can change what is and is not “popular.” Why is that view wrong?

It’s worth being precise about mechanisms. It’s true that political parties have enormous control over the views of their partisans. There’s like 20 percent of the electorate that trusts Democratic elites tremendously. And they will turn their views on a dime if the party tells them to. So this is how you can get Abolish ICE to go from a 10 percent issue to a 30 percent issue. If you’re an ideological activist, that’s a powerful force. If you convince strong partisans to adopt your view, then when the party comes to power, strong partisans will ultimately make up that administration and then you can make policy progress.

The problem is that swing voters don’t trust either party. So if you get Democrats to embrace Abolish ICE, that won’t get moderate-ish, racist white people to support it; it will just turn them into Republicans. So that’s the trade-off. When you embrace unpopular things, you become more unpopular with marginal voters, but also get a fairly large segment of the public to change its views. And the latter can sometimes produce long-term change.

But it’s a hard trade-off. And I don’t think anyone ever says something like, “I think it was a good trade for us to lose the presidency because we raised the salience of this issue.” That’s not generally what people want. They don’t want to make an unpopular issue go from 7 percent to 30 percent support. They want something like what happened with gay marriage or marijuana legalization, where you take an issue that is 30 percent and then it goes to 70 percent. And if you look at the history of those things, it’s kind of clear that campaigns didn’t do that.

If you look at long-term trends in support for gay marriage, it began linearly increasing, year over year, starting in the late 1980s. But then, right when the issue increased in salience during the 2004 campaign, it suddenly became partisan, and support declined. After it stopped being a campaign issue, support returned to trend.

Graphic: Gallup

Campaigns just can’t effect those kinds of long-term changes. They can direct information to partisans who trust them, and they can curry favor with marginal voters by signaling agreement with them on issues. But there isn’t much space for changing marginal voters’ minds.

How do you square this analysis with the events of the past few weeks, in which the salience of racially discriminatory policing increased in tandem with Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump? Obviously there are a lot of other variables. But we have seen a surge in support for the Black Lives Matter movement and police reform. We’ve seen Biden boasting a bigger advantage over Trump on the question of which candidate can best handle race relations — and all while progressive activists have been associating the left with the exceptionally unpopular concept of defunding the police.

Yeah. I’m not going to pretend that I would have predicted that this is how it was going to shake out. But I do think it’s actually consistent with what we’ve been discussing.

One way to think about electoral salience and the effects of raising the salience of given issues, is to look at which party voters trust on a given issue, not just what their stated policy preference is. So if you do a poll on universal background checks for guns, you’ll find that they’re super-popular. But then, politicians who run on background checks often lose. In the same way, if you poll comprehensive immigration reform, it’s super-popular, even among Republicans. But then Republicans can run on anti-immigrant platforms and win. So how do you square that circle?

One way is to remember that these polls give us a very limited informational environment. You just throw people a sentence-length idea, which they’ve often never heard of before, and then people react to it. So it tells you how people will respond to a policy at first brush without any partisan context. But ultimately, when people hear from both sides, they’re gonna revert to some kind of partisan baseline. But there’s not a nihilism there; it’s not just that Democratic-leaning voters will adopt the Democratic position or Republican-leaning ones will automatically adopt the Republican one. Persuadable voters trust the parties on different issues.

And there’s a pretty basic pattern — both here and in other countries — in which voters view center-left parties as empathetic. Center-left parties care about the environment, lowering poverty, improving race relations. And then, you know, center-right parties are seen as more “serious,” or more like the stern dad figure or something. They do better on getting the economy going or lowering unemployment or taxes or crime or immigration.

If you look at how this breaks down in the U.S. — Gallup did something on this in 2017, and I’m sure the numbers haven’t changed that much since then — you see that same basic story. But there’s an interesting twist. One thing that Democrats consistently get rated highly on is improving race relations. And this points to the complexities of racial resentment. The way that racially charged issues generally get brought up in the U.S. is in the context of crime, which is a very Republican-loaded issue (in terms of which party the median voter trusts on it). Or it comes up in terms of immigration, which is itself a Republican-loaded issue. So even if voters acknowledge the massive systemic inequities that exist in the U.S., discussion of them normally happens in a context where conservatives can posit a trade-off with safety, or all these other things people trust Republicans on.

