Category: Electoral College

Romney Exits

The Daily Escape:

Northern Lights, Malletts Bay, Lake Champlain, Colchester, VT – September 2023 photo by Adam Silverman Photography

By now, everyone’s heard that Mitt Romney (R-UT) isn’t going to run for a second term in the Senate. From the WaPo:

“Romney, 76, said his decision not to run again was heavily influenced by his belief that a second term, which would take him into his 80s, probably would be less productive and less satisfying than the current term has been.”

He used the opportunity to say that Biden and Trump were too old to be the presidential candidates of their Parties, and they, like him, should stand aside and let the next generation of politicians take center stage.

But the big news was generated from a few quotes Romney made to McKay Coppins, who’s book about Romney is coming out in October. Coppins has a teaser article in The Atlantic in which Romney lets loose his ire against Trump (who Romney carefully cultivated in 2016 and 2017, when he was angling to be Secretary of State):

“So many Republican Senators privately expressed their support for Romney’s public criticism of Trump that the Utahan began keeping count, telling staffers he’d had more than a dozen nearly identical exchanges. He recalled one senior lawmaker complaining to him: “[Trump] has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”

Romney told Coppins:

“Almost without exception, they shared my view of the president.”

This has earned Romney accolades from the media and from a few Democrats. Karen Tumulty in the WaPo credits Romney with “paving the way for national health-care reform…” This ignores the fact that Romney ran for president in 2012 promising to repeal Obamacare.

Yet, after reading The Atlantic article, the media used terms like “noble,” “principled,” and “courageous.” But there is nothing courageous about saying the right thing only when you’re on your way out the door.

Wrongo has had issues with Romney since his run for the presidency in 2012. In May of 2012, Wrongo wrote:

“Over the past few days, Mitt Myth Romney has taken credit for GM being alive and Osama Bin Laden being dead.”

On the auto bailout Wrongo had previously reported what Romney actually said about the auto industry bailout: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“On February 12, 2012, Romney said:  “Three years ago, in the midst of an economic crisis, a newly elected President Barack Obama stepped in with a bailout for the auto industry. The indisputable good news is that Chrysler and General Motors are still in business. The equally indisputable bad news is that all the defects in President Obama’s management of the American economy are evident in what he did.”

/snip/

“The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”

Romney lied or changed his positions throughout his 2012 campaign against Obama. America is better off because he only received 206 votes in the Electoral College to Obama’s 332. He always was a plutocrat who’s political philosophy is basically trickle-down economics, low taxes and traditional religious cultural values.

There is room for those views in our politics, but Romney, who was the only Republican who twice voted to impeach Trump, could have done more to rally his fellow Senators to confront Mr. 91 counts. But, he’s gone from being the Republican nominee for president to being forced to leave politics just a decade later.

You may say “Thank God for Brave Men like Mitt Romney”, men with strong spines willing to stand up for what they believe and then march forward right out of the room!

Enough for this week, it’s time to let go of whatever is happening to Hunter Biden and his impeachable dad, and center ourselves for the government shutdown that’s coming at the end of the month. It’s time for our Saturday Soother!

Here in northwestern Connecticut, we’re seeing nights in the high 40° as summer draws to a close. Despite the threats from Hurricane Lee, let’s spend our Saturday Soother outside, sitting on the deck. To help you let go of the many insults of your week, listen to “Winter” (“Invierno”) from Astor Piazzolla’s “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” (“Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas”). Piazzolla was an Argentine composer who is credited with developing the nuevo tango.

Wrongo and Ms. Right were fortunate to attend a concert last week which featured Vivaldi’s Four Seasons followed by Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. Piazzolla’s classical work often features tango like rhythms. Here is his “Winter” played by Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, NL in 2014. The soloist is the conductor Liviu Prunaru:

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Why The Polls Are Wrong

The Daily Escape:

Belle, a water taxi in Camden, ME – September 2023 photo by Daniel F. Dishner

Happy Saturday, hopefully, you are getting a great start to a restful Labor Day weekend! This past week, we had friends from Los Angeles stop by the Mansion of Wrong. We had a few bottles of a delightful wine, and the question that never goes away came up again: “Why is Biden doing so badly in the polls?”

There really isn’t a good answer. The economy is doing fine, much better than the pundits expected it would be in the third quarter of 2023. But as Dan Pfeiffer points out:

“…somehow — against all common sense — the 2024 election between a competent President and an incompetent criminal — will be incredibly close. The Real Clear Politics polling average has Biden up by only 1.4%. Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by 4.5%. Given the strong Republican lean of the Electoral College, a Biden popular vote win of this size would likely mean that Trump ends up with 270 electoral votes.”

