Daniel Flynn, Cult City

At Amazon, Daniel Flynn, Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco.

Orange County Goes Blue

My congresswoman, Mimi Walters, was ahead on election night, but the late ballot counting saw her slip behind and she's toast.

The Democrats swept all the so-called toss-up congressional districts in the county, plus a couple of other races that pundits had been watching. Republicans haven't been relevant in California for a long time, and while Arnold Schwarzenegger was Republican, he wasn't conservative. It's a blue, far-left California nowadays and I don't know what it going to take to swing it back the other way.

At LAT, "Orange County goes blue, as Democrats complete historic sweep of its seven congressional seats."

And, "Going, going ... with midterm wipeout, California Republican Party drifts closer to irrelevance":

For a party in free fall the last two decades, California Republicans learned that it's possible to plunge even further. https://t.co/kvKH2tl3nl

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) November 18, 2018

For a party in free fall the last two decades, California Republicans learned that it's possible to plunge even further.

The GOP not only lost every statewide office in the midterm election — again, in blowout fashion — but Democrats reestablished their supermajority in Sacramento, allowing them to legislate however they see fit.

After major defeats in Orange County and the Central Valley, two longtime strongholds, Republicans will have a significantly smaller footprint on Capitol Hill. (Democrats hold both Senate seats.) The GOP won’t even have enough lawmakers in California’s 53-member House delegation to field a nine-person softball team.

“It’s dead,” Mike Madrid, a former political director of the California Republican Party, said of the state GOP. “It exists in small regional pockets, where there are enough white, non-college-educated working-class communities for there to be a Republican Party. But that’s not much.”

Other states tilt lopsidedly in favor of one party or the other. But never before has a state with California’s huge populace and enormous import — socially, culturally, economically — been so dominated by a single political party. The implications will take years to fully comprehend.

Jim Brulte, chairman of the California GOP, professed not to worry. He said the party has legislative leaders “whose job it is to give voice to Republicans in the state capital.” Also, he went on, substantial numbers in the U.S. House and Senate, where the GOP holds the majority, will speak for Republicans in Washington as well.

The leader of House Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, hails from Bakersfield and enjoys a strong relationship with President Trump, which should help the state in its dealings with the administration. (If, as expected, San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi is elected speaker, she would also be well positioned to protect California’s interests.)

Still, many observers — not all of them dispirited Republicans — expressed concern about the effects of such thorough Democratic domination, both in terms of policy and, more broadly, faith in the state’s political system...

Yeah, "faith" in the system, of which there's none if you're conservative.

But keep reading.

Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

The winner from last night's National Book Awards ceremony, Sigrid Nunez, The Friend.

Myla Dalbesio in the Middle of the Sea (VIDEO)

Hopefully, Sports Illustrated will keep the Rule 5 (babe-blogging) flame alive.

Victoria's Secret Chief Executive Jan Singer to Step Down

I guess Victoria's Secret is having problems, big problems.

At Quartz, "Victoria’s Secret’s CEO exits in the latest blow to the once-dominant lingerie brand":

Victoria’s Secret’s CEO exits in the latest blow to the once-dominant lingerie brand https://t.co/VG2Ix38MHI

— Quartz (@qz) November 14, 2018

The CEO of the lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret, Jan Singer, will leave her role at the company, owned by L Brands, after only two years, Bloomberg reports—the latest blow to a brand that has fallen far from the days when it held a near-monopoly on the bra market (pdf).

Singer, the former head of Spanx, was responsible for VS’s $4 billion lingerie business, which has taken a massive downturn in the past several years. And her departure—just a week after VS’s annual extravaganza of a fashion show got withering reviews—is only the latest sign of the company’s decline.

Most recently, a tone-deaf interview with the architects of the annual ogle-fest in Vogue last week served to showcase just how out of touch the brand has become. Edward Razek, chief marketing officer of L Brands, was roundly criticized on social media for his comments, many of which were defensive explanations for the show’s lack of diversity. Razek’s remarks about casting transgender models (referring to them as “transsexuals,” an antiquated phrase regarded as a slur) was especially crude:

“Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in the show? No. No, I don’t think we should,” Razek is quoted as saying. “Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy. It’s a 42-minute entertainment special. That’s what it is.”

Razek later issued a meek apology via Victoria’s Secret Twitter account. But his message was clear: Transgender models—alongside any woman who doesn’t fit the brand’s narrow definition of bombshell beauty—does not belong in the “fantasy” that he and the show’s co-curator, VS executive Monica Mitro, want the brand to represent.

In his suggestion that the brand’s sex-kittenish aesthetic is working, the marketing chief seems to be indulging in his own fantasy, and missing a crucial fact: Victoria’s Secret is failing. As new, body-positive women’s underwear brands eat its lunch, investors have continued to abandon its parent company, L Brands, causing its stock to swan-dive—72% over three years and 43% in 2018 alone...

And everybody's hatin' on the VS fashion show, it turns out, moaning about how "out of touch the brand still is."

Right.

Mandatory intercourse with transsexuals coming soon. (*Eye roll.*)

Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes Mulls Retirement

Heh.

Serves her right.

At Instapundit, "THE DEMOCRATS MUST HAVE TOLD HER THEY COULDN’T PROTECT HER ANYMORE."

Dana Loesch: 'Law-Abiding People Should Not Always Be Paying the Price for the Actions of Criminals...' (VIDEO)

Here's Ms. Dana, on Fox and Friends the other day:

President Trump Has Been Largely Absent Since Election Day

There's a little cottage industry of these "post-midterms blues" stories.

(See for example, Vanity Fair, via Memeorandum, "“Insanity,” “Furious,” “On His Own”: Trump's Post-Midterms Blues Are Vexing His Staff and Roiling the White House.")

And at LAT, "Trump, stung by midterms and nervous about Mueller, retreats from traditional presidential duties":

For weeks this fall, an ebullient President Trump traveled relentlessly to hold raise-the-rafters campaign rallies — sometimes three a day — in states where his presence was likely to help Republicans on the ballot.

But his mood apparently has changed as he has taken measure of the electoral backlash that voters delivered Nov. 6. With the certainty that the incoming Democratic House majority will go after his tax returns and investigate his actions, and the likelihood of additional indictments by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump has retreated into a cocoon of bitterness and resentment, according to multiple administration sources.

Behind the scenes, they say, the president has lashed out at several aides, from junior press assistants to senior officials. “He’s furious,” said one administration official. “Most staffers are trying to avoid him.”

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, painted a picture of a brooding president “trying to decide who to blame” for Republicans’ election losses, even as he publicly and implausibly continues to claim victory.

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who are close allies, “seem to be on their way out,” the official said, noting recent leaks on the subject. The official cautioned, however, that personnel decisions are never final until Trump himself tweets out the news — often just after the former reality TV star who’s famous for saying “You’re fired!” has directed Kelly to so inform the individual.

