Subscribe to the IHARE Blog

2016 Elections

Republican Party versus the Trumpican Party: The 2020 Elections

May 9, 2019
by Peter Feinman
"Thank you Istanbul": A victory poster shows Mr Erdogan (R) and mayoral candidate Binali Yildirim (BBC.com)

When did you first know that Individual #1 would not honor the 2020 election results if he lost?

DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WINS POPULAR VOTE

Technically, that headline is not really a news item. In the baby-boomer era of the American presidency, the Democratic candidate routinely wins the popular vote. The lone exception is the post-9/11 election in 2004. Otherwise the Democratic victory in this facet of the electoral process can almost be taken for granted. Obviously winning the popular vote is not enough to win the presidency.

Nonetheless, the Democratic popular vote victory in 2016 while expected also should generate questions. Consider two commonly asserted claims that combined should have undermined the Democratic popular vote margin:

1. The turnout of black voters in support of the Democratic candidate declined from 2012
2. White Obama voters switched parties especially non-college educated ones.

One might think therefore the chances of a Democratic candidate prevailing in the popular vote would be correspondingly reduced. So if the margin was still nearly 3 million votes, then imagine what it would have been if Democrats had been able to retain these 2012 voters in 2016.

But there is a piece missing. It is not one that has garnered a lot of attention. It is not one that I recall hearing on the talk shows or reading about on blogs or in newspapers or magazines. I am not saying it has not been discussed, only that it seems to have done so minimally at best.

To begin with, although Trump is president whereas Mitt Romney lost in 2012, look at the vote totals.  Trump actually received a slightly smaller share of the vote than Romney did — 45.95 percent for Trump versus 47.15 percent for Romney.

Let’s look at Wisconsin as an example to determine what was going on. This is the state that one candidate famously never visited while it is alleged the Russian violation of the United States may have made a difference. The vote totals tell a more complete story.

In 2012 the Democratic candidate received 1,620,985 votes. In 2016 that number declined substantially to 1,382,536. One might think a 238,000 drop would result in big gain for the other side. Think again.

In 2012 the losing Republican candidate received 1,407,966 votes while in 2016 the winning candidate received 1,405,284, also a decline but of only 2700. However this roughly comparable total to 2012 was enough to win the state in 2016 due to the precipitous Democratic drop-off.

As it turns out, there is more to the story than the presidential election alone. In the Senate election, the Republican candidate won with over 50% and over 3% margin compared to the miniscule presidential margin of .7%. This winning candidate had 1,479,471 votes, over 74,000 more than the presidential tally. That means 74,000 people went to the polls voted for the Republican senatorial candidate but did not vote for the Republican presidential candidate. By contrast the Democratic presidential candidate had about 2000 more votes than the Democratic senate candidate.  When the Democrats went to the polls they voted for both the Democratic presidential and senate candidates; when Republicans went to the polls they did not. Where did the missing Republican presidential votes go?

The issue of the missing Republican voters was addressed in an article entitled “Trump Is Driving Out Precious Voters” (NYT 2/17/19 printed edition). The authors are:

Sean McElwee, Data for Progress
Brian F. Schaffer, Tufts University, political scientist
Jesse H. Rhodes, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, political scientist
Bernard L. Fraga, Indiana University, political scientist.

The article opens with the well-known commonly accepted truths noted above: the Democratic problem with the Obama-to-Trump voters and the loss of popular vote by the Republicans in six of the last seven elections.  The authors then state a caution:

It has flown under the radar a bit [EXACTLY!!!], masked perhaps by the switch of millions of Barack Obama voters into Mr. Trump’s column, but in 2016 Mr. Trump did not receive support from a large segment of voters who pulled the lever for Mitt Romney in 2012.

In fact, the Wisconsin example reported above shows even people who went to the polls and voted for a Republican senator did not vote for the Republican presidential candidate.