What’s powerful about nonviolent protest — and particularly nonviolent protest that incurs a disproportionate response from the police — is that it can shift the conversation, in a really visceral way, into the part of this issue space that benefits Democrats and the center left. Which is the pursuit of equality, social justice, fairness — these Democratic-loaded concepts — without the trade-off of crime or public safety. So I think it is really consistent with a pretty broad, cross-sectional body of evidence (a piece of which I obviously tweeted at some point) that nonviolent protest is politically advantageous, both in terms of changing public opinion on discrete issues and electing parties sympathetic to the left’s concerns.

As for “the abolish the police” stuff, I think the important thing there is that basically no mainstream elected officials embraced it. Most persuadable voters get their news from the networks’ nightly news broadcasts and CNN. And if you look at how they covered  things, the “abolish the police” concept didn’t get nearly as much play as it did on Twitter and elite discourse. And to the extent that it was covered, that coverage featured prominent left politicians loudly denouncing it. And I think that’s a success story for everyone involved. Activists were able to dramatically shift the terms of debate around not just racial justice issues, but police justice in a way that’s basically the Second Great Awokening. But because Democratic politicians kept chasing the median voter, we got to have our cake and eat it too. We got to have public opinion shift in our direction on the issues without paying an electoral price.

To play insurrectionist’s advocate: The protests weren’t entirely nonviolent. And one could argue that, had there not been rioting in Minneapolis, there would have been less media attention and thus, fewer nonviolent protests. So how do we know that the nonviolent protests were the source of the movement’s political efficacy? And why didn’t the violence at the fringes of those protests activate the public’s concerns about crime?

I want to caution against turning this into physics. There’s only so much we can understand about the dynamics of these events. But if you wanted to be purely utilitarian, and set aside the morality concerns, I think you can tell a story about how the initial wave of violence triggered media coverage, or got the police or security forces really primed to use violence against nonviolent protesters, and without that happening, it wouldn’t have exploded as much as it did. It’s hard to know. I can’t really evaluate that counterfactual.

But there’s always a mix of violent and nonviolent protest; or, there’s always some violence that occurs at nonviolent protests. And it’s not a situation where a drop of violence spoils everything and turns everybody into fascists. The research isn’t consistent with that. It’s more about the proportions. Because the mechanism here is that when violence is happening, people become afraid. They fear for their safety, and then they crave order. And order is a winning issue for conservatives here and everywhere around the world. The basic political argument since the French Revolution has been the left saying, “Let’s make things more fair,” and the right saying, “If we do that, it will lead to chaos and threaten your family.”

But when you have nonviolent protests that goad security forces into using excessive force against unarmed people — preferably while people are watching — then order gets discredited, and people experience this visceral sense of unfairness. And you can change public opinion. And if you look at the [George Floyd] protests, there was some violence in the first two or three days. But then that largely subsided, and was followed by very high-profile incidents of the state using violence against innocent people.

And, you know, the real inflection point in our polling was the Lafayette Park incident, when Trump used tear gas on innocent people. That’s when support for Biden shot up and it’s been pretty steady since then.

In describing the Democrats’ troubles with non-college-educated white voters earlier, you put a lot of emphasis on discrete decisions that the Hillary Clinton campaign made. But, in my understanding, the 2016 election just accelerated a preexisting trend: In both the United States and Western Europe, non-college-educated voters have been drifting right for decades. Doesn’t that suggest that something larger than any given campaign’s messaging choices is at work here?  

That’s a great point. I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, “Where did things go wrong?” You see Matt Stoller and Ryan Grim do this, where you try to pinpoint the moment in time when Democratic elites decided to turn their backs on the working class and embrace neoliberalism. Maybe it was the Watergate babies. Maybe it was the failure to repeal Taft-Hartley. Maybe it was Bill Clinton in 1992.

But then you read about other countries and you see that the same story is happening everywhere. It happened in England with Tony Blair. It happened in Germany with Gerhard Schröder. The thing that really got me was reading about the history of PASOK, the Social Democratic Party in Greece. And you’re reading about an election in the 1990s where it’s like, “the right-wing New Democracy party made gains with working-class voters,” and you realize there are broader forces at work here.

So why is this happening? The story that makes the most sense to me goes like this: In the postwar era, college-educated professionals were maybe 4 percent of the electorate. Which meant that basically no voters had remotely cosmopolitan values. But the flip side of this is that this educated 4 percent still ran the world. Both parties at this point were run by this highly educated, cosmopolitan minority that held a bunch of values that undergirded the postwar consensus, around democracy and rule of law, and all these things.

