The political press seems to be invested in the narrative that Joe Biden’s presidency is on the rocks after Democrats lost the governor’s race in Virginia and nearly lost New Jersey. In November, 2009, just one year after Barack Obama’s landslide victory, Democrats lost both the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, Eric Boehlert noted (11/4). But that didn’t end the Obama presidency. The following year he signed Obamacare into law and in 2012 he won re-election with relative ease.
“One thing that has clearly changed since then, though, is the caterwauling political press, which is treating Tuesday’s two-race results like a political earthquake that has all but destroyed Biden’s four-year term. Rushing to use every conceivable, hysterical adjective to describe a three point-loss in Virginia as the equivalent of the Democratic Party’s permanent demise, the press has eagerly lost all perspective and seems to relish the assignment of burying Biden. (WashingtonPost.com Wednesday night posted no less than 15 articles and columns about the Democratic loss.)
An “enormous hurdle that’s been erected since 2009 is that the Republican Party and the larger conservative movement now successfully traffic in uncontrollable lies, misinformation, and deranged conspiracies as part of their daily diet. They do it through a billion-dollar media machine that doubles as the propaganda arm of the GOP. And the press has shown little interest in confronting the trend,” Boehlert wrote.
“One of the strategic advantages that Republicans have is they’re able to feed their base propaganda and misinformation directly through their news outlets,” David Turner, senior strategist at the Democratic Governors Association, told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. “The Democratic Party needs to figure out ways to more actively court its base voters on a regular basis.”
The monumental challenge facing Democrats is how to counter a party and a movement that lies about everything, and a press corps that’s not willing to try to stop it. Or worse, a press corps that gladly helps spread the lies during a heated campaign season. The media’s critical race theory charade during the Virginia campaign was a perfect, and chilling, example. Republican Glenn Youngkin built his entire campaign around a pledge to ban CRT from Commonwealth schools, even though it’s not taught in Commonwealth schools. Instead of relentlessly detailing that lie, the campaign press toasted Younkgin for his savvy, race-baiting strategy, Boehlert wrote.
That’s when the press wasn’t turning a blind eye to the Youngkin campaign ad that blamed Democrat Terry McAuliffe for “covering up rape and sexual assault in our schools,” at a time when McAuliffe held no public office in Virginia. Beltway journalists also couldn’t have cared less about Youngkin’s claim that he wasn’t sure if humans were responsible for climate change, and never treated that quip as a damaging “gaffe.”
For weeks, it was clear the press viewed the Virginia race as a way to confirm its preferred narrative about a stumbling White House — that storyline determined coverage in all kinds of ways.
Here’s one small example. On Monday morning, the Dow Jones for the first time in history passed the 36,000 mark, as the stock market continues a robust one-year expansion. In fact, the Dow is up 10,000 points since Biden was elected. Typically, the press pays close attention to historic gains like that, and often uses the Dow to judge the strength of the economy and particularly uses it for political analysis to grade sitting presidents. But on Nov. 1, the history-making 36,000 marker was not mentioned once on cable news, according to TVeyes. Nor was it mentioned on the network evening newscasts that night. (When the Dow closed above 36,000 on Nov. 2, CNN referenced it three times the following day.)
Was it a coincidence that the milestone was ignored by the media at the same time they remain so committed to the storyline of a floundering Biden presidency, and that he’s spent the last three months dogged by “crises”? It’s certainly possible. There’s also likely a connection between the fact that Biden’s public approval for handling the economy is declining at a time when the press ignores his economic accomplishments.
Democrats are facing a mountain of challenges, including two intransigent senators who are blocking a legislative agenda that 99% of elected Democrats want passed and signed into law. They’re battling a GOP that long ago walked away from governing, and they’re facing off against an openly antagonistic press corps.