Now, Wrongo never relies on Real Clear Politics’ average of polls, but they’re not alone in offering up grim polling data, and the one thing Trump beats Biden on in surveys is running the economy, a very scary number :

While the actual economic numbers are good, people mostly look at how much money is in their pockets, asking: “What can I buy, given what I’m earning”? The August jobs report showed continued solid gains in aggregate pay for nonsupervisory workers even after inflation is taken into account. From the Bondad blog:

“Average Hourly Earnings for Production and Nonsupervisory Personnel increased $.06, or +0.2%, to $29.00, a YoY gain of +4.5%….”

YoY is year over year. By comparison, the most recent Consumer Price Index for July was 3.3%. Pay increases have been outpacing overall CPI inflation this year. So wages are creeping up, inflation is almost under control, and there’s no recession on the horizon.

A helpful statistic is that spending on pleasure boats is near previous highs, Axios reports:

“Why it matters: You don’t buy a boat unless you’re feeling fairly confident the economic wind is at your back. So this is a good sign for the economy. The ongoing boat-buying binge — which began during COVID shutdowns — is another strike against the once dominant “looming recession” narrative.”

One million used boats sold in the last 12 months! One guess as to who’s buying all of these boats: It isn’t the antifa-BLM Marxist globalists from big cities and blue states. Florida and Texas are in the top three states in revenues from boating.

And you won’t buy a boat unless you’re fairly confident that the economic wind is at your back. That means despite what people are telling pollsters, people are feeling pretty good about the economy.

Pfeiffer notes that all isn’t lost. As of now, Biden is in better shape politically than Obama was at this juncture. August of 2011 was the first (and only) time Obama’s approval dropped below 40%, and he was losing to a generic Republican. More:

“The primary reason for the statistical tie in the race is that Trump is holding onto more of his 2020 vote than Biden. In a NYT poll, 91% of Trump’s 2020 voters are supporting him again while only 87% percent of Biden’s voters plan to vote for him in 2024.”

More:

“Among Biden’s 2020 voters, only 77% percent of Democrats in the poll have a favorable opinion of Biden, compared to 80% of Republicans for Trump.”

But Pfeiffer says we shouldn’t panic, because convincing people who have already voted for Biden to vote for him again is doable, and easier than convincing a Trumper to vote for Biden. But despite that, given the Reddish tilt to the Electoral College, we should assume that 2024, like the 2020 presidential election, will depend on a number of voters smaller than the number of attendees at a Taylor Swift concert.

A second point we talked about was Biden’s age. There are two referendums that will be a part of the 2024 presidential election. First, on Trump and his 91 counts. Second, on Biden’s age and whether he seems up to the task going forward.

It’s one thing for Biden to tell us about all that his administration has accomplished in 3 years. His results should be pitched to turn his vulnerability as an older person into a perception of wisdom. He needs to convince voters that the country is on a good path and that Biden, our captain, with his age and experience, has steered us to where we’re starting to see success.

Charlie Sykes suggests the pitch should sound like this:

“We’ve done the hard work. We took the punches. We had a plan and now it’s starting to turn around. So the question is, as we come back, who do you want in charge for the next four years?”

And when Republicans spew their litany of racial hatred, and class warfare, Biden should be saying:

“Working folks like you need cheaper prescription drugs, you need to be able to spend more time with your family by getting better wages for your labor…”

Ultimately 2024 will be about voter turnout. Convincing younger voters and those who aren’t fired up about Biden to come out to the polls will decide America’s fate.

Now take a beat and forget about the many crises we face. Let’s focus instead on our Saturday Soother. We’re expecting beautiful weather in the northeast, and much of our time will be spent outside. So join Wrongo in pulling up a comfy chair in the shade and spend a few minutes watching this lovely video of a Loon family swimming on a lake in a thunderstorm. It’s guaranteed to improve your outlook. You may want to bookmark this video to use whenever our politics are driving you nuts:

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My Way Or The Highway

The Daily Escape:

Azalea gardens at the Biltmore, Asheville NC – April 2023 photo by Sherry Maddock

We all know that the US is staring down a series of domestic threats to American democracy. Here’s a short list: Corruption on the Supreme Court, fundamental rights being lost via Supreme Court decisions, and voting rights being on the ballot in many states. Then there’s the question of whether any high level politician will ever be held to account for the Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt.

These threats require that we convince every voter to turn out in 2024. Even so, surprisingly the presidential race in 2024 could be very close.

