FiveThirtyEight: How Did Lindsey Graham End Up In Such A Close Race?

 Recent polls of the U.S. Senate race in South Carolina have found third-term Sen. Lindsey Graham effectively tied in his contest against Democrat Jaime Harrison, a former top aide to longtime South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn and a one-time South Carolina Democratic Party chair. This is pretty surprising at first glance — Graham cruised to victory in 2014, winning by 15 percentage points. And Harrison isn’t some political juggernaut; in fact, he’s never before won any elective office. [...]

The reason: The makeup of South Carolina’s electorate is relatively good for Democrats (up to a point). The electorate is about 28 percent Black — a higher percentage than every other state save Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and Mississippi. (About 28 percent of Alabama’s voters are Black too.) And South Carolina has a higher percentage of white voters with college degrees (27 percent) than all of those states but Maryland (29 percent).2 Put those two groups together and you have the conditions for a sizable Democratic vote.

Also, President Trump is slightly less popular in South Carolina than he was in 2016. His net job approval rating3 in South Carolina was +7 at the start of his term (50 percent approval, 43 disapproval) compared to +2 now (50 percent approval, 48 percent disapproval), according to Civiqs data. And that shift, and the unpopularity of the Trump-led GOP with college-educated white people in cities and surrounding suburbs, gives Democrats more of a chance. Democrat Joe Cunningham won the congressional district in the Charleston area two years ago, becoming the first Democrat to do so since 1978. [...]

We are talking about fairly small differences here, so I don’t think there is a clear and obvious explanation for why Graham is running behind Trump. But here is some semi-informed speculation about why some Republicans and conservative-leaning independents who like Trump might be wary of Graham. In the past, Graham has aligned himself with decidedly un-Trumpy causes and people, from Graham’s close relationship with the late Sen. John McCain to his pre-Trump call for the GOP to adopt more lenient policies toward undocumented immigrants. Having served in Congress since 1995, Graham at this point is the definition of a Washington insider. Also, Graham spent much of the 2016 campaign blasting Trump in very harsh terms, including calling him a “complete idiot.” (Graham ran for president himself, remember.) So Republican voters might remember those comments and not trust Graham’s post-2016 conversion to Trump diehard.

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Politico: Trump tweets about Barr interview after AG complains about Trump tweeting

Barr's rebuke of Trump's online conduct came after the president tweeted his displeasure Tuesday with federal prosecutors' seven-to-nine-year sentencing proposal for Stone. [...]

Barr confirmed Thursday that he had personally interceded to walk back Stone's stiff sentencing recommendation, but maintained that he did so hours before Trump tweeted his objection. [...]

Although Barr's statements could be viewed as a sign of heightened tensions between the president and his attorney general, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham claimed Thursday that Trump was not irked by Barr‘s interview. [...]

Some Democratic lawmakers, however, have speculated that Barr's admonishment of Trump was a calculated maneuver aimed at quelling outrage within his department, rather than a genuine plea meant to curb the president's behavior.

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New York Magazine: What Will Republicans Do If Trump Goes Down?

If there is a Republican cascade against Trump, in retrospect, it will look inevitable, as if the steady drip of revelations and testimony was always destined to reach that final dramatic tipping point. But a note to future historians: As of this moment, it does not look inevitable at all. [...]

The obvious figure who could keep a party together composed of MAGA folk and other sorts of conservatives who for one reason or another dumped Trump, it would be Mike Pence. He’s been loyal to POTUS to the point of embarrassing sycophancy. Yet before he joined Trump’s ticket, he was a rigidly conventional conservative with many friends among his fellow House Republicans. And he’s beloved (at least at the leadership level) among Trump’s and the GOP’s single most important constituency: white conservative Evangelicals. As McKay Coppins notes, he could represent a soothing alternative if the stormy barbarian in the White House just vanished [...]

Indeed, Pence seems to have been involved up to the eyeballs in the Ukraine plot. His team’s messaging — Yes, he pressed the Ukrainians to investigate corruption, but he never appreciated that Trump’s true purpose was to pursue the Bidens — fails the laugh test. Pence’s taint presents a political problem for him, but raises a much graver question for the country. If the Senate ever could muster the integrity to remove Trump from office, there would be no Ford to put in his place, only a vice president who participated in Trump’s dirty schemes, from staying at a remote resort to direct government funds to Trump’s failing Irish golf course to extorting an invaded country to fabricate political dirt to help Trump’s reelection. [...]

Besides, outside Utah and LDS circles, and perhaps some Wall Street precincts, Romney has never been and will never be a beloved party titan. He was tolerated by many in 2012 because his rivals turned out to be feckless. But he’s become a symbol of Establishment Republican failure, the most important contributor to Trump’s ascent in the first place. Replacing Trump with the Mittster would be the deepest insult imaginable to mourning MAGA folk who view him as the epitome of the Swamp, both as a politician and as a champion of financial elites. It really wouldn’t make much sense. [...]

By process of elimination, if Trump goes down and Pence is cast aside, Republicans would need to quickly find a unity figure not involved in 2016 or more recent, divisive intra-party squabbles. That narrows it down to possibly one person: Paul Ryan. He’s obviously very well-known, with plenty of friends on Capitol Hill and on Wall Street. He’s been on a national ticket before, with the Mittster, whose defeat no one blamed on him. He’s in the neighborhood, having recently moved back to Washington, probably in anticipation of getting the Mother of All Lobbying Gigs — which fortunately he has not yet secured. He’s from the state many experts believe will decide the 2020 election, Wisconsin. And he knows how to graciously accept a call to service while appearing to resist it, having become Speaker of the House precisely through this role as a reluctant party savior.

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Politico: Congress pressures Trump to back down on Syria 'betrayal'

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is reminding Trump of supermajorities supporting a U.S. presence in Syria. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is threatening sanctions against Turkey in partnership with Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). And a bipartisan pair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee members are demanding administration officials testify before Congress. [...]

Lawmakers will also have multiple chances to weigh in on Trump’s foreign policy in the coming weeks and months, as Congress must pass its annual defense legislation as well as spending bills to fund the government. [...]

Republicans in Congress have shown a willingness to challenge Trump on foreign policy in a way they haven’t over most domestic issues or the president’s inflammatory rhetoric and controversies.[...]

Trump has faced several bipartisan challenges to his administration's relationship with Saudi Arabia after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but opposition from McConnell has kept votes to restrict arm sales to Saudi Arabia and the U.S. involvement in Yemen's civil war short of a veto-proof majority.

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Politico: The Humiliation of Lindsey Graham

In his cruelest cut of all, he compared Trump with Barack Obama. “No matter what President Trump is saying about his decision,” wrote Graham on Twitter, “it is EXACTLY what President Obama did in Iraq with even more disastrous consequences for our national security.” [...]

For the past several years, Graham has transformed himself from one of Trump’s fiercest critics, into one of his most reflexive defenders. Even by the cynical and shape-shifting standards of Washington, Graham’s metamorphosis has been a thing of wonder. The senator once known as John McCain’s best friend in the Senate, transformed himself into Trump’s shinebox, willing to ingratiate himself with rationalizations and praise even as Trump became increasingly erratic. [...]

Despite Graham’s compulsive turd-polishing of the past few years, Trump didn’t even consult him before making the decision to abandon the Kurds. Graham, who had given up so much self-respect to prevent just this outcome, was not even in the room. He didn’t even get a text.

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The New Yorker: The White House Coverup of the Saudi Coverup of the Jamal Khashoggi Murder

Congress has been outraged over the Administration’s response to the Khashoggi murder, especially Trump’s willingness to give the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a pass. “I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,” Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted recently. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis went to the Hill to explain U.S. policy on Saudi Arabia—in the context of the Khashoggi murder—and U.S. military support propping up the kingdom’s brutal four-year war in Yemen. Moves to punish Saudi Arabia for the murder by curtailing its war have rapidly gained momentum in recent weeks. Mysteriously missing from the briefing, however, was Haspel. [...]

The C.I.A. later issued a statement denying that Haspel had been blocked from the briefing. “The notion that anyone told Director Haspel not to attend today’s briefing is false,” a spokesman, Timothy Barrett, said. The C.I.A. response kind of fudged the issue. The White House may not have told Haspel not to go, but it also didn’t invite her to accompany Pompeo and Mattis, even though she has, by far, the most firsthand intelligence about the Saudi killing. [...]

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, was furious. He vowed not to vote on any key legislation pushed by the White House—including government-funding bills and judicial nominations—until Haspel fully and candidly briefs Congress on the Khashoggi assassination. “I’m not going to blow past this,” he told reporters. “I’m talking about any key vote. Anything that you need me for to get out of town, I ain’t doing it until we hear from the C.I.A.” His threat is real. A government-funding bill is due to be voted on next week; without its passage, the government could be shut down. [...]

But on Wednesday, Pompeo, who was Haspel’s predecessor at the C.I.A., never even mentioned Khashoggi’s name in his opening remarks. He instead digressed from the event that has galvanized Congress to frame Riyadh’s importance in terms of countering Tehran. “Degrading ties with Saudi Arabia would be a grave mistake for U.S. national security,” he said. U.S. military exports help the kingdom deter regional rivals. He even dismissed the impact of U.S. bombs, warplanes, and intelligence on the Saudis’ four-year war in Yemen, which has produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in the twenty-first century. “The suffering in Yemen grieves me,” Pompeo said, “but if the United States of America was not involved in Yemen, it would be a hell of a lot worse.”

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Quartz: The Auschwitz Museum hits back at Lindsey Graham’s Holocaust mansplaining

Ocasio-Cortez argued that the point of the museum was to keep the era’s lessons alive—including impact of authoritarianism and the forces that drive families to seek asylum elsewhere. Her position was soon reiterated by an organization uniquely positioned to understand the Holocaust’s horrors: the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which maintains the historical site in Poland where Nazis killed an estimated 1.1 million people between 1940 and 1945 through execution and mistreatment.

“When we look at Auschwitz we see the end of the process,” the museum replied on Twitter to Graham. “It’s important to remember that the Holocaust actually did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed from words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanisation & escalating violence.”

This is not the first time that historians of World War II’s ugliest crimes have spoken out against the Trump administration and its supporters. Japanese-Americans who survived US internment camps vehemently criticized the administration’s policy of family separation at the border earlier this year. In October, a Holocaust historian who specializes in the origins of genocides published an essay in the New York Review of Books noting “troubling similarities” between 1930s Germany and the US today, including a growing policy of isolationism and the failure of lawmakers on the right to curtail or criticize their side’s worst impulses.

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Axios: Defying Trump, key GOP senator to sharpen focus on Saudi prince

In a phone interview, Graham told me he and some of his colleagues have requested an intelligence briefing this coming week to find out whether the reporting is correct that the CIA has "high confidence" MBS ordered the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. [...]

Why it matters: It doesn't look like the Khashoggi story is going away. It's unlikely new sanctions on Saudi will pass in the lame duck. That means this fight will likely carry over into next year — potentially pitting Democratic senators and a smaller group of Republicans against the president. [...]

The bottom line: Graham is arguing the opposite. "We cannot have a normal strategic relationship with somebody this crazy," Graham told me. Graham said "everything would be on the table" to punish Saudi Arabia, including blocking arms sales.

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The Atlantic: Why the U.S. Can’t Quit Saudi Arabia

The U.S.-Saudi relationship was already attracting fierce criticism in some quarters because of the carnage of the war in Yemen; now the gruesome suspicions surrounding the fate of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who lived in the United States and wrote for The Washington Post, have brought a bipartisan chorus demanding answers and threatening sanctions. Meanwhile, both the kingdom and, it seems, President Donald Trump are scrambling for a way out of the crisis. Trump declared Monday that King Salman had told him he knew nothing about the incident, and the president speculated that it could have been the work of “rogue” actors.[...]