And, according to a source outside the White House who has spoken recently with the president, last week’s Wall Street Journal report confirming Trump’s central role during the 2016 campaign in quietly arranging payoffs for two women alleging affairs with him seemed to put him in an even worse mood.

Publicly, Trump has been increasingly absent in recent days — except on Twitter. He has canceled travel plans and dispatched Cabinet officials and aides to events in his place — including sending Vice President Mike Pence to Asia for the annual summits there in November that past presidents nearly always attended.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II was in Washington on Tuesday and met with Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, but not the president...

More.

Democrats Won the Wealthy Suburbs

This is interesting.

At WaPo, "These wealthy neighborhoods delivered Democrats the House majority":

Analysis | These wealthy neighborhoods delivered Democrats the House majority https://t.co/LvZ2AT15n6

— Thomas Edsall (@Edsall) November 11, 2018

In Tuesday’s election, House districts on the outskirts of major American cities were the site of electoral shifts that propelled Democrats to power.

Wealthy and middle class voters delivered the suburban votes for enough Democratic pickups to secure a majority. In several cases, the battleground districts were wealthy and highly educated places that Hillary Clinton won in 2016, exposing the vulnerability of those Republican lawmakers.

The precinct-level results shown on the maps in this story show the most precise view of how voters within a district swung. This level of detail can also provide more insight into what caused a district to flip — or not.

These maps show how those neighborhoods handed Democrats the House.

We’ll start in Virginia’s 7th District, where Rep. Dave Brat (R) was challenged by ex-CIA operative Abigail Spanberger (D). This north-south district goes from above Culpeper to rural areas near the southern border of the state, but the voters are concentrated in the suburbs of Richmond and Fredericksburg.

Here are precinct-level results for the 2016 presidential election, with circles sized based on the margin of victory for the Democrat or Republican in each precinct.

The district backed Donald Trump by six percentage points in 2016. Democratic margins around Richmond were outweighed by the Republican tilt of the rest of the district.

But in 2018, those Fredericksburg and Richmond suburbs flipped to Spanberger, securing her the win.

In 2018, Brat’s support in wealthier neighborhoods softened ... while middle-class voters surged for Spanberger. Remember that there are many more voters around the cities in the east part of the district.

As with many of the districts shown here, the 7th District voted overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney, but less favorably for Trump.

“These are places that just don’t like the president that much, and I think that’s reflected in this House vote,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor at the nonpartisan political analysis site Sabato’s Crystal Ball...

Click through for the maps. This is a really cool article.

Hug a Veteran

An interesting post, from Jeffrey Carter, at Points and Figures, "45 Years; 66 years; 73 Years; 100 Years; 153 Years; 235 Years."

Martha McSally Concedes

This is just wow.

I mean, remember this post from 2010? "Kyrsten Sinema, Bisexual Israel-Hating Antiwar Radical, is Face of Today's Democrat Party."

Well, Ms. Sinema goes back to Washington as the new (junior?) senator from Arizona.

Just wow, man.

At the Arizona Republic, "Kyrsten Sinema defeats Martha McSally; will be first woman from Arizona in U.S. Senate," and at ABC News 15 Phoenix:

Michelle Obama, President Trump, and the Need to Forgive

From Mollie Hemingway, at the Federalist, "Dispute Between Michelle Obama and Donald Trump Shows Our Need to Forgive":

It’s legitimate to strenuously fight political battles and also to be upset at how those battles are fought and the depths people sink to. At all times, however, let’s remember the gift of forgiveness that we’ve been given and that we get to share with others.

But RTWT.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, the the old Bantam paperback edition, Gravity's Rainbow (Mass Market Paperback).

And the current edition, Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition).

Republicans Keep Majority Control of the Senate, With Lasting Implications for the Courts

This makes me happy. I was pretty sure the Dems would take the House, mostly because the president's party always loses seats in the midterms ---- 2018 was no exception.

But the map was favorable for the GOP in the Senate, and it's not a far stretch to expect another Supreme Court opening in 2019 (Ruth Bader Ginsberg comes to mind, as she is recovering from a fall this last week at the Court, which left her with three broken ribs; and it may also be that her cancer is coming back; no one should wish her ill will, but it does mean that an opening may be imminent).

At NYT, "Lasting Implications for the Courts as Republicans Gain in the Senate":

Republicans’ expansion of their Senate majority means it's easier for the White House and Mitch McConnell to confirm conservative judges https://t.co/YBF6djjntr

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 8, 2018

Bella Hadid Tight Dress at Victoria's Secret After Party

At Taxi Driver, "Bella Hadid in Skin Tight Dress at the VS After Party."

Shop Today

Thanks for your support everybody!

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California Wildfires

Huge coverage at the Los Angeles Times.

Also, "Woolsey fire explodes to 70,000 acres overnight; 2 deaths reported amid fight to save hillside communities."

And at Daily Mail, "A-list fire panic: Caitlyn Jenner's sprawling hilltop Malibu house and the 'Bachelor' mansion are burned, flames reach Kim and Kanye's home and smoke envelopes Lady Gaga's nearby pad as worried Will Smith shows how close he is to the danger zone."

A STATE OF EMERGENCIES: Fires threaten Californians in the north and south while one community deals with the anguish of two kinds of fire in the wake of a shooting followed by an evacuation. Early look @LATimes. pic.twitter.com/lfjR6iXx4P

— michael whitley (@michaelwhitley) November 10, 2018

Good lord this is my street 🙏🏻 https://t.co/IVmsw7pMp9

— Valerie Bertinelli (@Wolfiesmom) November 10, 2018

Pray for Malibu— and #TheBachelor Mansion... pic.twitter.com/D9t8VxFXeo

— Mike Fleiss (@fleissmeister) November 9, 2018

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Getting Into Harvard

At NYT, "Getting Into Harvard Is Hard. Here Are 4 Ways Applicants Get an Edge":

A federal case against Harvard has brought to light many of its closely guarded admissions secrets https://t.co/CGdXLwd8x9

— NYT National News (@NYTNational) November 8, 2018

For three weeks in October, Harvard’s admissions system was on trial before an often standing-room-only crowd in a federal courtroom in Boston. Harvard was accused of discriminating against Asian-American applicants, but the university firmly denied this throughout the trial, which ended last week.

Through testimony and internal documents, the case provided an eye-opening look into the often guarded and opaque admissions process at Harvard. With some 40,000 applicants and about 1,600 available seats, Harvard argued, some students would inevitably be left out.

How admissions officers went about that sifting process seemed to some in the gallery like an exercise in cynicism, which perpetuated the established ruling class, and to others like a noble pursuit, which lifted “diamonds in the rough,” of all backgrounds, into the future elite. Here’s what we learned about who gets an admissions edge:

‘A.L.D.C.’s

Harvard gives advantages to recruited athletes (A’s); legacies (L’s), or the children of Harvard graduates; applicants on the dean’s or director’s interest list (D’s), which often include the children of very wealthy donors and prominent people, mostly white; and the children (C’s) of faculty and staff. ALDCs make up only about 5 percent of applicants but 30 percent of admitted students.