The authors suggest based on their data that 5 percent of the Romney vote in 2012 stayed home in 2016. Another 5 percent voted Democratic. They provide no figures for people who voted Republican for some offices but abstained from voting for a presidential candidate. The implication of the numbers the authors provided is the 10% drop-off in Republican voters from 2012 to 2016 was compensated for by the better-known Obama-to-Trump shift by uneducated whites.

Are these shifts temporary or do they reflect the beginning of a permanent realignment. The congressional elections of 2018 witnessed a nearly 9% difference between the total house vote of the two parties. That is a huge amount if extended to the presidential election in 2020. According to the analysis, the authors hypothesize that based on the 2016 and 2018 elections, the Republican Party may have lost more than 40% of the Romney voters born after 1976. Ironically given the front runner status of Joe Biden and the continuing popularity of Bernie Sanders, it is the Republican Party that increasingly becoming the party of old white males!

The authors then ask: “Can Republicans solve their demographic problem?”

They express some doubt. They do so by comparing the political positions of the lost Romney voters with the 2016 and 2018 voters and detect a gap that probably cannot be bridged. Such people might still vote for Republicans at the local level as indicated in the Wisconsin Senate vote but even that becomes problematic when at the federal level all, or almost all, Republicans have abandoned being Republican.

Which of the following actions since the 2018 elections seem likely to win back the missing Republican voters in 2020?

Trump’s shut down of the government.
Trump’s obstruction of justice at least 10 times according to the Mueller report.
Trump’s nullification of checks and balances and assertion of rule above the law.
Trump’s exposure as the biggest financial loser in American history.
Trump’s North Korean lover building more bombs and firing more missiles.
Trump’s claim that winning trade wars is easy is exposed as fraudulent.
Trump’s thriving in insulting and demeaning people.
Trump’s laughter at the “joke” of shooting illegal immigrants.

The Panhandle has replaced Peoria. The old claim of as goes Peoria so goes nation has become as goes Panhandle so goes just enough of the nation to win in the Electoral College without winning the popular vote. In 2000 and 2016, it was not the intention of the Electoral College winners to lose the popular vote. In fact, in 2016 the winning candidate was just in it for narcissistic marketing reasons and did not expect to win at all. The circumstances have changed. Now for the first time in American history, a candidate in a two-major-party election is not even seeking to win a majority of the popular vote or even a plurality. Instead the focus is on the Electoral College. Individual #1 has no interest in winning back the lost Republican voters. That’s because at the federal level, there is no Republican Party, just the Trumpicans.

 

Impeachment: The Elitist Democrat Holy Grail

December 26, 2017
by Peter Feinman
Illustration by Tim O'Brien, The Atlantic

Impeachment is the elitist Democrat Holy Grail. Through the forcible removal from political office of the one who never should have become president in the first place, cosmic order will be restored and all will be right with the world. Once the traumatic shock of the election night was over, the therapy for the post traumatic shock disorder among elitist Democrats was the belief in the power of the Constitution to heal America.

In the previous post on my winter solstice reflection on the coming light for the new year, I reviewed some extraordinarily wrong and misguided posts about the election results by Feinman, not me, Peter Feinman, but Ronald Feinman. He successfully predicted the wrong result in almost every single state “in play” for the 2016 presidential election and the less said about his Senate predictions the better. In this regard, he provides a glimpse into the disconnect with reality that prevented elitist Democrats from grasping the tactical brilliance of the immature child candidate in exploiting the fears and insecurities of many Americans to become the winner. Democrats simply were not capable of understanding why they weren’t up by 50% and that all those voters weren’t deplorable.

In this post, I examine how the other Feinman dealt with the new alternate reality where truth and lie have been reversed.

Why We Need a Crash Course in the 25th Amendment (January 22, 2017)

Even before the inauguration had occurred, Feinman already was calculating how the new president could be removed from office. He begins his post with:

Keith Olbermann has said it. Michael Moore has said it. Many intelligent, perceptive people across the political horizon have said it.

