By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, January 4, 2018)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

In the latest Gallup Poll, President Donald Trump has reached a 40 percent job approval rating for the first time since late September.

While not great — no elected president has been this low this early in his presidency — it does represent a significant improvement for Trump from the low 30s he saw in early December 2016.

Are we at a pivot point in Trump’s presidency where more and more independents and weak partisans are starting to give Donald Trump and the GOP another chance? Is the passing of the Trump tax bill, the growing strength of the U.S. economy, and the territorial defeat of ISIS giving some Americans a reason to reconsider their view of this president and his party?

In just a few months, some Americans will see perceptible increases in their after-tax disposable income as a result of the new law — especially in red states where the Republicans need to rebuild and reinforce their support going into the 2018 midterms.

Still, the Democrats and #TheResistance are not going to yield an inch to Trump and the GOP for an imbalanced tax cut that gives 50 percent of the benefits to the top 1 percent of Americans. And, on the objective merits, they shouldn’t.

But for a large swath of the American electorate, when it comes to taxes, they simply are not the ideologues the Democrats want them to be. They are too busy working hard and paying bills and they just don’t begrudge wealthy people getting wealthier.

If the Democrats are convincing themselves that the GOP will pay dearly at the ballot box for passing the Trump tax bill, they may be disappointed on the morning of November 7th.

When New York Senator Chuck Schumer says, “Republicans have directed a lion’s share of the benefits to the already wealthy, the already powerful corporate America and the rich,” he may be factually correct, but he fails to appreciate an almost vicious streak of schadenfreude that colors the views of many Americans.

That’s a bit harsh, I suppose. But when you compare American attitudes to Europeans’ about personal responsibility, empowerment, and economic outcomes, Americans are much less likely to believe their life’s outcome is determined by uncontrollable social forces (Source: Pew Research, 2011).

As to their society’s priorities, Americans are also much more likely than Europeans to prioritize “freedom to pursue life’s goals” over eliminating poverty (Source: Pew Research, 2011).

Collectivism and empathy simply do not define American culture. If they did, would we be ignoring this country’s opioid epidemic, or shrugging off the millions of Americans that will once again (though often by their own choice) not have health insurance, or turning our backs to the consequences of the Syrian civil war we helped instigate?

We can be generous in our charity. According to Gallup, 85 percent of Americans give money to charities each year.

But charitable giving is not the same as empathy and it should not surprise us when tens of millions of Americans walk into the voting booth next November and vote for the party led by a man who is an alleged sexual assaulter, shows more compassion towards racists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia than Puerto Rican Americans still reeling from the aftermath of a Category 4/5 hurricane, has no fear of nuclear brinkmanship, shows little capacity to empathize with others, and has only a casual relationship with the truth or the basic knowledge necessary to be president.

The America people have a staggering capacity not to give a sh*t about most things.

This cynical assessment of the American people, while not entirely fair, moderates my expectations for the Democrats in the midterm elections.

Yes, standing just eleven months out from the midterm elections, it is hard to fathom the Democrats not crushing the GOP in November. The media’s coverage of #TheResistance and #MeToo movements in 2017 is far more positive than its coverage of the Tea Party in 2010.

Yet, I can feel it in my bone marrow. The Democrats are going to blow it — and on an Hindenburg/Titanic scale.

But what are the data telling us?

The PredictIt futures market gives the Democrats a 64 percent chance of gaining control of the U.S. House and a 45 percent chance of controlling the U.S. Senate.

But that is the same futures market that predicted a Hillary Clinton landslide electoral college victory a day before Election Day last year.

This is partly why we prefer econometric models for election predictions.

In an earlier column, NuQum.com analysts offered a simple predictive model for U.S. House midterm elections. The model variables are as follows:

• Dependent variable: House seats net gain/loss for president’s party in midterm elections.
• Independent variables:
  • Gallup’s presidential job approval average from August to October in the election year,
  • real disposable personal income (RDPI) growth (average for 1st two quarters of the election year, seasonally-adjusted),
  • an indicator variable for post-Watergate Republican administrations, and
  • the incumbent party’s net gain/loss from the previous midterm election.

The statistical model’s specification is as follows:

NuQum.com’s current prediction, where Trump approval is at 40 percent and real disposable income growth at around 3.6 percent (which is historically high), is that the GOP will lose 25 seats in the midterm elections — right at the cutoff point where the Democrats regain control of the House.

The NuQum.com model puts a heavy emphasis on the economy and our current assumption of an unusually strong economy in 2018 is critical to its midterm prediction.

The bottom line is, if the economy continues to grow at a steady pace where people feel it and Trump can find a way to get his approval numbers over 41 percent, the GOP has an even chance of keeping control of the U.S. House.

After almost two years of breathless coverage of the Trump-Russian collusion investigation, and an almost daily offering of ill-considered Trump tweets or other manifestations of Trump’s cruel brand of narcissism, the Democrats may still find themselves in the minority in the U.S. House after the midterms.

If that happens…there will be hell to pay in the Democratic Party.

Well, rather, there should be hell to pay…

K. R. K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, January 4, 2018)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

If it wasn’t there already, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative has officially entered the Twilight Zone.

We can thank the entire news and media establishment for our collective decline in understanding what really happened in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Most recently, The New York Times now wants you to believe the U.S. intelligence communities’ inquiry into the Trump-Russia collusion started with an Australian diplomat’s passing on a conversation he had with Trump campaign surrogate George Papadopoulos.

This assertion is absurd on its face. Prior to working on the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos’ biggest foreign policy achievement was participation in the Model UN, an educational simulation in which students learn about diplomacy.

