The Guardian: Don't be fooled. The midterms were not a bad night for Trump

True, some of the most strident white nationalist and white supremacist Republicans were defeated – although an open neo-Nazi like Arthur Jones still got over 25% of the vote in the third congressional district of Illinois, while openly white nationalist and pro-Confederate Corey Stewart lost the Virginia Senate race with virtually the same score as his conservative predecessor six years ago. Perhaps most painful for Trump was that Kris Kobach, a key player in his ill-fated and ill-named Presidential Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity who has a decade-long history of racial voter suppression, was handsomely defeated in the Kansas gubernatorial race. [...]

On the other side of the political spectrum, the Democratic party made modest overall advances, in terms of seats rather than votes – barely taking the House, while staying well behind a US Senate majority. That said, the party has changed fundamentally in composition. Two years after Bernie Sanders’ failed challenge for the presidential nomination, there will be almost as many democratic socialists as conservative-leaning Democrats (known as Blue Dog Democrats) in Congress. While still a minority, they will be a loud minority, convinced they represent the future of the party. [...]

Whether the Republican establishment likes it or not – and more and more are actually perfectly happy with it – the Grand Old Party is now Trump’s Party. Their fate is intertwined with his. The old conservative Republican party is dead, for now. In the coming two years they will campaign as a radical right party, led by an omnipresent leader, who will define the Republican party for a whole generation of Americans.

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The Guardian: Donald Trump's unchecked hold on power has come to an end

The exit polls gave Democrats a massive 21-point advantage among women, while Republicans scored just a two-point lead among men. White women split 50-48 for the anti-Trump movement known as Democrats. The only age group that Republicans won were 65 and older – and that was only by one point.

Just two years ago, in those same exit polls, white women gave Trump a nine-point lead over the first woman to hold a major party’s presidential nomination. Married women were pretty divided in 2016, but leaned heavily towards Democrats on Tuesday. [...]

Republicans should have sailed to victory at a time of relative peace and prosperity, with unemployment at historic lows and wages rising. But in the House – a truly national contest, unlike the US Senate – voters showed there were clear electoral limits to Trump’s rabidly anti-immigrant racism and stunningly shameless sexism.[...]

In Florida, where the Democratic disappointment in the Senate and governor’s races was profound, the changes are coming. A state that just decided two contests by less than 100,000 votes also decided to restore voting rights to 1.4 million former felons.

Yes, Ron DeSantis won the governorship despite his close ties to white nationalists. He’ll need many more of the white-sheet gang once those former felons start voting. Meanwhile, Kris Kobach in Kansas, running with the support of similarly racist friends, failed to win the governorship in a state that Trump won by more than 20 points.

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CNN: 7 takeaways from election night 2018

House Democrats placed a MASSIVE bet on women in their plan to retake the majority. Dozens and dozens of Democratic female candidates jumped into races across the country. Democrats tailored much of their messaging on health care, on taxes, on everything to female voters -- especially in the suburbs. That was clearly the right bet. Women made up 52% of the overall electorate, according to preliminary exit polls, and they went for Democratic candidates over Republicans by 20. According to the Cook Political Report's Dave Wasserman, there will now be more than 100 women in the House in 2019 for the first time in history. [...]

That, by the way, is not unique to Trump. Midterm elections are almost always referendums on the president and his party. And they are almost always negative referendums. (Americans like divided government.) It's why the president's party has not lost House seats in only three midterms since the Civil War. (What years were those? 1934, 1998 and 2002.) [...]

The Ohio Democratic Senator cruised to a third term on Tuesday night against a credible opponent -- Rep. Jim Renacci (R) -- in a state that Trump won by eight points two years ago. That won't get all that much attention -- no one on either side thought Brown would lose -- but it should, as the party turns to 2020. Remember that Trump is President because of 80,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The Midwest is, literally, where he built his path to the White House -- and where he will look again in 2020. [...]

If you asked Democrats going into Tuesday night which governor race they wanted to win the most, they'd likely name Florida first and then Ohio. They won neither. And there's meaning well beyond simply losing at the gubernatorial level. Both are swing states -- maybe the two swingiest states -- going into the 2020 presidential election, and it's always better to have a governor's political machine working for you rather than against you in a swing state. And Republicans will have the upper hand in redistricting in 2021 in that trio of states -- which matters a whole hell of a lot.

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CityLab: Stockholm Isn’t Buying This Apple Store

Last month, Stockholm announced that it would block plans for a new Apple Store in the city’s center, overturning the agreement of a previous administration following widespread public outcry. As this article in The Guardian notes, the objection wasn’t against Apple as such (the company already has three Swedish stores) but against the site they chose. Had the company’s plan gone through, the electronics giant would have been camped at the end of Stockholm’s oldest, most central park: a lovely oblong oasis of greenery and paving called the Kungsträdgården, or King’s Garden. In doing so, Apple would have also taken over (but not necessarily built on) 375 square meters (4,037 square feet) of the park surrounding its store—a small chunk of the park’s overall footprint, but a sizeable privatization of public space in such a key, pivotal site.[...]

You might assume locals would thus be less bothered about what came afterwards. The sheer force of resistance—a public consultation received not a single petition in Apple’s favor—shows that there’s something more at work here than a simple debate over shopping space. Stockholm’s resistance is powered, it seems, by widespread concern about corporations taking over public spaces.

