Biden's agenda is quite popular, per new ABC News-Ipsos poll. 81% percent support mask-wearing requirement on federal property, 77% support government-wide focus on racial equity, 70% percent support rejoining WHO, 65% support rejoining Paris agreement.
Journalists have to get clearer about the values of our profession and clearly articulate them. For example, journalists are evidence-based, not just repeating 2 sides (or 7 sides) and treating them as equally valid. "Evidence-based" is an important idea.
Stacey Abrams didn't win. But her ideas did. 1. That Georgia could be won in part by boosting the Dem vote share in the Atlanta area, among minorities, among younger voters 2. That Georgia was more of a swing state than places like Ohio
Mike Lee (America is not a democracy), Greg Abbott (limiting ballot drop boxes in Houston) and Ron DeSantis (you can hit a protestor with your car and not be held liable) are likely to run for president in 2024. They are assuming these moves help them with GOP primary voters.
The press needs to consider if debating with Republican elected officials over whether Trump won or lost is a useful exercise. It sounds like "no concession, continue meritless lawsuits" is now the GOP position. We should accept that and move on to covering the Biden presidency.
I get dunking on individual reporters for their "both sides" takes on democracy. But CNN leaders have been leaking to media reporters for months that they want the network to be more "neutral." They just fired Stelter, whose work emphasized the GOP's anti-democratic turn.
This is useful context. The "reconciliation" bill is $3.5 trillion OVER 10 YEARS, which should be included in every story. So about $350 billion a year--about $1000 in spending per person.
"It is the job of The New York Times to point out a demonstrable, undeniable fact: Joe Biden supports democracy and Donald Trump doesn't. That is not opinion. That is fact. Now, if Times readers still want to vote for Donald Trump after that, good luck."
Important thread. This is why what happened in Georgia is so important. The lesson many Repubs seem to have taken from 2020 was not, “don’t try to overturn the election results,” but, “let’s make sure the system is set up so we can actually execute the overturning next time.”
"You know what I mean," Biden responded on Friday when asked about his semi-fascism remark. I don't fault the reporters for asking. But when DeSantis is bragging about arresting people who were confused about whether they were eligible to vote, we all do know what Biden means.
High inflation. Manchin and Sinema. Some of his own mistakes. But in my view, one of the biggest challenges for Biden has been facing a mainstream media looking to "balance" its anti-Trump coverage from 2017-2020.
I am alarmed. I see 1. a political party radicalizing against multi-racial democracy 2. intense polarization ensuring that party can keep and even grow its power 3. institutions and 4. another party that don't seem up to taking on the radicalizing party.
This is why activists are so focused on reducing the broader police apparatus/structure and its political power. Reform efforts are often futile, since many local policy departments do not respect civilian control.
Pittsburgh police are "demoralized" that the city's laws prevent them from harassing Black motorists over trivial offenses, so they're literally violating municipal law in order to continue "enforcing" trivial violations.
We took a detailed look at how and why Jaime Harrison is basically tied in the polls against Lindsey Graham. A big part of the story is not about the candidates, but simply that South Carolina isn't that red in the first place.
In Kentucky, Republican state senator breaks with GOP/Bevin and endorses Democrat Andy Beshear for governor. Potentially the start of something big--Laura Kelly beat Kobach in Kansas last year with the aid of GOP electeds there backing her.
Collins and Murkowski know the evidence against Trump. They also know voting against Obamacare repeal and for Trump’s removal would get them cast out of the GOP. So feigning outrage at how Dems speak about Trump’s behavior, instead of Trump’s behavior, is their only real option.
I try to avoid too much criticizing of other journos. But any tweet that starts with, "This is exactly why Trump won" you should be skeptical of. Trump won for lots of reasons. But the main one is he was the Republican nominee for president, basically giving him a 50/50 shot.
An actual US senator. The context is important: it is a Republican senator being asked if his state’s gubernatorial candidate and secretary of state is complicating the voting process in a way that disproportionately affects blacks.
The savvy approach is to not be alarmed. Don't take the savvy approach. We don't know the future. We don't know how seriously the Republican Party will push this effort. The first steps to overturning the election results are taking place. That is the most important story now.
Not sending out a press release congratulating Biden is not a big deal, even if it's breaking with traditional norms. Actively launching investigations whose goal is to disqualify votes hits at real core democratic values, and we are seeing more of the latter than I expected.
What Rand Paul tried to do this morning ("I am just giving my side," he said essentially) was once the problem with how the media covered climate change. The media eventually started covering climate policy in an evidence-based way. The same should apply to elections and voting.
Journalists have to get clearer about the values of our profession and clearly articulate them. For example, journalists are evidence-based, not just repeating 2 sides (or 7 sides) and treating them as equally valid. "Evidence-based" is an important idea.
