We Need a High Wall With a Big Gate
With Trump using immigration simply for political gain, Democrats need to be the adults and offer a realistic, comprehensive approach.
THOMAS FRIEDMAN, NY TIMES
November 27, 2018
Mueller says Manafort breached plea deal by lying. Manafort’s Lawyer Said to Brief Trump Attorneys on What He Told Mueller.
POLITICO & NY TIMES
-- Paul Manafort’s lawyer repeatedly briefed Trump’s attorneys on the former campaign chairman’s discussions with special counsel Bob Mueller’s team. The New York Times’s Michael S. Schmidt, Sharon LaFraniere and Maggie Haberman report: “The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago ... Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with [Mueller] in hopes of a lighter sentence. Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed. Such information could help shape a legal defense strategy, and it also appeared to give Mr. Trump and his legal advisers ammunition in their public relations campaign against Mr. Mueller’s office.
“While [Manafort’s lawyer Kevin] Downing’s discussions with the president’s team violated no laws, they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors, who accused Mr. Manafort of holding out on them despite his pledge to assist them in any matter they deemed relevant ... That conflict spilled into public view on Monday when the prosecutors took the rare step of declaring that Mr. Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to them about a variety of subjects. … Though it was unclear how frequently he spoke to Mr. Trump’s lawyers or how much he revealed, his updates helped reassure Mr. Trump’s legal team that Mr. Manafort had not implicated the president in any possible wrongdoing.”
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| Why Manafort sought out Julian Assange in 2013 is unclear. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA |
-- Manafort reportedly visited
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Jerome Corsi speaks during an interview in New York on Tuesday. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters) |
-- Mueller’s prosecutors filed a draft court document alleging conservative author Jerome Corsi provided Trump ally Roger Stone with early knowledge about WikiLeaks’s planned email dumps. Carol D. Leonnig, Rosalind S. Helderman and Manuel Roig-Franzia report: “Corsi emailed Stone about WikiLeaks’s plans nearly 10 weeks before the group published [Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta’s hacked emails in October, according to the document, which was prepared by [Mueller’s] team as part of plea negotiations with Corsi that have collapsed. ‘Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging,’ Corsi wrote in the email quoted in the draft document, referring to [Assange] … The email continued: ‘Time to let more than [Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop [Clinton]. That appears to be the game hackers are now about.’
“The draft filing … provides a remarkable look at the case Mueller is building related to WikiLeaks and the most detailed allegations yet that a key associate in Trump’s orbit was provided advance knowledge of the group’s plans. … Stone, who has long denied coordinating with WikiLeaks, reiterated that denial Tuesday. ‘None of the emails cited prove I had advance notice of the source or content of either allegedly hacked or allegedly stolen emails published by WikiLeaks,’ he wrote in a text message to The Post. ‘When did political gossip become a criminal activity? More importantly these emails provide no evidence that I received any materials from WikiLeaks or Assange or Corsi or anyone else and passed them on to Donald Trump or the Trump campaign or anyone else.’”
-- Legal analysts said Mueller’s loss of two potential cooperating witnesses — Manafort and Corsi — would likely harm but not destroy his investigation. Matt Zapotosky reports: “Manafort probably will never take the stand as [Mueller’s] star witness. And Mueller’s prosecutors might have to plow deeper into the world of WikiLeaks and its contacts to determine what, if any, coordination occurred between the Trump campaign and Russia over the release of emails. That probably will leave Mueller disappointed but undeterred.”
November 21, 2018
Is Trump Beginning to Lose His Grip?
It isn’t just white suburban women who switched to Democrats. Parts of rural and white working class America peeled off too.
NY TIMES
November 14, 2018
November 12, 2018
2018 was a WAY better election for Democrats than most people seem to think
CHRIS CILLIZZA, CNN
Midterms Saw Historic Turnout by Young Voters
REAL CLEAR POLITICS
Making sense of the midterms: How politics changed, and stayed the same, in America
NORM ORNSTEIN, NY DAILY NEWSIn the Campaign, Democrats Didn’t Let Trump Distract Them. That Will Be Harder Now.
NY TIMES
Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, has encouraged fellow Democrats in private meetings to resist the urge to leap at Mr. Trump’s every utterance and misdeed.CreditSarah Silbiger/The New York Times
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis
Nov. 11, 2018
WASHINGTON — Two days after midterm congressional elections that handed them control of the House, triumphant Democrats dialed in to their first conference call since winning the majority to strategize on the way forward.
