A Sanguine Trump

There is something exceedingly weird about this election.  For a man who should be extremely worried about the direction this campaign trail is turning, he seems remarkably calm.  It's not like he doesn't see the numbers.  He is constantly remarking on them, but utters the "fake news" mantra each and every time.  It's like he is holding an ace or two up his sleeve.  

There have been a lot of warnings about voter roll purges.  Texas recently removed a million people from its voter rolls.  This affects the Senate race more so than the presidential race, where Trump is expected to win easily.  Ted Cruz is having a little more difficult time fending off his latest challenger Colin Allred.  Still, it is very disconcerting.  You could show up to the poll and find you are not listed on the voter roll and it is too late to register.  FTR, the voter registration deadline is October 7 in the Lone Star state.  

The Supreme Court has upheld these voter roll purges, even if there is no real reason to have them other than to disenfranchise more voters.  Republicans' attempts to undermine the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been a long-term effort, using the Supreme Court and district federal courts to help states carry out their purges, redistricting and other gerrymandering schemes to assure conservatives stay in power.  David Daley was on CNN's Amanpour the other night describing the process and how much Chief Justice Roberts has had a hand in it.

Conservatives certainly don't stay in power because of their policies.  Texas has become an economic basket case under Gov. "Wheels" Abbott, yet Texans still vote for him, those who can anyway.  He's been in power since 2015.  One more term and he will have served longer than Rick Perry before him.  It has been 30 years since Ann Richards, a very popular governor at the time, lost to George W. Bush and the rest as they say is history. 

People still haven't figured out how Dubya pulled it off.  This was two years before Fox News was launched.  There was no social media to speak of.  Yet Bush, or should I say Karl Rove, figured out a way to undermine public confidence in Gov. Richards and send her packing by a comfortable margin of eight percentage points.  His brother wasn't quite so lucky in Florida.  Jeb would need another four years to win that governorship, and turn the Sunshine State red.

We hear a lot of talk about the economy being so important in elections.  However, the Republicans have been very effective in using "traditional values" as the central theme of their campaigns.  They have been able to paint the Democratic Party as a godless, often soulless political party, especially when it comes to abortion.  This issue has been the cornerstone of their campaigns for decades now.  It has worked time and time again in their favor, but it seems America is turning "soulless" as more and more people think women should have the right to choose by a whopping 63 percent, according to Pew Research.  

Of course that view varies from state to state, and Republicans have been very savvy in figuring out which states to concentrate on and dismiss the others as "godless."  After all, you only need 270 electoral votes to win a presidential election.

Rove was a master strategist.  He parlayed Dubya's successful two governorship wins into a national campaign in which Bush won by the slimmest of margins.  The 2000 election came down to one state, Florida, and they counted the ballots over and over again in hotly contested districts.  Just a coincidence his brother happened to be governor.  We learned all about "hanging chads" and other terms used by ballot counters.  In the end, the conservative Supreme Court stepped in and said enough was enough, and shut down anymore attempts to challenge the results.  Al Gore bitterly accepted the outcome and we moved on, hoping to learn from our lessons.

Well, that didn't happen.  Dubya defied the odds and got re-elected in 2004 with a popular mandate to boot.  Was all of America turning red?  Rove and other conservative strategists certainly thought so.  Arnold Schwarzenegger had won the race for Governor of California.  George Pataki was firmly ensconced as Governor of New York.  More importantly, Republicans controlled Congress. The Dems were definitely on the back of their heels.

Then a funny thing happened.  Barack Obama was elected President in 2008.  This seemed to change everything.  Or did it?  Democrats had made some big gains in 2006 thanks to unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  That discontent carried over into the 2008 election, especially when the floor fell out of the housing market in 2008 and we saw the biggest stock market plunge since the Depression.  

In Obama's euphoria, he took many Democratic leaders into his administration, including Janet Napolitano and Kathleen Sibelius, two outstanding women who gave up their governorships of deep red states to serve in his administration.  No one expected the backlash that occurred in 2010, at least not the magnitude of it.  These states turned red again, as did many former Democratic strongholds like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  It was an electoral wipeout.  The only thing the Democrats managed to save was the Senate by the thinnest of margins.  Yes, the economy was struggling after a massive banking collapse but it was "Obamacare" that became the defining theme of the midterm elections.

This second red wave was even more devastating than the first, as Republicans now felt themselves vindicated.  They busily went about remaking voting districts in former Democratic states to make sure they held onto the state legislatures if not the governors' mansions.  Some of their efforts were so outrageous that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the new lines drawn in 2011.  After a 7-year legal battle, the conservative state legislature was forced to redraw their lines after a landmark 2018 case. 

However, many states like Wisconsin still get away with this gerrymandering, including who gets to sit on the state supreme courts.  Unlike the US Supreme Court, citizens get to vote for their state justices.  In 2023, Janet Protasiewicz won a statewide election.  The Wisconsin Republican Senate immediately tried to impeach her.  The only thing that stopped them was that the Democratic governor threatened to nominate his own justice to serve in her place if they went through with the highly partisan impeachment, and so the Republicans demurred.  

Democrats and Republicans find themselves in similar battles all over the country.  The governor might be Democratic, but the state legislature is Republican and so they are locked in these epic battles largely over abortion, contraceptive rights, and now IVF, not the economy as you might think would be the case.  Republicans don't seem to care about the economy because they think reproductive rights is a winner for them, at least in socially conservative states.

However, it doesn't work nationally any longer and even if you play the numbers you still come up short of 270, so Trump tried to change the calculus a little bit by saying 6 weeks is too short for an abortion ban and that maybe we should expand it.  This is on the ballot in Florida, his adopted home state, and if Florida goes the same way many other states have gone recently then that draconian abortion ban will be soundly defeated in November.  Trump doesn't want to go down with it, but demurred to the religious conservative block that forms the base of his support.

Nevertheless, he doesn't seem overly worried.  All right, I lose a few women voters, he might say, but I'll go on these young alpha male podcasts and try to get some young disenfranchised male voters to fall my way.  Add a few rappers into the mix so that I can get the young black male vote as well, at least 25 percent.  There you go, the sheet is balanced.  

Not quite but then it doesn't really matter to him.  He enjoys rambling on these podcasts, or "weaving" as he calls it.  He feels like he is reaching a younger audience but polls show that there isn't a major gender divide among Gen Z.  Both men and women of this age group tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic.  I guess he hopes to reach that ten percent that say they won't vote at all, claiming Barron as his "secret weapon."

I don't think Team Trump is banking on young men to tip the outcome in his favor.  Let him have his podcasts, they'll focus on election commissions like the one in Georgia, a state teetering on the edge of going for Kamala.  Maybe even in a big way.  So, his campaign team has made sure they have favorable representatives on the public service commission and there is nothing anyone can do about it, so sayeth the US Supreme Court.  It is very much shaping up to be a situation similar to 2018 when Stacey Abrams lost by the thinnest of margins to Brian Kemp but wasn't successfully able to challenge the voter roll purges and other gerrymandering Kemp had done as Secretary of State.  In the end, she was deemed a "sore loser."

Team Trump is hoping for nail-biters in the "battleground states." Even with Democratic governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the feeling is that these races will all be close and that they will have the state courts to side with them over the disputes they will inevitably file.  Unlike 2020, they are much better prepared this time around.  No more dripping hair dye and Rudy Giuliani holding press conferences in front of the Four Seasons Total Landscape storefront.  

They think they have all their ducks in a row and that they will get the magic 270 electoral votes no matter how well Kamala does in the popular vote.  If not, they are prepared to go all the way to the Supreme Court where they have six sympathetic judges.