By ~5p ET another phase of this ordeal will be over.
Till then, dig all this.
JRubin WaPo on the 'overwhelmingness':
Biden not only received a majority of the popular vote, but also cleared 51 percent — the largest vote percentage obtained against an incumbent president since 1932 and a bigger percentage of the popular vote than any Republican president since George H.W. Bush in 1988, when Bush was essentially running for a third Ronald Reagan term. In the process, Biden amassed the largest total number of ballots in U.S. history. He pummeled Trump by more than 7 million votes (and exceeded Barack Obama’s 2008 vote total by more than 11 million). That margin is bigger than Massachusetts’s entire population; in fact, only 14 states have a population of more than 7 million. Biden’s popular vote margin by percentage (4.4 percent) far surpasses Obama’s 2012 victory over Mitt Romney.
MGoldberg NYT
The radically different way the media treats boundary-pushing on the left and on the right is about more than hypocrisy or double standards. It is, rather, an outgrowth of the crisis of democracy that shields the Republican Party from popular rebuke. There’s no point asking if the G.O.P. can control its right. It has no reason to.
Democrats have just won the popular vote in the seventh out of the last eight presidential elections. In the aftermath, analysts have overwhelmingly focused on what Democrats, not Republicans, must do to broaden their appeal.
Comments
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/arizona-republican-party-calls-on-supporters-to-fight-to-the-death-for-trump-live-for-nothing-or-die-for-something/
PWaldman WaPo tonight
This is a never-ending obsession with Democrats. How can we get conservatives to like us more? Is there some special strategy we can deploy, or argument we can make, that will open their hearts and minds to what we have to say?
You may have noticed that Republicans — who have now lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — never bother to ask themselves how they might reach out to liberals. They appoint no people to carry out this task; they publish no essays in their journals about how to go about it; they hold no think-tank forums to explore the problem and consider solutions. They’d much rather dream up new voter suppression schemes to make it more difficult for liberals to cast their ballots.
It’s reinforced by a media double standard: Reporters seldom bother to ask Republicans what they’re doing to reach out to the other side, because everyone knows the answer is “nothing.” That’s despite the fact that in our lifetimes we’ve never seen a president more contemptuous of people who didn’t vote for him than Trump, and he just lost reelection by 7 million votes. You might think it’s a problem the GOP could benefit from considering.
And Republicans are allowed to show utter contempt for liberals and the places they live, while heaven help a Democrat who says anything disrespectful about red states or small towns.
Yet we constantly scratch our chins wondering why Democrats fail to get more support from conservative white voters, especially in rural areas. Is it their policy choices? The fact that they nominate too many candidates from the Northeast? Are they not showing sufficient “respect”? Should they offer more praise to country music, pickup trucks and other rural conservative cultural markers? Would that do the trick?
The answer, of course, is no.
The truth is that Democrats reach out constantly. They hold forums to show they understand and care about rural issues. They support policies to give people in conservative states better health care and better education and more economic opportunities. They come up with plans to boost rural America. It doesn’t penetrate.
Why is that? The first reason is simply that conservatives are, well, conservative. We live in a time of party polarization and ideological coherence, which means the two parties have profoundly different perspectives and policy agendas. As much as dishonest politicians insist we need to stop all the bickering and find solutions, Washington is full of solutions and bickering is not the problem. It’s that conservatives and liberals have incompatible ideas about what we should do, about taxes, government spending, healthcare, climate change and almost everything else.
The second reason is that conservatives’ ideas about liberals are created and sustained by an extremely effective propaganda machine. You simply cannot overstate the influence Fox News, conservative talk radio and the rest of the rightwing media universe has over the way conservatives view liberals.
It’s a billion-dollar megaphone blasting in conservatives’ ears every day around the clock, telling them that liberals are arrogant, condescending, immoral, hypocritical, snakes who hate them and everything they stand for, who spend their days plotting the destruction of America and God and all that is good about the world.
.....But given the stunning accuracy of what's been shared above, trying to win over Repubs and flip them to vote Democratic is a waste of time. In the months leading up to the Nov. election, I was engrossed in some learning from a bunch of lectures that were not connected to the campaigns, but the term "identity politics" was frowned upon. As it was being defined, I could see the logic of it.
But I'm coming around to the idea that "identity politics" is the way to go, and to get Progressive agendas accomplished. Indeed, that is the whole point of Zerlina Maxwell's book, "The End Of White Politics: How To Heal Our Liberal Divide." People of color, with all of their particular issues, overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Black WOMEN, especially. And demographically, that is the future of this country. (The fact that so many voted for the Trumpster TWICE flies in the face of reality. I take it as a slap-back from the ones who represent and support the old oligarchic and chiefly WHITE status quo.)
Stacey Abrams in Georgia represents a new thing. She and her comrades flipped Georgia BLUE, though barely. But they did it. It's quite an accomplishment. I wonder what real chance Warnock and Osoff have? ...... I had the CBC's nightly news on last night, as I do each night. Their reporter for "The National" was in GA, and on-camera with an "ordinary guy on the street." She asked something like: "How do you think Joe Biden managed to turn Georgia BLUE, this time?" And the response was: it ISN'T Blue, it's RED. "They" want you to THINK so, but Georgia is RED. It STAYED RED, Georgia is RED!"
How can you profitably speak and discuss, in the face of such childish (white) ignorance?
There are larger issues here: the biases we all bring to the place where learning MIGHT take place. The LACK of education in the general populace. The influence of the "churches" which have married the cross and the flag, into a twisted mentality that purports to be "Christian," but is really puritan Rugged Individualism dressed up to look holy. And Rugged Individualism: how well has THAT worked for the vast majority???
State Houses, seats in Congresses, local Alderman's races, State Senate seats--- all these need to be wrested from the Powers That Be, still.
The poisoned political environment we are dealing with began way back with Gingrich the Newt's antics. Uncle Bill Clinton did not help. On his watch, the Democratic Party began its own slow, gradual move to the Right, so that even CENTRIST policies can be labeled as "crazy radical and Lefty communist" by the Repugnants. There is no "Left" in the USA today. It won't happen with the Repugnants. It won't happen with the Socialists. The very name has been ignorantly blacklisted. There will be no viable "Left" again in the USA until the DEMOCRATS own it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/09/states-tell-supreme-court-they-support-texas-bid-to-reverse-biden-win.html
The clown show has become cemented, institutionalized. Things in the USA are not in a healthy state. Organs of GOVERNMENT are sowing mistrust of our bedrock democratic processes, procedures and institutions. Uncle Vladimir is happy, I suspect.
https://djtrumplibrary.com/