Obviously, these people were more right wing on a bunch of social issues than their contemporary counterparts, but during that era, both parties were run by just about the most cosmopolitan segments of society. And there were also really strong gatekeepers. This small group of highly educated people not only controlled the commanding heights of both the left and the right, but also controlled the media. There were only a small number of TV stations — in other countries, those stations were even run by the government. And both sides knew it wasn’t electorally advantageous to campaign on cosmopolitan values.

So, as a result, campaigns centered around this cosmopolitan elite’s internal disagreements over economic issues. But over the past 60 years, college graduates have gone from being 4 percent of the electorate to being more like 35. Now, it’s actually possible — for the first time ever in human history — for political parties to openly embrace cosmopolitan values and win elections; certainly primary and municipal elections, maybe even national elections if you don’t push things too far or if you have a recession at your back. And so Democratic elites started campaigning on the things they’d always wanted to, but which had previously been too toxic. And so did center-left parties internationally.

What is your understanding of why there’s such a profound divide between college-educated and non-college-educated people on these so-called cosmopolitan issues?

Education is highly correlated with openness to new experiences; basically, there’s this divide where some people react positively to novel things and others react less positively. And there’s evidence that this relationship is causal. In Europe, when countries raised their mandatory schooling age from 16 to 18, the first generation of students who remained in school longer had substantially more liberal views on immigration than their immediate predecessors. And then, college-educated people are also more willing to try strange foods or travel broad. So it really seems like education makes people more open to new experiences.

But politically, this manifests on immigration. And it’s ironclad. You can look at polling from the 1940s on whether America should take in Jewish refugees, and college-educated people wanted to and non-college-educated people didn’t. It’s true cross-nationally — like, working-class South Africans oppose taking in refugees from Zimbabwe, while college-educated South Africans support taking them in.

Other research has shown that messaging centered around the potential for cooperation and positive-sum change really appeals to educated people, while messaging that emphasizes zero-sum conflict resonates much more with non-college-educated people. Arguably, this is because college-educated professionals live really blessed lives filled with mutually beneficial exchange, while negative-sum conflicts play a very big part of working-class people’s lives, in ways that richer people are sheltered from. But it manifests in a lot of ways and leads to divergent political attitudes.

We’ve been talking a lot about the education split among white voters. But the polling results you just referenced from South Africa suggest that education-based splits on cosmopolitanism manifest across racial and ethnic lines. Are Democrats losing ground with nonwhite, non-college-educated voters?

Yeah. Black voters trended Republican in 2016. Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican. In Florida, Democratic senator Bill Nelson did 2 or 3 points better than Clinton among white voters but lost because he did considerably worse than her among Black and Hispanic voters. We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too. I think there’s a lot of denial about this fact.

I don’t think there are obvious answers as to why this is happening. But non-college-educated white voters and non-college-educated nonwhite voters have a lot in common with each other culturally. So as the salience of cultural issues with strong education-based splits increases — whether it’s gender politics or authoritarianism or immigration — it would make sense that we’d see some convergence between non-college-educated voters across racial lines.

American politics used to be very idiosyncratic, because we have this historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and all of these things that don’t have clear foreign analogues. But the world is slowly changing — not changing in ways that make racism go away or not matter — but in ways that erode some of the underpinnings of race-based voting. So if you look at Black voters trending against us, it’s not uniform. It’s specifically young, secular Black voters who are voting more Republican than their demographic used to. And the ostensible reason for this is the weakening of the Black church, which had, for historical reasons, occupied a really central place in Black society and helped anchor African-Americans in the Democratic Party. Among Black voters, one of the biggest predictors for voting Republican is not attending church. So I think you can tell this story about how the America-centric aspects of our politics are starting to decay, and we’re converging on the dynamics that you see in Europe, where nonwhite voters are more left wing than white voters, but where they vote for the left by like 65 to 35 percent, rather than the 90-10 split you see with African-Americans.

To be clear, if that happens, it would take a long time. But if I had to guess, I’d say young African-Americans might trend 4 or 5 percent against us in relative terms. But they’re a small percent of the Black electorate. These are slow-moving trends.

Are all of the trends you’ve studied unfavorable for Democrats? If the party is losing young African-Americans and non-college-educated whites, is it making compensatory gains? What is the outlook for the party over the coming decade?