But the call that Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, convened on Thursday with Democratic lawmakers and their newly elected colleagues was not a planning session on how to protect health care coverage or lower prescription drug prices, thematic pillars of the party’s successful campaigns. It was a briefing about President Trump’s latest remarkable move — his decision, hours after the last polls closed, to fire the attorney general — and a discussion of how Democrats would address the cascade of potentially grave constitutional consequences that could follow.
The strategy session highlighted the central challenge that Democrats face as they prepare to assume control of the House in a new era of divided government that begins in January. Democrats, who remained remarkably focused during their campaigns, must now figure out how to put forward their own agenda — one Ms. Pelosi says will be focused on lowering drug costs, rebuilding the nation’s roads and bridges, and cleaning up government corruption — even as they deal with the provocations of a president who relishes confrontation and disdains institutional norms.
“Trump’s great genius is to try and reduce everyone to his level and approach, and he wants to be able to paint Democrats as single-mindedly bent on his destruction,” said David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist and former top adviser to Barack Obama. “These Democrats didn’t get elected, by and large, to war with Trump. They got elected to try and get some positive things done on issues like health care and economic issues for their constituents, and the notion that on Day 1 they should spend all their energy trying to bedevil him is wrong. Striking the balance is going to be difficult.”
Ms. Pelosi, who expects to reclaim her post as speaker in the new Congress, has encouraged fellow Democrats in private meetings to resist the urge to leap at Mr. Trump’s every utterance and misdeed — “I don’t think we’ll have any scattershot freelancing,” she told reporters last week — lest they lose focus and play into his hands.
At the same time, there is a giant pent-up appetite among Democrats to hold Mr. Trump and his administration accountable in ways that Republicans have refused to over the last two years.
The dynamic was on display on Sunday, as top Democrats fanned out to the morning television news programs to talk extensively about the avenues they intended to pursue to investigate Mr. Trump and check his power. There was little talk of a proactive policy agenda as Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warned on NBC’s “Meet the Press”that Matthew Whitaker, who is acting as attorney general after the removal of Jeff Sessions, must have no role in the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the incoming Judiciary Committee chairman, said he would subpoena Mr. Whitaker if necessary, making him the committee’s first witness after the new Congress convenes in January. And Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who will assume the helm of the Oversight and Government Reform panel, said that while he was “not going to be handing out subpoenas like somebody’s handing out candy on Halloween,” he planned to delve into a number of subjects, including the administration’s handling of the health care law and its addition of a citizenship question to the census.
Striking the right balance is a political imperative for Democrats, who owe their majority to a new, younger and more diverse crop of members-elect — about half of them women — many of whom won races in centrist or Republican-leaning areas after campaigning as change agents.
Ms. Pelosi and other top Democrats toiled during the campaign to stay wedded to a carefully honed, poll-tested agenda that would be broadly popular, calling, for example, for protecting the Affordable Care Act rather than promising to replace it with a single-payer health coverage plan. Democrats talked about a broad, bipartisan infrastructure plan of the sort that Mr. Trump campaigned on.
They have also promised to restore checks and balances to a presidency that has gone unchecked under two years of all-Republican rule on Capitol Hill, and are eyeing investigations of the administration’s environmental policies, its undercutting of the health care law, and its family separation policy, to name just a few. And they face consequential decisions about whether to engage in a potentially fierce legal battle over Mr. Trump’s tax returns and, ultimately, about whether to impeach him.
Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, has encouraged fellow Democrats in private meetings to resist the urge to leap at Mr. Trump’s every utterance and misdeed.CreditSarah Silbiger/The New York Times
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis
Nov. 11, 2018
WASHINGTON — Two days after midterm congressional elections that handed them control of the House, triumphant Democrats dialed in to their first conference call since winning the majority to strategize on the way forward.
But the call that Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, convened on Thursday with Democratic lawmakers and their newly elected colleagues was not a planning session on how to protect health care coverage or lower prescription drug prices, thematic pillars of the party’s successful campaigns. It was a briefing about President Trump’s latest remarkable move — his decision, hours after the last polls closed, to fire the attorney general — and a discussion of how Democrats would address the cascade of potentially grave constitutional consequences that could follow.
