Dear Republicans
What you need to know about sharing the ticket with an unpopular president.
This week Robin Whetstone offers another chapter from her Moscow memoir, Red Ticket, in which she shops for a birthday present for her boyfriend. My friend Maggie Smith, best known for her 2016 poem “Good Bones” (“Life is short, though I keep this from my children…”), offers us a new poem, “A Room Like This.” People, this is a big day for me. The world might be at least fifty percent terrible, but today’s pretty good if we’ve got a new Maggie Smith poem to read.
And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to, including a seminal Sam Cooke live album I rediscovered.
But first, let me tell my Republican friends a little something:
Let’s get one thing straight: I’ve helped elect a lot of people. I stopped counting after electing or re-electing more than three dozen members of congress, and there were too many state legislators elected to ever start counting in the first place. There were a couple red-state governors that I helped flip red to blue, and two members of Obama’s cabinet owed their first big wins in small part to my work. But if you learn more from losing than from winning, I have the practical equivalent of a PhD in political science, because hoo doggie.
My first night was my worst. As deputy press secretary, I helped take Ann Richards from sky-high approval ratings to a big loss against an amiable near-namesake of a one-term president. That this was a historically bad night for my party compounded my misery, which I carried around my neck for twenty years before I allowed that the end of Ann Richards’ political career might not have been completely my fault.
I recovered just in time to help a Democrat lose to Rick Perry, a historically unpopular governor who only got 39% of the vote. Four years later, about half my clients lost their seats in the tea party wave of 2010. Four years after that, the other half lost. When I left politics after two decades, the party that I had toiled for was worse off than when I started. My career as a political consultant is kind of like Donald Trump’s business career. I would have been better off doing nothing.
So to my Republican friends, I get it. You’ve got an unpopular president, and he’s dragging down the rest of the ticket. I’m going to run through some data here, and to quote Jude Law in Closer, this will hurt:
Hillary Clinton won women by 13% in 2016, a record; Biden’s leading them with 26%.
Seniors have backed the Republican nominee every election since George W. Bush beat John Kerry. Trump carried them by 8% in 2016; in June, seniors preferred Biden by anywhere from 2% to 8%.
The latest Quinnipiac poll found 71% saying they are somewhat or very dissatisfied with the way things are going; Monmouth has the wrong track at 74%. In 2014, which was a wave election, 69% of Americans thought things were headed in the wrong direction.
The generic congressional ballot, which asks which party you’d prefer run things in congress, gives Democrats an average 11% lead. In 2010, Republicans went into Election Day with a 9.4% lead on the generic ballot, and they won big. In 2018, Democrats won big with a 7.3% advantage, and then they won big. If the generic ballot were a windsock, right now it would be pointing straight out. It’s a good time to be selling Democratic surfboards, because a wave’s coming.
Biden leads in all the 2016 battleground states in the Rust Belt. The 2020 battleground is in the Sun Belt. Trump is playing defense in Arizona and Georgia.
Nathan Gonzalez, who heads the nonpartisan Inside Elections website, just moved a lot of senate races to the left. Alaska and South Carolina are no longer solidly Republican. Georgia and Texas are no longer likely Republican. Iowa and Montana are toss-ups. Arizona is tilting D. The betting line on Predictit.org isn’t on whether there will be a Democratic majority but how large it will be.
It’s important in politics not to freak out unnecessarily. It’s good to be the calmest one in the room and to project quiet confidence when everyone else is losing heart, because when you do sound the alarm, you want people to believe a wolf is out there.
To my Republican friends: This is where you scream.
This will not blow over. This isn’t a mood. We’ve got an economic recession sliding into a depression thanks to the botched response to a pandemic inflamed by the exposed nerve of racism. To create this in the lab, you’d have to combined the presidential elections of 1920, 1932, and 1968, plug it into the internet, and then go hide in a cave because you’ve probably created SkyNet.
This isn’t a political problem of perception. These are actual problems exacerbated by political failures. Normal political problems have abstract consequences quantified in poll numbers. This one has body counts, jobs lost, and death tolls, and it’s not happening in hearing rooms or on cable TV hits but in our streets, hospitals, offices, and homes.
Treating the whole world like a reflection of your own grandeur works a lot better when the world’s a lot grander. We’ve got a President who takes everything personally, which doesn’t work as well when everything is bad and impacts the voters personally.
One option for good-faith Republicans would be good-faith efforts to fix the problems, but we’re seeing what is happening to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who belatedly and half-heartedly is trying to close down their cities and counties to stop the spiking caseload in Texas. Already, 78 counties have opted not to enforce his rules. In some counties where cases are numerous enough to trigger mandatory limits, local Republican officials are just refusing to do so. The Republican parties of nine counties have even passed resolutions condemning the governor for tyranny for making people wear face masks.
“My party is dead,” a Republican operative friend messaged me this morning. “The inmates are running the asylum.”