And, if you swallow the new ‘Papadopoulos started it all’ story line, you also have to believe this young man in the middle of the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy thought it was OK to tell a senior Australian diplomat about one of the key elements in the plot (i.e., obtaining Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 deleted emails). Drunk or not, it is utterly implausible that someone could be that stupid. If it had been Eric Trump spilling the beans, maybe I could believe it.

From that farcical story premise, we are now told (by The New York Times‘ anonymous sources) that a FISA judge used information from that source to authorize the U.S. intelligence community to spy on anyone associated with the Trump presidential campaign. If a FISA judge approved that request, he or she needs to be immediately removed from the bench.

By all accounts, Papadopoulos was a foreign policy expert wannabe who, through a serpentine network of social and business connections, wormed his way into Donald Trump’s informal circle of campaign foreign policy advisers. That this could happen is a serious indictment of the Trump campaign’s competency.

More importantly, the Papadopoulos story suggests the Trump campaign’s desire to find “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the Spring of 2016 was relegated to the lowest ranks of the campaign operation. Amateur-level political chicanery this may have been, but collusion with the Russians this was not.

The National Review’s Andrew McCarthy lays waste to the Times‘ story:

McCarthy writes:

“Papadopoulos was told that the Russians had ’emails of Clinton.’ But the hacked emails that were published (in Summer 2016) were not Clinton’s emails; they were those of the DNC and John Podesta — exceedingly few of which Clinton was even included on, much less participated in. Given the amount of misinformation the credulous Papadopoulos was given (one of his interlocutors falsely posed as Putin’s niece), the likelihood is that he was being toyed with: Remember, there was much speculation at the time, including by Trump himself, that the Russians (and other foreign intelligence services) might have hacked former secretary Clinton’s unsecure private server and obtained the 30,000-plus emails that she refused to surrender to the State Department; it is probable that these were the emails Papadopoulos’s dubious Russian connections purported to be dangling.

In fact, rumors that the Russians possessed Hillary Clinton’s 30,000-plus deleted emails had been circulating as early as the Fall of 2015. A CBS News report on the rumor was published on September 30, 2015.

McCarthy further writes:

“There is no evidence that Papadopoulos or the Trump campaign was ever shown or given any of the emails the Kremlin purportedly had. The evidence, in fact, undermines the collusion narrative: If the Trump campaign had to learn, through Papadopoulos, that Russia supposedly had thousands of emails damaging to Clinton, that would necessarily mean the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia’s acquisition of the emails. This, no doubt, is why Mueller permitted Papadopoulos to plead guilty to a mere process crime — lying in an FBI interview. If there were evidence of an actual collusion conspiracy, Papadopoulos would have been pressured to admit guilt to it. He wasn’t.”

So what possibly could have inspired the Trump campaign to condone a marginal figure like Papadopoulos to represent the campaign on foreign soil?

In all likelihood, the campaign leadership didn’t. [That is what President Trump has been saying]. But if the campaign did, it was most likely part of a broader effort to find as much “dirt” on Hillary Clinton as they could find. All avenues of inquiry were probably considered, including Russian-sourced.

It is even possible this meant active coordination with Putin surrogates; but, as yet, there is sparse evidence of that level of cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

The media spotlight has been especially focused on a June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, then Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York. Veselnitskaya’s claim to have “dirt” on Hillary Clinton proved erroneous, according to Trump Jr.

Not widely emphasized in media reports on the Trump Tower meeting is the connection between Veselnitskaya and the firm hired by the Clinton campaign to do opposition research against Donald Trump.

What we know is that the Clinton campaign helped finance an effort to collect “dirt” on Donald Trump through Fusion GPS, a commercial research and strategic intelligence firm based in Washington, D.C., and Christopher Steele, a retired British intelligence professional.

Curiously, Veselnitskaya had met with representatives of Fusion GPS both before and after the Trump Tower meeting, presumably as part of a contracted lobbying effort to repeal The Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law intended to punish Russian officials responsible for the death of Russian tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky.

I’d almost believe the Russians and Clinton campaign worked together to set up the Trump campaign. Or, perhaps, the Russians were working both sides of the equation, making the 2016 election a win-win proposition regardless of the electoral outcome.

As for the Steele dossier, it is little more than opposition research commissioned by political actors dedicated to discrediting Donald Trump. It is not serious intelligence reporting, even if created by a respected former British intelligence officer. Any senior FBI intelligence analyst or FISA judge would recognize the Steele dossier as less than reliable intelligence. Yet, we know it was used to some degree by the Justice Department to authorize intelligence collection on Trump campaign surrogates.

The dossier’s existence and its orbit around a FISA request to collect intelligence on the Trump campaign begs the following questions: (1) Did the FBI verify the dossier before using it in an application to the FISA court? and (b) did the Justice Department even tell the FISA court who produced the dossier?

Before we tear down another presidential administration, the American people have the right — and need — to know the contents of the Justice Department’s FISA Court request.

===================================================================

Are there any credible theories left in the Trump-Russia collusion story?

Three million dollars have been spent so far by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of FBI investigators and four people have already been indicted or plead guilty to charges filed.

More indictments and guilty pleas are in the pipeline, according to the usual unnamed sources.

The indictments so far have focused on financial misdeeds unrelated to the Trump-Russia collusion story and the guilty pleas have been related to process crimes, not conspiracy crimes.

There is still no evidence of any conspiracy or collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

But that doesn’t stop the conjecture.

Journalist Michael Wolff’s forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” quotes former Trump adviser Steve Bannon as saying the Trump Tower meeting between Trump Jr., and Veselnitskaya was “treasonous.”

As currently reported, it wasn’t.

It may have been ill-advised, ham-handed, and stupid…but it was not treasonous. Did Donald Trump himself know about the meeting? Probably, but so what.

There are other more important questions surrounding the Trump campaign that will not go away any time soon.

