From a TPM Reader PH trying to find out what their Rep’s position is on Paul Ryan’s Medicare Phaseout plan.
Just called my Rep., Pete Roskam’s (R-IL06) DC office. The young guy I spoke to asked me unprompted if I was calling about Steve Bannon. He sounded as if he’s taken a lot of calls today.
I’ve been doing running updates about this on Twitter. But I wanted to mention that Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead has just topped 1 million votes and it will likely go substantially higher. As I write, the exact number is 1,002,296.
I follow the vote spreadsheet put together by David Wasserman of The Cook Political Report and 538.
We’ve discussed a number of times since Black Tuesday that the idea of a unified Republican government is in many ways quite misleading. I’m not being Pollyannaish. This does not mean it’s good news for people who are progressives and/or Democrats. But the ‘unified’ part of that phrase makes no sense.
The House is back in business for the first time since the election. As Lauren Fox reports, everyone donning “The Make America Great Again” hats and singing the praises of Donald J. Trump couldn’t mask the cognitive dissonance that until a week ago it was every member for himself to survive having Trump as the party’s nominee.
One member captured it well:
Donald Trump is on Twitter this morning complaining about people talking about his losing the popular vote in the 2016 election.
Michael Gerrard is the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, an Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Law School and a member of The Earth Institute. He’ll be dropping by the Hive on Thursday to discuss what the presidency means for climate change and the environment, as well as to take your questions on climate change law. Drop them in here at or before 2 p.m. ET on Thursday, Nov. 17th, and see you then! If you want to participate but aren’t a Prime member, sign up here.
The last thing I was thinking about after last week’s shattering election results was Prime signups. But in the aftermath of the election, lots of readers started signing up for Prime. Not quite a gusher but a lot. Since Wednesday we’ve had 705 new signups which, to give you some perspective, is out of a total membership of 16,908. Going by the emails and messages we’ve gotten, people are signing up because they see our role in the news ecosystem as newly important. That is the kind of thing I would be chary of saying myself but is very heartening to hear from readers. We appreciate the confidence. We will do our best to live up to that confidence. If you find value in what we do and believe it will be even more valuable in the coming year, there’s never been a better time to subscribe and support it. Just click right here.
If you’ve been listening to my new podcast I think you’ll like this one. You won’t want to miss it. My former colleague Josh Green of Bloomberg Businessweek has been reporting on Steve Bannon for several years and had a lot of access into the Trump campaign and particularly their analytics and data team down in San Antonio. In this episode we talk about how Trump won, why no one – including the Trump campaign – saw it coming and the hints the Trump team got in late October about newly activated white rural voters. Fascinating stuff. Along with other information I gleaned from within the Clinton campaign it helped me finally get a clearer picture of just what happened. I hope you enjoy. Click here.
CNN is reporting that Donald Trump wants security clearances for his children and son-in-law. Unclear from the report whether this includes Barron.
A number of TPM Readers have written in having called their Reps and Senators about Paul Ryan’s Medicare Phaseout Plan. Not surprisingly, most readers are hearing that the people on the phone say they don’t know anything about it, that the Rep or Senator doesn’t have a position, or that they refuse to disclose what their position is.