Abbott is a good example of the box that all Republican officials are in. Doing the right thing — to obey the laws of epidemiology — shows the President disloyalty, which earns the enmity of Republican voters. This President takes expert advice as personal criticism. In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out a report about the dangers pregnant women faced with the coronavirus; an adviser to a top Health and Human Services Department official — that is, one of the President’s men — accused the CDC of “undermining the President.”
Panic is setting in among those who know better, giving rise to the ridiculous. A friend texted yesterday: “I’m putting apx zero stock in this, but a GOP friend of a mine was talking to a friend of his... who ‘strongly implied Pence’s team is looking for a way to get him off the ticket.’”
That same day, the Washington Post had an account of Frank Luntz briefing GOP senators recommending they create daylight between them and the President without disavowing him. Dan Bartlett, formerly of the second Bush White House and now of Walmart, calls that “Getting Luntzed,” i.e., when someone shows up and gives you either unasked for advice or advice that is entirely useless. This is the latter.
Tim Miller, a former Jeb Bush comms director and spokesmodel for the RNC, knows exactly how impossible creating that daylight is. In what might be the most shocking thing I’ve read this year — I know, I know, but really — he anonymously and separately interviewed several of his former Republican operative friends about how bad it is, what hope they have, and what options they see. First off, they all know that a sharply improving economy is the Republicans’ only hope. Let me go on record to speak for all Democrats, independents, druids, designated hitters, and other ne’er-do-wells that we are all rooting for a better economy regardless of who benefits politically. A better economy means less suffering as well as getting the pandemic under control. But that wasn’t even close to the shocking part.
Want to know what the number one issue for Republican primary voters is? More than any issue that has defined the GOP for a generation — tax cuts, strong military, law & order, tax cuts, “the gays,” cutting taxes, abortion, cutting more taxes, God, guns, LIBERTY!, and, lest I forget, tax cuts — Republican voters prioritize a candidate’s loyalty to Donald Trump. One consultant characterized his support from conservatives as “Saddam Hussein level numbers.” And that was surprising but still not the most shocking thing in Miller’s piece.
A little backstory: When I was a Democratic consultant, we regularly had conversations on conference calls about creating daylight with our unpopular standard bearers. In 1994, my mentor C.M. famously said of Bill Clinton, “We are not running toward President Clinton, and we are not running away from President Clinton.” That worked, sort of. My friend B.D. found that the following language for a ‘90s Kentucky Democrat polled well: “I’ll be with him when he’s right for Kentucky, and I’ll disagree with him when he’s wrong.” Under Barack Obama, I was in the room with a Florida congressman when he made his decision on how to vote for Obamacare. The choice was between whether he wanted to vote against it and lose in the primary or vote for it and take a chance in the general. He was one of the last votes to get on board for Obamacare; he did not survive November.
These conversations are no less useful to a republican democracy for their self-interest and calculation. This is, to borrow a phrase, what democracy looks like, or used to. But according to Miller, these conversations are not even happening in private among most Republican campaign teams.
[A]ll of the consultants but two said they haven’t even had a conversation about the possibility of distancing from Trump with any of their candidates or campaign teams. Another put it this way: “The idea of distancing, if it’s discussed, it’s discussed very quietly, it’s discussed one-on-one. You wouldn’t talk about it on a conference call…maybe someone would, but let’s just say it hasn’t happened yet and I’m on a lot of those calls.”
Sit with that for a second. The idea of separating from Trump is so verboten in GOP circles that the best consultants won’t even talk about talking about doing it in mixed company, for fear of being stigmatized, and thus losing potential client work on other campaigns.
Dear Republicans: God bless you, but you’re fighting a losing fight for Trump and not the Republican Party. By turning every honest analysis of a global crisis into a personal criticism, Trump has turned the party of Lincoln into a party of, and, for, and by Trump precisely when it should be about helping the American people. A third of American households cannot pay the rent. The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 is edging closer to the combined totals of Americans killed in action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, Vietnam, and WWI combined. A huge majority of the country believes Black Lives Matter and that we need to do something about it.
If you keep doing things the way you have been, you’re going to get the same result, except now the consequences are not the abstract degradation of democratic norms but death, poverty, and racism in every single city of the United States of America.
I have heard your private admissions for four years that you think Trump is unfit for office, and believe me, I understand that you feel hectored by secular society and the liberal media, but my dude. It’s time to speak up for what you and I both know is right. It doesn’t take a focus group to know what the reaction will be when you say after the fact that you were with Americans all along. It’ll sound like you were just following orders. Look at the polling in the senate races. It’s time. It’s us or him. You have to choose whether you’re with Trump, or you’re with America, because God bless you, but you can’t be both.
Red Ticket: Where Shopping Is a Pressure
by Robin Whetstone
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. This week, Robin goes shopping for a birthday present.
Across the street, a long line of people rounded the corner and disappeared down the block. I walked across the street and got at the end of it. Would it end with lipstick from Poland? Oranges from the brand-new Czech Republic? It didn’t matter. When you saw a long line in Moscow, you stood in it, because if someone else wanted it, it was worth having. Of course, I remembered. This was how you bought things here. You stood in line.