First, the FBI is reviewing the financial records of Trump himself, The Trump Organization, Trump’s family members, and his campaign staff, including Trump’s real estate activities as the relate to Russia. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is considered by many observers to be a central figure in this element of the Mueller investigation.

Few of us would survive unscathed from an FBI audit of our tax and financial histories and, if Bannon is correct, Kushner’s financial interests are so “greasy” they will attract significant Mueller probe attention.

In hiring some of the country’s top money laundering experts, including Andrew Weissmann, a former senior Justice Department official with expertise in financial crimes, the Mueller probe is going in a direction that is hard to predict. Early conjecture is on the investigation taking a deep dive into the Trump organization’s Deutsche Bank loans, which added up to $364 million at the end of 2016.

New York University law professor Ryan Goodman suggests that Mueller could be determining if Trump has bank loans guaranteed by Russian interests. Considered in isolation, that would not be a financial crime; but, if the loans are Russian-backed, it would underscore a larger narrative that President Trump’s repeated acquiescence to Russian leader Vladimir Putin is at least partially tied to business debts.

Second, it doesn’t take an actual conspiracy for Mueller to catch Trump and his associates on process crimes. General Michael Flynn can attest to that. Undoubtedly, lawyers have already advised any Trump associates before their FBI interviews, including the President himself, that lying to the FBI while under oath is a federal crime. Regardless of the warning, someone always screws up.

Third, President Trump has committed enough unforced errors surrounding his firing of FBI Director James Comey to suggest it was done to impede the Mueller investigation. Some legal experts argue this would be obstruction of justice. We will see if Mueller feels empowered enough to bring down a president over an executive action that is allowed by the Constitution.

Finally, and perhaps the most unreported aspect of the Trump-Russian collusion story, did the Trump campaign coordinate with the Russians (or their proxies) in the promulgation of Russian-created propaganda on various social media platforms?

Specifically, did the Trump campaign feed voter data to the Russians in order to maximize the impact of Russian propaganda efforts? As of now, this theory is without substantive supporting evidence — though one of Twitter’s most prolific Trump antagonists, @TeaPainUSA, has offered forensic data from various servers controlled by the Trump organization and Kushner’s business interests showing unusual repeated “contact” between those servers and servers purportedly located in Russia.

At this point, the @TeaPainUSA server data analysis is unverified and it remains mere conjecture that the Trump campaign’s database operations were in direct communication with databases in Russia for nefarious purposes.

What is not conjecture is that the Mueller investigation has spent too much money and is building too many reputations too end up with just a few financial and minor criminal indictments. All roads are pointing towards more indictments.

They will not lead, however, to the end of the Trump presidency.

===================================================================

It was an old-fashioned cabal, not Papadopoulos or the Deep State, that initially powered the Trump-Russia collusion investigation

The Trump-Russia collusion investigation starts with the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration and not with the Papadopoulos’ chance meeting with an Australian diplomat in a Kensington wine room.

The evidence in support of this conclusion remains circumstantial, but it grows with every New York Times Trump-Russia collusion story exclusive.

Once it became evident in the Spring of 2016 that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president, the Obama administration went into action. FBI agent Peter Strzok’s text to a fellow FBI agent that an “insurance policy” was necessary to stop a Trump presidency was possibly an artifact of a larger bureaucratic effort to obstruct the Trump rise.

In this context, the Papadopoulos-Downer meeting most likely represents the operational imperatives of an undisciplined Trump campaign that knew it was at war with the entire Washington, D.C. political establishment. That the Trump campaign was so amateurish in its execution is indicative of its inability to fully comprehend the forces arrayed against its success.

Just as Hillary Clinton’s reckless use of a private server is the distal cause of her ’email’ problems in the 2016 campaign, including the infamous Comey letter, Donald Trump’s willingness to make deals with sketchy business types, including perhaps the Russians, is the root cause of his current troubles. And, yes, the Clinton campaign and Obama administration were more than happy to exploit these Trump associations for political purposes.

That his son and son-in-law may go to jail as result will haunt Donald Trump through his last mortal days. For those eagerly awaiting Trump’s pound of flesh, their patience will be rewarded — but will it be justified?

More Mueller investigation indictments are coming, not because the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians, but because Trump campaign operatives were too inexperienced to know how vulnerable their actions were to discovery by opponents eager to exploit that information.

Furthermore, a much bigger issue is at stake in the alleged Trump-Russia collusion story:  Why are the original FBI’s original FISA requests to collect intelligence on the Trump campaign not released to the public? And, more importantly, to what extent are we going to allow the U.S. Government to employ classified information and sources to destroy the reputations of individual American citizens?

Our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights are rendered impotent if the evidence used against us hides in the shadows. If they weren’t genetically wedded to the federal government, The Washington Post might want to change its tumid new motto ‘Democracy Dies Darkness’ to a more relevant phrasing: ‘Our Liberties Die in Darkness.’

The U.S. intelligence community contends the protection of sources and methods is paramount to national security. But does releasing the substance of the FBI’s original FISA requests to spy on Trump operatives undermine these security imperatives? The U.S. government has processes designed to redact such information without losing the substantive value of bringing the FISA requests to light.

The intelligence community will resist, but without seeing the original FISA requests, reasonable people will have the right to assume the FISA warrants were approved under specious circumstances and not because of the sanctity of sources and methods

After one year into the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, many of us are exhausted by the New York Times’ and The Washington Posts‘ unending dependence on anonymous sources. It is time, for the good of national sanity, that the federal government come clean on exactly what happened from their end between April 2016 and Election Day.

Exactly what prompted the FISA court to authorize the FBI’s spying on the Trump presidential campaign? The American public is on a need-to-know basis.

Absent verifiable fact, it is impossible to independently know if the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians or if the Clinton campaign and Obama administration exploited the Trump campaign’s buffoonery to invalidate an election outcome they didn’t pre-approve.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC want you to believe collusion occurred. Don’t ask how they know, just take their word for it. They have reliable government sources.

Unfortunately, their unwillingness to explore the political motivations of their anonymous government sources puts our liberties at risk.

I.F. Stone famously said “All governments lie.” If he were alive today, he’d amend that to “All governments lie and all journalists are easily misled.”

K. R. K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, December 29, 2017)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

Democrats are poised to take control of the U.S. House and possibly the U.S. Senate in 2018, but their potential to squander this opportunity is hard to ignore.

One of the iron laws of electoral politics: The party of an unpopular incumbent president always suffers significant losses in midterm elections.

But if the 2016 Donald Trump campaign tell us anything, what’s past is not necessarily prologue. The Trump campaign broke all of the rules of political campaigns and still won (an electoral college victory).

Could the political pundit class be wrong again in 2018?

The Democrats should remember the broad consensus among political experts on the morning of November 8th last year. [Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm’s premature endzone dance the day before Election Day is an entertaining reminder of the fallibility of political pundits.]

The lesson of that day is simple: Democrats should never be over-confident about their chances on any election day.

Although, the early signs are looking very good for the Democrats in 2018. The prediction market PredictIt currently estimates the Democrats have a 59 percent chance of gaining control of the U.S. House in 2018 and a 47 percent chance of controlling the U.S. Senate. In both cases, these probabilities are significantly higher since the election of Democrat Doug Jones in the U.S. Senate race in Alabama.

Yet, beyond the constant ‘anti-Trump’ drumbeat, the Democrats struggle to find a compelling message that appeals to a broad range of American voters, but particularly swing voters. Though, according to former DNC chair Howard Dean, the message doesn’t matter as much in midterm elections:

“In the off-year elections for Congress, your message is ‘I’m not the president’ and that’s all you need,” said former DNC chair Howard Dean on MSNBC’s Morning Joe recently. “In 2018, not being Donald Trump is enough and the Republican Party is going to get nailed with corruption because of the tax bill — 14 Republican Senators who voted for that tax bill are making one million dollars or more off a provision that was slipped in at the last minute by Orrin Hatch. You cannot be voting to line your own pockets. People don’t like that, I don’t care what party you are in.”

Dean is correct on the corruption charge, but whether the Democrats can make that charge (or any other) stick is the real challenge.

Of course, the early signs — including elections in Alabama, Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania — show the Democrats are likely to witness a turnout surge in 2018 relative to the Republicans. There is also strong evidence independent voters are going to lean Democratic.

And underwriting these positive trends for the Democrats is the wide and indubitable #Resistance movement which is showing a persistence and vitality similar to the Tea Party movement in 2010.

However, there is a key difference between the Tea Party and the #Resistance. The Tea Party drew its energy from the impending launch of Obamacare that was not going to take effect until after the 2010 midterm elections. In other words, the Tea Party’s energy source was not going away before voters entered the voting booth.

In contrast, the #Resistance largely draws its power from the assumption that a serial misogynist, Donald Trump, colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.

Charges of sexual assault against President Trump are not going away, but should Robert Mueller’s investigation fail to support the collusion premise, and even if a number of Donald Trump’s inner circle are presented with obstruction of justice or false testimony charges — potentially even the president himself — what then will happen to the #Resistance’s energy level?

The Democratic Party’s leadership is not preparing its base for the possibility that the Mueller investigation will not prematurely end the Trump presidency.

The ‘Trump is a traitor, bigot and sexist pig‘ slogan may not be enough to convince voters to elect Democrats if the Mueller investigation finds little concrete evidence of collusion. Add a strong U.S. economy to the electoral equation, and the Democrats may not have the tailwind advantage they assume in 2018.

Despite what Governor Dean says, the Democrats need a coherent message in 2018, if only to set up their nominee, most likely Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), in the 2020 presidential campaign.

In that effort, the Democrats are already testing some messages before the 2018 midterms.

Beyond ‘Never Trump,’ What is the Democratic Party’s Message?

Last July, Democrats repackaged their traditional pro-labor and pro-government intervention economic policies under the slogan “A Better Deal.”

The Deal, focused on such things as fighting corporate mergers, lowering prescription drug prices and creating jobs for 10 million Americans, proved so uninspiring that the party leadership mercifully let it die on the vine before the American people even knew about it.

The National Republican Congressional Committee rightfully called the re-packaged Democratic Party agenda “stale.”

“Democrats fail to connect with millions of middle class Americans because they simply don’t understand them,” said Jesse Hunt, National Press Secretary at National Republican Congressional Committee.

But middle class Americans understand giving nearly 50 percent of tax cuts to the Top 1 percent? That’s the logic Trump and the Republicans are betting the 2018 midterms on.

With the passage of the Trump tax reform package, many Democrats believe they have their core argument for the midterms: Trump and the congressional Republicans serve the Top 1 percent to the detriment of everyone else.

On the surface, it appears to be a good argument. But it has one serious problem…it completely ignores the American political ethos embedded in this republic since its creation 241 years ago.

Americans don’t begrudge the ultra-wealthy or the advantages that come with it. Quite the opposite, on average, they applaud them. It was Barack Obama himself, in an interview with Bloomberg Business Week in 2010, said, “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system.”

Americans are an aspirational people centered on individual pursuits of happiness, not collective outcomes or obedience to economic fairness or social justice. It is encoded in our Constitution, which is not a collection of moth-eaten political ideas and procedures but, rather, a testament of this country’s origin myth.

As social critic Sam Harris will tell you, “Words matter.” And the U.S. Constitution makes it clear in the Bill of Rights that individual liberties and freedom from the government supersede considerations of economic equity or justice.

Yet, what do today’s Democrats offer as a message to the American voter?

New York Times journalist Michael Tackett recently interviewed six prominent Democrats from outside the D.C. beltway about what message they would craft for their party in 2018. With one exception, their answers are not encouraging.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee says there are three pillars for future Democratic Party success: jobs, unity, and a focus on state-level solutions.

India’s young voters and America’s millennials may offer some useful insights to the Democratic Party

The Democrats may want to familiarize themselves with the fast changing politics of India over the past few years. As economic growth has quickened, India’s voters, particularly younger ones, are moving away from the traditional parties organized around caste or religious block and choosing ‘aspirational’ parties, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which scored significant electoral victories in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh in 2017.

“For the first time, we are moving away from identity politics to aspirational politics” says BJP spokesperson Sudesh Verma. “The youth want to move up in life. They see that the BJP is a party that does not talk the language of caste (class) and religion.”

 Of course, India is not the U.S. and the social dynamics of a fast-developing country are different from those of a mature, developed economy. Nonetheless, consumer marketers in the U.S. have long known the importance of aspirational messages in attracting customers.

“Effective marketing has always been about identifying and fulfilling aspirations,” says Rainmaker Digital CEO Brian Clark. “If you’re selling material goods, you need to understand how your widget fits into the broader aspirational lifestyle of your target audience.”

Democrats keep insisting on making policy-based ideological arguments to an American voter population that wants to be inspired. The Republicans understand this and have effectively exploited it for electoral advantage since Ronald Reagan.

Unless the Democrats find a message to discount two years of strong economic growth in the minds of voters, they may not win control of the Congress in 2018 or the White House in 2020 — despite the flood of public opinion evidence suggesting otherwise.

K. R. K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, December 17, 2017)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

While browsing postings on Whisper, I came across a meme contrasting President Donald Trump to a ham sandwich.

For some of us, just saying ‘ham sandwich’ invites a grin.

‘Ham sandwich’ references have a serious origin, however. During a 1985 newspaper interview, former chief judge of New York state, Sol Wachtler, wanting to highlight the disproportionate influence district attorneys had over grand juries, suggested DAs could get them “to indict a ham sandwich.”

The ‘ham sandwich’ meme on Whisper wasn’t particularly clever, but it does suggest an intriguing question. Would this country be just as well off (or even better off) if we replaced our president with a ham sandwich?

Isn’t Donald Trump living proof of the position’s substantive irrelevance in the current era?

Just look at this president’s accomplishments and how little he was involved in achieving them.

In just under one year of the Trump administration…

• Our economy is booming and shows no sign of slowing down. Employment is up. Wages are up.
• A neoconservative created nightmare in Syria (thank you George W., Obama, Clinton and Kerry) has stabilized and ISIS is no longer a territory controlling power in Syria or Iraq.
• And, after over 20 years of pushing the North Korea nuclear weapons and ballistic missile problem down the road, under the leadership of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, the U.S. has shepherded through the UN Security Council the most significant economic sanctions in a generation against North Korea.

And was Donald Trump critical to any of these results?

His election victory meant the Republicans would again make the federal administrative rules, regulations, procedures, orders, and decisions. The importance of judicial appointments cannot be underestimated either.

But everything done by this administration so far is consistent with post-Reagan Republican orthodoxy: cut regulations, appoint conservative (pro-business) judges, and defer to the generals on military policy. Donald Trump has introduced no new thinking on any of these policies.

Donald Trump’s core campaign promises were to build a wall and impose a travel ban on Muslims entering the U.S. Neither is going to happen soon, and probably never.

The policies implemented in the first year of Trump’s administration were pre-packaged and ready for the president’s signature soon after Day 1.

A ham sandwich wouldn’t have us on the brink of war with North Korea, would it?

North Korea’s provocative missile tests are the proximal cause of the current North Korean crisis, not Donald Trump; but the crisis’ urgency has been amplified through a series of impulsive and reckless Trump tweets. At least, Trump should be credited with refusing to punt on this external threat (as did previous administrations) and for getting the Chinese and UN’s career diplomats off their butts and making substantive decisions on North Korea again.

But, again, can Donald Trump take credit for whatever outcome is achieved on North Korea? Frankly, I don’t think Trump could pick out North Korea on a map if you narrowed it down for him to the Korean peninsula.

As the North Korea situation demonstrates, Trump is not as risk averse as past presidents. Barack Obama was painfully so, particularly on foreign policy.

The possible outcomes on North Korea now range from: an all-out U.S.-led invasion that could conceivably include a nuclear weapon detonation in a major city (Seoul being the most likely target) or North Korea returning to the negotiating table and agreeing to dismantle its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs in exchange for economic assistance and regime security guarantees.

Donald Trump’s lack of competence on everything limits his impact

Love him or hate him, most agree Donald Trump is not a normal president. He doesn’t acquit himself they way we’ve come to expect from presidents.

That may be a positive in some instances. Often through late night tweets, Trump shapes the daily news cycle like no president before him. But on specifics, forget about it. As former McCain senior campaign strategist Steve Schmidt once said when comparing Trump to former VP candidate Sarah Palin on their campaign debate performances: “She (Sarah Palin) was monumentally more fluent and prepared. She looked like Henry Kissinger compared to him.”

Furthermore, now in office, Trump has shown little capacity to learn public policy’s complexities to an extent necessary to influence support for his legislative agenda. Columnist George Will describes Trump as someone who “doesn’t know what it is to know.”

Yes, a major tax bill is about to be passed; but, by all accounts, the president has shown a limited understanding of tax or economic policy and no gift for persuading undecided legislators to support the bill.

Gary Cohn, the Trump administration’s chief economic adviser, may have faked a bad phone connection just to get Trump off a conference call with moderate Democrats being courted by Republicans to work on the tax bill. That account is disputed by the White House; but, sadly, there many other instances where Trump’s hostile relationship with facts and knowledge has been exposed.

Generally, cutting taxes, even if the bulk of the benefit may go to the wealthiest Americans, should be an easy sell to the American people.

But not for Trump.

A significant majority of Americans oppose the Republican tax bill. A recent Harvard CAPS-Harris survey found that 64 percent of respondents oppose the bill, while only 36 percent support it.

A ham sandwich would do no worse selling this tax bill.

Yet, there are things a ham sandwich could never accomplish as president, who are not just partisan political leaders pushing their legislative and national priorities. Since George Washington, who chose country over faction when he decided not to seek a third presidential term, the office has come to speak for the nation’s moral center of gravity. ‘Normal’ presidents are more than political leaders.

The seminal moment in the rise of the presidency as the nation’s moral compass was Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863, delivered in the midst of one of the Civil War’s darkest moments.

Barbara Perry, a presidential historian in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, calls the Gettysburg Address “the ultimate presidential speech of unification, grief, calming — but also uplifting and inspirational.”

Other presidential moments have reaffirmed the presidency’s healing role.

In the aftermath of 9-11, President George W. Bush stood with Islamic leaders at the Islamic Center of Washington to deliver words meant to unite a country and protect its most vulnerable citizens:

“Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes,” Bush said. “Moms who wear cover must not be intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know.”

Though simple words, they exemplify why some have suggested presidents are our ‘pastors in chief.‘

Regardless if that’s true, we do look to our presidents in times of national crisis for comfort, inspiration and guidance.

Which is why President Trump’s remarks after last August’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia fell short of the standard set by previous presidents.

When asked by a journalist about the violence, which included the death of a young woman by a car-driving white supremacist protesting the removal of a General Stonewall Jackson statue, Trump said: “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent.  And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now.  You had a group on the other side that came charging in, without a permit, and they were very, very violent.”

In all seriousness, a ham sandwich would have been more soothing.

Perhaps, ironically, Iowa’s conservative evangelical community in the 2016 Iowa Republican caucuses may have unofficially ended the presidency’s role as a moral authority. In that caucus, Iowa’s evangelical voters split their votes between Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Trump. The election ended for many evangelicals the use of Biblical competency tests for selecting presidents. In their new reality, presidents are just powerful vessels (i.e., tools, if you prefer) leveraged to achieve partisan goals. Its all about politics now.

“I don’t give support simply by quoting the Bible. I want to see it lived out in the policy,” said John Lee, an influential Iowa pastor, prior to the 2016 Iowa caucuses. “I’m not electing a pastor in chief. I’m electing a commander in chief.”

A Republican voter base that had in previous Iowa caucuses supported the overtly Christian-centered candidacies of Pat Robertson (2nd place in 1988, behind an Iowa-favorite, Bob Dole), Mike Huckabee (1st in 2008), and Rick Santorum (1st in 2012), was now supporting a candidate whose favorite Bible verse,  Exodus 21:22-25, known for its “eye-for-an-eye” passage, was singled out and repudiated by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount speech.

Well, maybe Trump isn’t walking in Jesus’ steps, but at least he’s consistent with Moses, right? Well, actually no. What should be no surprise by now, Trump completely misunderstands the meaning behind the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ passage.

According to Orthodox Rabbinic tradition, the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ passage “never intended to mandate physical punishment in personal injury cases” and instead “means the perpetrator must pay the monetary value commensurate with the victim’s injury.”

Though über Christian Ted Cruz actually won the 2016 Iowa Republican caucus, Trump’s close second place finish set the stage for his surprising strength among white evangelicals in other primaries and caucuses.

In the general election, four-out-of-five white evangelical Christians voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton.

We get it. Donald Trump is not the uniter in chief in the mold of Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama or George W. Bush, or pretty much any other U.S. President (except William Henry Harrison, who served for 32 days as president and spent most of it on his death bed, offering him little opportunity for comforting others).

Maybe there are other things a president does besides knowing stuff, making decisions, persuading others, and uniting a country?

“Over-turning the norms of American politics was a (Trump) campaign promise,” conservative columnist George Will recently noted.

In that effort, Trump has emphatically succeeded.

He is breaking most all of the rules.

Where presidents once carefully measured and crafted their words so as to minimize misinterpretations of their intent, now we have President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un trading insults like two schoolyard bullies. After Kim called Trump a “dotard” for saying during his UN speech that the “U.S. would totally destroy North Korea” if it developed an nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic,” Trump responded with a tweet (of course).

Kim, who serves his own internal audience by keeping this public pissing match alive, responded by calling Trump “old,” which, of course, inspired another Twitter reply from Trump:

In case you aren’t sure, this is not a new form of diplomacy. These are the blustery rants of two jejune adults who lack significant oversight from experienced advisers.

It is safe to say a ham sandwich would not have engaged in this type of banter with the leader of hostile nuclear power.

Are we better off for this banter? We will see.

Everything is Awesome…What could go wrong?

Objectively, it is difficult to deny the success of the Trump administration so far, despite what we are told by a daily blizzard of anti-Trump news from the major news organizations.

As George Carlin might say, the country is doing fine…its the politicians and the journalists that are f*ucked up.

That is probably closer to the truth than what you see on CNN or MSNBC or read in The New York Times. Trump  is wrong, though. They don’t give us ‘fake news.’ They are just so demented by their hate for Trump that they have stopped trying to see the world as it is, and can only see it as they want it to be.

Clumsy, unsophisticated Trump campaign operatives trying to get ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton from the Russians, who have been engaged in a long-term information operations campaign to discredit the American democracy, is not collusion.