I’ll start with the good news. The fear I had after 2016 was that Romney-Clinton voters were going to snap back to being Republicans, but Obama-Trump voters wouldn’t snap back to being Democrats. And that hasn’t happened — we’ve retained Clinton’s gains. We see this in 2020 polling. We saw it in 2018, with Democrats making big gains with these voters in the Senate, House, and state-level elections.

And those don’t just reflect discrepancies in which college-educated professionals decided to turnout for a midterm?

Some of it was. But roughly 75 percent was people changing their minds. So college-educated professionals have basically become Democrats. These voters aren’t optimal for winning the Electoral College. But they have other assets as a demographic.

There’s this sense in left-wing politics that rich people have disproportionate political influence and power. Well, we’ve never had an industrialized society where the richest and most powerful people were as liberal as they are now in the U.S. You know, controlling for education, very rich people still lean Republican. But we’re at a point now where, if you look at Stanford Law School, the ratio of students in the college Democrats to students in the college Republicans is something like 20-to-1. Harvard students have always been Democratic-leaning, but only like three or four percent of them voted for Donald Trump. So there is now this host of incredibly powerful institutions — whether it’s corporate boardrooms or professional organizations — which are now substantially more liberal than they’ve ever been.

And this is reflected not just in how they vote but in their ideological preferences. If you look at small donors — which, to be clear, are still mostly rich people — Democrats got around 54 percent of small donors in 2012. In 2018, we got 76 percent. People like to chalk that up to ActBlue or technology or whatever. But 2018 was also the first year where super-PACs, as a spending group, gave more to Democrats than Republicans.

So these constituencies that previously did a lot to uphold conservative power are now liberal. I don’t know what all of the consequences of that are. But Democrats are now better funded than they were. And the media is nicer to us. There’s a lot of downstream consequences.

Many on the left are wary of the Democratic Party’s growing dependence on wealthy voters and donors. But you’ve argued that the party’s donor class actually pulls it to the left, as big-dollar Democratic donors are more progressive — even on economic issues — than the median Democratic voter. I’m skeptical of that claim. After all, so much regulation and legislation never crosses ordinary Americans’ radar. It seems implausible to me that, during negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Obama administration fought to export America’s generous patent protections on pharmaceuticals to the developing world, or to expand the reach of the Investor State Dispute Settlement process, because they felt compelled to placate swing voters. Similarly, it’s hard for me to believe that the primary reason why Democrats did not significantly expand collective-bargaining rights under Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama was voter hostility to labor-law reform rather than the unified opposition of business interests to such a policy. So why couldn’t it be the case that, when it comes to policy, a minority of big-dollar donors who are highly motivated — and reactionary — on discrete issues pull the party to the right, even as wealthier Democrats give more ideologically consistent responses to survey questions? 

It depends on what level of government you’re talking about. When you’re talking about state legislatures, that’s all really low-salience stuff. And the reality is that state parties have to do some ethically questionable things to keep the lights on because small-dollar donors generally don’t donate to their campaigns. So in state and local politics, corporate money is absolutely a big driver.

But the rise of small-dollar donors has really changed federal politics. And again — to be clear — “small-dollar” donors are mostly affluent people. Most of these donors are giving hundreds of dollars. But the thing people don’t realize is, at this point, that’s most of the money. Most of the money in Democratic politics now comes from ideologically motivated small donors and very liberal millionaires and billionaires like George Soros. There’s corporate money, but it’s not the biggest pool anymore. This produces some counterintuitive dynamics where, like in West Virginia, there aren’t a lot of affluent liberals, and so there isn’t a lot of small-dollar donations, and so Joe Manchin is a little bit more beholden to corporations.

It’s true that, if you are a representative in a swing district, you have a strong incentive to raise lots of money. But I think those incentives mostly pull candidates left, for the simple reason that the way that you get a lot of small-dollar donations is to stand up and yell at Trump — or do whatever makes very liberal dentists and doctors excited. Obviously, that doesn’t mean calling for socialism. But these liberal professionals do tend to be pretty economically left wing.

David Broockman showed in a recent paper — and I’ve seen this in internal data — that people who give money to Democrats are more economically left wing than Democrats overall. And the more money people give, the more economically left wing they are. These are obviously the non-transactional donors. But people underestimate the extent to which the non-transactional money is now all of the money. This wasn’t true ten years ago.

