Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Democrats Won the Wealthy Suburbs

This is interesting.

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


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.


Monday, November 12, 2018

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).


Saturday, November 10, 2018

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":


Bella Hadid Tight Dress at Victoria's Secret After Party

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

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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."



Thursday, November 8, 2018

Getting Into Harvard

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


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

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

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":


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.


Tuesday, November 6, 2018

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!

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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":


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.

Monday, November 5, 2018

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: