TLDR News: Anti Trump Republicans & The Lincoln Project: Why Some Don't Want Trump

In recent weeks, a group of anti-Trump Republicans seems to be increasing its campaign against the president. Groups like the Lincoln project and GOP leaders (including Romney and Bush Jr) have come out against Trump, saying they won't vote for him in 2020. So in this video, we explain this movement, the issue they have with their leader and what it means for Trump's 2020 campaign.

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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FiveThirtyEight: If Republicans Ever Turn On Trump, It’ll Happen All At Once

It’s not exactly a secret that if congressional Republicans could hold a secret-ballot no-confidence vote,1 they’d probably vote to oust Trump. There’s just one problem with that logic (aside from the fact that it’s not how our democracy works): Private preferences aside, congressional Republicans actually have some very strong incentives to support Trump publicly, at both the individual and collective level. [...]

Collectively, Republicans want to keep Trump popular so they can keep winning elections. In our era of increasingly nationalized politics, most Republicans can’t run independently of the president, even if they want to. Perhaps recognizing this, many have instead tied themselves more closely to him. Trump defines the Republican Party brand as president, so if Trump is unpopular, the Republican Party is unpopular, which would likely spell steep electoral losses for the party.

The only way this dynamic changes is if the entire Republican Party apparatus (not just politicians, but also media commentators and surrogates) turns on Trump en masse. But for this to happen, somebody still has to speak up first, and others have to follow. But it could happen. Let’s use political scientist Timur Kuran’s classic work, “Private Truth, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification,” as a guide to understanding major political transformations. He argues that political regimes can persist despite being unpopular, which is why a government overthrow, when it does come, can often seem so sudden. [...]

Even if most Republicans believe Trump is bad for the long-term health of the party, they have a major here-to-there problem. Turning against Trump seriously jeopardizes their immediate political fortunes. So all signs point to Republicans sticking it out with Trump. That means they’ll continue to find new ways to dance and dodge, and eventually, they’ll probably even vote to exonerate him in a Senate impeachment trial, if things come to that. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in particular, has no incentive to break from Trump. After all, his plan for grinding out partisan victories with Trump in the White House involves the same zero-sum attack politics as the president uses. Not to mention, McConnell is also among those red-state Republicans up for election in 2020.

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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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Vox: White threat in a browning America

The country’s gender dynamics are also in flux. Hillary Clinton was not just the first female presidential candidate to win the popular vote but the first to be nominated by a major political party. Women now make up 56 percent of college students, and are 8 percentage points more likely than men to have earned a bachelor’s degree by age 29. [...]

Another way to say that is it’s often our perception of race and power that matters. In that case, though, most Americans feel the browning of America is happening even faster than the demographers report. Back in 2013, the Center for American Progress, PolicyLink, and the Rockefeller Foundation surveyed Americans and found that the median participant believed the country was 49 percent nonwhite; the correct answer was 37 percent. [...]

Before and after sending these Spanish speakers to the train platforms, I surveyed passengers on the platforms about their attitudes about immigration. After being exposed to the Spanish speakers on their metro lines for just three days, attitudes on these questions moved sharply rightward: The mostly liberal Democratic passengers had come to endorse immigration policies — including deportation of children of undocumented immigrants — similar to those endorsed by Trump in his campaign. [...]

Obama’s presidency didn’t force race to the forefront of American politics through rhetoric or action but through symbolism: Obama himself was a symbol of a changing America, of white America’s loss of power, of the fact that the country was changing and new groups were gaining power. That perception wasn’t incorrect: In his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama won merely 39 percent of the white vote — a smaller share than Michael Dukakis had commanded in 1988. That is to say, a few decades ago, the multiracial Obama coalition couldn’t drive American politics; by 2012, it could. [...]

It would be easy to dismiss these comments as the over-the-top rantings of pundits, but Limbaugh and O’Reilly’s views are widely shared. A 2016 Public Religion Research Institute poll found that 57 percent of whites agreed that “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” A 2017 GenForward poll of white millennials found 48 percent agreed with a similar statement, showing that the sentiment isn’t confined, or even concentrated, among older whites. [...]