All of this could be undermined by the plans of the emerging political party called No Labels. They are gathering signatures to get on the presidential ballot in all 50 states in 2024, while recruiting both Democrats and Republicans to run as a bipartisan ticket. The WaPo reports that the group has already gained ballot access in Arizona, Colorado, Alaska and Oregon. Apparently, they are backed by shadowy donors who have provided them with $70 million in seed money.

Former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman is associated with No Labels. Other names often mentioned as possible No Labels candidates are Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WVA), Kirsten Sinema (I-AZ), Susan Collins (R-ME), and former Republican Governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan.

Here we go again. Another centrist third party effort to create a “unity” ticket that supposedly appeals to those Americans who say they want to end the partisan bickering in Washington. This year, it’s No Labels who are trying to throw a big monkey wrench onto our Electoral College map. If they are successful, it could possibly send Trump back to another term in Washington.

All in the name of unity, of course.

Lieberman is acutely aware of the impact third-party bids can have on presidential elections. He ran as Gore’s VP candidate in 2000, when the Democratic campaign fell 537 Florida votes short of an Electoral College victory. That year, Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee, won more than 97,000 Florida votes.

It might be useful for Lieberman et al to remember that in the 2016 presidential election, Jill Stein got 50,000 votes in Michigan, allowing Trump to win Michigan by 14,000 votes. Ross Perot in 1992 arguably shifted the race to Bill Clinton.

The No Labels website specifically describes itself as an “insurance policy against a Trump-Biden rematch.” From Larry Hogan:

“The vast majority of people in America are not happy with the direction of the country and they don’t want to see either Joe Biden or Donald Trump as president.”

Hasn’t Biden worked productively with Republicans to pass a broad array of bipartisan legislation? His main partisan domestic initiative was essentially written by Manchin, who now wants a larger voice with No Labels.

First, it seems bizarre for No Labels to equate Biden with Trump. Comparing the two when Trump is under indictment in NY and likely to be indicted in several more cases, after having incited an insurrection is crazy. What’s Biden’s crime? Not paying off porn stars?

Second, why is a group dedicated to promoting moderate, bipartisan legislation working against a president who has actually accomplished just that? Jonathan Chait in NY Magazine reports that No Labels’:

“…own polling suggests its candidacy would serve as a spoiler on behalf of Republicans. In December, it found an unnamed moderate third-party candidate would win just 20% of the vote, against 33% for Trump and 28% for Biden.”

This result seems completely logical given Biden’s greater reliance on moderate voters than Trump. But still they persist. For Wrongo, you only needed to say “Joe Lieberman” to convey that this organization is wrong-headed on its face. When politically marginal people like Lieberman and Manchin are interested in a new political organization, you know they’re looking for a way to insert themselves more deeply into our politics, despite how little actual support they have.

They’re willing to cause great harm for an outside shot at real power.

We need to understand that political centrism isn’t the halfway point between today’s median Democrat and today’s median Republican. Biden has governed basically as a 21st Century centrist; otherwise, the left of his Party wouldn’t be so frustrated with him. The No Label people need to realize that there’s already a perfectly good moderate Party in America, and it’s called the Democratic Party.

The No Label centrists seem to be living in some kind of dream world where the Electoral College isn’t closely divided and today’s political stakes aren’t monumental.

This is a vanity political project that could easily lead to a political disaster. Let’s hope it fizzles like most centrist third party bids have done in the past.

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Saturday Soother – December 3, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Pondicherry Park, Bridgeton, ME – November 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Are the Democrats prioritizing the need to pass the Electoral Count Reform Act? Some are worried that amending the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA) might not get done in what remains of Congress’ lame-duck session. If it isn’t done by January 1, it’s unlikely to be passed at all once Republicans take control of the House.

From the WaPo’s Greg Sargent:

“Versions of ECA reform have advanced in the Senate and the House, but it’s hard to see either passing as a stand-alone bill with only a few weeks left in the lame-duck session. That would chew up valuable floor time with much else left to do, including funding the entire government.

So, the most likely option at this point, a congressional aide tells me, is for ECA reform to get attached to that end-of-year spending bill.”

It’s worth worrying that this might not happen. Roll Call reports that Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Amy Klobuchar have said that it should be made a part of the must-pass spending omnibus bill.

The pending ECA Reform bill is the most substantial legislative action trying to deal with the Jan. 6, 2021 attempted coup. Citing ambiguities in the ECA, Trump’s supporters argued that Vice President Mike Pence could set aside some states’ results. You know what followed that.

The pending legislation would clarify that the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is purely ceremonial, and that s/he does not have the discretion to set aside any state’s properly certified votes. It would also raise the threshold to hear objections to a state’s electors from just one member in each chamber to 20% of both Houses.