The strategy session highlighted the central challenge that Democrats face as they prepare to assume control of the House in a new era of divided government that begins in January. Democrats, who remained remarkably focused during their campaigns, must now figure out how to put forward their own agenda — one Ms. Pelosi says will be focused on lowering drug costs, rebuilding the nation’s roads and bridges, and cleaning up government corruption — even as they deal with the provocations of a president who relishes confrontation and disdains institutional norms.
“Trump’s great genius is to try and reduce everyone to his level and approach, and he wants to be able to paint Democrats as single-mindedly bent on his destruction,” said David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist and former top adviser to Barack Obama. “These Democrats didn’t get elected, by and large, to war with Trump. They got elected to try and get some positive things done on issues like health care and economic issues for their constituents, and the notion that on Day 1 they should spend all their energy trying to bedevil him is wrong. Striking the balance is going to be difficult.”
Ms. Pelosi, who expects to reclaim her post as speaker in the new Congress, has encouraged fellow Democrats in private meetings to resist the urge to leap at Mr. Trump’s every utterance and misdeed — “I don’t think we’ll have any scattershot freelancing,” she told reporters last week — lest they lose focus and play into his hands.
At the same time, there is a giant pent-up appetite among Democrats to hold Mr. Trump and his administration accountable in ways that Republicans have refused to over the last two years.
The dynamic was on display on Sunday, as top Democrats fanned out to the morning television news programs to talk extensively about the avenues they intended to pursue to investigate Mr. Trump and check his power. There was little talk of a proactive policy agenda as Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warned on NBC’s “Meet the Press”that Matthew Whitaker, who is acting as attorney general after the removal of Jeff Sessions, must have no role in the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the incoming Judiciary Committee chairman, said he would subpoena Mr. Whitaker if necessary, making him the committee’s first witness after the new Congress convenes in January. And Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who will assume the helm of the Oversight and Government Reform panel, said that while he was “not going to be handing out subpoenas like somebody’s handing out candy on Halloween,” he planned to delve into a number of subjects, including the administration’s handling of the health care law and its addition of a citizenship question to the census.
Striking the right balance is a political imperative for Democrats, who owe their majority to a new, younger and more diverse crop of members-elect — about half of them women — many of whom won races in centrist or Republican-leaning areas after campaigning as change agents.
Ms. Pelosi and other top Democrats toiled during the campaign to stay wedded to a carefully honed, poll-tested agenda that would be broadly popular, calling, for example, for protecting the Affordable Care Act rather than promising to replace it with a single-payer health coverage plan. Democrats talked about a broad, bipartisan infrastructure plan of the sort that Mr. Trump campaigned on.
They have also promised to restore checks and balances to a presidency that has gone unchecked under two years of all-Republican rule on Capitol Hill, and are eyeing investigations of the administration’s environmental policies, its undercutting of the health care law, and its family separation policy, to name just a few. And they face consequential decisions about whether to engage in a potentially fierce legal battle over Mr. Trump’s tax returns and, ultimately, about whether to impeach him.
November 10, 2018
‘The Whole World Was on Fire’: Infernos Choke California
Evacuees are turned away from overflowing shelters as more than 300,000 residents are told to leave their homes and unrelenting flames reduce entire California communities into ashes and nine are confirmed dead.
The most destructive fire in modern state history.
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| Communities across Ventura and Los Angeles counties including the city of Malibu, Calabasas and the Topanga Canyon area were placed under evacuation orders on Friday as the Woolsey and Hill fires torched more than 40,000 acres, razing countless buildings and homes to the ground. More than 600 members of law enforcement canvassed the area through Friday night, pounding on doors to tell residents to leave their homes as the fires closed in. However, the Los Angeles Times reports that a number of shelters have had to close their doors because they have no more space, creating an even more dire situation as the firestorm threatens to intensify when another round of strong, dry Santa Ana winds blow through on Saturday and Sunday. Meanwhile, the Camp Fire in Northern California, now the most destructive in state history, has claimed the lives of at least nine people and another 35 are missing in Butte County.
Even in a state hardened to the ravages of wildfires, the infernos that raged at both ends of California on Friday were overpowering. At least nine people were killed, including several who died in their cars in a retirement community called Paradise. Malibu mansions burned. And in the neighborhood in Thousand Oaks where a gunman had killed 12 people in a crowded bar earlier in the week, survivors now fled the flames.