NOV. 2 WAS A GOOD DAY FOR DIVERSITY. While the Virginia election results overshadowed other races, the Nov. 2 election proved to be a good day for diversity, as Cincinnati elected its first Asian American mayor, New York City elected five Asian Americans onto its city council as well as a Black mayor, Boston elected its first Asian-American mayor, and Michigan elected three Muslim-American mayors. “We’ve also seen some great wins when it comes to openly LGBTQ+ folks,” Marissa Higgins noted at DailyKos (11/5).
The election of two openly gay men, Darin Mano and Alejandro Puy, to the Salt Lake City, Utah, Council makes four of seven people serving on the city council will be openly LGBTQ+, according to LGBTQ Nation. This is perhaps initially surprising given Utah’s reputation as a profoundly red, religiously conservative state, Higgins noted. But Salt Lake City is relatively progressive, and the state as a whole has made some significant progress in the right direction, despite its conservative stronghold. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, this is the first time the council will be a majority of people of color.
More than 80 openly LGBTQ+ candidates won elections across the country on Nov. 2. According to The Advocate, when the newly elected councillors are sworn in, there will be more than 1,000 openly queer elected officials, Higgins noted.
VOTERS OF THE MEQUON-THIENSVILLE SCHOOL DISTRICT CAN SEE WHAT’S GOING ON. CAN THE NATIONAL MEDIA? The Mequon-Thiensville School District has been roiled by controversy over the necessary measures—school closures, masking—the school board took to combat the pandemic, Charles Pierce noted at Esquire.com (11/3). “Because Wisconsin used to have good ideas by the bucketful, there are extensive procedures in the state for recall elections. These procedures have been used so extensively over the past year that Wisconsin had more recall petitions lodged against more school-board members than any state except California. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
The number of recall attempts against school board members this year in the US — 81 petitions against 209 members so far — is double the total of any previous year tallied by Ballotpedia, a Middleton-based nonprofit. Groups pushing for recalls, echoing nationwide Republican talking points, have said they wanted new board members who would reject guidance from health officials, make masks optional, and clamp down on teaching about the harms of racism.
“‘Echoing Republican talking points’ is nice. I do not believe in the power of coincidence in politics,” Pierce noted.
But there also is something else about this spate of recall elections, he noted. “They’ve all lost. Every damn one of them. In the Mequon-Thiensville School District, there were recall attempts against four members of the M-T school board. All four incumbents won fairly handily.” Again, from the J-S:
Over 11,600 ballots were cast. In the April Mequon-Thiensville school board election, there were 6,442 ballots cast, a turnout of about 30%. Recall organizers had pushed the message that academic achievement was declining in the district, arguing that the district’s pandemic safety measures and commitments to equity were contributing to that decline. They cited the district’s “seven milestones for success,” which have shown declines in recent years. Standardized test scores have declined statewide over the past two years as the pandemic disrupted classroom learning.
WISN, the ABC affiliate in Milwaukee, reported:
The effort was launched in August with a successful petition drive. The two sides have been at odds over COVID-19 protocols and critical race theory in schools. The campaign has also drawn high-profile backers, like conservative billionaire donor Richard Uihlein. It’s also ignited passions across these communities.
“It’s heated. It’s getting national attention because these are our babies. This is emotional. This isn’t some politician we’ve never met. This is our community, and these are our children,” recall organizer Amber Schroeder said.
“There is a national campaign against the public schools, funded by people like Richard Uihlein,” Pierce said. “This is a longstanding conservative goal, and the fauxtrage against “Critical Race Theory” is merely its latest, and most malignant, vehicle. And the ginned-up tantrums against the public-health measures regarding the pandemic is another vehicle, part and parcel of cynical political maneuvering that ended up killing people. And, as the Journal-Sentinel reported, the money behind this campaign doesn’t give much of a damn what kind of crackpots it tries to elect to further this campaign. Take Kris Kittell, one of the candidates supported by the people behind the M-T recall campaign.”