But the news media have a Trump-Russia narrative they won’t give up without a fight.

This confirmation bias dominates today’s news. Journalists interpret all new information through a filter that is designed to draw only one conclusion: Donald Trump is an illegitimate, unqualified president that colluded with the Russians in order to get elected and remains loyal to their interests over those of the American people.

There is no need to watch or read the news anymore — the above sentence underscores every news story on every news outlet (not including Fox News, of course, which uses a completely different biased filter).

Yet, as the Trump-Russian collusion soap opera continues — with no end in sight — and a president that shows no evidence that he is learning on the job, the American economy chugs along…

…what could go wrong?

The nearly yearlong rise in the U.S. stock markets continues. Stock markets, which are forward-looking, though not always perfect predictors of future economic performance, are increasingly optimistic about this country. This increased optimism is not the residual effect of Obama’s economic policies — the impact of his policies were most likely baked into stock market prices months prior to his departure.

Stock markets react to surprises and shocks to the world economic system, not post-presidential popularity. It is possible Obama’s economic policies resulted in the recent (unexpected) positive economic strength, but that does beg the question, “What Obama economic policy?”

In terms of economic legislation, the Obama saw passage of a major spending bill early in his presidency to boost an ailing economy (though the U.S. Federal Reserve’s historical level of quantitative easing was probably more critical) and a healthcare bill (of course, known as Obamacare).

The Paris Accords on Climate Change can also be included as an economic policy accomplishment for the Obama administration.

Good luck proving any of those three economic policies account for the historic rise in the U.S. stock market since Trump took office. Especially considering the last two have been all but overturned by Trump and the congressional Republicans.

It is far more likely the U.S. stock market is reacting to Trump administration’s business-friendly rollback of regulations (including Obamacare) and likely reductions in corporate and personal income tax rates, particularly for wealthy Americans.

Now that will spur a stock market boom.

Of course, the five trillion dollars in new wealth from rising stock prices could evaporate overnight. Literally, overnight.

And there are clouds looming on the horizon that will challenge the Trump administration’s novel governing approach:

U.S. household debt is rising 60 percent faster than wages. This is not sustainable.

We are in the midst of a long-term experiment to see what level of public debt our economy can sustain without serious economic consequences. So far, so good.

Our (gross) government debt, as a percentage of GDP, stands at 106 percent and could go even higher with the passage of the current GOP tax bill. This level of public debt puts us in the neighborhood of countries like Portugal and Iceland in this regard.

While few economists see a recession in the next six months, but there are concerns.

“Easy monetary policies during the post-crisis period have propelled equity prices higher and driven bond yields lower,” according to Jeffrey Gundlach, founder of DoubleLine Capital. “But as central banks reverse their quantitative easing (QE) and raise rates, this ‘Goldilocks era’ will come to an end.”

In this last week, the U.S. central bank raised rates by a quarter of a percentage point to a range of 1.25 percent to 1.50 percent. It was the third rate hike this year.

And how will the world markets absorb the over 4 trillion dollars in U.S. Treasury bonds as the U.S. Federal Reserve reverses quantitative easing?

“U.S. Treasury debt is high quality and so the market will buy it…but at what price?” asks a frequent ZeroHedge.com blogger, govtrader. “Will the market sell stocks to make room to buy up all this new debt (reverse QE)?  Does this cause the next stock market crash?”

According to govtrader, the answer is probably yes.

Perhaps a ham sandwich could have handled the job of U.S. president through the first year of the Trump presidency — but inevitably there will be an unforeseen economic shock or an unprecedented international crisis that will force this president to make real decisions based on complex, sometimes contradictory, information. When that happens, we will want more than a ham sandwich for a president.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, December 13, 2017)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

The beltway pundits this morning are saying, for the Republicans to have any chance of staving off an electoral disaster in 2018, Roy Moore had to lose in the Alabama senate election.

Not so fast.

Yes, Roy Moore would have been a malignancy attached to U.S. Senate Republicans. But he also would have represented an opportunity for the congressional GOP to distinguish themselves from such a man.

I’m old to remember how the Democratic Party in the 1970s used Alabama Governor George Wallace for the same purpose. And it worked….up to a point.

Could the Republicans have made such a pivot given their current White House occupant’s support for Moore? Why couldn’t they?

An ethics investigation process exists in the U.S. Senate to remove people like Roy Moore, who most likely had a historical pattern of inappropriate contact with female minors, a potentially illegal contact with at least one female minor. It is unlikely Moore would be convicted in a criminal trial on these allegations given the time passed and politicization of his case. However, had he been elected to the U.S. Senate, his fellow senators would have held him to a tougher standard than the American criminal justice system.

Fewer and fewer congressional Republicans are afraid of Donald Trump, who is proving to be a tragically bad leader of his own party. Why would they be? Donald Trump and Steve Bannon aren’t organized enough to influence more than a small handful of party nominations. It’s a big party and GOP party regulars still control the party nomination process for the vast majority of congressional races.

Had he been elected, Moore would have been publicly flogged and humiliated for the sole purpose of allowing Senate Republicans to cleanse their ranks and image of Moore’s stink.

Of course, the Democrats would work hard to deny the Republicans the positive sanitizing effects of expelling Moore from the Senate. But that is politics. Nothing is set in stone. Like a football game, until the game is played, nobody can know for sure what the outcome will be.

We will never see the political game around U.S. Senator Roy Moore. Perhaps the GOP would have lost that game, but why would anyone be so confident the Democrats could capitalize on Roy Moore’s presence in the Senate hallways.

At a minimum, the internecine war on Moore would have made for great television and high ratings for MSNBC. Potentially, Roy Moore could have served as the GOP’s version of Al Franken (D-MN), a soon-to-be a former U.S. Senator.