The fire-prone state was battling three major fires, one in the northern Sierra and two west of Los Angeles. In the northern town of Paradise, the ruins of houses and businesses smoldered throughout the day, while in Southern California, tens of thousands of residents fled their homes and jammed onto highways. Exotic lemurs and parrots were packed up and carried away to safety as fires ringed the Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park.
Officials estimated that the blaze in the north, called the Camp Fire, had destroyed a staggering 6,700 structures — most of them residential. Such vast devastation would make it the most destructive fire in modern state history.
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November 9, 2018
Trump FIRES Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replaces him with ultra loyal stand-in Matt Whitaker who could shut down Mueller probe.
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| President Donald Trump canned his attorney general on Wednesday and replaced him with a former federal prosecutor who has been openly critical of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe and will now have the power to end it. Jeff Sessions was not expected to last long after Tuesday's elections. Session's chief of staff, Matt Whitaker, has taken over as acting attorney general. Trump shared the news in a tweet, and a Justice Department spokeswoman said shortly afterward that Whitaker would have responsibility for overseeing Mueller. Sessions had recused himself from that role early on in the Trump administration, putting it in the lap of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Whitaker wrote in an essay for CNN last year that Mueller was 'dangerously close to crossing' a 'red line' by considering broadening his investigation to include a probe of the Trump family's business dealings. 'It does not take a lawyer or even a former federal prosecutor like myself to conclude that investigating Donald Trump's finances or his family's finances falls completely outside of the realm of his 2016 campaign and allegations that the campaign coordinated with the Russian government or anyone else,' he wrote then. 'That goes beyond the scope of the appointment of the special counsel.'
Matthew G. Whitaker, the attorney general’s chief of staff, jockeyed over the last two months to replace his boss by forging a close relationship with the White House, where he was seen as a reliable political ally. On Wednesday, President Trump fired Jeff Sessions and named Mr. Whitaker acting attorney general, rewarding his loyalty.
Inside the Justice Department, senior officials, including Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, have viewed Mr. Whitaker with intense suspicion. Before his current job at the Justice Department, Mr. Whitaker, a former college football tight end, was openly hostile on television and social media toward the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and was seen by department officials as a partisan and a White House spy. Now Mr. Whitaker will oversee Mr. Mueller’s investigation, prompting concerns that he could move swiftly to shut it down or hobble it, despite serious questions about his own potential conflicts in supervising it.
In a CNN interview the month before, Mr. Whitaker offered a situation in which Mr. Trump could try to hobble Mr. Mueller’s investigation behind the scenes by pressuring the Justice Department to cut the special counsel’s budget.
He said that situation was “a little more stage-crafty than the blunt instrument of firing the attorney general and trying to replace him.”
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November 8, 2018
New York: A Summary of the Election.
It has been a bruising, expensive and drawn-out election season here in New York, and it finally came to an end last night.
Here are the big takeaways.
Andrew M. Cuomo slides to victory
Mr. Cuomo won a third time in the race for governor of New York, easily beating his Republican rival, Marcus Molinaro. He ran on his record, which includes same sex-marriage, gun control measures and paid family leave. Just like his father, Mr. Cuomo won a third term as governor, and just like his father, he has denied that he has presidential ambitions.
Democrats take New York seats in the House
New York State had nine incumbent House Republicans, out of 27 total House representatives. Yesterday, three of those Republicans lost their seats. The most notable was John J. Faso, a Republican who represented New York’s 19th Congressional District, whom Antonio Delgado defeated. Here in the city, Max Rose defeated Representative Dan Donovan in Staten Island, and in central New York, Anthony Brindisi beat Representative Claudia Tenney.
Democrats seize control of the State Senate
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| Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins was poised to become the majority leader, making her the first woman to lead either legislative chamber in New York and the first black woman to lead the State Senate.Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times |
Democrats won control of the New York State Senate for the first time in nearly a decade. The Democratic senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins is slated to become the next majority leader, which would make her the first black woman to lead the Senate, and the first woman to lead the State Senate or Assembly.