ECA reform would also require governors to certify the correct slate of electors.  It creates new ways for legal challenges when governors violate that duty, and requires Congress to count the court-sanctioned slate of electors even if a bad-acting state legislature appointed a sham slate.

This is important since right now, we’re seeing Arizona’s Cochise County’s election board simply refusing to certify the results of their midterm election. This shows that election denialism is alive and well in the states and demonstrates the need for ECA reform. Arizona’s GOP is showing us exactly what they plan to do in 2024. We should believe them.

In a future presidential election, a GOP-controlled state legislature could seize on exactly this kind of thing — a local refusal to certify results — as its excuse to appoint a different slate of electors for the losing presidential candidate. If that state’s GOP-controlled House counted those electors, under current law it could lead to a stolen election or major crisis. That must be fixed.

The Democrats are pushing on a string trying to get the bill passed. Attaching the ECA reform to a spending bill is complicated. Right now, 10 GOP Senators support the Senate version of reform, the exact number required to overcome a filibuster. But will those same Senators support the spending bill Sen. Schumer wants to pass in the Senate?

And if not, will the ECA reform bill get a stand-alone vote? More than a few GOP Senators could seek to derail it with poison-pill amendments. What’s more, a stand-alone vote could subject it to attacks from Trump and other Republicans. That might weaken the support of some of the 10 GOP Senators who are for it.

And the Democrats need Mitch McConnell and other GOP Senate leaders to agree to attach ECA reform to a spending bill, and enlist the 10 GOP Senators to support it. That means the GOP controls whether this bill is enacted.

The threat of election subversion won’t disappear in our lifetimes. As Greg Sargent says, Jan. 6 has caused unusual bipartisan urgency for Electoral Count Act reform. It would be the height of folly to let that slip away.

And now it’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we try to forget about power, politics, and economics for a few minutes, and calm ourselves before we rush headlong into the holiday season.

We’ve gotten through Thanksgiving and are heading towards Christmas. Here at the Mansion of Wrong, the faux Christmas tree is up, the Christmas plates are going into the cabinets, and the caviar and good single malts have been stocked. The first overseas Christmas cards have arrived.

Let’s put on our wireless headphones and watch and listen to Saint-Saëns’s “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Op.28” for violin and piano, played in 2017 by Bomsori Kim on violin, and Jeongwon Kim on piano. The piece was written by Saint-Saëns in 1867 as the finale of his first violin concerto, but its success as a solo composition at its first performance led Saint-Saëns to publish it separately. Her violin is a Guarnieri from 1725:

Bomsori Kim is new to Wrongo and is outstanding.

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Monday Wake Up Call – November 28, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Thanksgiving Day, Brewster, MA – November 2022 photo by Anne Marie

There was plenty of news over Thanksgiving that Wrongo was itching to talk about, but instead, he decided to take a complete break. Here’s something that’s been on his mind.

Despite all of the self-congratulating by Democrats, the Cook Political Report shows that Republicans received some 3.5 million more votes than Democrats in the midterms. Republicans received 54.13 million votes compared to the Democrats’ 50.79 million votes. Republicans did better in 2022 than they did in the 2018 midterms by 3 million votes, while Democrats got 10.3 million fewer votes than 2018, when they won control of the House by 235–199. Much of this is turnout.

Despite this context, the narrative is that America rejected the far Right by defeating election denier candidates. And most Trumpist candidates were defeated by significant margins. Democrats shouldn’t rest on their laurels or assume “the Trump fever has broken”. It hasn’t. America comes out of the midterms with voters evenly divided between the Parties.

Now, there are only four swing states left: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. These four only account for 43 Electoral Votes. Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster points to the striking “continuity among the elections” since Trump emerged as a national political figure:

“We’ve now gone through 2016, ’18, ‘20 and ‘22 – and all looked pretty much alike….And it has locked in the coalitions.”

So we’re not only evenly divided, but we’re also deeply divided politically.

Looking at the Electoral College, the midterms offered some optimism to Democrats when 2024 comes around. The five states that decided the last presidential race did so by flipping from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020. Those five (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) moved more toward the Democrats in 2022.

The Dems won six of the eight Senate and governor races across these states, and Dems could notch a seventh victory if Sen. Raphael Warnock defeats Herschel Walker in a Georgia run-off next month.

But Republicans made Ohio, Iowa, and Florida Redder. Each now appears securely in the GOP’s column for 2024 (and most likely beyond). And the Dem’s perennial hope of turning Texas Blue still looks like it’s another 10 years away after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s double-digit victory against Beto O’Rourke. Republicans again won all of Texas’ statewide offices, continuing a Dem shutout that stretches back to the 1990s.