This dynamic is behind much of the frustration about “identity politics.” When a single group dominates the political agenda, their grievances and demands are just coded as politics, and the vast majority of policy is designed in response to their concerns. But that changes when no one group can control the agenda but many groups can push items onto it; then the competition between identity-based groups becomes visible. And it becomes particularly visible to the group that’s traditionally dominated the agenda and believes that their issues reflect what politics is supposed to be about and other groups’ concerns represent special pleading.

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Crooked Media: Wilderness The Change

What is Barack Obama’s legacy? A closer look at how an historic presidency shaped the party and the country.

The Wilderness is a documentary from Crooked Media and Two-Up about the history and future of the Democratic Party. Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau tells the story of a party finding its way out of the political wilderness through conversations with strategists, historians, policy experts, organizers, and voters. In fifteen chapters, the series explores issues like inequality, race, immigration, sexism, foreign policy, media strategy, and how Democrats can build a winning majority that lasts.

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FiveThirtyEight: How Trump And Race Are Splitting Evangelicals

Two factors appear to be driving this divide. First, the number of white evangelicals is in decline in America at the same time that the evangelical population is becoming more racially diverse. According to 2016 data from the Public Religion Research Institute, about 64 percent of evangelicals are non-Hispanic white, compared to about 68 percent in 2006. [...]

And these nonwhite evangelicals see politics differently than white evangelicals. While the largest plurality of white evangelicals identify as Republicans, most black evangelicals are Democrats. A plurality of evangelical Latinos, in contrast, identify as political independents — and they’re less supportive of the Democratic Party than Latinos overall — but they are still more likely to consider themselves Democrats than Republicans.   [...]

In a recent New York Times op-ed, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network cast Trump as God’s gift to evangelical Christians, arguing, “The Bible is replete with examples of flawed individuals being used to accomplish God’s will.” Congressional Republicans often defend the president, but few compare him to biblical figures.

Why are influential figures in the white evangelical community so willing to align themselves with Trump? Well, first of all, Trump remains popular with white evangelical voters. A Pew survey from December found that 61 percent of white evangelicals approved of Trump’s job performance,2 compared to 32 percent of voters overall. (This was a substantial decline from Trump’s 78 percent approval among white evangelicals in February 2017, but they are are still one of the most pro-Trump blocs in the electorate.)

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The Guardian: We need to rethink our resistance to Donald Trump’s ideas

Every day some terrible fact is exposed and social media rouses itself and ... nothing much happens. We are caught in a cycle of ineffectual reaction. Can this man really be in charge of pushing the nuclear button, we ask, every single time he pushes our buttons? Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury was going to bring it all tumbling down. It is a belting read, in a-bucket-of-KFC way; greasy and ultimately unsatisfying. Hillary Clinton reading bits of it out at the Grammys is surely the ultimate signifier of impotence.

Let’s all laugh at him, us who are so much better.  As a collective strategy, this is proving as futile as my pathetic tweets. The Republican party keeps him in power. The Democrats still appear to be in a state of post traumatic stress disorder, stuck in the loss, unable to put it in the past. Trump has delivered to the right, to the Tea Party element, to the so-called “nativists” (also known as racists). He has cut taxes in ways Mitt Romney lost the nomination for talking about. The liberal revulsion to his misogyny and racism has been mistaken for opposition. It is not enough.

Gary Younge’s recent reporting from Muncie, Indiana, where he also spent a month before Trump’s election, revealed that most Trump voters think he is doing OK (and these people are not even his core supporters). Tax cuts, deregulation and a conservative in the supreme court are all cited as achievements. The underlying forces that propelled people to vote for Trump – a belief he would smash up the system and, yes, racism, are still there. The narrative of a maverick who works against the mainstream media operates successfully in a huge country where news remains suprisingly local.

The focus on his ludicrous ego and ignorance may make us feel superior. But that is all it appears to be doing. He will not be toppled by us jeering at a picture of his enormous arse or reports of his word salad on climate change, his links to Russia and his comments about pussy-grabbing. Not as long as he is supported by racists, the far right, Christian fundamentalists, the global business elite and his own party. And he is. It is time to get serious about what drives this presidency. At the moment, the joke is on us.

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Vox: The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment

Contrary to what some have suggested, white millennial Trump voters were not in more economically precarious situations than non-Trump voters. Fully 86 percent of them reported being employed, a rate similar to non-Trump voters; and they were 14 percent less likely to be low income than white voters who did not support Trump. Employment and income were not significantly related to that sense of white vulnerability.  

