Politico: ‘It’s a big, big swing’: Trump loses ground with white voters

 But the president is tilting at the margins with those groups. His bigger problem is the demographic that sent him to the White House — white voters, whose embrace of Trump appears to be slipping in critical, predominantly white swing states. [...]

But Trump is working from a disadvantage this year. There are relatively few undecided voters left to persuade. Democrats are also highly energized about the Supreme Court. And Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court one month before the midterm elections two year ago did nothing to stop Democrats from steamrolling Trump and the GOP.

The erosion of Trump’s white support — and its significance to the November outcome — was never more obvious than in Trump’s messaging in recent days. Last week, he called for the creation of a commission to promote “patriotic education,” while dismissing “critical race theory” and the 1619 project of The New York Times Magazine. At a rally in Mosinee, Wis., he lit into Kamala Harris — the first major party woman of color vice presidential nominee — lamenting the possibility of her becoming president “through the back door.”[...]

Trump is doing better with whites in some states than others. In North Carolina, he is drawing noncollege-educated white voters at about the same levels he was in 2016. But in other states, including some with sizable populations of people of color, he is underperforming with whites. In Florida, Trump is running ahead of Biden with white voters 56 percent to 39 percent, according to a Monmouth University poll. But that is far short of the 32 percentage-point margin he posted in 2016. In Arizona, he has seen his 14-point edge with white voters in 2016 cut as well. [...]

Even if the result is a margin of victory with noncollege-educated white voters that is smaller than it was four years ago, Trump will almost certainly carry that group. And if he can turn them out in greater numbers, he could shift the electorate toward him in several predominantly white states. Republicans and Democrats alike estimate there are hundreds of thousands of unregistered, noncollege-educated whites in key swing states that Trump could still pick up.

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The Atlantic: The 53-State Solution

Two of the past three presidents received fewer votes than their opponent. In 2017, most legislation passed by the Senate was supported by senators representing only a minority of the population. And after the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, all five of the conservative Supreme Court justices—a majority of the Court—have been appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, supported by a group of senators who received fewer votes than the opposing senators, or both. [...]

None of these arrangements are necessarily partisan, and for much of the nation’s history, they did not consistently favor either political party. But today, the system is in tension with the bedrock principle of democracy: majority rule. Due to an advantageous distribution of voters in the right states, the Republican Party has repeatedly been able to control the federal government despite a lack of popular support. In 2016, for example, Republicans failed to win a majority of votes cast for the House, Senate, or the presidency, yet nonetheless secured control of all three. [...]

A better solution to the problem of minority rule would address it directly. Democrats—if and when they regain control of Congress—should add new states whose congressional representatives would likely be Democrats. In areas that are not currently states, like Washington, D.C., or territories like Puerto Rico, this could be done with a simple congressional majority. But Democrats should also consider breaking up populous Democratic states and “un-gerrymandering” the Senate. Perhaps there could be a North and South California, or an East and West Massachusetts. A new state of Long Island, an area that is geographically larger than Rhode Island, would be more populous than most of the presently existing states. [...]

However, small and large states are now divided politically in a way they haven’t usually been. As Matthew Yglesias notes, one important factor is race. Nonwhite voters represent a growing share of the country, but they are unevenly distributed, often clustered in large states. Another factor is higher education. White voters are more divided on lines of educational attainment, and smaller states are more likely to have a less educated population than larger states. As these sorts of demographic divides have come to coincide with the rural-urban divide, one party—the Republicans—has benefited tremendously, and is now the favorite for the majority of states, but not the majority of people.

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UnHerd: Will the Evangelicals dump Trump?

This was Donald Trump’s third appearance at the convention in the last four years, a necessity when 81% of white Evangelicals voted for him in 2016. After sticking with Trump through sexual assault accusations and scores of half-truths and outright lies, it seemed as though nothing could shake their faith in the man; yet an accumulation of factors may be eroding Evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the President, and perhaps even undermining their support altogether. [...]