Indeed, Apple’s Stockholm plans form part of an international pattern. The tech giant has sought to set itself up in key public areas across the world’s cities, often taking over previously non-commercial spaces such as, in certain cases, former library and museum sites (more of which in a moment). They then present their store facilities as natural extensions of this public space, even as cultural institutions that provide unique opportunities for social exchange. These are not electronics stores—they are “town squares,” places where, according to Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts, “everyone is welcome.” [...]

The problem is the ground ceded to Apple and corporations like it by the state, which (partly under corporate pressure) is relinquishing its role as place-maker and ensurer of democratic access to public space. Apple’s ability to plausibly present their stores as new town squares rests on a tacit, erroneous assumption that the old, existing town squares are gone or broken. There’s no consideration, for example, that a new, truly public function for an underused library could be found.

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Politico: Macron criticizes ‘ultra-liberal’ Europe

In his first appearance on a radio talk show since he was sworn in, the increasingly unpopular French president came out swinging against an EU he is better known for defending against opponents such as Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin.

The EU is letting down its middle classes, ignoring their legitimate fears and exposing itself to a populist wave that could ultimately submerge the bloc, Macron told Europe 1 radio a few months before his centrist La République En Marche starts campaigning for the European Parliament election.[...]

His target was not the right-leaning populists who oppose him face-to-face. By railing against European “ultra-liberals,” Macron was pointing to all the factions that have resisted his plans, articulated during his presidential campaign and during a landmark speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, to make the EU a more “protective” bloc via tighter security cooperation, taxes on digital giants and tougher restrictions on state-aid takeovers. [...]

An example of “ultra-liberal” resistance was on display this week in Brussels, where Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire was pitching a French plan to impose a 3 percent revenue tax on companies like Google and Facebook. After more than a year of high-level diplomacy, the best Le Maire was able to extract was a vow from Germany to consider enforcing the tax from 2020, only if and when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was unable to come up with its own solution for taxing digital companies.

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Politico: Inside the EU, eastern approaches diverge

The formerly communist members of the EU club — from the Baltics in the north to Romania and Bulgaria at Europe’s edge — are diverging on big issues such as the rule of law and defense.

The weakening of their close ties could most immediately impact the negotiations over the next seven-year EU budget. The last time around, the Eastern bloc took a common position with other like-minded countries on regional funds, wresting billions from the EU in aid.[...]

The splits have emerged markedly only in recent months. A year ago, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called the Visegrad group — a club founded by Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to advance the eastern cause in Europe and known by the acronym V4 — “one of the poles of the European Union.” Yet as the Hungarians and the Poles have since repeatedly clashed with Brussels over their alleged democratic backsliding, and Orbán resorts now to calling the EU “an empire,” Prague and Bratislava have been notable in their moderation. [...]

Tomáš Petříček, the Czech Republic’s newly appointed foreign minister, has distanced Prague from Orbán’s vision of “illiberal democracy” and pledged not to shrink from from criticizing other Visegrad group members. “Among partners and allies, it’s good practice not just to assure each other of mutual support but also to talk about things that we don’t just see as positive,” he told Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper last month.

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Vox: Colorado passes Amendment A, voting to officially abolish prison slavery

More than 150 years after the ratification of the US Constitution’s 13th Amendment, Colorado has officially abolished slavery. Coloradans voted Tuesday for Amendment A, a measure removing language in the state constitution that allowed prison labor without pay.

Colorado is one of more than a dozen states whose state constitution technically still allows involuntary servitude as a form of criminal punishment. The state’s language closely resembles a contested passage that remains in the US Constitution 13th Amendment, which outlawed chattel slavery, but allowed those convicted of crimes to be forced into labor.[...]

The Tuesday result makes Colorado one of the first states to remove this language from its constitution. Governing magazine notes that bills “with similar goals failed this year in Wisconsin and stalled in Tennessee.”  

But this wasn’t the first time that such a proposal has appeared on Colorado ballots. In 2016, with the backing of state politicians and various local advocacy groups, a similar measure called Amendment T aimed to remove the “slavery as punishment” language from the state constitution. But the amendment was rejected by the state’s voters, a development experts like University of Colorado Law professor Melissa Hart blamed less on overt racism and more on the confusing way the amendment was written.

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Bloomberg: Populism Hits Home for EU Party Papering Over Its Orban Problem

“This resolution is definitely aimed at Orban and is a balancing act in trying to explain why the EPP accommodates an illiberal party within its ranks while confronting populists elsewhere,” said Julian Rappold, an analyst at the European Policy Centre in Brussels. “But this debate won’t go away as long as Fidesz belongs to the EPP.” [...]

The EPP members will choose between two contenders: Manfred Weber, who backed triggering a sanctions mechanism against Hungary but who nonetheless said he supports dialog over punishment for Orban; and Alexander Stubb, a former Finnish prime minister who has said he would expel Fidesz from the EPP if it violated the group’s values. Orban backs Weber, the EPP’s current chairman, in Thursday’s vote. [...]

At the same time, Orban has ruled out trading his seat in the most influential group in the EU Parliament for one in the populist camp before the elections, which might help explain why the party may ultimately sign the anti-populist resolution. Fidesz would sign the text in its present form, according to a party official who asked not to be identified because no final decision has been taken.

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