While being an A.L.D.C. helps — their acceptance rate is about 45 percent, compared with 4.5 to 5 percent for the rest of the pool — it is no guarantee. (One of those rejected despite being a legacy was the judge in the federal case, Allison D. Burroughs. She went to Middlebury College instead.)

Harvard’s witnesses said it was important to preserve the legacy advantage because it encourages alumni to give their time, expertise and money to the university.

Students from ‘sparse country’

Every year, Harvard sends out thousands of recruitment letters inviting high school juniors to apply, based in part on their P.S.A.T. scores. Students who take Harvard up on the invitation are about twice as likely as other applicants to be admitted.

In “sparse country” — 20 largely rural states where relatively few apply to Harvard — the university drops the P.S.A.T. score cutoff for white students to qualify for an invitation. In 2013, white applicants with P.S.A.T. scores of 1310 were invited to apply from sparse country, compared with 1350 for white and Asian-American women and 1380 for white and Asian-American men outside of sparse country. Black, Hispanic, Native American or other minority students needed an 1100 or better to be invited to apply, regardless of location.

Effervescent (or reflective) applicants

Admissions officers are urged to look for applicants with “unusually appealing personal qualities,” which could include “effervescence, charity, maturity and strength of character.”

Outgoing students seemed to benefit most, according to court documents and testimony.

But new guidelines issued days before the trial began last month caution officers that character traits “not always synonymous with extroversion” should be valued, and that applicants who seem to be “particularly reflective, insightful and/or dedicated” should receive high personal ratings as well.

At trial, Harvard did not dispute that Asian-American applicants received, on average, lower personal ratings than applicants of any other race or ethnicity. The plaintiffs said this was evidence of Harvard’s stereotyping of Asian-Americans as industrious but dull. Harvard said it was not the result of discrimination; rather, it was partly because of weaker support from high school teachers and guidance counselors.

“We do not endorse, we abhor stereotypical comments,” the dean of the Harvard admissions office, William Fitzsimmons, testified.

Those with a compelling life story, who have overcome obstacles

Court documents, including guidelines issued to admissions officers, repeatedly showed clear advantages given to poor students and those from disadvantaged circumstances. But stories of besting challenges of other kinds also gave applicants an edge.

In his application, Thang Diep, a Harvard senior who came from Vietnam as a child, talked about being bullied for his accented English, and how affirming it was when a Harvard professor was the first teacher to pronounce his name correctly.

Sarah Cole appeared in court to testify that as a black student from Kansas City, Mo., she had worked hard to get a scholarship to a prestigious private college-prep school, but suffered socially for it. She said white teachers told her she was not smart enough to excel, and customers at her job laughed at her for wearing a Stanford T-shirt...

Still more.

Harvard's going to lose this case, especially on the effervescent" criteria, which systematically limits Asian acceptance rates. 

'Your Love'

Honestly, I don't remember this song from the '80s, so since 93.1 Jack FM's been playing it, I checked it out.

The haircuts are the pure giveaway, lol.

From Tuesday morning's drive-time, the Outfield:

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
U2
6:46am

All Along The Watchtower
Jimi Hendrix
6:42am


Riptide
Vance Joy
6:38am

Surrender
Cheap Trick
6:34am

Longview
Green Day
6:23am

Your Love
The Outfield
6:19am

Radioactive
Imagine Dragons
6:16am

I Won't Back Down
Tom Petty
6:13am

Shout
Tears For Fears
6:07am

Summer Of '69
Bryan Adams
6:04am

Polarization Makes Gains in Senate, But Costs Republicans the House

A good piece, at LAT, "Republicans depend on Trump’s polarizing approach to gain in the Senate, but it costs them the House":

Throughout his 22 months in office, President Trump has focused intensely on a single political priority — maintaining the support of his base, even at the risk of alienating millions of other voters.

Tuesday night’s election proved both the wisdom and the risk of that approach.

In a deeply divided country, Trump’s efforts to stoke his supporters’ enthusiasm helped his party expand its margin in the Senate. But his heated attacks on opponents and denunciations of immigrants also helped Democrats retake control of the House and make major gains in races for governor.

White House aides were quick to pronounce the outcome a victory for the president. But if it was, it came with ominous overtones for his next big political challenge, in 2020.

Democrats won significant victories statewide in each of the big mid-Atlantic and Midwestern industrial states where Trump secured his upset victory two years ago. Their control of the House will give them license to investigate him and his associates for the next two years, a prospect no president welcomes, especially not one seeking reelection.

Overall, Democratic congressional candidates won considerably more votes than their Republican opponents. Like winning the popular vote in the presidential race, that doesn’t give a party any additional power. But as a rough gauge of public sentiment, it sets a troubling marker for Trump.

In 2016, he became only the fifth person in American history to win the presidency while losing the popular vote. No one has pulled that off twice.

The night provided a split decision in which the country’s liberal, Democratic cities and its conservative, Republican rural areas moved further apart politically than ever, leaving neither side with the sort of clear majority needed to resolve major national issues.

That’s not just a political abstraction. Settling big national issues almost always requires one party having the political strength to put its ideas into law.

Without that, Congress can only tinker: Both Trump and Democratic leaders, for example, have said they might agree on more money to build and repair roads, bridges and other types of infrastructure.

But Tuesday’s results point to two more years of political trench warfare and the worsening of major problems — an immigration system that both parties decry as broken, a healthcare system that remains the world’s most expensive even as it fails to cover everyone, rapidly rising federal debt, festering inequality.

Unsurprisingly, roughly three-quarters of voters in exit polls conducted for the major television networks said that the country is becoming more divided politically. Fewer than 1 in 10 said Americans are becoming more united.

For a generation, despite the efforts of four consecutive presidents starting with Bill Clinton, neither party has been able to create a long-lasting electoral majority. This period stands as the longest in more than a century in which neither party has managed to maintain clear dominance, controlling both the White House and Congress.

People in both parties who run campaigns, as well as academic experts who study them, provide a surprisingly consistent list of the reasons why stalemate has proven so persistent.

Personal leadership shortcomings are not the main problem, said UCLA political science professor Lynn Vavreck, coauthor of a newly released book, “Identity Crisis,” which analyzes the causes of Trump’s 2016 victory.

“I don’t think this is a failure of these leaders” as individuals, she said.

Instead, successive presidents have been stymied by a fundamental shift in politics in which both of the two major parties have grown more homogeneous and the mix of national concerns increasingly has turned toward issues of identity. Those two trends hardened partisan lines, making bipartisan compromise tougher and complicating any effort to forge a broader coalition.

Legislators “can shave a dollar per hundred off a tax bill, but how do you get gradations of equality?” Vavreck asked. “These issues are harder. It’s harder to see what compromise would look like.”

As each party has grown more internally united — one liberal, one conservative — party membership has increasingly overlapped with other ways in which people identify themselves — race, religion, region, even occupation and the entertainment choices people make. That has alienated the two sides further from each other, said Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland.

“If you’re a Democrat, and you go to church with a Republican … it makes you understand them in a way that you wouldn’t have,” Mason said. As Americans have sorted themselves out along partisan lines, “we’ve seen a move away from cross-cutting identities” of that sort. As those dwindle, “people tend to be more intolerant” of those they see only as adversaries, she said.

Republican voters are now overwhelmingly white, conservative, older, rural, often evangelical Protestants. Democrats have have become the party of cities, of racial and ethnic diversity, of college graduates and younger people, and are largely secular. And politics increasingly revolves around “who you are, what your identity is,” Mason said.

Partisan media outlets and social media choices reinforce those identity lines.

A person watching CNN or MSNBC would find that “the world they’re reporting on is a different universe than the world Fox News is reporting on,” said longtime Republican strategist and pollster Whit Ayres.

“You have the ability to listen to only those outlets that reinforce what you already think” and emphasize “the rightness and goodness of your side and the evil and wrongness of the other side.”

Polling provides extensive evidence of the strain that sort of partisanship causes. Almost two-thirds of Americans, 63%, say that when they talk about politics with people with whom they disagree, they find they have less in common than they thought, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

Over half of Americans, 53%, say they find such political conversations “stressful and frustrating,” Pew found.

That number has grown since 2016, when partisan divisions already ran deep...

Still more.

Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.

Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right

At the New York Times, "One Legacy of Merkel? Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right":

One Legacy of Merkel? Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right - The New York Times https://t.co/3AWDhXWafo

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 6, 2018

EBERSBACH-NEUGERSDORF, Germany — Frank Dehmel was on the streets of East Germany in 1989. Every Monday, he marched against the Communist regime, demanding freedom and democracy and chanting with the crowds: “We are the people!”

Three decades later, Mr. Dehmel is on the streets again, older and angrier, and chanting the same slogan — this time for the far right.

He won freedom and democracy when the Berlin Wall came down 29 years ago on Nov. 9. But he lost everything else: His job, his status, his country — and his wife. Like so many eastern women, she went west to look for work and never came back.

To understand why the far right is on the march again in Germany, it helps to understand the many grievances of its most loyal supporters: men in the former Communist East.

No doubt the far right has made gains across Germany. The Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 13 percent of votes in last year’s elections, enough to make it the leading opposition voice in Parliament. It is now represented in every one of the country’s 16 state legislatures.

But support for the AfD in the East is on average more than double that in the West. Among eastern men, the party is the strongest political force, with 28 percent having cast their ballots for the AfD last year.

Eastern Man, a figure long patronized, pitied or just ignored in the West, is in the process of again reshaping German politics.

No one more embodies the frustrations of eastern men — or has been more the object of their ire — than Ms. Merkel, an eastern woman who rose to the pinnacle of power and provides a daily reminder of their own failure.

Yet Ms. Merkel never became the ambassador for the East that people yearned for: Living standards in the region still lag those in the West, even after what is perceived as a traumatic economic takeover.

Mr. Dehmel calls her a “traitor” and worse.

After reunification, Mr. Dehmel recalled, western men in suits and Mercedes-Benzes arrived in his eastern home state of Saxony, soon running businesses, running universities, running the regional government, “running everything.”

And that was before more than a million asylum seekers, many of them young men, came to Germany in 2015.

“I didn’t risk my skin back then to become a third-class citizen,” said Mr. Dehmel, now 57, counting off the perceived hierarchy on his fingers: “First there are western Germans, then there are asylum seekers, then it’s us.”

One-third of male voters in Saxony, where he lives, cast their ballots for the far right last year — by far more than any other place in the country...

More.

Today's Shopping

Thanks for your support everybody. October was strong for my Amazon sales promotions. And every little bit helps (i.e., I get to splurge on more books for myself, hehe).

Today's election day, so I won't be having too much blogging until after dinner time. I'll be checking the election returns on the cable networks, and if there's something particularly interesting, I'll be posting some entries.

Be sure to get out there and vote!

In the meantime, here's the promotions.

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What's at Stake in Today's Midterm Elections? Both Sides Say 'Everything'

From Susan Page, "What's at stake in the midterms? Both sides warn the future of our democracy is at risk":

What's at stake on #ElectionDay? https://t.co/vZHzZA16Fy

— USA TODAY Politics (@usatodayDC) November 5, 2018

WASHINGTON – What's at stake?

Democrats warn that the midterm elections Tuesday will undermine the future of America's democracy unless President Donald Trump's authoritarian instincts are curtailed. Republicans argue that the nation's sovereignty is at risk if Democrats prevail.

"Fear is the dominant issue, bar none," said Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.

That's particularly remarkable because the economy is strong and the nation doesn't face an instant foreign policy crisis, although there are trouble spots around the world. Instead of a sense of peace and prosperity, the final weeks of the campaign have been dominated by violence and conflict: the mass murder of worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the mailing of improvised explosive devices to more than a dozen leading Democrats, the images of a caravan of Central American asylum seekers making their way across southern Mexico.

The campaign has crystallized clashing visions of what defines the nation: America First or an increasingly diverse population?

Keep reading.

America's Weimar Moment

This is a great piece, from Joel Kotkin, at the O.C. Register, via Instapundit, "Lurching to a new Weimar":

America seems to be heading inexorably toward a Weimar moment, a slide toward political polarization from which it could be increasingly difficult to return. Weimar — that brief, brilliant and tragic German republic of the 1920s — was replaced by Hitler’s murderous regime in 1933.

Like Weimar, our politics are increasingly defined by violence, whether the Pittsburgh massacre, the mass mailing of bomb-laden parcels, dueling mobilizations on the border, the shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise or, less lethally, the antics by unhinged partisans such as Maxine Waters. Respect for the basic folkways of a functional republic is vanishing, damaged by the angry narcissism of both President Trump and his often-hysterical media enemies...

Let’s start by stating that Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler, and his increasingly cowed Republican Party no National Socialist clone. But his intemperance has widened gaps that were already gaping. And certainly, his prior, mistaken refusal fully to denounce the alt-right activists at Charlottesville displayed a terrifying ignorance about white nationalists and their agenda.

Yet, less obviously, the road to Weimar is also being paved by his opposition. Trump was elected legally, but from the beginning his opponents — including senior member of the Democratic Party — devalued his election and threatened his impeachment. By claiming to be the “resistance,” as opposed to the loyal opposition, they have set in play a tit-for-tat political war game that is becoming all too real.

In a democracy, norms of transcending partisanship matter. It was the refusal of the various parties in Germany, notes City University of New York historian Eric Weitz, to express faith in free speech and democratic norms that undermined that country’s democracy. In Weimar Germany, he notes, lack of faith in liberal principles infected many, if not most, of the top aristocrats, intellectuals, clergy, bureaucrats and industrialists — most eventually welcomed the authoritarian Nazis. “Democracy,” Weitz notes, “needs democratic convictions and a democratic culture.”

