Republican "Facts"

He’s clear [sic] got a message that works. If you look at what Trumpism is to the Republican Party, it’s the highest vote-getter that we’ve ever received. We grew the party in all ethnic communities — African-American, Latino, Asians. You know, he received the largest non-white vote in 60 years. I think the Republican Party is doing fine under Trump. The ball just didn’t bounce his way. That’s what happens when you play these sports.” 

            Bryan Lanza, speaking on the BBC Newshour podcast, 11/7/20

 

Boy howdy, donnit take all kinds? Even in an age of truly bizarre claims of "alternative facts" and "fake news," this one caught me totally off guard.

The spin is absolutely dizzying. Fortunately I was raking leaves when I heard this and could steady myself with my rake. But the depth of this guy's depraved indifference to Consensus Reality left me stunned. And in awe.

Now, this Bryan Lanza is an interesting character. Formerly a communications director for the Trump campaign and transition team in 2016-17, he has since cultivated ties to Ukraine, just as the White House was under investigation for pushing their president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, for dirt on the Bidens. That didn't go anywhere, of course, but apparently neither did Lanza. More's the pity.

At any rate, he's hardly an impartial, or even a rational observer. He is on record as calling the Congressional investigation of Mr. Trump a "sham impeachment" and a "partisan coup."* He's one of those hyaena-like creatures who seem to exist in the public sphere mainly to bark in time to whatever the Duke of Deceit says is the topic du jour. He and Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee-Sanders and Sean Spicer and Devin Nunes and Lindsay Graham and...

And today the theme is denying the Duke's demise at the ballot box, a sausage that the Suffering Trumpists will no doubt swallow whole ... that is, if they actually bother to listen to the BBC, which I doubt few will do. It ain't American, and we're trying to Make/Keep 'Merca great.

Where to begin? This whole statement is low-hanging fruit. Let's start at the beginning, then: Trumpism is the highest vote-getter in GOP history. In the original version broadcast on the BBC, he added that the D of D had gotten the "second-highest vote total in history." Obviously, no one wins an election by getting the second highest vote total! You win by getting the most votes. 

And in fact, had the GOP not cheated by removing hundreds of thousands of left-leaning voters in MI, WI and NC,** the D of D would never have been elected in the first place, 'cause he lost the popular vote that time, too!

Surely the actual brains in the GOP must grasp this basic arithmetic: The "Trump coalition" is a losing coalition. He turned out some 5 or 6 million more votes this time, but then, so did Biden...and more. Unless you are prepared to steal every election from now until 2100, Trumpism is a losing bet, and that cannot be lost on the Cold Calculators in the GOP establishment.

Lanza says they grew the GOP's share of minority voters this time round. And that's partly true: They went from 10% of the African-American vote in 2016 to 12% — hardly a stunning turnaround. But for the Latinx community, well...Biden actually outperformed HRC this time — 66% vs. 65%!*** How that counts as "growing the base" is a mystery to me. 

Yes, the key was in FL, where Cubans seem to have gone for the D of D in larger numbers. But that hardly counts as a major win for him: Elsewhere and among other nationalities, a huge turnout by younger Latinx voters more than offset the Duke's gains in FL and south TX (which did not matter to the election, anyway).

Since when has the Cuban community been the sole representative of the Latinx population in the US? Only when the Liar-in-Chief is involved!

But the most startling comment of all comes right at the end: Politics — the management of power and authority to govern over 300 million people — is just a game with a ball that might bounce here or might bounce there. 

I mean, this gesture at being "philosophical" is truly astonishing, if you
really stop and think about it. Lanza is saying that what people actually  want from their government is nothing more than a whim, a matter of chance that depends upon the weather, maybe, like a capricious bouncing ball...Oh well, if you don't win today, it has nothing to do with what you said or did, or who you really are. It's all about making the ball bounce the right way. Ahem.

A bouncing ball

Even more: With this one, blithe comment, he can dismiss all the failings of the Republican Party under Trump. Trump's defeat at the ballot box has nothing to do with his behavior, nothing to do with fundamentally bad policies, nothing to do with the grift and ethical violations and obstruction of justice that #45 has engaged in and that the Party has enabled at every turn.