Electoral politics matter. They do. But they can't be allowed to swallow every conversation.A lot of the police reforms haven't really worked. So more drastic ideas deserve a hearing. And people pushing more drastic ideas aren't all involved in the horse race--nor should they be.
At the same time, I have had more deep conversations about police budgets/funding/power in the last 7 months than I had in the previous 7 years. And I'm not alone--cities all over the country are having real debates about the power/funding of their police departments.
Today was quite bad. Georgia GOP senators attacking the sec of state (a Republican) basically for administering an election that Dems won. Republicans AG’s across the country trying to get votes tossed out in Penn. Pa GOP legislators calling for an audit of the results.
Trump is very savvy at constantly forcing fellow Republicans to choose between 1. doing his bidding and therefore remaining a Republican-in-good-standing in GOP circles or 2. acting according to normal democratic values, but losing Republican-in-good-standing status.
This idea that Manchin and Sinema are not beholden to Dem voters is a bit off. A rough estimate based on the exit polls is that 65 percent of Manchin voters are Biden voters, as are about 90 percent of Sinema voters. Yes, they need swing voters to win, but they need Dems too.
Good Politico story here. And this is a big part of the broader story. Editors, I plead to you, your plan for covering the Republican Party in the next two years can't be just covering Republicans in Washington, the Trump family or the 2024 candidates.
There has been some great access-based journalism the last two years. But there has also been way, way too much, overhyped, thinly-sourced stuff that confuses readers and over time erodes trust in the media overall.
The people and groups who will be hit hardest by these GOP voting laws did everything they could to get Biden elected. They deserve a full-throated, aggressive push from his administration on voting and democracy issues that goes beyond a speech or two.
Biden did something super-important tonight in stating clearly, in a high-profile setting, that Donald Trump and the people aligned with him are regularly taking anti-democratic actions and are right now a threat to America as we know it.
All presidential speeches are "political." A speech about democracy in 2022 must be "partisan," because Republican officials are the ones are taking anti-democratic actions, like Jan 6.
"The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war."
Loan forgiveness, which I keep reading is only a concern of wealthy college graduates, is being championed by the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, both black Democrats in the Senate (Warnock, Booker) and the Congressional Black Caucus. Is the argument that these people only care about grads?
Really important story. More focus should be on local and state Republicans, who are going to play a big role in whether or not the party gets off its current anti-democratic course.
Our democracy didn’t fail in part because of the consciences of a handful of state and local GOP officials. The party is already trying to replace them
It's important that people understand the stakes of the fall elections. They are not about inflation, infrastructure or climate policy, as important as those are. We could be putting into power a bunch of people who will not acknowledge election results unless their party wins.
The media plays an important role in our society, so strong criticism comes with the territory and sometimes that criticism will feel disrespectful to us. I strongly disagree with the sentiments expressed in this tweet and want to emphasize that all reporters do not share them.
I know we in the media (myself included) have trained everyone to be a savvy observer of politics, to count the votes, read the polls, know what is "realistic." But it's okay to be just really alarmed about what is happening to our democracy and want something to be done.
I am a journalist and think the people on Twitter seem perceptive about the incentives that shape reporters’ work. But if you think the Hicks story was really solid, feel free to defend it, as opposed to vague insinuations that Times readers and subscribers are misinformed.
"Project 2025 is telling us exactly how the conservatives plan to take away the rights of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. I beg the American people to believe them," writes
@ElieNYC
.
So it's worth considering if the management of CNN and other orgs are pushing this approach, and the journalists are on some level just engaged in job preservation. (So blame the managers more.)
In 2017, Collins, Murkowski and a few other Senate Republicans (Dean Heller) communicated in a thousand different ways that they were wary of repealing Obamacare.
It would be useful to know what are woke policy positions/words in the view of Carville/Dowd and then find out which ones were adopted by Murphy/McAuliffe/Biden, the figures at the center of the Tuesday results. That kind of precision would make this discourse more productive.
Does the punditry ever have to explain what they mean by “wokeness” or are they just allowed to dribble it out as an informed talking point that they never have to define even as they claim it is unraveling the Democratic Party??
I think it is very likely that Biden will be president on Jan 20. But a lot of Republicans, facing the choice of acknowledging the results of an election the party lost or actively supporting bad faith efforts to contest the results, are choosing the anti-democratic course.
Today was quite bad. Georgia GOP senators attacking the sec of state (a Republican) basically for administering an election that Dems won. Republicans AG’s across the country trying to get votes tossed out in Penn. Pa GOP legislators calling for an audit of the results.