So what was? Racial resentment.

Even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, region and a host of other factors, white millennials fit Michael Tesler’s analysis, explored here. As he put it, economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment; rather, racial resentment is driving economic anxiety. We found, as he has in a larger population, that racial resentment is the biggest predictor of white vulnerability among white millennials. Economic variables like education, income and employment made a negligible difference. [...]

As Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta wrote in their paper, there’s growing evidence that 2016 was unique — in that racism and sexism played a more powerful role than in recent presidential elections. “Specifically, we find no statistically significant relationship between either the racism or sexism scales and favorability ratings of either [previous Republican candidates] John McCain or Mitt Romney,” they wrote. “However, the pattern is quite strong for favorability ratings of Donald Trump.”

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The Atlantic: The Nationalist's Delusion

It was not just Trump’s supporters who were in denial about what they were voting for, but Americans across the political spectrum, who, as had been the case with those who had backed Duke, searched desperately for any alternative explanation—outsourcing, anti-Washington anger, economic anxiety—to the one staring them in the face. The frequent postelection media expeditions to Trump country to see whether the fever has broken, or whether Trump’s most ardent supporters have changed their minds, are a direct outgrowth of this mistake. These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of. [...]

The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal. [...]

Trump’s great political insight was that Obama’s time in office inflicted a profound psychological wound upon many white Americans, one that he could remedy by adopting the false narrative that placed the first black president outside the bounds of American citizenship. He intuited that Obama’s presence in the White House decreased the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois described as the “psychological wage” of whiteness across all classes of white Americans, and that the path to their hearts lay in invoking a bygone past when this affront had not taken place, and could not take place. [...]

Trump’s support among whites decreases the higher you go on the scales of income and education. But the controlling factor seems to be not economic distress but an inclination to see nonwhites as the cause of economic problems. The poorest voters were somewhat less likely to vote for Trump than those a rung or two above them on the economic ladder. The highest-income voters actually supported Trump less than they did Mitt Romney, who in 2012 won 54 percent of voters making more than $100,000—several points more than Trump secured, although he still fared better than Clinton. It was among voters in the middle, those whose economic circumstances were precarious but not bleak, where the benefits of Du Bois’s psychic wage appeared most in danger of being devalued, and where Trump’s message resonated most strongly. They surged toward the Republican column. [...]

Birtherism is a synthesis of the prejudice toward blacks, immigrants, and Muslims that swelled on the right during the Obama era: Obama was not merely black but also a foreigner, not just black and foreign but also a secret Muslim. Birtherism was not simply racism, but nationalism—a statement of values and a definition of who belongs in America. By embracing the conspiracy theory of Obama’s faith and foreign birth, Trump was also endorsing a definition of being American that excluded the first black president. Birtherism, and then Trumpism, united all three rising strains of prejudice on the right in opposition to the man who had become the sum of their fears.

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The New York Review of Books: Year One: The Mad King

He laid out the clear and present danger posed by Trump. “He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants. He calls for the use of torture. He calls for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit First Amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.” [...]

Like so many of his fellow Republicans, Romney would eventually make his peace with Trump, even entertaining over a dinner of frogs’ legs the possibility of becoming his secretary of state. Nearly a year after Trump’s election, congressional Republicans and the president find themselves locked in a relationship of morbid co-dependency, but it is not one based on misunderstanding. There was no mystery, no hidden knowledge, about who or what Donald Trump was, or what it would mean to invest him with the royal purple of the presidency. Republicans gave it to him knowingly. [...]

Even as Robert Mueller’s investigation accelerates, there are few signs that the party has any will to resist him. In the last year and a half, Trump has succeeded in moving the window of acceptability in our politics, especially on the right. The collaborators rationalize their response thus: if they did not go along, then power would shift to even worse actors. As the former presidential aide Steve Bannon plots a populist revanchist rebellion, some Republicans tell themselves that it is better to be a Vichy Republican, a quiescent enabler, than one of the denizens of Bannon’s Crazytown.  

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Vox: What really happened in 2016, in 7 charts

Exit polls indicate that a majority of voters were persuaded by Clinton’s arguments that Trump was unqualified and temperamentally unsuited for the presidency, but a decent swathe of voters who agreed with her about that voted third party rather than for Trump’s opponent — ultimately denying Clinton the victory. [...]