It appears that the offsetting and hardening partisan strengths of each Party could again give the power to decide the presidency to a few hundred thousand voters, in a very few close counties in a few very balanced states.

CNN’s Ron Brownstein says that a 2024 presidential race with just Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona as true battlegrounds would probably begin with Democrats favored in states holding 260 Electoral College votes (including Washington, DC) and Republicans in states with 235. That means Democrats would need to win just one of Arizona (11 votes), Georgia (16), or Wisconsin (10) to reach an Electoral College majority. But that’s far from a certainty.

This division will make for tons of political stress over the next two years. Each Party understands that our nation’s future is now controlled by the choices of a tiny minority of people living in a few contested political districts: White-collar suburbs of Atlanta and Phoenix, working-class Latino neighborhoods in and around Las Vegas, and the mid-sized communities in Wisconsin’s so-called BOW counties (Brown County, Outagamie County and Winnebago County).

No GOP presidential candidate will concede Michigan or Pennsylvania just because of the midterm results. But the magnitude of those 2022 Democratic wins show how difficult it will be for a Republican nominee to take them in 2024 – particularly if the GOP candidate supports further restrictions on abortion.

It’s likely that Democrats will target North Carolina to expand their roster, while Republicans will target Minnesota and New Hampshire. But flipping any state will be difficult, depending upon candidate quality.

This shrinking list of competitive presidential states could increase political tensions for the next two years. Time to wake up America! Think about how your indifference to politics and to voting in our elections has put the country on a knife edge. The threat posed to America by the MAGA extremists remains very real.

It’s going to take tremendous effort in every single election until this dynamic shifts. And that could take a full generation. To help you wake up, watch “People Get Ready”, a Curtis Mayfield tune that foretold the turning tide in the battle for racial equality. It hit the top of the R&B charts after its original 1965 release by The Impressions.

It’s been covered by scores of artists, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and here in 2009 by Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles. Beck’s reaction when Stewart comes on stage is priceless. Stewart served as vocalist for the Jeff Beck Group back in 1969:

Sample Lyrics:

People get ready
There’s a train a-coming
You don’t need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear the diesels humming
Don’t need no ticket
You just thank the Lord

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 13, 2022

While we were focusing on the midterms, Biden flew to Egypt to appear at the COP27 climate conference where he took a brief victory lap before heading to Cambodia and then to Bali for the G20 summit (which Putin is skipping).

This particular climate conference is largely focused on what, if anything, the industrialized countries owe to poor nations that are suffering climate disasters which they did little to cause. The catch phrase for this is “Climate Reparations”.

It’s hard for America to be a global leader on climate given our internal political issues. We’re always going to be just a few Electoral College votes away from electing a climate denier. So the world can’t count on us. But America will never pay climate reparations. We must at least TRY to get clean water in US cities first.

Even after 157 years, we won’t really consider paying reparations to the descendants of our fellow citizens for the sin of slavery. The political will to pay reparations to brown skinned folks on the other side of the world will never be a majority view in America.

There was both good news and bad news about the 2022 midterms. The good news is that the outcomes were not as catastrophic as predicted. The bad news is that they were bad enough. While all the races aren’t finished and all the votes aren’t counted, we know the Senate will be controlled by the Democrats. It’s likely that the GOP will control the House. Still, it’s very clear there’s a very large segment of American voters who fail to read the writing on the wall about the threat of an authoritarian takeover of American democracy. Even though that writing is in large, blinking neon letters. On to cartoons.

The authoritarians are pensive:

The incredibly shrinking authoritarians:

The Georgia runoff doesn’t mean what you think it means:

The MAGA celebration ended early:

MAGA is still with us:

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Saturday Soother – Midterms Edition, November 12, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Colorado River with the Fisher Towers and the La Sal mountains in background, UT – November 2022 photo by Benjamin Williamson Photography

Wrongo can admit to being anxious and a bit depressed during the two weeks leading up to the midterms. But it wasn’t the blowout that America’s BS pollsters and the slavish media had been predicting. So he’s feeling better.

While it’s still too early to know what the political landscape will be in 2023, we can be reasonably sure that the Republicans will control the House and the Dems the Senate.

If that happens, what should Biden’s strategy be? It’s likely that he will retool the White House into a more overtly political operation with a focus on 2024. Axios reports that Biden’s considering bringing on a business leader to improve Democratic relations with the business community. That becomes more important if the US is heading into a recession sometime before the 2024 presidential election.