So then you get to the question: Why do so many moderate Democrats vote for center-right policies that don’t even poll well? Why did Heidi Heitkamp vote to deregulate banks in 2018, when the median voter in North Dakota doesn’t want looser regulations on banks? But the thing is, while that median voter doesn’t want to deregulate banks, that voter doesn’t want a senator who is bad for business in North Dakota. And so if the North Dakota business community signals that it doesn’t like Heidi Heitkamp, that’s really bad for Heidi Heitkamp, because business has a lot of cultural power.

I think that’s a very straightforward, almost Marxist view of power: Rich people have disproportionate cultural influence. So business does pull the party right. But it does so more through the mechanism of using its cultural power to influence public opinion, not through donations to campaigns.

So, in your view, the reason that Democrats aren’t more left wing on economic issues isn’t because they’re bought off, but because the median voter is “bought off,” in the sense of responding to cues from corporate interests?

Yeah. One thing I’ve learned from working in Democratic politics for eight years is that the idea that the limiting factor on what moves policy to the left in this country is the personal decisions of individual Democrats is kind of crazy. Democratic politicians, relative to the country, are very left wing. But campaigns really want to win.

In my career, I have seen circumstances where polling has said to do one thing, and then we didn’t do it for ideological reasons. But every single one of those times, we ignored the polling from the left. Like, if Joe Biden wanted to just follow the polls, he should support the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal funding for abortion services). The Hyde Amendment polls extremely well. But the people who work on his campaign oppose the Hyde Amendment. So Joe Biden opposes the Hyde Amendment.

Like, if you look at the Obama administration, the first time they resorted to procedural radicalism was to make recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. They didn’t do that to win votes; a lot of labor’s agenda — repealing right-to-work laws, establishing sectoral bargaining — is unpopular. But Democrats do pro-labor policies because the people who work on Democratic campaigns, and who run for office as Democrats, are generally very liberal people. Leftists just don’t understand how small of a minority we are.

One personal anecdote: Shortly after Civis did a poll showing that a federal job guarantee is actually a very popular idea, one of my colleagues took a call from a big Democratic super-PAC. And they said, “You know, we saw the job guarantee polling from Civis” — and my colleague was about to throw me under the bus (you know, “Oh, it was just those crazy socialists in Chicago”) — but the super-PAC just thought it was cool. And then there was a long discussion about how to incorporate public job creation into messaging.

So I think people underestimate Democrats’ openness to left-wing policies that won’t cost them elections. And there are a lot of radical, left-wing policies that are genuinely very popular. Codetermination is popular. A job guarantee is popular. Large minimum-wage increases are popular and could literally end market poverty.

All these things will engender opposition from capital. But if you focus on the popular things, and manage to build positive earned media around those things, then you can convince Democrats to do them. So we should be asking ourselves, “What is the maximally radical thing that can get past Joe Manchin.” And that’s like a really depressing optimization problem. And it’s one that most leftists don’t even want to approach, but they should. There’s a wide spectrum of possibilities for what could happen the next time Democrats take power, and if we don’t come in with clear thinking and realistic demands, we could end up getting rolled.

Do you think the coronavirus crisis has expanded the realm of realistic demands? 

I think a really underrated political consequence of coronavirus has been a large increase in Democrats’ odds of taking the Senate. A year ago, I thought it was possible but a long shot. Now, it’s something that has a very reasonable chance of happening.

And I think that’s partly because a lot of Senate Republicans have put themselves in the position of opposing very popular things. The coronavirus has really increased the salience of health care, which is a Democratic-loaded issue. But it’s also made opposing things like paid leave incredibly toxic. And we’ve seen Republican incumbents do that again and again. I think Republican Senate incumbents are being blamed for a lot of what’s happening in ways that aren’t fully appreciated by the media. So that’s the most direct way that coronavirus is expanding the realm of the possible.

Sorry, so you were saying about positive trends for Democrats?

Yeah. So the other positive thing is that age polarization has also gone up. It’s not just that every new generation is more Democratic. Something much weirder has happened. People who were 18 years old in 2012 have swung about 12 points toward Democrats, while people who were 65 years old in that year have since swung like eight points toward Republicans. Right now, that’s a bad trade. Old people vote more than young people. But the age gap has gotten so large that cycle-to-cycle demographic changes are actually worth something now. On the Obama campaign in 2012, I calculated that demographic change between 2008 and 2012 — holding everything else constant — would gain Democrats like 0.3 points. Now, I think that number is probably two-to-three times higher. Young white people are now very liberal. And that’s going to be important.