Even religiously conservative politicians are starting to break ranks. Retiring Illinois Rep. John Shimkus, who gained notoriety for using the Bible to dismiss climate change, officially withdrew his support for the President over the “despicable” decision regarding Syria. And prominent conservative Christian media personality Erick Erickson tweeted at Nancy Pelosi to speed up the impeachment process so that “perhaps we’ll still have time to save some of the Kurds”. [...]

This betrayal is especially hard to swallow because Christian persecution in the Middle East has been a prominent issue for American conservative Christians, and many have therefore been keeping track of how the Kurds became the major defenders of Christian minority populations in Iraq and Syria. American Evangelicals fear these Middle Eastern Christians may now be endangered by a policy that decimates and alienates the Kurds and allows for the resurgence of ISIS. [...]

Yet even with Trump’s apparent success in reshaping the courts, Evangelicals may be in for a disappointment. New Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have pushed the Court somewhat to the Right, but they haven’t been the firebrand conservatives that many conservatives were looking for. The new justices may prove unwilling to halt the trend of advances made to LGBT rights, and sexual identity may be ruled a federally protected class.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Supreme Court Might Have Three Swing Justices Now

Now that this year’s Supreme Court term is over, we know that Kavanaugh is shaping up to be a solidly conservative justice — he barely beat out Roberts as the court’s new median and voted most frequently with Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. And although Roberts did step several times into the role of “swing” justice, he wasn’t the only conservative justice who joined the liberals over the course of the term. Although he wasn’t in the middle ideologically, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s other nominee, was actually the most likely to join the liberals in closely decided cases.1 In fact, each of the conservative justices joined the liberals in a 5-4 or 5-3 decision at least once. With a newly cemented conservative majority on the court, the days of a single “swing” justice may be over. [...]

Last year, we wrote that Roberts would likely land at the ideological center of the court in Kennedy’s absence, and he did — but so did Kavanaugh, who voted in almost total lock-step with Roberts. In fact, Kavanaugh was actually slightly closer to the center than Roberts was, according to their Martin-Quinn scores, a prominent measure of judicial ideology calculated by scholars Lee Epstein and Andrew Martin of Washington University in St. Louis and Kevin Quinn of the University of Michigan using data from the Supreme Court Database.

Kavanaugh’s score this term is very similar to Kennedy’s score from the last term, but Kennedy was somewhat unpredictable in his last few years on the bench, occasionally shifting into liberal territory. The fact that Roberts and Kavanaugh are now at the median means the court’s ideological center will likely be solidly conservative going forward. The shift, though, didn’t put the court in dramatically new territory, since Kavanaugh’s score is still similar to Kennedy’s in many of the years when he was the median justice.

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Today in Focus: Who is trying to ban abortion in the US?

Janet Porter believes life begins at conception and has spent the last 10 years lobbying on the fringes of the US abortion debate. Many on the left and right despise her, but in Donald Trump’s US, she has just had one of the biggest victories of her life. Porter successfully lobbied Ohio’s legislature to pass one of the strictest abortion bans in the world in April – the “heartbeat bill” would make the procedure illegal about six weeks into pregnancy. Alabama followed in May with an even more restrictive version, outlawing abortion at any stage of pregnancy, with no exceptions for those resulting from rape or incest. Six-week bans have been introduced in 15 states, although none are currently in effect.

Jessica Glenza, the Guardian’s US health reporter, tells Anushka Asthana about her meeting with Porter. With the recent appointment of two Trump-nominated supreme court justices and a growing number of anti-abortion federal judges, the ultimate aim of anti-abortion activists and lawmakers is to mount a challenge to Roe v Wade, the 1973 court decision that legalised abortion in the US.

And: Serena Daniari on why achieving a higher voice can be essential to embracing a female identity, and can provide a cloak of protection from bias and bigotry.

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FiveThirtyEight: People Are Changing Their Views On Race And Gender Issues To Match Their Party

A huge body of research has shown that voters were more divided by race and gender views in the 2016 election than they were in previous elections. But it turns out that rather than voters supporting the party that best represents their views about race and gender, the effect may more often work the other way — the parties may be shaping voters’ personal beliefs. Candidates and elected officials can drive a person to change their views, or loyalty to a party may dictate both a person’s beliefs and their candidate preferences.[...]