Olbermann and Moore! These are the figures of authority he chooses to cite as he launches his argument on how the 25th Amendment can save America? Hard to imagine two more inappropriate people to herald to rally the American people to the cause. And what is it that they and many other “intelligent, perceptive people” know?

…that he is a dire threat to America and its future. Clearly, Donald Trump is displaying evidence that he is mentally unbalanced and unhinged. Many psychologists have said he fits the textbook definition of a psychopath.

He is not even in office and hasn’t demonstrated any presidential behavior yet. He hasn’t even sent a hissy fit tweet about the crowd size yet! Besides, how much confidence should one have in psychologists who can’t even recognize a 7th grade smart-aleck/dumb-aleck in the body of an adult male when they see one?

Nonetheless, even before the inauguration has taken place, Feinman is outlining how the constitutionally authorized removal from office could occur.

He seems, clearly, to be living in a parallel universe, out of touch with reality, and obsessed with his own vanity. Fortunately, there is a constitutional remedy: The 25th Amendment to the Constitution, Section 4.

Feinman then details how Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan can lead this implementation. To be fair to that Feinman, no one anticipated that former Christian Mike Pence would sell his soul to the Donald as the savior of the universe and express his gratitude for being blessed to share the same space-time continuum with him.

Donald Trump Is On His Way to Second or Third Shortest Presidency in American History (February 15, 2017)

Hope springs eternal. Not even one month into the new administration and the person who was completely wrong about the election results, offers another prophecy: the briefest term in office ever. The catalyst for the removal from office will be …are you ready for this?… Mike Pence.

The fact that Vice President Mike Pence played a major role in pushing Flynn out is a sign that Pence is already asserting himself with Trump, and it seems clear that Pence will not stand by and allow our foreign policy to be damaged, or our national security to be endangered. The American people, ultimately, would not expect anything less.

After going on and on about how Mike Pence will save the day, Feinman does what every sane Christian apocalyptic knows not to do – be specific about when the End of Days will occur. Nothing good can be gained in such prophetic exactitude. None the less, Feinman persists.

In any case, it seems likely that Donald Trump will be leaving the Presidency at some point, likely between the 31 days of William Henry Harrison in 1841 (dying of pneumonia) and the 199 days of James A. Garfield in 1881 (dying of an assassin’s bullet after 79 days of terrible suffering and medical malpractice). At the most, it certainly seems likely, even if dragged out, that Trump will not last 16 months and 5 days, as occurred with Zachary Taylor in 1850 (dying of a digestive ailment). The Pence Presidency seems inevitable.

I confess that after this prophecy, I checked the calendar to see when the 199th day of reckoning would occur. Another way to check was with MSNBC The Eleventh Hour with Brian Williams. Night after night he intones the number of days into the presidency. He is not providing a countdown to its ending, he is marking a count up of our imprisonment as was done during the Iranian hostage under Jimmy Carter leading to his election loss in 1980. Our days of capture are now over 300 and the prophecy of early removal has been exposed as a pipe dream by the desperate. Besides, why exactly would elitist Democrats want Mike Pence as president? In effect, Pence functions as insurance to mitigate the chances of Democrats voting to impeach the president.

Feinman has no illusions about the Pence’s shortcomings from a Democratic perspective but what other option does he have? The Republican Party?

Can We Count on the GOP to End the Trump Presidency? (August 6, 2017)

And for many of the list of critics above, the accession of Vice President Mike Pence would be seen as a plus, although not by progressives and Democrats. But the instability and uncertainty associated with Donald Trump is seen as likely to end under a Pence Presidency, even though it would be the most conservative Presidency since Calvin Coolidge, in many ways, to the right of Coolidge or Ronald Reagan, the other conservative favorite. So for many Republicans and conservatives, they will have won the power to promote their agenda, but be much more able to predict their direction and goals than under the unpredictable Donald Trump. Expect the eventual abandonment of Trump by Republicans as the months go by into 2018. A Pence Presidency is likely coming sooner rather than later, with the best situation for Republicans being to resolve the matter before the midterm Congressional elections next year.