The bad news is, over the next ten years, our institutions’ structural biases against Democrats are going to become very large. People say this a lot, but I don’t think they truly appreciate how bad things are. The Electoral College bias is now such that realistically we have to win by 3.5 to 4 percent in order to win presidential elections. Trump is historically unpopular, so this year we can maybe pull that off. But for the past 30 years or so, most presidential elections have been pretty close. So the fact that we need to win by four points is going to decrease the amount of time we hold the presidency. People like to say things like, “Oh, but the Sun Belt will trend towards us” — I think if you actually go and simulate things, barring some large realignment, the Electoral College bias is probably going to hold steady over the next decade.

So you don’t think Texas could become a 51 percent Democratic state by 2030?

If education-based polarization reaches a point where Texas becomes the tipping-point state, then that means that Michigan and Minnesota and Maine and Wisconsin are all gone. Right now, we’re in a place where there are a bunch of working-class states that are two points more Republican than the country. And that sucks, but we can live with it. If those states become five points more Republican than the country, then it becomes harder. I’m not saying it will be like this forever. But for the next two cycles, the baseline case is fairly bad.

The Senate is even worse. And much worse than people realize. The Senate has always been, on paper, biased against Democrats. It overrepresents states that are rural and white, and mechanically, that gives a structural advantage to Republicans. For 50 years or so, the tipping-point state in the Senate has been about one percentage point more Republican than the country as a whole. And that advantage did go up in 2016, because white rural voters trended against us (it went up to 3 percent). But the problem isn’t just about that increase in the long-term structural bias. If it were, I wouldn’t be so despondent about the future. The real problem is that the Senate’s bias used to not matter much, because the correlation between how people voted for president and how they voted for Senate used to be much lower. As recently as 2006, if you looked among Democratic incumbents, there was literally zero correlation between how states voted on the Senate level and how they voted on the presidential level. That year, Ben Nelson in Nebraska actually did better than Bob Menendez in New Jersey. So 14 years ago, the correlation was roughly zero. And now, it’s roughly 90 percent.

That’s the core of the problem. There used to be a lot of randomness down ballot, and there also used to be very strong incumbency advantages. In 2004, being an incumbent was worth about 11 points of vote share. Now it’s about three points. And with an incumbency advantage that low — and correlation with presidential vote that high — it’s just not possible for Democrats to win in all these states that used to be the backbone of our Senate majorities. We won an open race in North Dakota in 2012. It’s true that the bias is getting higher, and that that’s made things worse. But 90 percent of the story is that ticket-splitting used to be common and now it’s rare. And that’s not a Trump thing. Ticket-splitting was declining in the Bush era, and accelerated under Obama. And that trend line probably isn’t going to change.

Why not?

The reason people aren’t splitting their tickets anymore is probably because the internet exists now and people are better informed than they used to be. There was this broadband rollout study where they looked at the fact that different places got broadband at different times. And what they saw was that when broadband reached a given congressional district, ticket-splitting declined and ideological polarization went up. 

Right now — because we already have a lot of these incumbents in red states, and because we were lucky enough to have a big wave when many of them were on the ballot in 2018 — we have a decent chance of winning the Senate in 2020. But if you just project out the trends — if you fit a regression on 2018 polling and apply it forward — if we have a neutral national environment in 2024 (i.e., a 2016-style environment), we’re going to be down to 43 Senate seats. It’s really quite bleak. The Senate was always a really fucked-up anti-majoritarian institution. But it was okay because people in Nebraska used to vote randomly. But now they have the internet, and they know that Democrats are liberal.

So what should Democrats do? Abolish the internet? Or add states? 

Everything we can. Obviously, D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood are great. But we should really strongly consider adding more than two states. I’ve been trying to push the U.S. Virgin Islands, for example — home to largely nonwhite, marginalized people who don’t have representation. We’ve actually done polling on this. And even with pro and con arguments provided, it polls really well. People have really weird, incoherent views on representation. When you tell people, “There are 50,000 people in American Samoa and they don’t have a senator to stand up for their interests. Do you think they should get a senator?” — even when you tell them that Republicans say this proposal is an absurd Democratic power grab — still a very large minority of Trump supporters say yes. In our polls, majorities are onboard with adding three or four or five states. People think it’s fair. One fun thing is, Virgin Islands statehood actually polls much better than D.C. statehood. D.C. statehood is actually the least popular of any of the statehood proposals we’ve polled.