Kittell shared his post on his Facebook account: “It didn’t start with gas chambers. It started with one party controlling the media. One party controlling the message. One party deciding what is truth. One party silencing speech and silencing opposition. One party dividing citizens into ‘us’ and ‘them’ and calling on their supporters to harass ‘them.’ It started when good people turned a blind eye and let it happen.” The post also included the letters “WWG1WGA,” an abbreviation often used by QAnon that stands for “Where we go one, we go all.”
Pierce concluded: “My point, at which we have now arrived, is that it is possible to beat the crazy into a fine pulp, at least at the local level. We all agree that Wisconsin, the birthplace of so much of American progressivism as the 19th century became the 20th, went a little nuts at the turn of the last century. But even with that, not one of these recall elections has succeeded, not even this last one, which had the attention of the national media, and which was driven by the same dark money that helped elect Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. The crazy was beaten on the ground, through the hard work of door-to-door local politics. But it takes a lot of grinding grunt work that never will get you into a cable-news greenroom. And it takes a political party willing to spend more time on that than on courting a hopeless elite national campaign media, which has shown less ability to recognize the rise of idiot fascism than did the voters of the Mequon-Thiensville School District, who can rest easily—for a while, anyway. And that’s all I have to say about Election Night 2021.”
OCTOBER JOBS GROWTH EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS. The October jobs report was a burst of good economic news, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (11/5). Not only did job creation exceed expectations in October with 531,000 new jobs added, but the previously disappointing jobs reports from August and September were revised upward by a combined 235,000. That adds up to a three-month job creation average of 442,000 a month.
In other good news, women gained 57% of new jobs added, the National Women’s Law Center reports, after a disproportionate number of jobs lost during the pandemic were women’s. The unemployment rate ticked up among women, likely because of women reentering the labor force but not having found jobs yet.
The recovery is still incomplete and unequal, though. Among women, 292,000 of those reentering the labor force were white and 114,000 were Hispanic—but 52,000 Black women left the labor force. More than 1.7 million women are still out of the labor force as compared with February 2020, as compared with 1.2 million men.
The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.6%, but continued to highlight racial inequities. The white unemployment rate is 4%, while the Black unemployment rate is nearly twice as high at 7.9%.
“Payroll employment is still down 4.2 million from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould tweeted. “But the real job shortfall is more likely to be in the range of 5.5 to 8.2 million using reasonable counterfactuals to absorb working age population growth or pre-pandemic trends.”
While overall jobs growth was good in October, the gap in state and local government jobs grew, largely due to seasonally adjusted losses in education jobs. State and local governments “are down 928,000 since Feb ’20—most of that, 574,000, in education,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz tweeted, calling for the governments to use American Rescue Plan funds to close that gap.
PROGRESSIVE GROUPS WARN OF GOP ATTACK ON 2022 ELECTIONS. Citing “unprecedented and coordinated” Republican efforts to undermine public trust in the US electoral system, 58 advocacy groups warned of the need defend democracy ahead of the 2022 midterm elections—including by passing the Freedom to Vote Act.
“Our democracy faces an existential threat—the very real possibility that the outcome of an election could be ignored and the will of the people overturned by hyperpartisan actors,” the groups, including MoveOn.org, Protect Democracy, Public Citizen, SEIU and the Sierra Club, assert in an open letter, Brett Wilkins noted at CommonDreams (11/8)
“Since the 2020 election, we have seen unprecedented and coordinated efforts to cast doubt on the U.S. election system,” the letter states. “These efforts have taken many forms,” the authors explain, including “widespread disinformation campaigns and baseless claims of election fraud ... intimidation of election officials and administrators just for doing their jobs, new state laws to make election administration more partisan and more susceptible to manipulation or sabotage, and outright violence.”
Noting that “exaggerated and unsubstantiated fears about voter fraud have been a vote suppression tool for some time,” the letter argues that “these efforts took on entirely new ferocity with the advent of former President [Donald] Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ regarding the 2020 presidential election.”