Notice how Feinman has learned the lesson of being too precise. No more exact number of days until End of Days; now it’s “sooner rather than later.” He still can’t grasp the possibility of “never.” If it turns out that removal from office is due to the two-term limit of the 22nd Amendment rather than the forcible removal through the 25th, I think Feinman and others who experienced PSTD on election night 2016 will become the Walking Dead, unable to function in the alternate universe of continual fake news that incredibly has become the real world. How long will MSBC persist in counting the days until our freedom anyway?

Feinman still has not given up hope.

Just 43 Republicans Joining with Democrats Could End Donald Trump’s Presidency (August 20, 2017)

The crisis that Donald Trump represents cries out for movement toward impeachment and trial to remove him from the Presidency, unless he agrees to resign, or Vice President Mike Pence, in league with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Senate President Pro Tempore Orrin Hatch, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and a majority of the Presidential Cabinet agree to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment Section 4, as mentally incompetent to stay in office. Neither of these seems likely at this stage, as we enter the eighth month of the Trump Presidency later in August.

As the goddess closes one door, she opens another. If the 25th Amendment is not going to work, what about outright impeachment? In the House of Representatives, only a majority is needed to impeach. Here Feinman wonders if the necessary number of Republicans will join the Democrats to make it so. He implicitly presumes that 100% of the Democrats will favor impeachment so the only issue is convincing a couple of dozen Republicans to defy party loyalty.

The centrists and moderate conservatives who are uncomfortable with Donald Trump are known as the Republican Main Street Partnership, estimated at 67 members of the House (about one out of every four Republicans) and a minimum of 4 in the Senate.

Feinman then names names. He names names in both the House of Representatives and the Senate as possible candidates to effect first impeachment and then conviction. With the Alabama Senate election, one less Republican vote is needed. I confess in my opinion, Feinman is grasping at straws. Plan A with Democrats winning the election failed. Plan B with Mike Pence taking the lead under the 25th Amendment is a non-starter and Plan C with Republicans in the House voting to impeach is an extreme example of wishful thinking. The only realistic way for impeachment to occur is if Democrats win the House in 2018 and even then Democrats may refrain from doing so. Wake up and smell the coffee.

I suspect Feinman has grudgingly learned to live in the real world. While he is not ready to accept the 22nd Amendment as the solution, he is ready to abandon the activation of the 25th Amendment as a likely event. As for impeachment, he now has to wait for the midterm elections. So much for the short presidency. He may even think that if Mueller produces a damning report or is fired before he can do so, then impeachment will occur. Hope still springs eternal for those trapped in the horror of the real world. We are witnessing the Democratic struggled to cope with reality one proposed solution at a time in the face of the success of the greatest con artist in American history who has a hold on a segment of the American public Democrats still ignore.

Then again, Feinman’s faith in Pence and the Republicans to do the right thing may not be misplaced after all. According to an article by McKay Coppins on “God’s Plan for Mike Pence” in the current issue of The Atlantic (I get the printed copy), there almost was a coup after the Access Hollywood tape went viral. Pence would have become the Republican presidential candidate then. He declined. Perhaps he recognized that the candidate had no shame and could not be bought off if it meant going on record for all eternity as being a loser. As events proved out, Pence was right.

Still the palace intrigue continues. Coppins reports:

But for all his aw-shucks modesty, Pence is a man who believes heaven and Earth have conspired to place him a heartbeat—or an impeachment vote—away from the presidency. At some crucial juncture in the not-too-distant future, that could make him a threat to Trump.

He suggests:

It’s not a matter of when Republicans are ready to turn on Trump,” the aide said. “It’s about when they decide they’re ready for President Pence.”