What probability would you assign to Donald Trump winning reelection? 

I think one big lesson of 2018 was that Trump’s coalition held up. Obviously, we did better as the party out of power. But if you look at how we did in places like Maine or Wisconsin or Michigan, it looked more like 2016 than 2012. Donald Trump still has a giant structural advantage in the Electoral College.

So, in 2016, we got 51.1 percent of the two-party vote share (of the share of votes that went to Democrats and Republicans). And if we had gotten 51.6 percent of that, we would have had about a 50 percent chance of winning an Electoral College majority. We probably needed to get to 52 percent in order to have a high chance of winning the presidency. For most of the last six months, in public polls, Biden was at 52 or so. Now, we’re at like 54.

So, the question is just: Are things going to go down?

I’m not gonna speculate about whether the coronavirus will get better or whether it will get worse. I think you can tell plausible stories in either direction. But if you go back and look at polling this far out, and then do a regression where you predict Election Day as a function of polling, generally, when candidates are this far ahead, things tend to revert toward a mean. And unfortunately, in this case, the historical mean we’re regressing to isn’t 50 percent; incumbents have historically averaged 51 percent of the vote. So things are likely to tighten. And, of course, polling was wrong in 2016. And actually, on a state level, the polling was wrong by a similar margin in places like West Virginia or Ohio or Michigan or Montana in 2018. So after we get through the conventions, and partisans activate on both sides, there’s a substantial chance that we’ll find ourselves in a close election. And everybody should treat it that way.

Personally, I remember that in 2016, around September, we gave Hillary an 85 percent chance of winning. And this led to situations where you had Democratic organizations, our clients at Civis, wanting to take money out of Pennsylvania and put it in other places. I think one person literally asked me, “What if we try to maximize 370 electoral votes instead of 270.” I think there’s going to be a real instinct for us to take the election for granted, and start to do dumb, hubristic things like spending millions of dollars on our victory stage, which is something that Hillary Clinton did.

So we should all have the discipline to continue investing in tipping-point states and appealing to the median voter. Because this is an incredibly important year. This is our last chance to win a trifecta for a very long time. And if we don’t win the presidency, things could get very dark. So everything we do matters a lot.

*In an earlier version of this interview, Shor attributed a blog post about “climate week” to Daily Kos Elections (DKE). He was referencing something he remembered reading eight years ago extemporaneously, and misidentified the outlet that published the (alleged) blog. DKE published no such post.

 

 

ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT NO CAPS ON IMPORTING CHEAPER FOREIGN WORKER.

 

Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California. 

 

 

Biden’s Billionaires

 

By Steve McCann

Many years ago, while participating in a voter registration drive, I came upon a grizzled and disheveled old man sitting in the overgrown and weed-infested yard of his paint-starved house calming smoking his pipe.  Despite his gruff demeanor, Ully (Ulysses) was very pleasant and loquacious as we talked for over an hour on topics ranging from the weather to the innate foibles of mankind.  It turned out that he had to leave school after the fourth grade in order to work in the fields to help support his family and had toiled in a variety of menial and labor-intensive jobs ever since.  Yet, he had a deep and thorough insight into human nature.  Among his comments about the rich and ostensibly well-educated was: “All the money in the world cain’t buy a fool a lick of common sense.”

I was reminded of that observation after reading an article describing the 131 billionaires who are pouring millions into the coffers of the Democrat party and Joe Biden’s campaign in their mindless obsession to defeat President Trump in November.  Among the prominent names are Jeff Skoll, a founder of eBay who has contributed $4.5 million; Laurene Powell Jobs of Apple and owner of The Atlantic magazine has donated $1.2 million,  and Josh Bekenstein, Chairman of Bain Capital (co-founded by Mitt Romney), $5 million.  

Far more Wall Street financers have also jumped on the Biden/Democrat party bandwagon than are supporting Donald Trump, whose policies have overwhelmingly revived the economy after the stagnation of the Obama-Biden years. The tech billionaires, not content to simply cough up untold millions in direct political contributions, are also funding massive voter drives, promoting mail-in balloting, creating divisive partisan news sites, aiding and designing the Democrat party’s digital campaigns and unabashedly censoring the social media accounts of the Trump campaign and innumerable conservatives. 