The idea is for Biden to stay in front of any potential financial crises. His team wants to be sure he’s getting a 360-degree view of the economy, even if that means angering the Party’s progressive wing.

Biden also plans to sharpen the contrast between Democrats and Congressional Republicans. It’s certain that the GOP will at best, hold only a narrow margin in the House. Some Republican Congress Critters are already considering mounting a challenge to Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as House Speaker.

That’s likely to leave Republicans with an unwieldy and possibly chaotic majority, which should give Democrats an opening to be on offense. If Democrats keep their minimal Senate majority, Biden could promote his agenda in the Senate and then continually ask why House Republicans are stalling it.

And when it comes to House Republicans spending time investigating the Biden administration, Biden and his team should use similar delay and deflect tactics as the Trump administration did.

The MAGA fringe in the House will also try to hold the country hostage to increases in the debt ceiling. It’s logical that a Dem + responsible Republican faction will work on a bipartisan basis to stave off the MAGA effort to burn up America’s credit rating.

Wrongo would urge the Senate and the House to try to get two big things accomplished in the lame duck session. It MUST complete its reforms of the Electoral Count Act. Over the summer, a bipartisan group of senators reached a deal to make it harder to overturn a presidential election. The proposal still needs to be approved by both chambers. The Senate proposal has the backing of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The House has passed a slightly different version, but if it doesn’t get done by January you can kiss these reforms goodbye.

Second, the Senate should attempt to use the budget reconciliation process to raise the debt ceiling to preclude House Republicans from threatening default on the national debt as pretext for extracting concessions on Social Security, Medicare, and possibly, Veterans benefits.

If Biden can have success with working across the aisle on the Electoral Count Act along with the budget and debt ceiling, that will position Democrats (and Biden) as the adults in DC politics. To the extent that inflation continues to fall, and we avoid a deep recession, Biden can claim the Democrats are doing a good job on the economy.

Since it’s Saturday, welcome to our Saturday Soother. Wrongo invites all readers to pause for a few hours, (or more) to recharge after escaping the phantom red wave. It is imperative that we prevent burn out because there’s much more to do before the new Congress is sworn in, in January.

For Wrongo, that means going outside and doing yard work, or simply wandering around the fields of Wrong.

Wrongo and Ms. Right started this early on Friday by taking a walk in a nearby town park. The leaves on the park’s trees are down, but the grass and plants remain green and the air was warm. Despite being a national holiday the park was nearly empty, making for a delightful escape.

To help you pause, grab a seat by a south-facing window and watch and listen to Telemann’s “Sonata in D major, TWV 44:1” played here by the Bremer Barockorchester (Bremen Baroque Orchestra). It was performed at the Unser Lieben Frauen Church in Bremen in October 2021. It features a very interesting performance on a 3′ long natural trumpet, which is valveless. Julian Zimmermann is the great musician making this solo trumpet performance:

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Preventing Stolen Elections

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Heceta Beach, OR – September 2020 photo by Jack Arnold Photography

From the NYT:

“Activists driven by false theories about election fraud are working to toss out tens of thousands of voter registrations and ballots in battleground states, part of a loosely coordinated campaign that is sowing distrust and threatening further turmoil as election officials prepare for the November midterms.”

Government databases being what they are, voter rolls do contain errors, usually because voters have died or moved without updating their registrations. States typically rely on systematic processes as required by their laws to update or purge voter rolls.

Now, outside partisan Republican groups are attempting to use privately generated lists to “help” clean up the information. The Conservative Partnership Institute, (CPI) which has Mark Meadows as a senior partner, has distributed a playbook that instructs local groups on how to vet voter rolls.

CPI and other groups have challenged at least 65,000 voter registrations across eight counties in Georgia. In Michigan, another group challenged 22,000 ballots from people who had requested absentee ballots for the state’s August primary. And in Texas, residents sent affidavits challenging the eligibility of more than 6,000 voters in Harris County, the state’s largest county, which is home to Houston.

These are challenges by Republicans who are targeting Democratic cities and counties in battleground states. It takes time for local election officials to review each challenge, and in some cases, the challengers are angry and impatient.

What would bring most of this to a halt, is for cities and counties to impose a hefty filing fee that would be refundable in proportion to the number of valid challenges. Checking to see if a challenge is valid or not takes time and effort. States shouldn’t allow partisans to gum up the work of local election officials for free. If there’s no penalty for throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks, everybody will toss some.

In a more positive note about protecting our democratic process, it appears a reform of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 will pass Congress later this year. Abuse of the vague language in that Act led Trump and his co-conspirators to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021.