Suppose the Mueller report is damning. Suppose Mueller is fired. Suppose people are pardoned. Suppose Republicans are looking at a wave year that will make them a minority party in both chambers. Then suppose that they decide now is the time to remove the RINO President who is bringing the party down. The entire Democratic strategy for 2018 is running against the most unpopular President in American history. Suppose he is gone by the fall election season and the new President Pence is too new to have established a record yet. What happens then? Maybe Feinman got it right after all.

A Pence Presidency is likely coming sooner rather than later, with the best situation for Republicans being to resolve the matter before the midterm Congressional elections next year.

Survival cancels programming. That is the equation. Suppose the Republican Party decides its survival is at stake, what would it do then?

Happy New Year. It should be an interesting one.

Demographic Deluge or Democratic Disaster? The 2016 Elections

February 4, 2017
by Peter Feinman

Clinton-Trump Probably Won’t Be The Next ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’

by Harry Enten, October 16, 2016 (Getty Images)

When the 2016 election year began, the Democrats were singing “Happy days are here again.” The old FDR song seemed very appropriate for the coming year. The Democrats expected to win the presidential election. The Democrats expected a “third term” for both the incumbent and the previous Democratic president. The Democrats expected to win back the Senate. The Democrats expected to make significant gains in the House. As we all know, those dreams were not fulfilled and the vision of a robust return to power were dashed by the great disrupter. Actually there is more to the story than one individual, something the Democrats need to keep in mind if they are serious about reversing the results the next time around.

Starting at the top, the Democrats didn’t do as well as they had in the 2012 presidential elections. Last time, the Democratic candidate won just over 51% of the popular vote. This time around the result was just over 48%, a drop of approximately 3%. That decrease is a significant number, roughly triple the 1% drop in the Republican percentage from just over 47% to just over 46%. In part both declines may be attributed to the disgust by voters over the two main choices. Still the large decline in the Democratic vote should give pause to those who focus on the plurality vote total and ignore the percentage trend.

One obvious area of concern is the women’s vote. As we enter the period of suffrage centennials, the white women vote did not go as hoped for by the Democrats. Despite all the egregious comments and actions by the Republican candidate who loves women only when he grabs them and they meet his age, race, and physical standards, white women voted 53% for him. That was not the expected result in the presidential election with the first female candidate of a major party.

In this regard, it is time for the Democrats to put Madeline Albright out to pasture. Her admonition about there being a special place in hell for women who don’t help women is part of what was fundamentally wrong with the Democratic candidate.  It is a racist comment that discounts black women who supported Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary; her implication is that “women” means “white women” the way “actor” means “white person.” It is a sexist comment that denies women the right to choose be it a Mitt Romney, Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump without being a traitor to their gender. That attitude of moral superiority and zealousness for the cause did not go over well with white women in the Day 1 march who did not share agreement on every item on the approved list of “women’s issues.” At some point, the Democrats might want to consider why they are alienating white women even with a world class pig in White House.

Besides touting the popular vote win, Democrats also like to point out the narrowness of the electoral win. While it certainly is true that the winner did not win in a landslide except in Trumpietown, his narrow victory still raises warning signs for the Democrats. Consider state of Wisconsin. Trump’s margin of victory was under 1% numbering in the thousands of votes, a seemingly small amount. By contrast, Obama won the state by close to 7% and over 200,000 votes. Those numbers are too big a shift to attribute to Russian intervention or the FBI. Wake up and smell the coffee.

One wonders why the state never appeared on the Democratic radar. One wonders why the Democratic candidate never appeared in a state that shifted over 7% in the vote in one election cycle. I recall reading just before the election a smug condescending out-of-touch-with-the-real-world blogger who confidently predicted a Democratic victory in 2016 comparable to the one in 2012 (332 votes). Maybe it would be even better with over 350 electoral college votes if some of the Republican states flipped Democratic.  I suspect this attitude may have been too prevalent among the Democratic elitists for them to see what was happening in the real world.