More at the link.

Sabato's Crystal Ball: Final Picks for Election 2018

Larry Sabato and company got egg on their faces in 2016, like just about everybody else, of course.

But I think this projection sounds about right.

See, "Final Picks for 2018":

There is the shifting political landscape that emerged nationally in 2016, with some traditionally Democratic blue collar small cities and rural areas across the North moving toward Trump and the Republicans, and some traditionally Republican suburbs dominated by voters with high formal educational attainment breaking sharply away from Trump and the GOP. Those latter areas make up a significant share of the competitive House districts, many of which seem poised to deliver for Democrats on Tuesday, although some Trumpy, traditionally Democratic turf is part of the Democratic House calculus too.

Keep reading.

Danielle Gersh's Election Day Forecast

Should be quite nice out tomorrow for casting your ballot.

Here's the lovely Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Why We're Headed for Huge Turnout

From Charlie Cook, at Cook Political Report:

A week before the midterm elections, both parties are filled with anxiety. Like football wide receivers who have been blind-sided one time too many, many Democrats are hearing real or imaginary footsteps—residual trauma from the 2016 election, when they thought things were going so well until they didn’t.

Similarly mindful of history, Republicans know that midterm elections are referenda on incumbent presidents and that President Trump is a particularly polarizing party leader, evoking the strongest emotions. They also know that in times of one-party rule across the White House, House, and Senate, it’s difficult to shift the blame to anyone else, so midterm elections are particularly explosive.

The Democratic nightmare of Nov. 8, 2016, a day in party history that will live in infamy, was triggered by overwhelming support for Trump in small-town and rural America, combined with white, working-class voters in trade-sensitive manufacturing areas. These were the places and types of people that Franklin D. Roosevelt attracted to the Democratic Party during the New Deal. They had begun flocking to the GOP before Trump came along, but with him as the face and the leader of the GOP, they shifted with much greater enthusiasm. Needless to say, ambivalence towards Hillary Clinton on the other side was a factor as well.

Education has become a key defining variable: The Republican Party has re-centered to those with less than a four-year college degree, and of course men, with ties to women and those with degrees loosening. This is what realignments look like. The gender gap that has been around at least since the days of Ronald Reagan is growing wider. Grievances among certain groups accumulated during eight years of President Obama, the rise of the tea-party movement being one obvious outward sign, then all exploded in 2016, with Trump lighting the fuse.

Any discussion of the voting patterns of these white, noncollege voters should note that this is a very big and broad group. It should be segmented into those who are and have long been conservative, middle-of-the-roaders, and finally those who are liberal and populist, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and are intrigued by Elizabeth Warren, with few sympathies for more-establishment Democratic figures. Noncollege whites are not a monolithic group. It is also important that those who are conservative, white, evangelical Christians—whether they are college-educated or not—are a very distinct and important voting bloc. At least for whites, the Democratic Party has become the secular party.

While many Democratic strategists accuse fellow party members of being bedwetters, overly fretting about what happened two years ago, some very smart Democrats who examine a lot of data and early-voting patterns privately say they are seeing some signs that more Republican/conservative-leaning white working-class voters are showing increased electoral interest that is reminiscent of 2016. Possibly they’ve been triggered by outrage over what they perceive to be unfair attacks on Brett Kavanaugh during the fight over his Supreme Court nomination or, more recently, the caravan of Central American immigrants working their way up through Mexico toward the U.S. border—something they interpret as a middle finger aimed at Trump and the United States...

Keep reading.

Winds of Change in Conservative Orange County

The O.C. was at one time a bastion of American conservatism, but those days may be long gone.

At the L.A. Times, "In Orange County, land of reinvention, even its conservative politics is changing":

If you want to understand how Orange County went from being a conservative fortress to a political battleground with four congressional seats at stake, read this epic @joemozingo https://t.co/FBj9P8HjLp

— (((Mark Z. Barabak))) (@markzbarabak) November 5, 2018

In La Palma Park Stadium in Anaheim, a month before the Bay of Pigs invasion, 7,500 students and parents skipped school or work and gathered to learn about communist plans to take over the United States.

“Right now, we have a 50-50 chance of defeating the communist threat,” Herbert Philbrick, a former FBI agent, told the crowd on March 8, 1961. “Each day our chances grow less.”

Walter Knott, of berry-farm fame, sponsored the five-day “Christian Anti-Communist School” to help Orange County see the world that he saw, one where big government and liberalism led to Soviet domination.

The message stuck. Within the decade, Orange County would have 38 chapters of the conspiracy-minded, ultra-right-wing John Birch Society, which called Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “communist tool.” Knott and actor John Wayne were members, as was the county’s congressman.

The rightward mobilization during the suburban explosion of the 1960s gave Orange County a national reputation for hard-line conservatism with a crackpot edge — “nut country,” in the words of Fortune magazine.

The county’s deep pockets funded right-wing candidates and movements throughout the nation. At home it spawned popular but ultimately doomed measures such as the Briggs Initiative in 1978 to ban gays and lesbians from working in public schools, and Proposition 187 in 1994, which would have denied public services to immigrants in the country illegally.

The Republican Party reached its peak in the Reagan era and has been slowly losing its membership edge since 1990, as the diversity of Los Angeles and the world at large started to bleed through the so-called Orange Curtain.

Registered Republicans today outnumber Democrats by only 2 percentage points, down from 22% at the peak, with a large contingent of self-declared independents positioned to swing elections either way. The GOP has a chance of losing four congressional seats in the county in Tuesday’s midterm election. If so, it would be the first time since the 1930s that Orange County would be without Republican representation in the House.

A GOP loss of even one or two seats would be significant, not as a turning point so much as a powerful sign of change — hastened by dislike for President Trump — in this one-time heart of American conservatism.

Orange County seceded from its northwestern neighbor, Los Angeles, in 1889, led by fiercely independent ranchers, sheepherders, beekeepers, citrus growers and crop farmers who had bristled under the control of a rich city 30 miles up the rail line.

The county then was a constellation of small farm and dairy towns in the north and scattered resort towns along the coast. In the south, the basin tapered off into a narrowing valley between the Santa Ana Mountains and the coastal San Joaquin Hills, where sheep and cattle ranches had thrived since California was part of Spain and Mexico.

Americans had taken over the ranchos in the late 19th century after a devastating drought left many old landowners of Spanish ancestry, the Californios, broke.

Lewis Moulton was one of the Yankee migrants. He came from Boston in 1874 and grazed sheep on the open range from Oceanside to Long Beach. Family lore has it that natural gas seeps were so rich in some spots that, as he camped, he would light them to cook his breakfast.

After two decades of renting land, he and a Basque shepherd, John Pierre Daguerre, had enough money to buy Rancho Niguel, which they eventually expanded to 22,000 acres. It was rugged, isolated country, good mostly for grazing. The cheapest land was the steep part near the coast, between what would become Laguna Beach and Dana Point — about $15 an acre. Today, small fractions of an acre go for double-digit millions.