Since Jan. 6, we’ve seen an organized effort by Republicans in many states to fill key, lower profile election jobs with people who will only certify elections that Republicans win. To prevent that from happening again, both Houses have come up with legislation to reform the Act.

In a move that most likely guarantees passage of an electoral reform bill this year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced support for the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022.

Eleven Senate Republicans have already announced they are co-sponsoring it, more than enough for it to avoid filibuster and pass. The Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday voted 14-1 to advance the bill, with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Asshole) being the only committee member to object.

Last week, the House passed its version of Election Reform, with the support of nine Republicans. It’s similar, and both bills make it clear that the vice president’s role in counting Electoral votes at the joint session of Congress is purely ministerial.

That by itself would have saved a lot of bloodshed at the US Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Senate bill ensures that Electoral votes counted by Congress accurately reflect the results of each state’s popular vote for president, something the House bill also does. It also provides clearer guidelines for when eligible candidates for president and vice president can receive federal resources to support their transition to power, something that Trump vindictively stalled after the 2020 election.

It would also substantially increase the threshold for Congress to consider an objection to the Electoral votes of individual states, requiring that at least one-fifth (20%) of each Chamber sign on to such challenges. Currently, that requires just one Senator and one House member. From Sen. Amy Klobuchar, (D-MN):

“Right now, just two people out of 535 members can object and slow down and gum up the counting.”

So it sets a much higher bar.

This is good news for America. One, it helps ensure we continue to have peaceful transfers of power between presidential administrations. And two, we’re seeing bipartisanship around a key Constitutional issue.

It’s clear that these bills must be negotiated into a single bill that is approved before January when there’s a decent chance that Republicans will get control of the House.

Most pundits think it will come to a vote after the November mid-terms. Now we have to hope McConnell doesn’t change his mind.

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Can We Become A Representative Democracy Again?

The Daily Escape:

Toroweap Point, North Rim, Grand Canyon NP, AZ – August 2022 photo by Andrei Stoica

Our democracy is teetering. Minority states representing a fraction of the whole population of the country, have an outsized representation in the Electoral College and in the Senate. This has helped ignite an acute threat to American democracy that’s based in Red State America. The NYT’s David Leonhardt quotes Harvard’s Steven Levitsky:

“We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world,”

One reason is that the more populous states over the past century have grown much larger than the small states. That means the bigger state residents now hold (relatively) less political power in the Senate and the Electoral College than they did in the 1900s.

This was something that the founders understood and agreed on. At the time, there was an alternative discussion about maintaining proportional representation in the House. In the first US Congress, (1789-1791), James Madison had proposed 12 potential Constitutional amendments. We all know that ten amendments were quickly ratified as the Bill of Rights. Another amendment was ratified in 1992 as the 27th Amendment which prohibits salary increases for House and Senate members to take effect before the next election.

The only one of the 12 amendments passed by Congress that wasn’t ratified is the Congressional Apportionment Amendment (CAA). The CAA was designed to let the number of seats in the House grow to meet future population growth.

A majority of the (then) states ratified the CAA. But by the end of 1791, it was one state short of adoption. No other state has ratified this potential amendment since 1792. Here’s the text of the proposed CAA:

“After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.”

The CAA lays out a mathematical formula for determining the number of seats in the House of Representatives. Initially, it would have required one representative for every 30,000 constituents, with that number eventually climbing to one representative for every 50,000 constituents.

But the amendment wasn’t added to the Constitution. Today, Congress controls the size of the House of Representatives. They had regularly increased the size of the House to account for population growth until 1911, when it fixed the number of voting House members at 435. Today, that’s about 761,000 Americans per House seat. Miles away from 50,000.

Delaware leads in the malapportionment with 990,000 people per representative, about 250,000 more than the average state. Rhode Island has the most democratic apportionment with 548,000 people per representative. Both are small, Blue states.

The small Red state Wyoming has 578k/representative. All of the big states are higher than the average: NY has 777k, and CA has 761k, while Florida has 770k and Texas has 768k.

This also impacts the distribution of Electoral College votes, which equal the apportionment of House seats. As a result, the Electoral College is also becoming less representative. David Leonhardt points out:

“Before 2000, only three candidates won the presidency while losing the popular vote (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison), and each served only a single term.”

But two of the past four presidents (Trump and GW Bush in his first term) have become president despite losing the popular vote. Small states represent a fraction of the whole population of the country yet, absent something like the CAA, have an outsized representation in both the Senate and the Electoral College.

This was on purpose. But when the filibuster was added in the Senate’s rules, it changed everything. The filibuster has been part of the Senate in many forms, but in 1975, the Senate revised its cloture rule so that three-fifths of Senators (60 votes out of 100) could limit debate.