Comparing exit polls from 2016 (left) to 2012 (right) we see that while Clinton did worse with voters overall than Barack Obama, she did gain 1 percentage point more of the white women’s vote — rising from 42 percent to 43 percent. Most white women, however, preferred Trump. And though Trump did no better with white men than Romney had, Clinton did considerably worse than Obama. [...]

Clinton, the first woman major party presidential nominee, won the votes of most American women. But this is entirely typical for a Democrat of any gender. Obama won women twice, John Kerry won women in 2004, and Al Gore won women in 2000. You have to go all the way back to Michael Dukakis in 1988 to find a Democrat losing the women’s vote. Conversely, Trump carried white women, just as every Republican Party nominee has done for generation or two. [...]

Conversely, there’s fairly strong evidence that James Comey’s October letter to Congress about the discovery of what turned out to have been new copies of already-reviewed emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop did swing national opinion enough to make a difference.

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The Atlantic: The First White President

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible. [...]

Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed. In a study of preelection polling data, the Gallup researchers Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found that “people living in areas with diminished economic opportunity” were “somewhat more likely to support Trump.” But the researchers also found that voters in their study who supported Trump generally had a higher mean household income ($81,898) than those who did not ($77,046). Those who approved of Trump were “less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time” than those who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: “The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” [...]

Part of Trump’s dominance among whites resulted from his running as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters. Trump’s share of the white vote was similar to Mitt Romney’s in 2012. But unlike Romney, Trump secured this support by running against his party’s leadership, against accepted campaign orthodoxy, and against all notions of decency. By his sixth month in office, embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew Research Center poll found Trump’s approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic group, that is, except one: people who identified as white. [...]

This transfiguration is not novel. It is a return to form. The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as far. Like the black working class, the white working class originated in bondage—the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In the early 17th century, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the 18th century, the country’s master class had begun etching race into law while phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution. From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged: The descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave. But if the bargain protected white workers from slavery, it did not protect them from near-slave wages or backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a fear of having their benefits revoked. This early white working class “expressed soaring desires to be rid of the age-old inequalities of Europe and of any hint of slavery,” according to David R. Roediger, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas. “They also expressed the rather more pedestrian goal of simply not being mistaken for slaves, or ‘negers’ or ‘negurs.’ ” [...]

Obama allowed that “blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends”—but less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution. This notion—raceless antiracism—marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.

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The New York Review of Books: South Korea’s Real Fear

So, many South Koreans have shrugged. As has long been true, the 10 million residents of greater Seoul are essentially human shields: any attack on Pyongyang by the US would be followed by a barrage of traditional artillery from the DMZ on the South Korean capital, and hundreds of thousands would be killed. But in recent months, the primary worry in South Korea has not been its bizarre and militaristic neighbor to the north; most Koreans are by now long used to living within close firing range of Pyongyang and do not think it will attack unless provoked. What really worries them is that the new US president doesn’t know all this—and is too contemptuous of the State Department to be instructed.

In fact, South Koreans did lose a measure of their calm in the weeks after Trump was inaugurated. In the past, the US has tended to observe a cautious policy toward North Korea. For example, during an earlier nuclear crisis in 1994, it was the threat of a retaliatory attack on the south that convinced Bill Clinton not to use force and to pursue negotiations instead. More recently, while Barack Obama’s policy of “strategic patience” was recognized long ago as a non-policy, a way of kicking the can down the road, it wasn’t reckless—and everyone assumed that the can would be picked up by a president like Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney. When Trump announced that all options were on the table, including military action, South Koreans hoped it was bluster, an opening gambit for dealing with Pyongyang. But they couldn’t be sure. Some foreign residents of Seoul even packed evacuation bags and carried them around at all times, in case war broke out. [...]

Indeed, some analysts believe Pyongyang’s long-term strategy is to wait for a US administration that isn’t fully committed to defending South Korea, and then start a second Korean War to accomplish what the first failed to do: make Korea a united, communist nation. It’s an aspiration that has survived seventy-two years and two generational shifts in the world’s only communist dynasty. It’s also an aspiration that has few echoes south of the DMZ. Many South Koreans, while also hoping to reunite their nation, fear that even a peaceful unification with the north could be such a financial drain that it would make them poor again.