“The danger posed by the concerted effort to spread disinformation and undermine confidence in our elections is not hypothetical or speculative,” the authors assert. “We have already seen tragic consequences in the form of a violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.”
“Despite the fact that experts across the political spectrum—including Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security—have confirmed that the 2020 election was as free, fair, and secure as any in American history, Trump and his supporters have done all they can to cast doubt on the integrity of the process,” the letter says.
“We must push back on dangerous state initiatives that endanger democracy; Congress must enact critical provisions to protect federal elections and elections officials from partisan attacks and subversion, such as those included in the Freedom to Vote Act; and legal remedies must be brought to bear as needed,” the coalition says.
“Further, elected officials and public servants at all levels must condemn attacks on the processes that allow for free and fair democratic election, free of partisanship,” the signers add.
Many of the groups that signed the letter also support abolishing the Senate filibuster, a procedure historically used to block civil rights legislation—as recently as Republicans blocking the Freedom to Vote Act in late October.
TRUMP SANK TRUST IN US ELECTION BY MORE THAN 40 POINTS. It’s now standard practice for Donald Trump and his henchmen to declare a “stolen” election in advance of every big contest with national implications. And an NBC News poll released Nov. 1 shows that Trump’s incessant and baseless lying about 2020 has primed Republican voters to believe something is afoul whenever an election doesn’t go their way, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (11/5).
The NBC poll found that Trump eroded Republicans’ faith in the notion that their voted will be counted accurately by more than 40 points from October 2020 to October 2021.
“Last year, 84% of Republicans said they were confident in the vote count, about on par with Democrats. But now, 41% of Republicans share that view, while 50% say they are not confident their vote will be counted accurately,” writes NBC.
That giant drop in confidence is anomalous among Republicans. Confidence among independents that their vote will be counted, for instance, dropped by less than 10 points since last year—from 84% confident last year to 76% confident this year. That’s a notable dent, but it pales in comparison to the rise in distrust among Republicans.
Republican views of whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected also stood apart in the poll, with a meager 22% of them saying Biden’s victory was legitimate, while 71% of independents and 93% of Democrats believe Biden was legitimately elected.
Overall, two-thirds of all Americans said they were confident their vote would be counted fairly compared to 85% who said that last year—a nearly 20-point decrease mainly attributable to Republicans.
Trump’s success in stoking distrust of US elections among his fervent base now poses a domestic terror threat to the country. A Public Religion Research Institute poll (11/1) found 30% of Republicans agreed with the idea that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” The sentiment was particularly high among those who said they believed 2020 was “stolen” from Trump, with 39% of that cohort endorsing potential violence.
SMALL TOWN IN N. CALIFORNIA DECLARES ITSELF ‘CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC.’ The city council of Oroville on a 6-1 vote (11/2) declared the town a “constitutional republic,” which can declare state and federal government orders it considers “unconstitutional,” null and void. The move is largely in response to COVID-19-related restrictions and vaccine mandates, particularly those imposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“I proposed it after 18 months of increasingly intrusive executive mandates and what I felt to be excessive overreach by our government,” said Vice Mayor Scott Thomson, the resolution’s main sponsor. “After the failed recall in California, our state governor seems to [be] on a rampage and the mandates are getting more intrusive. Now he’s going after our kids and schools,” David Neiwert wrote at DailyKos (11/5).
However, one member of the council noted that the city receives millions of dollars in federal support, and wondered: “Will Oroville be able to stand alone and sustain itself?”
Oroville’s city attorney, Scott Huber, quickly assured her: “I am quite certain that this would not result in any loss of funding for the city. In the event that it could in the future you could revise this and do what you will but this is not going to put it jeopardy any state or federal funding.”
Lisa Pruitt, a rural law expert at the University of California-Davis, told *The Guardian* that the empty gesture does not grant Oroville more power or the ability to ignore state law.
“It seems to make the people of Oroville feel better that their city council has made this gesture but as a practical matter it doesn’t make any difference,” Pruitt said.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2021
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