Politico: ‘Extraordinary change’: How coronavirus is rewiring the Republican and Democratic parties

Last week, Republicans joined Democrats — and in some cases got in front of them — in calling for direct payments to Americans to help cope with the economic fallout from the pandemic. The Trump administration, after laboring for years to repeal Obamacare, said it was considering creating a special enrollment period for the program due to the coronavirus. When Donald Trump himself suggested the government could take equity stakes in private companies that receive federal aid, it was a Democratic governor, Colorado’s Jared Polis, who accused the president of being a socialist.[...]

He predicted that new normal including paid sick leave, and even guaranteed income of some kind. “In other words,” Richardson said, “the era of big government is back, and both parties are going to embrace it to resolve problems. And [the change] is caused by the virus.” [...]

But unlike many past crises, the coronavirus pandemic has caused turmoil in the economy, public health and politics all at once. The death toll is rising. The stock market is in freefall. The virus has consumed Trump’s presidency and his re-election prospects, and it has all but frozen the Democratic presidential primary in time.

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Vox: Colorado could save $2.5 billion by rapidly shutting down its coal power plants

That only exacerbates what is already a terrible economic climate for coal in the state. Last month, PacifiCorp, which owns coal plants in Colorado (among other states), revealed that, according to its own analysis, 13 of its 22 coal plants are uneconomic — as in, currently losing money. An analysis commissioned by the Sierra Club showed that it would be cheaper to replace 20 of the 22 plants with wind. [...]

Meanwhile, renewable energy continues its inexorable decline in prices, and there too, Colorado is at the center of the action. Xcel Energy, the utility that provides much of Colorado’s electricity, recently announced plans to go entirely carbon-free by 2050. [...]

Whether Colorado can achieve Polis’s goal of completely decarbonizing its electricity system by 2040 is a complicated question. But if running existing coal plants is no longer economic, then maybe the place to start is shutting down the eight utility-scale coal plants that currently supply about 40 percent of the state’s electricity and replacing them with a mix of renewable energy, storage, and natural gas. [...]

To summarize: Phasing out coal in Colorado and replacing it with a mix of renewable energy, efficiency, and natural gas is cheaper than continuing to run it and can be done with no impact on power reliability. That alone means there’s no reason to keep those plants open.

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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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