I mean, to actually advertise one's callousness like that. Wow! The sobering thing is that I actually have no doubt at all that that is how many important people in the GOP actually think. Not the rank and file, mind you. No, they are the victims of this philosophy. 

But behind the curtain, the machinery that keeps the great lie-machine turning out hooey in Republicanville, that absolutely does think this way. And so it's time for all Republicans of good heart to get out the lie detectors.

* https://www.thedailybeast.com/andriy-yermak-key-ukrainian-figure-in-impeachment-probe-spotted-with-former-trump-adviser-bryan-lanza

** See Greg Palast's reporting on Kris Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck program. Suddenly the incomprehensibles of 2016 will start to make a lot more sense.

*** https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/Latino-voters-overwhelmingly-supported-Biden-in-15705786.php and https://en.as.com/en/2020/11/10/latest_news/1604967286_230805.html and https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/06/why-biden-lost-the-latino-vote-florida-texas-434735

Polling for the Duke of Deceit

"Fuck you, we did a good job!"

- Nate Silver

Polling, so the Republican meme goes, fails because the pollsters don’t report on enough White people. They point to the surprises of 2016, and no doubt will trumpet the Duke of Deceit’s outperforming himself in 2020, as evidence that polling is fundamentally flawed exclusively because of liberal bias, and should therefore not be trusted.

The irony in this declaration is stunning, really, when you consider the depths of dishonesty that the GOP itself has sunk to in order to maintain its toehold on power in the face of being the minority party in the United States.* We can trace a straight line from the complete hooey of Reaganomics** to the absolute barrage of bullshit that has emanated from the Duke of Deceit and the Turtle over the past four years. 

The Duke, defeated

Everywhere you turn, whether you look at the income impacts of their economic policies, the global and economic effects of their foreign policies, their pronouncements on the “successes” of their routinely bad presidents, their claims to be upholding “American values,” or (most recently) their bad-faith manipulation of the norms of governance, you see one consistent theme: Republicans will say or do anything — anything — to get elected, even if it is not true, fails to coincide with reality, or even conflicts with something they said or did last year or 20 minutes ago. 

Mitch "The Turtle" McConnell

This may be somewhat less true at the state and local levels (though having lived in a red region of a blue state for more than a decade, I am skeptical even of that!), but one cannot doubt that the Duke of Deceit is not really an aberration in the longer-term scheme of things. Rather, he is the apotheosis of the Republican ethos to lie loudly and long. 

The situation has gotten so bad — and indeed, they have gotten so bad at it — even a few halfway honest Republican candidates (mostly those trying to survive in blue states) have found themselves stepping back from the brink that the D of D is dragging them toward. They find ways to “support the president” even as they mumble some denials of most of what he actually says.

The trouble is, of course, that Consensus Reality cannot be denied forever. What has postponed the Coming Reckoning has mainly been the peculiar slant that the electoral system and the structure of the United States itself can lend to unpopular ideas. Because every state is guaranteed at least one Representative and two Senators, regardless of population, and because there is a huge swath of the country that is relatively sparsely populated, the GOP has been able to maintain a grip on the Congress that outweighs its overall popularity. 

The Framers, in their wisdom, decided that the masses cannot be trusted and have to be balanced by an “upper chamber” that gives equal representation to every state. (So much for “original intent.”) Moreover, at the level of the Chief Executive, the Electoral College puts a thumb on the electoral scales, giving significantly more weight to minority opinions.***

Not the Sun

But in the end, just as we must all be compelled to admit that it is the sun and not the moon that shines in the daytime, so, too must this overly influential minority of Americans eventually come to accept that tax cuts do not pay for themselves, that consumers and not CEO’s are the real “job creators,” that everyone does have a vested interest in everyone else’s health, and that mankind is indeed destroying the environment that it depends upon for survival (and that there is no Planet B).†

So let us return, then, to the subject at hand: The lie that polling cannot be trusted because of blah blah blah. As Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com, the industry standard among polling aggregators, has repeatedly pointed out, the polls in 2016 were not that far off, in fact. Among the last 10 elections, 2016 falls close to the middle (#4 of 10) in terms of accuracy in predicting the final outcome of the election. Prior to 2016, you have to go all the way back to Truman’s “surprising” victory in 1948 to find polling that was actually, strikingly wrong.†† 

Certainly when it came to the popular vote, the polls were largely within their own margin of error in 2016. If anything was a surprise, it was Trump’s dubious “victories” by less than 75k votes in exactly three states (WI, MI and PA — three states that had participated in Kris Kobach’s remarkably anti-democratic Interstate Crosscheck system, which systematically removed hundreds of thousands of voters from the voting rolls…oddly enough, mostly from liberal-leaning voting blocs: Latinx and Black communities in cities). The only “surprise” here is that the “liberal” MSM has been so lax in covering the shenanigans that stole the election for the Duke. 

Indeed, returning to fivethirtyeight again, even as they were giving HRC >80% chance of winning in 2016, they were also pointing out that there were significant numbers of undecided voters in swing states that could tip the scales in the Duke’s favor. And that is (more or less, and ignoring the shenanigans just mentioned) what happened. Even the poll aggregators were pointing out that the Duke did have a path to victory. If you didn’t know that, you weren’t paying attention.

What was true four years ago has proven true again this time round: The polls predicted a Biden popular-vote victory all along, and lo and behold, that is what has happened. And the aggregators were saying all along that FL would be tough for either candidate to win outright. And they were predicting AZ and NV to lean Biden (which they did), and MI and WI to go for Biden (which they did), and that PA was going to be the tipping-point state (which it turned out to be – though Biden holding NV and AZ meant he doesn’t need PA).

Having said all this, it is true that there seems to have been a tiny red neap tide (one hesitates to call it a wave, since it has not put DT into the White House — only lawsuits can do that at this point). It made some of the popular votes closer than expected. What is going on with that?

Well it seems to me that one of the chief problems that pollsters face is that they are dependent upon the honesty of their respondents. If people are not willing to tell you what they really think, you are stuck. And in an environment completely awash in lies and deceit, where one candidate has run the country on complete bullshit and acted in the most shameful ways while promoting a complete disregard for facts and honest assessments of reality, it would not be surprising at all if one found lots and lots of otherwise decent ordinary people who were ashamed to admit publicly that they are Trumpists. Lies beget lies and the bad money drives out the good. (See my blog on that subject, actually....)

Jesus

Think of all the so-called Christians who turned out in droves for him in 2016 and at rallies throughout his presidency — even as he thoroughly trampled upon the most basic principles of Christian conduct (kindness, honesty, humility, respectfulness…). Whatever happened to "by their fruits ye shall know them"? (Matthew 7:15-20)

I don’t know (and I don’t care) how they have been sleeping at night, but I would not be at all surprised to discover that like their hero, they have been willing to lie and claim they are independents when pollsters came knocking. Not all of them, perhaps, but it wouldn’t take many of them to skew the polls in the tiny amounts we are seeing in this election. 

Non-Jesus 
Purveyor of Kool-Ade

By supporting the Duke of Deceit, they have abandoned all rational claim to be following Jesus, for the sake of a chance to impose their wretched beliefs on everyone else. “Sheep become like shepherds, and shepherds like sheep,” wrote Tolkien, and it’s true. 

And “in for a penny, in for a pound,” as the British say.

* Don't believe this statement? Consider: In recent elections, Democrats have earned millions more votes for Congress than Republicans, even when the GOP has taken control of both houses, as they did from 2001 to 2007; in the six presidential elections in the current century, Republicans have garnered a majority of the popular vote exactly once (in 2004, when incumbent W was running during two major wars); on virtually every issue (including abortion), traditional Republican positions are unpopular — often by wide margins. Only the peculiarities of our constitutional system, the Electoral College, and gerrymandering keep them in the game at all.

** www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/business/economy/tax-cuts incomes.html

*** For example, North Dakota has three electors for a population of around 760k (one EC vote for about every 253k people); California, with a population of over 39 million has 55 electors (about 710k people per EC vote).

† https://soundcloud.com/user-56350616/planet-b

†† www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0315-6; fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right/;   www.thecrosstab.com/2017/01/03/history-polling-error-us-uk/.

Picture credits: the conversation.com; howtolivebullshitfree.com; forbes.com.