In the second half of the 20th century, these backwater ranchers and farmers, the Moulton family, the O’Neills, Floods, Irvines, Segerstroms, would physically and culturally shape Orange County into the suburban giant it is today.

But there was always an underclass that made their dreams work...

Lots more at the link.

Richard Ben Cramer, What it Takes

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes: The Way to the White House.

Pete Davidson Mocks Republican Candidate Who Survived IED Attack in Afghanistan (VIDEO)

Dan Crenshaw is the Republican running for the House in Texas' 2nd congressional district. He's a former Navy Seal member who served five tours of combat, two after he lost his right eye in an IED attack in Afghanistan.

Pete Davidson, famous for recently breaking off his engagement to Ariana Grande after less than a week, mocked the military veteran in the "Weekend Update" segment on Saturday. It didn't go over well. (I never watch anyway, but caught the outrage on Twitter.)

At USA Today, "SNL's Pete Davidson slammed for mocking Republican candidate who lost his eye in war."

Fun fact: Dan Crenshaw did three tours BEFORE losing the eye. After he lost the eye, he went back and did two more. https://t.co/mn8XueBd8w

— Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) November 4, 2018

Emily Miller is Ted Cruz's Campaign Spokeswoman

I've been following Emily Miller for a long time. She used to be on Fox News as a D.C. pundit. Then she was on a local network newscast. She had her book come out, Emily Gets Her Gun, which was widely publicized, as was Emily obtaining her concealed carry permit in D.C., which is a bureaucratic nightmare.

In any case, I saw her tweeting all the time about Texas and I wasn't paying that much attention. But then she was getting picked up by the media while on the campaign trail with Ted Cruz and I googled it. She's Cruz's spokeswoman.

A good lady. She's really taken to the Lone Star State:

How we roll... #CruzToVictory #CruzCrew #Midterms2018 #KeepTexasRed https://t.co/FDAWFb1Ghu pic.twitter.com/cfFRhTZ7dA

— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) November 4, 2018

How #JobsNotMobs Took Off

At NYT, "Tracing a Meme From the Internet’s Fringe to a Republican Slogan":

Fascination: Tracing a Meme From the Internet’s Fringe to a Republican Slogan https://t.co/AM1w2qaK7a

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) November 5, 2018

Since President Trump’s election, his loyalists online have provided him with a steady stream of provocative posts and shareable memes, often filtered up from platforms like Reddit through media channels like Fox News. In return, Mr. Trump has championed many of their messages as his own, amplifying them back to his larger base.

This feedback loop is how #JobsNotMobs came to be. In less than two weeks, the three-word phrase expanded from corners of the right-wing internet onto some of the most prominent political stages in the country, days before the midterm elections...

Keep reading.

Mother of All Meltdowns: If No Blue Wave, Leftist Rage Will Be Off the Charts

Heh. This is great.

At American Greatness, "The Stages of (Liberal) Grief: Anger":

Hot off the presses: my take on how liberal ANGER will intensify after Nov. 6. https://t.co/S2fNoz6ZPE #TrumpDerangementSyndrome #Midterms2018 #Midterms #MidtermElections #MidtermElections2018 #RedWave #RedTsunami #RedWaveRising2018 #RedWave2018 #REDWAVECOMING #Republicans #gop

— Nicholas L. Waddy (@WaddyIsRight) November 4, 2018

Having explored the historical genesis of liberal derangement, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and having disclosed the role to be played by Denial after the probable failure of Democrats’ “blue wave” in 2018, we now proceed to the next stage of our analysis. We turn our attention to the forms of liberal Anger that are likely after November 6th.

Anger is, as previously discussed, the dominant emotion discernible in the Left’s reaction to Trumpism. In fact, rage is rampant among liberals. What has kept this anger in check, however, is a sense of assurance that the Trump phenomenon is something akin to a death spasm among conservatives. Leftists have long assumed that “progress” of the sort they desire is inevitable, and indeed they can point to many victories won in the last few decades. Moreover, soaked as they are in identity politics, the Left puts great stock in America’s changing demographics. They presume—understandably, given their inveterate anti-white racism—that the “browning” of America can only foretell doom for Republicans.

They ignore the obvious counterargument: this country has been “browning” for a long time, and the Republican Party is today stronger than it has ever been since the 1920s. In any case, it cannot be overstated how integral it is to the peace of mind of liberals to assume that the Republican Party will soon die an ignoble death, and therefore, they believe, any upsurge in nationalism or conservatism is a temporary aberration. The march of history towards the broad, sunlit uplands of progressivism will soon resume.

The failure of the “blue wave” would be a punch in the gut to this attitude of complacency and self-satisfaction on the Left. The American people will have chosen Trumpism and Republicans not once, but twice. As leftists see it, this will mean an affirmation of “hate” and a rejection of their own worldview of “inevitable” progress. The liberal throng (sometimes understandably mistaken for a mob) will have expended vast energies, and donated vast sums, to achieve a victory that remains elusive if not utterly improbable. The bile will rise in leftist throats as it begins to dawn on them that the last gasp of conservatism, which they perceived President Trump to hail, may instead be an enduring realignment of American politics that is favorable to Republicans. They will despair at the fact that millions of women and minorities, who by rights belong on the Democratic plantation, deserted the cause. They will, in short, experience anger on a scale that will make 2016-18 seem like child’s play.

What will be remarkable about liberal anger post-November 6, however, is that for the first time most of it may well be directed inward rather than outward. What do I mean by that? Up to now, divisions and grudges on the Left have been deferred and subordinated successfully to the overarching project of reversing the effects of the 2016 election. The one thing on which the Left could agree was that it despised Donald Trump and everything he stood for (even if , in some instances, what he stood for was the exact same thing Democrats had long been supporting). A truce was arranged, whereby Democrats and liberals would sweep under the rug any lingering questions about the methods by which Hillary Clinton and the “moderates” in the Democratic Party defeated Bernie Sanders and the progressives in 2016.

Even Clinton’s appalling ineptitude in her conduct of the 2016 election would be forgotten. Liberals would let bygones be bygones, and they would refocus on the urgent task of discrediting and obstructing the work of the Trump administration, and of removing President Trump from office. This left-wing consensus, this facade of liberal unity, will soon collapse in a heap in the early morning hours of November 7, absent the prophesied “blue wave.” Consensus and unity were always understood to be necessary because they were the price of victory in 2018 and beyond. When that victory does not arrive, it will be bedlam.

Liberal anger, therefore, should crest in the weeks and months after the midterms, and it will engender a great deal of internecine fighting among leftists. The Democratic establishment will struggle mightily to tamp down this ugliness, and the media will struggle to conceal it. We can anticipate strident calls from the Sanders wing of the party for the resignation of DNC chairman Tom Perez. He may well heed these calls. Activists will push for the party to move to the left on major issues, and their insistence that a Democratic House, if one is elected, produce articles of impeachment against the President will be more akin to an ultimatum or a threat than a mere request. Impeachment, however, will be unlikely to materialize, because Democrats representing swing districts will not cooperate. These Democratic Congressmen will therefore be subjected to a steady stream of invective from their fellow Democrats. The Democratic caucus, in short, will be riven by divisions as serious as those scarring the Democratic Party as a whole. It is doubtful whether a Democratic House could even function under these circumstances...