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The Intercept: Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues

Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and an expert on race relations, has pored over this ANES data and tells me that “whether it’s good politics to say so or not, the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were a key component of Trump’s appeal.” For example, he says, “in 2016 Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment.” [...]

For Sanders, Warren and others on the left, the economy is what matters most and class is everything. Yet the empirical evidence just isn’t there to support them. Yes Trump won a (big) majority of non-college-educated whites, but he also won a majority of college-educated whites, too. He won more young white voters than Clinton did and also a majority of white women; he managed to win white votes regardless of age, gender, income or education. Class wasn’t everything in 2016. In a recent essay in The Nation, analysts Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel point out that “income predicted support for McCain and Romney, but not Trump.” Their conclusion? “Racial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics.” [...]

If Democrats are going to have any chance of winning back the White House in 2020, they have to understand why they lost in 2016, and that understanding has to be based on facts and figures, however inconvenient or awkward. The Sanders/Warren/Moore wing of the party is right to focus on fair trade and income equality; the calls for higher wages and better regulation are morally and economically correct. What they are not, however, is some sort of silver bullet to solve the issue of racism. As the University of California’s Michael Tesler, author of “Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era,” has pointed out, the “evidence suggests that racial resentment is driving economic anxiety, not the other way around.”

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Vox: A political scientist explains how big data is transforming politics

Big data — defined by Todd and Dann as a “combination of massive technological power and endlessly detailed voter information” — has certainly changed the way campaigns are conducted. Like corporations, campaigns now know far more about their constituents than ever before — what they read, which movies they stream, which shows they watch, where they shop, which products they buy.

This allows campaigns to identify their most likely voters and target them with ads and favorable content. The result, increasingly, is that candidates talk only to voters disposed to agree with them, as opposed to persuading those who don’t.

In the end, Todd and Dann write, mobilizing likely supporters is “faster and far less expensive than persuading their neighbors.” So that’s what campaigns do: ignore the center and concentrate on the most fervent supporters. [...]

Think of the famous Romney 47 percent line or Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" comment. Both of these statements are forms of representation where you dismiss the people who are not your supporters. When I think of my job as a politician, I can think of it as serving the entire population, or I can think of it as serving my people, my voters. So I'm looking for 51 percent, not 60 or 70 percent.

Big data makes it easy for candidates to dismiss their opponents. They now know, with greater and greater precision, how people voted and how they're likely to vote in the future, and their campaigns reflect that.

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The Atlantic: Why Trump’s Republican Party Is Embracing Russia

Through his public statements and presidential appointments, Donald Trump is remaking Republican foreign policy in two fundamental ways. The first concerns Russia. Previous GOP leaders like Mitt Romney and John McCain described Moscow as an adversary. Trump describes it as a partner. The second concerns Islam. Previous GOP leaders—most notably George W. Bush—insisted that the U.S. had no beef with Islam, or with the vast majority of Muslims worldwide. Trump and his top advisors disagree. They often describe Islam itself as a hostile force, and view ordinary Muslims as guilty of jihadist sympathies until proven innocent. [...]

To understand this shift, it’s worth distinguishing two different strains of conservative foreign-policy thinking during the cold war. Civilizational conservatives like Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan saw the cold war as a struggle between two countries defined primarily by their view of God: The Judeo-Christian United States versus the atheistic Soviet Union. Ideological conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams, by contrast, saw the cold war as a conflict between two countries defined primarily by their view of government: the liberty-loving United States versus the totalitarian USSR. (A third group, composed of realists like Henry Kissinger and George Kennan, saw the cold war as a traditional great power conflict between two countries defined primarily by their geopolitical heft.) [...]

Partly, they’re aping Trump. But there’s something deeper at work. Ideological conservatives loathe Putin because he represents an authoritarian challenge to the American-backed order in Europe and the Middle East. But many civilizational conservatives, who once opposed the Soviet Union because of its atheism, now view Putin’s Russia as Christianity’s front line against the new civilizational enemy: Islam. Among the alt-right, Putin is a very popular man. He’s popular because he resists the liberal, cosmopolitan values that Muslims supposedly exploit to undermine the West. Richard Spencer, who was until recently married to a pro-Putin Russian writer, has called Russia the “sole white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, another prominent figure in the alt-right, recently told Business Insider that “Russia is the leader of the free world.” In 2013, Pat Buchanan penned a column entitled, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?”