With the Senate roughly equally divided, each Party has about 50 votes it can count on, but it needs 60 to pass most legislation. This means that the small states have more power in the Senate than they had before.

Using the 2010 US Census as an example, the US population was 308.7 million. If the CAA was in effect, the number of representatives in the House would be more than 6,000. That’s surely unwieldy, but is there a number of House seats between 435 and 6000 that would be more representative?

Our form of proportional representation needs an overhaul. Some changes to consider:

  • Better proportional representation in the House (via the CAA?) to help make the Electoral College more representative than currently
  • A version of ranked choice voting for all state-wide races
  • Overturning Citizens United
  • Ending gerrymandering by using independent commissions to establish district lines

Since only a few hundred people currently control the democratic direction of our country, can these ever be addressed?

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Tuesday Wake Up Call, Voter Fraud Edition – August 16, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Monsoon season, Sonoran Desert, Tucson, AZ –  August 2022 photo by Rene Martinez

The November mid-term election is 12 weeks away. Some Republicans who do not accept our country’s democratic tenets are focusing on getting elected in the battleground states in an effort to energize a future coup. From the WaPo:

“…in the six critical battlegrounds that ultimately decided the 2020 presidential contest, where Trump most fiercely contested the results…..Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, at least 54 winners out of 87 contests — more than 62% of nominees — have embraced the former president’s false claims.”

As an aside, reporters must stop using the term “election deniers”. It doesn’t convey what these Republicans believe. They know Trump lost, but they tried to steal the 2020 election anyway.

And they’re promising to steal the next one. These people call the government their “enemy”. Now, they’re calling for violence against the FBI. They say our elections can’t possibly be fair, yet they’re doing all they can to make them less fair.

There are many tools in the GOP tool kit to help a state create election-related chaos. They could decertify voting machines or block the electronic counting of ballots. They could empower their legislatures to determine how many of a presidential candidate’s votes are actually counted.

The GOP says that our local electoral processes and voting machines are highly suspect. In 2020 we saw Republican efforts to find voter fraud in several states, all of which failed. Still, in 2022, the GOP persists in saying there are voting machines that flipped votes in 2020 from Trump to Biden.

The gold standard for voting in America is hand-marked paper ballots. They leave a paper trail that is hard to challenge. Today states (including Connecticut where Wrongo votes) use digital scanners to read those hand-marked ballots. The machine tabulators can be checked before voting for accuracy and ballots can be re-scanned in random precincts afterwards to verify totals, along with hand counts.

Verified Voting a non-partisan firm that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections, rates the integrity of voting machines at the county level throughout the US. They have an interactive US map that allows anyone to check the quality of the voting machines in their county. Here’s a screenshot image of that interactive map:

You should go to the interactive map for greater detail. The green portion of the map represents the 69.2% of US registered voters that use highly reliable hand-marked paper ballots. The yellow portion of the map represents the 23.4% of our registered voters that use mostly reliable Ballot Marking Devices (BMD), with marked pre-printed ballots; some print summaries of voter selections, often with those selections encoded in barcodes or QR codes. Together, these account for 92.6% of America’s registered voters.

The red portion of the map represents the 7.4% of American voters who use a less-reliable direct recording electronic (DRE) voting system. DREs allow voters to record their selections directly into computer memory.

Despite what Republicans think, most of America can vote with total confidence that their voting machines are accurate, and that their votes will be counted accurately. So relax Republicans, election fraud just isn’t very possible in the US.

But there are plenty of other shenanigans that can be pulled at the local and state level. And that’s a concern given what the GOP is focusing on for the November mid-terms. They could take away voting rights by canceling voter registrations. They can close polling places or gerrymander more districts. The WaPo has a chart showing how close the GOP is to controlling the voting process in the six battleground states:

By weakening trust in our election system, Republicans are paving the way for America to become a one-party state led by an authoritarian strongman. They intend to take away the single and best power the people have, our vote. These Republicans aren’t election deniers, they’re anti-democracy. If they are elected, they will end democracy as we know it.

Time to wake up America! We can’t leave the vote-counting to people who won’t count all of our votes! America has a long tradition of subverting the voting process and denying millions of people the right to vote, and these Republicans want to take us right back to those days in our past. To stop that, they must be beaten in November’s mid-terms.

To help you wake up, watch, and listen to “Queen Bee” played by Taj Mahal and friends in this Playing For Change video, that features Ben Harper, Rosanne Cash, and many others from around the world.

The tune is from Taj Mahal’s 1997 album, “Señor Blues”, which won a Grammy. It’s an album that Wrongo highly recommends:

 

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