Keep reading.

Alexis Ren on Location (VIDEO)

She's really fantastic.

California Matters Tuesday

My district's in play, the 45th congressional, where two-term incumbent Mimi Walters has a good chance at being shown the door. Their campaign has not done door to door canvassing and outreach, while the Democrat Katie Porter's campaign has come to our house thrice in the last week, one time leaving voter information materials at our door when no one was home.

At LAT, "California hasn't mattered in national politics for a long time. Here's why this Nov. 6 is different":

Successive congressional wave elections have come and passed, cresting without ever breaching the Sierra Nevada.This year is different.
https://t.co/XjO3jkwkbg

— Jim Puzzanghera (@JimPuzzanghera) October 30, 2018

California — big, bounteous, beautiful — is pretty much used to irrelevancy come election day.

Sure, the state has produced many leaders of national import and helped countless more finance their political pursuits. But it’s been two decades since California was a presidential battleground, and longer still since the state played a meaningful role choosing a major party presidential nominee.

Successive congressional wave elections have come and passed, cresting without ever breaching the Sierra Nevada.

This year is different.

Unaccustomed as it may be, California stands at the center of the fight for control of the House, with at least half a dozen seats up for grabs, or more than a quarter of the 23 that Democrats need to seize the majority. A handful more could tip the party’s way if Nov. 6 produces a blue tsunami.

History favors the Democrats. With rare exception, the party holding the presidency loses House seats at the midpoint of a president’s first term. The current occupant could, of course, defy expectations; Donald Trump wouldn’t be in the Oval Office if he hadn’t managed to upend a number of political verities.

Trump won the White House while buried in a California landslide — no surprise there — and six of the seven congressional districts he lost to Hillary Clinton are key to Democrats’ hopes of taking over the House, which they last controlled in 2010. (The seventh, the mostly rural Central Valley district represented by three-term GOP incumbent and perennial target David Valadao, seems like a considerably further reach.)

Midterm elections are typically a referendum on the nation’s chief executive, and that dynamic has not helped Republicans in California, where the president remains deeply unpopular. Call it the Trump undertow.

Embattled GOP Reps. Mimi Walters in Orange County and Jeff Denham in the San Joaquin Valley would probably be headed to relatively easy reelection if the president hadn’t stirred such an outpouring of Democratic antipathy. Republicans would also be much better positioned to hang on to the northern Orange County seat of Rep. Ed Royce, who is retiring after more than 20 years in office.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who hasn’t faced much of a threat since his first election during the Reagan era, might not have his back to the wall in coastal Orange County but for his cozy relationship with Russia, which interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump.

Setting the president aside, the competition also reflects political and demographic changes that have transformed California.

The state’s burgeoning Latino population has grown more politically active and pro-Democratic in response to the belligerent tone sounded by many Republicans. The GOP’s embrace of religious conservatism also pushed many live-and-let-live Californians away from the party.

That helped turn Orange County, a onetime Republican bastion, into a congressional battleground, along with the high desert outside Los Angeles, where two-term GOP incumbent Steve Knight is fighting for reelection, and northern San Diego County, where Republicans are struggling to hold the seat being vacated by Rep. Darrell Issa after nine terms...

More.

Partisan Realignment After the 2016 Election

This is the best piece I've read on our current crisis of political polarization.

It's not a crisis of governmental institutions. It's a crisis of the party system. What a great read.

From Stanford political scientists David Brady and Bruce Cain, at National Affairs, "Are Our Parties Realigning?":

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE GOP

The election of Donald Trump was even more of a blow to any expectations of a new equilibrium than the back-and-forth elections of the prior decades. Not only was he not a standard Republican on free trade, taxes, entitlements, and so on, but the Republicans in Congress did not expect him to win. Their reaction to his victory was to try to pull together and pass the legislation they thought mandated by their 2010 wins six years earlier: end Obamacare, reform taxes, cut regulation, and increase energy production, among other longstanding Republican agenda items.

But the narrow Senate margin and Trump's lack of policy knowledge and legislative skill left Republicans with only a tax-bill victory. Obamacare is still the law of the land; immigration reform and budget policy remain problematic; and Trump is a more divisive president than either Bush or Obama. Thus our system — already burdened by partisan divisiveness, close elections, and few incentives for parties to cooperate on public policy — is saddled with an inexperienced, chaotic president and a governing party with no clear sense of what it wants or what voters want.

One result has been a struggle to define the GOP, which has sometimes seemed like a fight between the party's longstanding priorities and some of President Trump's particular emphases. But the battle lines have not been very clear — especially since neither the practical and contemporary meaning of the party's longstanding priorities nor Trump's beliefs are actually all that clear at this point, and since disputes about the president's character often overshadow internal policy debates.

If Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress in 2018, then the battle lines could be drawn more clearly, because those congressional Republicans who have held back criticism of Trump in order to pass legislation will no longer need to restrain themselves in the battle for the party. The 2018 and 2020 election cycles will, by and large, shape what Republicans become post-Trump. Republican incumbents might buy into Trump's views on immigration, deficits, trade, and so on to appease the Trump base, and thus change the party. Or the battle between Trump-like candidates and traditional Republicans could yield a new set of internal divisions and patterns. Or traditional Republican views might come to be reaffirmed.

The dimensions of the battle are revealed in survey data that YouGov has collected over the past few years. Starting in May 2015, they interviewed a panel of 5,000 Americans 17 times, with more interviews scheduled prior to the 2018 elections. The results have shown that Trump voters, compared to those Republicans who voted in the primaries for other candidates, are older, whiter, less well-educated, have lower incomes, and are disproportionately from the Southern, border, and Midwestern states. They are also, on average, angrier about politics, more likely to believe that many in the government are crooks, and  more dissatisfied with government. They are very anti-trade and anti-immigration and favor taxing the rich (those making over $250,000).

When asked about illegal immigrants living in the U.S. now, 70% of Trump supporters said they should be required to leave, while less than 35% of other Republicans agreed. In fact, a slight majority of other Republicans thought that they should be allowed to stay and acquire citizenship. On social issues such as gay marriage and the death penalty, Trump supporters were much more conservative than their fellow Republicans; in fact, a majority of other Republicans opposed the death penalty. In the post-election surveys, by a two-to-one margin, Trump Republicans favored a Muslim ban, while other Republicans opposed the ban. The battle for the heart and soul of the party is underway.