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Jacobin Magazine: Passing the Baton

It’s an apparatus that was built by both parties. George W. Bush massively expanded the system after the September 11 attacks, taking measures that were at the time viewed as extreme and unprecedented. But Obama’s ready acceptance and expansion of this national security state upon coming to power has helped entrench it, while also making it more powerful than Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams. Now it’s in Trump’s hands. [...]

Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power. [...]

Some were. After all, back in 2012, when the prospect of Mitt Romney becoming president was looming, the Obama administration rushed to establish rules around its totally lawless and oversight-free drone program in case he won. After Romney lost the election, these efforts again took a back seat. [...]

The targets for assassination appear to be currently determined through a process of intelligence gathering, then sent up the chain to be approved for killing. However, with no real oversight or legal limits on the program, it’s hard to see what would legally prevent President Trump from ordering the assassination of anyone he chooses. [...]

And in 2013, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder declared that this power of extra-judicial assassination even extended to US soil. While “entirely hypothetical” and “unlikely to occur,” he wrote in a letter to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, “it is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate … for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.”

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The New York Times: Why Republicans Don’t Even Try to Win Cities Anymore

Only three of the 25 largest cities in America now have Republican mayors. In the House of Representatives, Republicans from dense urban congressional districts have become extinct. In the 2012 presidential election, the counties containing Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Washington, San Francisco and Philadelphia each gave less than 20 percent of their vote to Mitt Romney. In this coming election, Donald J. Trump is unlikely to do better — and may fare worse. [...]

The pattern highlights a paradox about Mr. Trump: “He’s the most urban candidate in American history — he was born in Queens and lives in a skyscraper on Fifth Avenue,” said Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. And Mr. Trump’s personal fortunes have risen with the comeback of major American cities, with signature real estate projects in New York, Washington and Chicago. But he has portrayed these same cities as dystopias.

Mr. Trump has elevated a strategy that is risky to the Republican Party in the long run. Not only have recent Republican candidates neglected cities, but they’ve also run against them, casting urban America as the foil to heartland voters. Rick Santorum and Sarah Palin caricatured coastal cities as unmoored from the “real America.” Ted Cruz derided “New York values,” as if those values, whichever ones he meant, were alien. Mr. Trump has pre-emptively annulled the votes of Chicago, St. Louis and Philadelphia, cities where he warns the election will be rigged against him. [...]

Those Chicago voters embody both trends — party realignment and white flight — that have remade political geography since then. In the 1950s, in presidential election results compiled by the Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, a county’s population density was a poor predictor of how its residents voted. Today, the pattern is remarkably consistent: The denser the county, the more overwhelmingly its residents vote Democratic.

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Politico: Could Trump blow it in Texas?

The odds are long, they say, in a state that hasn’t voted Democratic for president in 40 years. But in recent polling data and early voting results, they are also seeing signs of the perfect storm of demographic and political forces it would take to turn Texas blue.

According to some Republican and nonpartisan pollsters, Donald Trump is turning off enough core GOP constituencies and motivating Hispanic voters in ways that could pump up Clinton’s performance to higher levels than a Democratic nominee has seen in decades. In 2012, Mitt Romney won the state in a 16-point blowout. The current spread is just 5 points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. [...]

Jacob Monty, a prominent Republican Hispanic activist based in Houston who resigned from Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council after an incendiary Trump speech on immigration, said he will not vote for the top of the ticket but will vote Republican down the ballot — highlighting the failure, even in deep-red Texas, to fully consolidate the GOP base behind the party nominee. [...]

A Clinton victory would also require a massive rejection of Trump by the Republicans who dominate the Dallas and Houston suburbs and formed the core of the George W. Bush coalition. While establishment Republicans appear to have ditched Trump in crucial areas like the Philadelphia suburbs and in suburban enclaves in Virginia and Colorado, there’s little sign of significant suburban erosion in Texas. Some Republicans actually see evidence from early voting suggesting high turnout in Republican-leaning areas of Fort Worth’s Tarrant County and in the suburbs north of Dallas.

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