A Room Like This
by Maggie Smith
My friend Maggie Smith is the author of four books, most recently Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017) and the forthcoming Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (One Signal/Simon & Schuster, 2020). Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Poetry, The Believer, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Paris Review. A freelance writer and editor, Smith is on the poetry faculty of Spalding University’s MFA program and serves as an Editor at Large for the Kenyon Review. This is her debut in The Experiment, a statement of truth that nevertheless explores new limits in absurdity. I am grateful for her contribution and hold her dear.
Bear cub,
you were a growling creature
all your own, not of my body
the way they’d told me
you would be
RIP
How we’re getting through this
Drinking boxed wine
Making trash cocktails
Wearing masks more often
Recalculating how old dog are
Making my own cold brew coffee
Abiding according to Andy Warhol’s philosophy
Making granola with dried cherries, ginger, and walnuts
Making delicious summer shrimp scampi with tomatoes and corn
Buying this Austin band’s T-shirt to benefit the Austin Justice Coalition
What I’m reading
Jabari Asim: “Some Call it God”
Axios: “Trump's failing culture wars”
Shirley Carswell: “Why news organizations’ move to capitalize ‘Black’ is a win”
Citylab: “The Dying Mall’s New Lease on Life: Apartments”
CJR: “Tuned Out: Andy Lack and MSNBC’s identity crises”
Adom Cooper: “U.S. ‘National Security’ Must Apply to the Entire Nation”
Daily Beast: “Right-Wing Media Outlets Duped by a Middle East Propaganda Campaign”
Ronald Brownstein: “Trump’s America Is Slipping Away”
Daniel W. Drezner: “How it could get so much worse for Donald Trump”
Twanna Hines: “What Do Protests Accomplish? 5 Global Lessons From Demonstrations Over Floyd’s Murder”
Mayor Betsy Hodges: “As Mayor of Minneapolis, I Saw How White Liberals Block Change”
Ryan Holiday: “Every Situation Has Two Handles”
“Every event has two handles,” Epictetus said, “one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t. If your brother does you wrong, don’t grab it by his wronging, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other—that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle that carries.”
Alex Horton: “‘The military’s #MeToo’: In wake of Vanessa Guillén death, servicewomen bear deep scars”
Rates of violent crimes are lower among service members than they are for civilians, analysts have said, owing to more severe punishment for offenders, lack of pre-service criminal records and other circumstances.
But researchers in the 1990s found “military rape rates are not reduced nearly as much as military rates of ‘other’ violent crime, relative to civilian rates.”
That dynamic continues to play out. A 2019 Pentagon review of sexual assault at military service academies found the crime’s prevalence “is comparable to rates observed in civilian colleges.”
Soraya Nadia McDonald: “Five years ago, ‘Hamilton’ turned a revolution into a revelation — what now?”
TNR: “The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism: The critics of progressive identity politics have got it all wrong: They’re the illiberal ones.”
NYT: “Debating ‘Hamilton’ as It Shifts From Stage to Screen”
Pew Research Center: “Local news is playing an important role for Americans during COVID-19 outbreak”
Ross Ramsey: “Analysis: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is lucky not to be on the 2020 ballot”
David Roth: “How ‘Starship Troopers’ Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat”
Damon Young: “Yeah, Let’s Not Talk About Race”
What I’m watching
Loved Netflix’s documentary on Sam Cooke. Ditto Star Trek: Discover on CBS All Access, which S.N.V. and I judge the best of all franchises.
Lovebirds on Netflix was slight, but it had one perfect joke in response to the bad guy’s flex about how many people he killed that day.
We’ve been watching a lot of Hamilton around here, which has re-introduced my sons to the concept of Dad Crying and sent me down familiar rabbit holes. Even Jimmy Fallon could not ruin the original Hamilton cast & The Roots singing "Helpless" with at-home instruments. The video of Lin-Manuel Miranda performing "Alexander Hamilton" at The White House is still a classic. And I’m linking to the PBC documentary about Hamilton here so I can watch it later.
As a former speechwriter, “One Last Time” kills me, but my favorite performance is not from the stage version but the Obama White House, when a Black actor portrayed a slave-owning president in a building built by enslaved people. And sitting in the audience was the first Black president and, perhaps, the next president. I am undone.
What I’m listening to
I was surprised how much I agreed with David Frum in his appearance on The Daily Stoic podcast.
It’s easy to denigrate an era’s pop music by hunting the slow and injured tracks, and for a long time we’ve slotted the ‘80s as a decade of weak pop music, ignoring the Talking Heads, Prince, Madonna, and others who made it an epoch. But take them all off the table and evaluate the ‘80s solely on Was (Not Was)’s “I Feel Better Than James Brown” and tell me that some cool stuff wasn’t happening then. I mean, “Walk the Dinosaur”? C’mon, man.
The Netflix documentary about Sam Cooke reminded me how much I loved Live at The Harlem Square Club, 1963.
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