But voters’ views of specific racial issues, rather than their broader feelings about minority groups, were more likely to follow their candidate preferences. A study by Peter Enns at Cornell University found that Trump and Clinton voters changed their views on controversies like the Black Lives Matter movement to match their candidate’s views, rather than choosing their candidate based on their views about this issue. [...]

Although media attention has largely focused on Trump voters, a working paper showed that it was actually Clinton voters who underwent the more dramatic partisan shift in 2016 (echoing other findings). The largest changes in views of race and gender occurred among white liberals; their perceptions of racial and gender discrimination increased, their feelings toward minorities improved, and their support of policies aimed at increasing diversity, like affirmative action and allowing more immigration, rose. Voters who consistently voted Democratic moved to the left on these questions, especially young voters. That means studies that show an increased association between Trump support and conservative views on race and gender might in part actually reflect Democrats becoming more liberal on these questions.

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Al Jazeera: On fake investigations: From Kavanaugh to MBS

The Saudis should have hired what in Hollywood they call a "script supervisor" before they opened their mouth telling the world what happened to Jamal Khashoggi. So far, they have gone from flat denial to having Khashoggi start a fistfight with 15 cutthroat butchers the Saudis had sent to cut him to pieces. Right now, they are shooting a martial art movie with Khashoggi cast as Bruce Lee.

The Saudis know the world is not stupid, but they also know for a fact Jared Kushner is in their pocket. According to Intercept's sources, Mohammed bin Salman bragged that the president's son-in-law and Middle East adviser is "in his pocket" months ago. It is payback time. Trump will try to sell this cover-up by the Saudis the same way he sold the FBI's cursory report on Kavanaugh.[...]

He produced a "fake" FBI investigation - one that simply going through the motions and did not even interview the primary suspect or accuser, and issued a secret report the public could not see, as his Republican accomplices rushed the nomination through a hasty vote cast almost entirely on partisan lines just a few weeks before crucial midterm elections. And Trump and his Republican cohorts won. Professor Ford and countless sexually abused women like her lost.[...]

Like a real estate crook (he is) who refuses to see he has made a bad investment in a building he bought, Kushner is singularly determined to sustain the Saudi-Zionist alliance in a manner that, in his estimations, neutralises and eliminates the Palestinian national aspirations. Kushner sees the key to his ambitious desire to destroy and eliminate the last bastion of Palestinian resistance in this particular Saudi prince.

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Vox: Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and the chilling power of sexual violence

In her 2006 book Analyzing Oppression, Boston University philosopher Ann Cudd takes an even broader social lens on these arguments. Cudd is interested in the way violence in general sustains oppressive social structures, like patriarchy and white supremacy. Violence, she argues, is one of several ways in which dominant groups to keep subordinate groups down. “Systematic violence,” meaning violence directed against members of a marginalized group by a dominant one, works to traumatize and terrify. [...]

“Violence against women is covert, neither recognized as a systematic war against women by the victims nor by those who would be sympathetic,” she writes. “[Yet] all women act under the shadow of a social threat situation which is, statistically, credible yet tacit. It changes our behavior; it makes acquiesce to limitations on our liberty that men do not have, it alters our sense of what is possible.”[...]

Sexual violence, these women argued, is not a purely intimate act between a victim and an assailant. It is a social phenomenon with much broader effects: It shapes how all women think and act. The greater the sense of fear, the more likely women are to avoid taking risks. By contrast, if powerful institutions can assuage women’s fear — if they believe they are safe, or that, at the very least, their assaulters will be punished — then the psychological effects of sexual violence can be minimized.[...]

For this reason, Cudd points to the way the legal system handles assault as playing an important role in the systemic effects of sexual violence. Rape, as feminists often point out, is not handled like robbery. Robbery victims don’t immediately encounter reflexive doubt that they were robbed, but rape victims often face a presumption that a crime may not have actually happened. Many women are reluctant to report their assaults for that reason — one factor in why they often go unpunished.

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