Trump-skeptical Republicans like George W. Bush are 8-10 percent of the electorate. They could defeat Trumpism. But that would require them to move on from their version of identity politics---insisting they are Republicans no matter how the party changes.
I wrote about Michelle Wu, who won the mayor's race in Boston, becoming the first woman and first person of color to do so. She once worked as a staffer for Elizabeth Warren and ran on a Warren-ish agenda for the city.
I promise that Al Sharpton, Sherrilyn Ifill and all us pleading for every step to be taken to address this issue have done the vote counts and read the polls. But none of us knows the future. It's okay to push for the outcomes you want to see, even if the odds are long.
At the same time, I have had more deep conversations about police budgets/funding/power in the last 7 months than I had in the previous 7 years. And I'm not alone--cities all over the country are having real debates about the power/funding of their police departments.
The slogan Defund the Police, like Black Lives Matter in 2014, created a dialogue that turned some people off--even some black ones. Since all black movements are linked to the Dems, I have no doubt these slogans, particularly Defund, were not helpful to Dems electorally.
Exactly. It is not up to him. If he loses the election, the message from everyone should be unequivocal that Jan. 20 is his last day. He and his staff have now basically announced that he will not consider any election that he loses fair. Seems fairly unlikely he will concede.
A lot of political journalists, myself included, implied last summer that John Kelly was a "non-ideological" figure who would reshape the Trump White House as chief of staff. How did we get it so wrong? I explored that here.
.
@ezraklein
is right here, and I am glad he used such blunt language. COUP. People voted. Biden won. The press is under no obligation to air frivolous vote fraud charges or downplay an undemocratic effort to reverse the results.
69% approve of Biden's handling of COVID-19, 29% disapprove. 71% liked his unity message, 56% percent support reversing Trump policy of excluding non-citizens in Census, 55% percent support ending travel ban, 65% support restarting DACA.
Biden's agenda is quite popular, per new ABC News-Ipsos poll. 81% percent support mask-wearing requirement on federal property, 77% support government-wide focus on racial equity, 70% percent support rejoining WHO, 65% support rejoining Paris agreement.
I doubt Feinstein, Coons or Warner is willing to do that. Perhaps Manchin and Sinema would. But that would be quite a vote to cast. Which is why ideally Biden and Schumer push the process to an actual vote. Manchin and Sinema should actually have to formally vote down the bill.
Daniel Dale, through his work, has been a leader and innovator in covering the Trump era. I would be more interested in how he thinks the NYT should cover politics than how the NYT thinks he should cover politics.
A lot of the debates about the Democratic Party are proxies for a broader question: How does the party advocate for civil rights causes and a truly multiracial nation while not offending too many White voters? We took a deep look at that question.
In America's "uncivil war," Republicans, particularly GOP state-level officials, are increasingly the side taking the most hostile and undemocratic actions against their perceived enemies.
NEW: the Georgia House Special Committee on Election Integrity is meeting at 3 this afternoon and just added HB 531 - a 48 page omnibus elections bill that proposes a *lot* of changes.
#gapol
Here's the text:
New: LMPD Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly (who is being investigated as part of Breonna Taylor’s case) sent an email to around 1,000 officers at 2am that calls protestors thugs, complains about the government enforcing civil rights violations, and claims this is "good versus evil”
It gets worse. Even if this is all just to please Trump, it is very worrisome to have the nation’s top law enforcement officials on a fishing expedition to prove the president’s claims of voter fraud. To quote
@BrendanNyhan
, what would you say if it happened in another country?
"Biden [is] not only the best domestic policy president of my relatively short lifetime, but the best since at least Johnson. But like Johnson, Biden has done his level best to mar and overshadow that record with an indefensible foreign policy project."
Being centrist on policy (think Amy Klobuchar) is an important, valuable part of politics. What seems to me to be "performative centrism" is less useful.
Maybe a voting rights bill will pass. Maybe one won't pass. But all of this is to say that's entirely logical and appropriate for people to push the president hard to push people in his party hard to back things the overwhelming majority of people in the party support.
I worry the "let me show you how contrarian/not liberal/not with the pack I am" instinct leaves you writing phrases like, "If we leave aside the administrative provisions and the question of intent."
Reality validated many of the progressive left's views about racial and economic issues. So the Democratic Party and the country adopted them. Reality seems to validating the left's views on foreign policy too.
“Locally rich” white people, those who had higher incomes than others in their zip codes, were much more likely to support Trump than those who were locally poor."
Pelosi notes that one of the articles of impeachment against Nixon was not cooperating with congressional investigations. She also uses the word “lied” to describe Barr’s testimony. Some other Dems had avoided that word.