A first for the attorney general
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| During the campaign, Letitia James emphasized that she would continue to use the New York attorney general’s office to contest the policies of President Trump.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times |
Letitia James, a Democrat, beat her Republican rival, Keith H. Wofford, to become the first woman elected attorney general in New York. She is also the first African-American woman elected attorney general and the first black woman to be elected to a statewide office. As New York’s attorney general, she will inherit several lawsuits against President Trump and could become a face of resistance to his policies.
In New Jersey, Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, fought off a strong challenge by his Republican opponent, Bob Hugin. Mr. Menendez managed to keep his seat, even after his federal corruption trial last year. Connecticut is remaining bright blue, sending only Democrats to Congress, including Jahana Hayes, the first black Democrat to represent the state.
For Both Parties, a Political Realignment Along Cultural Lines.
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| Voters went to the polls on Tuesday and delivered a cascade of contradictory results that added up to a portrait of a nation at odds with itself.Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times |
The midterm elections on Tuesday laid bare the growing chasm between urban and rural America, leaving Republicans deeply concerned about their declining fortunes in the metropolitan areas that extinguished their House majority and Democrats just as alarmed about their own struggles to win over voters in states that strengthened the G.O.P.’s grip on the Senate.
For both parties, the election represented an acceleration of dizzying realignment along cultural lines. Districts that once represented the beating heart of the Republican Party rejected President Trump’s avowed nationalism as a form of bigotry, while Democrats further retrenched from the agricultural and industrial communities where they once dominated.
Democrats took control of the House not merely by making gains in coastal states that supported Hillary Clinton, but also by penetrating deeply into suburban corners of traditionally conservative states in the South and across the Plains, like Georgia, Texas and Oklahoma. The House results made clear that the Trump-induced difficulties Republicans are suffering with once-reliable voters are hardly limited to blue states and could make it substantially harder for the president to remake his upscale-downscale coalition in 2020.
“The party should be concerned when you look at what was once one of its bases and see how increasingly vulnerable we are with them,” said Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee, an old-guard Republican who heads the Republican Governors Association, pointing to Democratic incursions into localities like Cobb County, Ga., that were once conservative bulwarks.
Mr. Haslam, whose party lost seven governorships but held onto the major prizes of Ohio and Florida, added, “I don’t think anybody can come away from last night claiming victory.”
Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader, said his fellow Republicans should be urgently concerned about the collapse of the longstanding political alliance between culturally conservative rural voters and high-income suburbanites who are focused on the economy and issues like education and child care.
Image
Embracing President Trump cost Republicans the House but strengthened their hand in the Senate.CreditTamir Kalifa for The New York TimesFormer Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, who served as agriculture secretary in the Obama administration, complained bitterly about his party’s worsening struggles with rural voters.
“It’s so frustrating,” said Mr. Vilsack, who has been pleading with Democrats to aggressively court the Farm Belt. “You pick out the interest group that’s part of our base and we always have a message for all of those folks, but we don’t do the same thing for folks in rural places.”
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| Supporters of Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who flipped a House seat in Virginia’s Seventh District, celebrated her win on Tuesday.Erin Schaff for The New York Times |
“The further you get from metropolitan areas, the more powerful Donald Trump is and the more allegiance there is to whatever he says and does,” said Ms. McCaskill, who only 12 years ago won her seat in the Senate by carrying a number of rural counties.
Ms. McCaskill was not the only Democrat felled by Mr. Trump’s second-city barnstorming. Her Senate colleagues Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota were also swept out of office, and a number of their colleagues won by far closer margins than was expected.
In every case, the results came about for the same reasons: Working-class white voters abandoned their ancestral party. For the Democrats, the power of incumbency and a fund-raising advantage meant little against the strength of this underlying cultural change.
In states like hers, Ms. McCaskill said the president’s inflammatory appeals to division and fear were ubiquitous, in large part because of Fox News. She recounted walking into restaurants in every corner of Missouri and invariably seeing the channel airing footage of the Central American caravans Mr. Trump demonized.
“It’s time we all quit dancing around what is now a state-owned news channel,” she said.
Mindful of her party’s delicate position, Ms. McCaskill said she was also concerned about the implications of a divided capital.
Rural voters in Missouri delivered a win for Josh Hawley, a Republican who defeated Senator Claire McCaskill on Tuesday.CreditRyan Christopher Jones for The New York Times“If this turns into, ‘the House investigates Trump and Trump turns the House into his foil,’ nothing is going to get done and that’s not going to help us,” she said.