Wisconsin should not have been that big a surprise. The state has a Republican governor, Scott Walker. After he was first elected he won a hard-fought recall election. In 2014, Walker won for a third time with a  6.7% margin. There are Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent candidate for Senate in 2016 won by about 3% and 100,000 votes. His seat was one the Democrats were counting on to win. The losing Democratic presidential and senate candidates won approximately the same number of votes. The Republican victory margin differs from 3% to under 1% in the two races because a third party candidate in the presidential race siphoned off votes that went for the Republican senate candidate.

These numbers mean that if the Republicans had nominated an adult for president instead of the loser of the Wisconsin Republican presidential primary, the margin of victory would have been closer to the 3% margin of victory in the Senate race. In other words, while the Democrats salivated over the prospect of Arizona flipping as New Mexico, Colorado, and Virginia have, they lost track of what was happening in the blue wall, their “own backyard.”

In approximately 80% of the states, Democrats did worse in 2016 than in 2012. This reduction occurred even when they won a state both times. This is Huge! Ohio was not even a battleground. The state the Democrats won by 2% in 2012, they lost by over 8.5% this time around. That’s no due to the Russians either. The Ohio senate race which was supposed to be hard-fought with a big-name Democratic candidate turned into a 21% drubbing. Hundreds of counties nationwide which had voted Democratic in 2012 voted Republican in 2016. Maps showing the trends from the last election to this one show Republican gains almost everywhere.

What is the explanation for these results? One answer by the losing Democratic candidate was that the voters for her opponent were deplorables. Well, maybe not all of them, just 47%. No data to support that conclusion were provided. As it turns out, the deplorables were just as capable of adopting the slur from the enemy as nasty women have been on the reverse side. As with Albright’s admonition and the smug take-it-for granted attitude of elitist bloggers, deplorables is a concept best relegated to dustbin if Democrats are serious about reversing the trends which have occurred following the 2008 elections.

Then, of course, there is the demographic wave of the future. Even if the Democrats do nothing, in time the demographic changes sweeping the country guarantee Democratic victories despite the temporary setbacks. For years now the Democrats have been waiting for Godot, for the magic moment when the new America of immigrants of color would sweep the country and turn the electoral map Democrat.

This demographic deluge has produced results in California and perhaps Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. So far the eagerly anticipated browning of America has not occurred. The vote totals in the last election by Latin American immigrants and their offspring were comparable to those in 2008 and 2012, in the 27-28% range. George Bush’s 40% vote represents a high point for Republicans but one that would do damaging results to Democratic aspirations if repeated.

What have the Democrats accomplished with their over-the-top rhetoric incessantly repeated that a demographic deluge is coming, that the old America is dying and that a new progressive one is being born? A great politician once said for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  So far the biggest impact of the rhetoric by the self-righteous zealots prophesizing the end is near has been to scare white people that the fate of their country is at risk due to alien invaders. How has that worked out for the Democrats?

It gets worse for the Democrats. What happens to the Democratic vision of identity politics if immigrants from Latin America (and Asia) intermarry with immigrants from Europe? What happens to the Democratic vision of identity politics if the Republicans catch on that Latin Americans Pope Francis, Fidel Castro, Marco Rubio, and Giselle Bündchen are not people of color? What happens to the Democratic vision of identity politics if Republicans catch on that immigrants from Latin America like immigrants from Europe know not only their continent of origin but their country, village, town, city, and ethnicity too? What happens to the Democratic vision of identity politics if Republicans catch on that immigrants from Latin American like immigrants from Europe want to live the American Dream? What happens to the Democratic vision of identity politics if Republicans catch on that immigrants from Latin America like immigrants from Europe are proud to be Americans and to be part of We the People?  Contrary to the Democratic wishes, Latin American immigrants are not middle-passage blacks where Democratic unanimity can be taken for granted. Should the Democrats take for granted that the party of malice will remain stupid forever? Alternative facts aren’t limited to just one party.

If the Democrats don’t like the election results they have no one to blame but themselves. Joe Biden for President and Elizabeth Warren for Vice President and none of this would be happening.