Yet the shared interests remain powerful, and have sustained the relationship through numerous crises in the past—including a 1973 oil embargo during the Arab-Israeli war and the revelation in the wake of the September 11 attacks that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. Since then, the Saudis have positioned themselves as a key ally in the fight against al-Qaeda and then isis (albeit too slowly for many officials and analysts), in particular when terrorists targeted the kingdom itself. The 9/11 Commission Report noted in 2004 that “cooperation had already become significant, but after the bombings in Riyadh in 2003”—in which more than 30 people died when Islamic militants attacked residential compounds in the city—“it improved much more. The Kingdom openly discussed the problem of radicalism, criticized the terrorists as religiously deviant, reduced official support for religious activity overseas, and publicized arrests.” The report added that in 2004, the Saudi ambassador to the United States called for a “jihad” against terrorists.

The period highlighted what the counterterrorism expert Daniel Byman has called in congressional testimony the “paradox” of U.S.-Saudi counterterrorism cooperation: “On the one hand, the Saudi government is a close partner of the United States on counterterrorism. On the other hand, Saudi support for an array of preachers and nongovernment organizations contributes to an overall climate of radicalization, making it far harder to counter violent extremism.”

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The Atlantic: Congress Is Forcing a Confrontation With Saudi Arabia

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of 22 senators sent a letter to President Donald Trump, which will force the administration to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance. The letter invoked a law, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, that allows Congress to order an investigation by the executive branch into human-rights violations—including torture, abduction, and extrajudicial killing—“against an individual exercising freedom of expression.” The lawmakers called on Trump to impose sanctions on “any foreign person responsible for such a violation related to Mr. Khashoggi,” including “the highest ranking officials in the Government of Saudi Arabia.” The law gives Trump 120 days to conduct an investigation, identify the culprits, and determine whether sanctions are justified.

It’s unlikely that the Trump administration would blame the crown prince for Khashoggi’s fate, which would trigger sanctions against the most senior Saudi royals. But by invoking the Magnitsky Act, senators are sending a signal to Trump and Saudi leaders that they will not let this matter go. The letter was orchestrated by Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the committee’s ranking member. Before sending it to Trump, Corker reportedly examined classified U.S. intelligence files on Khashoggi’s case, and said he had determined that the Turkish narrative was relatively reliable. “We need to take some type of action,” he said, “and there are some things we can do congressionally.” In an interview with CNN on Thursday, he went even further, saying: “My instincts say that there’s no question the Saudi government did this, and my instincts say that they murdered him.” [...]

Other lawmakers who have been supportive of the Saudis are also taking a hard line on Khashoggi’s case. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a member of the Armed Services Committee and a Trump ally, said that if the Saudis were found responsible for the journalist’s death, there would be “hell to pay.” He added, “If this man was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, that would cross every line of normality in the international community.”

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FiveThirtyEight: GOP Criticism Of Trump Is All Talk — But It Still Matters

Political scientists have done a great deal of research to figure out how much the president’s words matter — if they matter at all. Here’s what’s generally agreed upon: Presidential communication matters in a number of important ways. It can shape what issues citizens think about in the first place, how the public views the particular meaning or context of a major event, and provide important cues to partisans about where the party stands on a given issue.

Trump is facing a different dynamic than other presidents, though: He’s regularly contradicted by members of his own party on Capitol Hill. Take the president’s downplaying of Russian interference in the 2016 election. It will be harder for Trump to convince even most Republicans of these arguments as long as senators from his own party, like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, keep saying there was interference. Indeed, a (small) majority of Republicans believe the U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding that Russia interfered.  [...]

On paper, Trump, particularly on foreign policy, can still largely ignore Congress and implement his agenda if he chooses. But in reality, he keeps backtracking. Take his interest in implementing a more pro-Russia foreign policy. We think the criticism from congressional Republicans is a big part of that hesitancy on Trump’s part. The verbal opposition from fellow Republicans tends to lead to an escalation of opposition against Trump. Criticism by fellow Republicans frees the press, always leery of appearing too liberal, to attack controversial Trump initiatives more directly. That bipartisan and media opposition helps move the public in these instances to oppose what Trump is doing. Facing such opposition, the president often retreats. [...]

When the White House said last week that it was considering allowing the Russian government to interrogate Michael McFaul, who was the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Obama, the Senate passed a 98-0 nonbinding resolution condemning the idea, which the administration had by then disavowed.

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