Perhaps most ominous for Democrats on Tuesday were the election results in Florida — the only diverse and densely populated swing state in which Mr. Trump’s party appeared to win election for both Senate and governor.
To the shock of national Democratic leaders, Senator Bill Nelson was trailing Wednesday evening in a re-election battle against Gov. Rick Scott, while Andrew Gillum, the liberal mayor of Tallahassee, was defeated by Ron DeSantis in his bid for governor despite leading in most every poll during the general election.
Just as Mr. Trump did two years ago there, Mr. Scott and Mr. DeSantis rolled up wide margins in the state’s rural reaches and conservative-leaning retirement hubs, and won just enough Hispanic voters to offset their losses with African-Americans and suburbanites.
Those results reinforced for Democrats that there is a limit to the inroads they can make in historically Republican communities. And some of the Democratic lawmakers who were most essential to securing the House majority warned that the party could not take its gains in the suburbs for granted.
Representative Stephanie Murphy, a Democratic moderate from Florida, said the party would have to manage its House majority carefully in order to cement its emerging coalition. Having won a second term Tuesday in a purple district around Orlando, Ms. Murphy said the less-ideological voters who abound in districts like hers were open to electing Democrats they viewed as reasonable and public-minded.
When the new Congress is sworn in, Ms. Murphy predicted, Democrats will not “veer as far left as the Republicans wanted voters to believe.”
“The party still needs to be a big-tent party that allows members to deliver for their constituencies,” Ms. Murphy said. “We now have a bunch of new members who are representing districts that are more purple and red than they are dark blue.”
Representative Stephanie Murphy, a Democratic moderate from Florida, said the party would have to manage its House majority carefully in order to cement its emerging coalition. Having won a second term Tuesday in a purple district around Orlando, Ms. Murphy said the less-ideological voters who abound in districts like hers were open to electing Democrats they viewed as reasonable and public-minded.
When the new Congress is sworn in, Ms. Murphy predicted, Democrats will not “veer as far left as the Republicans wanted voters to believe.”
“The party still needs to be a big-tent party that allows members to deliver for their constituencies,” Ms. Murphy said. “We now have a bunch of new members who are representing districts that are more purple and red than they are dark blue.”
Why Democrats’ Gain Was More Impressive Than It Appears
They are poised to win more seats this year than they did in 2006, despite far fewer opportunities.
NATE COHN, NY TIMES
The Democrats are poised to gain around 30 seats after Tuesday’s elections. Republicans seem likely to gain a few seats in the Senate, and they triumphed in some high-profile governor’s races.
But Democrats faced formidable structural disadvantages, unlike any in recent memory. Take those into account, and 2018 looks like a wave election, like the ones that last flipped the House in 2010 and 2006.
In the House, where the Democrats had their strongest showing, it’s impressive they managed to fare as well as they did.
Democrats had so few opportunities because of partisan gerrymandering and the tendency for the party to win by lopsided (and thus inefficient) margins in urban areas. It gave Republicans a chance to survive a hostile national political climate that would have doomed prior parties.
As a whole, the House Democratic candidates overcame all of these disadvantages. They are on track to win more seats than Democrats did in 2006, with far fewer opportunities. They even managed to win more seats in heavily Republican districts than the Republicans managed to win in heavily Democratic districts in 2010.
Democrats pulled it off with an exceptionally deep and well-funded class of recruits that let the party put a very long list of districts into play. In prior years, the party in power wouldn’t have even needed to vigorously contest many of these races.
Democratic House candidates were helped by the declining value of incumbency, which made it harder for Republicans to outrun disapproval of the president.
The same forces, however, made it harder for Democratic senators to run as far ahead of the national party as they had in the past, and often their states had shifted far to the right since their last election.
Democrats benefited from a huge number of Republican retirements, and they have flipped eight of those seats so far. Many retirements were inevitable, but the number — the highest since 1992, a redistricting year — was not. Democrats also benefited from a string of court decisions that eroded or outright eliminated Republican gerrymanders in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and, most recently, Pennsylvania.
It is hard to measure the accumulated effect of these decisions. But it could have easily represented the Democratic margin of victory in Virginia’s Seventh District and in Pennsylvania’s Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and 17th. That’s atop Democratic gains already realized in 2016 in Florida and Virginia.
