Editors’ Blog

In a blow to Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey and Attorney General Mark Brnovich, the state’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the method through which bans on mask mandates and other coronavirus-related mitigation measures were passed in the state was illegal.

A lot of progressives across the country as well as in Buffalo were enthused by what a few months ago had seemed like the near certainty that India Walton, a self-described democratic socialist who won the Democratic primary against longtime Mayor Byron Brown, would be the next Mayor of Buffalo. But it appears that Mayor Byron Brown has managed a comeback victory as a write-in candidate.

(Neither Republicans nor New York’s various minor parties fielded candidates. So Walton was literally the only name on the ballot. Brown’s campaign spent about $100,000 on rubber stamps with his name to hand out to voters.)

One anecdote doesn’t capture a state. But I wanted to pass on this note from a TPM alum …

I read and enjoyed your piece on McAuliffe’s loss. I think it’s all on target, atop the fact that McAuliffe just isn’t a base moving guy on his own.

It may not have changed the result given the headwinds at play, but from where I sit in the Northern VA suburbs of DC, it also seems like McAuliffe and the VA Dems got completely out-hustled and out-campaigned, while leaving their reliable voters to do the work for them.

The networks haven’t called it. But the numbers crunchers I watch have. What do we make of this result? My main reaction is that we should not be surprised that Youngkin won. By this I do not mean that this morning I would have told you this was going to be the result. In fact, I had an inkling in the last day or so that McAuliffe might pull it out. I mean on the larger canvass: this shouldn’t surprise us.

Why? Let me explain.

Nearly all of the Democratic members of the North Carolina state House staged a walk-out on Monday evening to protest the seating of a new Republican state lawmaker who has not only dabbled in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but who was present at the Jan. 6 Trump rally that became the insurrection.

The new state House member Rep. Donnie Loftis (R) has drawn the ire of North Carolina Democrats since his appointment. Loftis is a former county commissioner in the state and resigned his position on a local hospital board last year after he was criticized for posting coronavirus conspiracy theories on Facebook. In some of the posts, he referred to stay-at-home orders, enacted in the deadliest days of the pandemic to slow the spread, as a form of tyranny, according to The Charlotte Observer.

But it was Loftis’ presence near the Capitol while the attack unfolded that drove Democrats to walk out during his swearing-in this week, the state Democratic Party said in a statement.

I just saw this comment from my friend Chris Hayes …

My unified theory of American social and political life is that we’ve lived through and are living through a once-in-a-century trauma/disruption and the results of that are going to revereberate throughout almost every facet of politics for a while.

I agree with this, with this additional and I believe critical fact: the pandemic hit during a period of intense social and political turbulence and instability in the United States. Not only Trump’s presidency, the escalation of destabilizing actions during his presidency but remember that the pandemic struck within days of the end of the President’s impeachment trial.

Today is the day for those off-year elections which in addition to electing governors and mayors and various other officials are taken as harbingers of the political climate going into the following year’s midterm elections. Attention tends to focus on New Jersey and Virginia. Democrat Phil Murphy looks set to win handily in New Jersey. But Virginia, where incumbents can’t run for reelection, looks way too close to call. There are two governing patterns in Virginia. One is that it is an increasingly Democratic state. Joe Biden won it by 10 points and it went narrowly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 even as she lost Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The other pattern is that it tends to be won by the party not currently holding the presidency. The guy who broke that latter pattern, ironically, is none other than Terry McAuliffe, who won in 2013, a year after President Obama was reelected.

Now we see which of those patterns will hold.

While the percentage is significantly higher among Republican voters (and deeply influenced by where said Republicans get their news, which I’ll get into below), the percent of Americans who believe that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump has remained relatively steady for (almost) an entire year.

The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute put out the staggering results of a new poll today, the highlights of which my colleague Josh Marshall lays out here. The results of the poll shed light on Americans’ perceptions on a number of topics, including revealing a concerning uptick in GOP voters being increasingly on board with acts of political violence as a necessary tactic for preserving their take on the country’s founding ideals. But one statistic was particularly striking to me, especially when juxtaposed alongside the same survey’s findings on Americans’ voter fraud concerns.

About three in 10 Americans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, approximately 31 percent. On its face, the number isn’t that surprising. The more unsettling part lies in this segment of the data: That number hasn’t shifted much, and has actually grown, albeit minimally, over the course of this year — even after countless courts have tossed out Big Lie-related litigation for lacking sound evidence to back up the Trumpy claims and even after politically-motivated election “audit” results have left much to be desired for the far-right proponents of the cause. Nonetheless, from PRRI: “This share has remained steady throughout 2021, in August (29%), June (30%), and March (29%).”

We went into the weekend thinking Congress was finally on the verge of passing a substantially reduced Build Back Better bill, at roughly $1.75 trillion. Joe Manchin was likely more involved in that negotiation than any other member of Congress. He just held a press conference on the Hill in which he not only refused to support it but actually trashed the whole proposal in entirely new ways – now saying he can’t vote on any version of it until he learns more about what’s happening on inflation, gets a report from the CBO and other complaints. He demanded a vote on the so-called BIF and said he’s open to voting against the whole Biden reconciliation bill.

One other dimension to this is that Manchin’s announcement came just as Democratic leadership seemed on the verge on getting House progressives to believe that they had the outlines of a recon bill covered and thus vote for the BIF in advance of a recon bill. In other words, he was about to get what he has claimed to have wanted: passing the BIF bill before reconciliation and still having leverage to shape the reconciliation bill after the rest of the party has surrendered its leverage. The odds of that happening now seem close to nil.

There’s a new PRRI study looking at American identity and probably the big takeaway is how much anti-democratic beliefs and openness to political violence have taken root in the GOP. I’m going to list here some of the findings. These are ones that stand out to me. Definitely worth reviewing the whole thing.

62% of Republicans believe being born in America is something that makes you truly American. 43% for Democrats. 63% say being a Christian is something that makes you “truly American”; 35% for Democrats.