The political party they are gleefully underwriting in order to oust Trump is no longer the party of the middle and working class (which is now one and the same) but a two-tier assemblage in which the prey is sleeping with the predator.  The witless wealthy and socially aware are in bed with the avowed socialists and militant Marxists.  What is holding this marriage of convenience together is a mutual hatred of Donald Trump and the undoable promises made by Joe Biden and the Democrat party hierarchy.

In a 2019 meeting with 100 super-wealthy potential donors, Biden assured the gathering that he would not demonize the rich and would only increase their taxes slightly while ensuring that their standard of living would not be affected by any of his policies.  He also stated: “I’m not Bernie Sanders.  I don’t think 500 Billionaires are the reason why we are in trouble”.  Further, he unabashedly emphasized that the wealthy are not the reason for income inequality and “If I win this nomination.  I won’t let you down.  I promise you.”  

Further, the dubious choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely to placate and reassure Wall Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to the mega-rich class based on her days in California. 

When the time came to deal with the Marxist/socialist wing of the Democrat party’s anti-Trump coalition, policy commitments, many diametrically opposite of what was promised the wealthy donors, were also guaranteed with a non-verbal pledge of we won’t let you down.

The first step was a de facto party platform.  The 110-page Biden-Sanders Manifesto which includes, among other commitments, a massive job killing $2+ trillion climate agenda to phase out fossil fuel usage within 15 years, the elimination of cash bail, redirecting (i.e. cutting) funding for the police, dismantling all border protections, legalizing virtually all illegal immigrants and massively raising corporate and individual tax rates on the wealthy.  This manifesto is a socialist screed that would destroy the middle class and permanently neuter the economy and nation. 

An effusive Bernie Sanders proclaimed to the world that Biden and the Democrats have embraced his socialist agenda and that Biden would be the most progressive president since FDR.  Sanders exposed not only the behind the scenes reality of today’s Democrat party but Biden’s figurehead role.

Further confirmation of the radicalization of the Party came about unexpectedly as the militant Marxist faction of the Sanders coalition forced the issue.  Impatient and unwilling to wait until after the 3rd of November, Antifa and Black Lives Matter used the death of George Floyd as a pretext to take to the streets and begin their long-hoped for revolution.  They claimed that rioting, looting, committing arson and attacking law enforcement was a necessity as this was a systemically racist country.  Yet, they openly demanded immediate changes rooted in their radical Marxist ideology of class warfare not so-called systemic racism.  As two of their preferred chants and graffiti slogans “eat the rich” and “abolish capitalism now” confirms. 

Biden, the Democrat party hierarchy as well as virtually all Democrat elected officials refused to address the violence and those responsible.  Thus, they tacitly approved of the lawlessness and by doing so flashed a green light to continue the riots.  When forced to acknowledge the reality on the streets of the nation’s cities, they instead blamed Trump, the police, white supremacists and even the Russians.  Due to their spinelessness, the armies of anarchy and revolution Biden and the Democrats unleashed will never be defeated or mollified by them.   

Considering the vast dichotomy in the litany of promises made and actions taken, it is inevitable that either the moneyed elite or the mob of passionate true believers will be betrayed.  There is no middle ground.  Who will prevail? 

Will it be the elites whose only weapon is money and fleeting political influence or the passionate mob whose weapons are unconstrained violence and intimidation?  Will it be those who believe a revolution could never happen here or those who are currently inciting revolution with the implicit blessing of a major political party?  Will it be those who believe that Biden and the Democrats, if elected, will be able to forcefully deal with the insurgents or the insurgents who now know that riots and extortion causes Democrat politicians to cower in the corner?

Beginning with the French Revolution and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, history has recorded that passionate mobs always prevail when dealing with a feckless ruling class or party.  And the first casualties have inevitably been the wealthy elites.

I can envision sitting with my old friend, Ully, and asking him if he thought the wealthy elites, indiscriminately tossing money at the Democrats for the sole purpose of defeating President Trump, understood the pitfalls involved.  He would lean back, slowly exhale a puff of smoke from his well-worn pipe and with uncontrollable anger in his eyes would say: “Nope.  Those damn fools ain’t got a lick of common sense.”