The Democratic disadvantage in the Senate isn’t going anywhere. State lines aren’t about to be redrawn, after all, and Hillary Clinton won just 19 states in 2016 while winning the national popular vote.
Perhaps Democrats still would have won the House without redistricting efforts and with a more typical number of Republican retirements. We still don’t know the full picture because the countinghas not been completed. But Democrats are likely to win the national popular vote in this election by seven to eight points once late votes — which typically lean Democratic — are counted.
That would be a slightly larger margin than Republicans achieved in 2010 or 1994. It would be about the same as the Democratic advantage in 2006. It would be, in a word, a wave.
Nate Cohn is a domestic correspondent for The Upshot. He covers elections, polling and demographics. Before joining The Times in 2013, he worked as a staff writer for The New Republic.
@Nate_Cohn
@Nate_Cohn
Democrats Capture Control of House; G.O.P. Holds Senate.
Trump puts a happy face on House bloodbath, while Democrats threaten to probe his finances - as Florida remains in recount territory and votes are still being counted in Arizona and Montana
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President Donald Trump hailed his own 'very Big Win' on election night – blasting Republicans who veered away from him even as newly-empowered House Democrats vowed to probe his finances. Trump said he considered Election Day s 'tremendous success,' hours after it became clear that the Democratic Party would control the House of Representatives during the next two years. 'Tremendous success tonight. Thank you to all!' the president tweeted, masking the inevitable anxieties that will come along with a split Congress.
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisc. lost last night to the Democrat, Tony Evers.
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Voting patterns signaled that the differences that have defined the country during the Trump presidency seem to be growing, setting the stage for a contentious 2020 election.
The results held implications for coming battles over the federal judiciary, trade, health care, government spending and immigration.
The party won contests in Wisconsin, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Illinois, Nevada and New Mexico. But the race was too close to call in Georgia.
GOP Senate will keep cranking out Trump judicial, cabinet nominees
White House officials and allies call retaining the upper chamber's power to confirm judges and cabinet nominees a 'huge victory.’
Democrats harnessed voter fury toward President Trump to win control of the House and capture pivotal governorships Tuesday night as liberals and moderates banded together to deliver a forceful rebuke of Mr. Trump, even as Republicans held on to their Senate majority by claiming a handful of conservative-leaning seats.
The two parties each had some big successes in the states. Republican governors were elected in Ohio and Florida, two important battlegrounds in Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign calculations. Democrats beat Gov. Scott Walker, the Wisconsin Republican and a top target, and captured the governor’s office in Michigan — two states that Mr. Trump carried in 2016 and where the left was looking to rebound.
Propelled by an unusually high turnout that illustrated the intensity of the backlash against Mr. Trump, Democrats claimed at least 28 House seats on the strength of their support in suburban and metropolitan districts that were once bulwarks of Republican power but where voters have recoiled from the president’s demagoguery on race.
Early Wednesday morning Democrats clinched the 218 House seats needed to take control. There were at least 15 additional tossup seats that had yet to be called.
- The consequences are potentially huge: Democrats have long vied for transparency from President Donald Trump, and now they finally have the numbers to see their demands through. The party has a list of subpoenas ready to challenge the administration on issues including Trump’s tax returns, Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election, the US’s response to Hurricane Maria, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s possible perjury in his confirmation hearings, and more. [CNN / Lauren Fox, Jeremy Herb, and Manu Raju]
- Democrats will also have an opportunity to show the country their policy vision for the future. The party badly wants leaders to chart an unabashedly progressive path that includes Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, and a green jobs bill. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]
- However, now that Democrats are in the spotlight, it means they are more vulnerable to attacks from the president. For Trump, who has a proven record of narrative-building and blame-shifting, the opposition party is the perfect scapegoat for poor policy decisions and possible government shutdowns — and may even serve as the ideal foundation for his 2020 reelection campaign. [Washington Post / Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey]
Think 2020 Will Be Better for Senate Democrats? Think Again
Without a smarter approach to rural America, liberals will be stuck in the minority for a long time.
MICHAEL TOMASKY, NY TIMES
November 4, 2018
Trump didn’t invent American bigotry. But new books argue that he released it – and he has no incentive to extinguish it.
WASHINGTON POST, Carlos Lozada
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