2021 has seen a continuation and in some ways acceleration of the eroding of core democratic practices and values in America by an increasingly-radical GOP. And as
@tzimmer_history
and
@dshyde
told me, time is running out to reverse some of this.
There was never a pipeline problem. I looked at how lots of institutions in America are finally letting Black people flourish and why that will benefit Black people but also non-Black people. With ideas from
@biblioracle
,
@DrIbram
,
@hmcghee
and others.
The slogan Defund the Police, like Black Lives Matter in 2014, created a dialogue that turned some people off--even some black ones. Since all black movements are linked to the Dems, I have no doubt these slogans, particularly Defund, were not helpful to Dems electorally.
American policing needs to change dramatically. And it's a shame that the people who were forcefully making that case in the summer of 2020 have been subsequently ignored.
Democrats adding justices to the Court is unpopular right now. It might remain so. But it's worth recalling what happened with impeachment. Polls showed it was unpopular, Dem leaders embraced it, basically all Dem voters then did and it was a 50/50 issue.
And if they vote down the voting rights bill, it will not be easy for them to vote against other major party priorities too. Particularly Sinema, who is very much vulnerable to a primary challenge.
Breyer and Manchin are never going to admit that the criticism is getting to them. Powerful people rarely admit they are moved by the views of the less powerful. But basically everyone that they respect blasting their decision-making right now is of course having an impact.
It sort of feels like, contrary to the widespread insistence that Joe Manchin feels no political pressure, that Joe Manchin is feeling some political pressure
Yeah, these kinds of stories are a problem. Trying to stay in power after you lost the election should not be covered as a political strategy but as a step towards trying to create a dictatorship.
"The people of Alabama have spoken," says Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, seeming to reject Moore's contention that the result is somehow in doubt.
"That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me" -- even Lindsey Graham can't defend Georgia Republicans making it a crime to give food and water to people waiting in line to vote
Don Lemon, John Harwood and Brian Stelter are excellent journalists. CNN's new leadership should make clear it understands those dismissals were mistakes. The real problem isn't Licht's workout comments but a flawed journalism vision that seems to come from Zaslav.
The Rick Scott plan is scary, radical and represents the GOP's broader goals. Notice the racial segment---if you are part of a movement committed to not addressing racial inequality, the next logical step is to eliminate evidence of that inequality.
More than 80 percent of Americans received $1400 cash payments from the Biden stimulus plan. Per new poll from
@Civiqs
, 37 percent of Americans say Biden has done something that benefited them personally, 57 percent say he has not.
That Trump lost and people like McConnell and Graham just won new six-year terms and are still behaving like this is a real problem. There is no longer a choice between supporting the president of their party and respecting democratic norms and values. He has lost.
Here's another example of this point. Gillum, who favored abolishing ICE and Medicare-For-All, got about the same number of votes, in the same areas as Bill Nelson, a more establishment Democrat who backed neither of those ideas.
The author *is* claiming causality, BTW, that progressive candidates like O'Rourke and Abrams are causing these big rural-urban divides. It's a claim that demands evidence and I don't see too much of it. Also weird given that Beto wasn't really running that much to his left.
Biden's early executive actions are quite popular. Part of the story is simply that Trump implemented a lot of policies that he believed in but were unpopular with the public--so Biden could walk in and do popular things simply by ending Trump's policies.
A lot of "Twitter is not real life" is really, "Twitter gives people who don't have a lot of offline power the ability to criticize/disagree with me--and do they know who I am?"
Political journalism was Politico-ized for much of the 2010s, in my view. I looked at the pluses and minuses of this approach and the signs political journalism is shifting (slightly) in a better direction. With thoughts from
@jayrosen_nyu
and
@nikkiusher
The shift of Graham from Trump critic to loyalist has been very sudden and it's not clear exactly what happened. Graham and McCain, once aligned on most issues, are far apart on Trump's breaking of norms, the defining issue of politics right now.
"In the 40 years since the US created its asylum system, no other Democrat suspended people’s ability to seek refuge in the US – an international right."
It's true: in piercing the dense thicket of lies told by Trump and his circle to conceal their deep wrongdoing, some media organizations have sometimes made promptly corrected errors.
We did a really deep look at Georgia going blue and why it might not stay that way. You've probably read a Georgia story (or six) but I promise you'll learn some things in this one.
Not sending out a press release congratulating Biden is not a big deal, even if it's breaking with traditional norms. Actively launching investigations whose goal is to disqualify votes hits at real core democratic values, and we are seeing more of the latter than I expected.
It gets worse. Even if this is all just to please Trump, it is very worrisome to have the nation’s top law enforcement officials on a fishing expedition to prove the president’s claims of voter fraud. To quote
@BrendanNyhan
, what would you say if it happened in another country?