While these issues will be important, perhaps even more important is the extent to which Trump Republicans and other Republicans differ regarding the president. The August 2017 YouGov re-contact survey showed that 92% of early Trump supporters liked him, with 72% liking him a lot; Republicans who weren't early supporters, however, liked him less, with only 29% liking him a lot. The president's ability to retain the support of his base means those Republicans running for Congress must face the delicate task of appealing to that base in both the primary and general elections. Ed Gillespie's run for governor of Virginia in 2017 was an excellent example of such balancing. As one Washington Post article put it a few days before the election, "Gillespie is at the center of a civil war that is dividing his party, one pitting the Republican establishment he personifies with his four-star credentials against the anti-Washington forces that propelled President Trump's rise."

The battle between the Trump wing and other Republicans will play out numerous times over the next two election cycles, and the future of the party hangs on who wins. Crucial to Republican success will be suburban independents and Republican women who chose Trump over Hillary but today do not like the president. Off-year election turnout numbers in Virginia and Alabama confirm the importance of these voters.

THE RACE TO REALIGNMENT

In American political science, the standard party-change model has focused on "realigning elections," wherein one party achieves dominance that lasts long enough to resolve the key issues generated by the instability of the era. Those issues, in our time, appear to be challenges like immigration, inequality, family and social breakdown, worker insecurity, automation, trade, America's role in the world, and environmental challenges, among others.

Some observers suggest that Democrats have the best chance to arrive at a formula that captures a durable majority on most of these issues. As of this writing, the 2018 generic congressional poll favors Democrats by seven points (according to the RealClearPolitics average), and Trump's popularity is low. Historically, presidents in their first term often lose seats at the midterm election. And winning the House, the Senate, or both in 2018 would be seen as a harbinger of winning control of the government in 2020.

Control of all the elected branches would give Democrats a base of support from which to reduce inequality, reform the immigration system, and restore American leadership in the economic realm, on the environment, and in other respects. Nice scenario, if you ask any progressive. But there are many reasons why the Democrats are likely to fail in their efforts to create a new stable majority. The first and most obvious is that Democrats, like Republicans, are badly split on how the party should respond to both the Trump presidency and the dominant issues of our time. The result is that the number of Democrats running for president in 2020 may well be in the double digits, creating divisions that resemble those the Republicans faced in 2016.

Second, potential candidates are already favoring policies, like Medicare for all and free tuition, that even Californians know are not affordable. These views don't actually represent today's Democratic coalition all that well. In YouGov surveys, Democrats, by over two-to-one, favor cutting spending over raising taxes to balance the budget, and by almost two-to-one, they believe that quite a few in government do not know what they are doing. In regard to free tuition, 40% of Democratic voters are either against it or are not sure that it would work. Thus, the Democrats have not achieved agreement within their party regarding policies that deal with today's core challenges, and a multi-candidate presidential primary is not likely to resolve the issues and create a stable majority. That leaves the Democrats, like the Republicans, divided and not unified, and, just as with the GOP, the necessary changes seem more likely to occur in primary and general-election contests over the next few electoral cycles. The Democratic Party does not look ready to step up; the Republicans don't either.

Here again, a student of history would be reminded of the closing decades of the 19th century, when there were pro-silver Republicans and pro-gold Democrats (like President Cleveland) and the same intra-party mix on tariffs and immigration and many other prominent issues. Control of the government shifted back and forth between these unsteady parties over and over again. But by 1896, the sorting of the parties had occurred, and Republicans were pro-gold, pro-tariffs, and so on, while the Democrats under William Jennings Bryan were the opposite. The electorate, in that case, chose Republicans, and the ensuing stability gave rise to economic growth and a period of prosperity.

A broadly similar transformation is very likely in our future. The sorting process in the Republican Party has begun, with the Democrats to follow in 2020. This time the sorting will not be conservatives to the GOP and liberals to the Democrats, since that has already occurred and has defined the very order that is growing exhausted. Rather, the coming era will be defined by questions like what do conservatism and liberalism mean to Republicans and Democrats, and which vision will the American people support? Whichever way it turns out, the parties have finally begun the process of adjusting to the realities of the new global economy.

The shapes our parties are likely to take might be easier to see if we consider their most extreme possible forms — which aren't where we will end up but can show us the contours of possibility. For Republicans, these are the possible alternatives on either pole: a Trump-like Republican Party that is anti-immigrant, protectionist, anti-gay marriage, dependent on entitlements, white, old, not well-educated, and concentrated in the southern and central United States; or a party that favors markets and smaller government, and is not anti-immigration per se but is, rather, more libertarian and diverse in membership.

The Democrats, likewise, face a similar polar choice: a Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren Party that pushes socialist-leaning policies (Medicare for all, free tuition, a smaller military, higher taxes, and more regulation) joined to an identity politics that excludes moderates from swing states; or a Democratic Party more like that envisioned by the Clinton-era Democratic Leadership Council, which is center-left on economic policy, inclusive on social issues, relatively moderate on defense and immigration, and somewhat resistant to identity politics.

The battles between these alternatives have already begun in some primaries. And the likely outcome is not any of the polar opposites, but a shuffling of the issues that gives shape to complex coalitions...

RTWT, at the link.

Beth Jacob Synagogue Vandalized (VIDEO)

The synagogue's in Irvine, on Michaelson on the south side of the 405. I was meaning to drive by there and pay my respects and make a donation for repairs, but didn't make it today. Will try to swing by tomorrow.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

'Dreams'

From yesterday's drive-time, at 93.1 Jack FM, the Cranberries:

Dreams
The Cranberries
8:53am

Rock You Like A Hurricane
Scorpions
8:49am

Demons
Imagine Dragons
8:46am

Hold The Line
Toto
8:43am

Sheena Is A Punk Rocker
Ramones
8:40am

Little Red Corvette
Prince
8:35am

Come As You Are
Nirvana
8:32am

Dirty Deeds
AC/DC
8:16am

Something Just Like This
The Chainsmokers & Coldplay
8:12am

Another Brick In The Wall
Pink Floyd
8:09am

Ghostbusters
Ray Parker Jr.
8:04am

You Make Lovin' Fun
Fleetwood Mac

The Many Faces of Jew-Hatred

From Ruth Wisse, at WSJ:

The Many Faces of Jew-Hatred by my former professor at McGill University Ruth Wisse https://t.co/Ud7ogCfXfz

— Mark Dubowitz (@mdubowitz) November 1, 2018

The most discouraging feature of the anti-Israel brand of anti-Semitism is its penetration of Western societies, including the U.S. That a single shooter wants to kill the Jews is less dangerous to this country than Louis Farrakhan’s smiling designation of Jews as “termites,” broadcast to a vast audience, or the vicious movement to boycott Israel—an extension of the Arab boycott launched in 1945. The incursion of fanatical anti-Israel politics into the American campus and the Democratic Party is a threat not to the Jews alone but to what they represent in liberal democracy.

Even as we try to comfort the mourners and suggest better security measures, we must stop the scourge before a full-fledged anti-Semitic politics emerges in America under the unifying banner of “intersectionality.” Anti-Semitism is the only ideology that can unite the far left and far right. Its success would signify America’s failure....

RTWT.