Unlike Franken, however, Moore would have deserved being cast out of the chamber and the GOP would have benefited far more than the Democrats did by chasing Franken out.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, December 12, 2017)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

How do we reconcile the final three polls for the Alabama U.S. Senate race? One, conducted by Fox News, shows Democrat Doug Jones ahead by 10 percentage points (50 to 40 percent). Another, by Emerson College, shows Republican Roy Moore ahead by 9 points (53 to 44 percent). Finally, a poll by Monmouth University shows the race to be a virtual tie (both candidates at 46 percent).

They can’t all be correct.

All were conducted at about the same point in time (between Dec. 6th and Dec. 10th). So, we can’t attribute the differences to the times in which the polls were taken.

As to the questionnaires, the questions themselves are similar enough to rule out format differences.

We do see, however, major differences in the methodologies used by the three polls: particularly with respect to the mode of data collection and the sampling frames.

The Fox News poll was conducted by the research firms, Anderson Robbins Research and Shaw & Company Research. They used live telephone interviews from a random sample of 1,408 Alabama registered voters. (You can find their methodology here.)

In general, a registered voter population skews more Democratic when compared to ‘likely voters.’

The Emerson College poll used a more complicated (and less expensive) data collection method. They employed an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system of landlines only and an online panel provided by Survey Sampling International (SSI). Their target population was of registered voters that were ‘very likely’ to vote. (You can find their methodology here.)

Based on NuQum.com’s experience with IVR (landline-only) samples, there tends to be a strong bias towards older, more conservative voters. In contrast, online panels tend to be younger and more liberal. In the Emerson College poll, the net bias of both data collection methods should presumably cancel out.

Finally, the Monmouth University poll was conducted by telephone from December 6th to 9th with 546 Alabama residents likely to vote in the December 2017 special election. Their sample was drawn from a list of registered voters who voted in at least one of the last four general or primary elections or have registered to vote since January 2016, and indicate they are likely to vote in the upcoming election. (You can find their methodology here.)

Unlike the Fox News poll, Monmouth filters their sample frame down to likely voters. Furthermore, by using a telephone (live interview) methodology, Monmouth does not contaminate its sample with the bias inherent in IVR (landline-only) samples.

So who do we believe?

Based on NuQum.com’s experience, the Monmouth Poll will come the closest to predicting tonight’s results in the Alabama Senatorial election.

It is going to be tight race.

We will see.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, December 11, 2017)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

As journalism dies in this country, the major news media organizations are gaining customers. These two trends are not unrelated.

First, television and digital news audiences for many media outlets have been steadily growing since the election of Donald Trump. He is their dream come true.

According to the News Media Alliance, “Newspaper websites in the United States have seen an increase in paid subscribers (in 2017) — The New York Times has grown to more than 2 million paid digital-only customers, while The Wall Street Journal passed the 1 million mark.”

Despite being branded as ‘fake news‘ by President Trump, CNN saw its 2017 3rd Quarter ad revenues grow by 9 per cent compared to last year. Likewise, CNN’s biggest competitor in the anti-Trump television news business, MSNBC, saw its prime time viewership grow 26 percent in November 2017 compared to November 2016.

Say what you want about President Trump, he is good for the news business.

The second trend is not a good one, however. Journalistic practice within national news outlets appears to be in a straight-line decline. Every few weeks now a news story has to be publicly retracted for fundamental inaccuracies. Perhaps more disturbing is that these journalistic fumbles aren’t just happening at the 24-hour-news-cycle-dependent television networks, but at the major national newspapers as well.

The most recent “reporting error” occurred on December 8th when CNN broke from its morning anti-Trump philippic to announce a “breaking news” CNN exclusive regarding an email in which WikiLeaks supposedly offered the Trump campaign prior access to the DNC’s Russian-hacked emails before they were made public.

According to CNN, multiple anonymous sources confirmed the e-mail contents.

MSNBC and CBS quickly repeated the CNN report on their own news platforms, presumably because they too had independently confirmed the e-mail contents.

This story, had it been true, would have been the first piece of concrete evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with a reputed Russian intelligence intermediary (i.e., WikiLeaks) to coordinate the release of information meant to damage the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

But, the story wasn’t true. Whatever email it was based upon, the journalists hadn’t actually seen; otherwise, they would’ve known that their timeline was off, rendering their ‘exclusive’ null-and-void.

Were the journalists set up by Trump sympathizers in the government? Were they set up by Never-Trumpers in the government that just wanted to keep the Trump-Russian collusion story alive? If CNN had any integrity left, they would try to get that answer for us. Prediction: They won’t.

The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists that broke the Edward Snowden story in 2013 and a favorite target of the Democratic Party’s neo-liberal elites, offers a much more detailed description of CNN’s reporting error and its consequences in a recent article posted on theintercept.com. Additionally, his article lists just some of the recent reporting errors made by major news organizations:

• Russia hacked into the U.S. electric grid to deprive Americans of heat during winter (Wash Post)
• An anonymous group (PropOrNot) documented how major U.S. political sites are Kremlin agents (Wash Post)
• WikiLeaks has a long, documented relationship with Putin (Guardian)
• A secret server between Trump and a Russian bank has been discovered (Slate)
• RT hacked C-SPAN and caused disruption in its broadcast (Fortune)
• Crowdstrike finds Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app (Crowdstrike)
• Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states (multiple news outlets, echoing Homeland Security)
• Links have been found between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund under investigation (CNN)

All substantively false or misleading stories that were (and may still be) promulgated as fact.

Isn’t the Trump menace justification for a little journalistic fudging?

A prominent Democratic Party operative recently asked if Donald Trump is capable of feeling shame for his actions. It is reasonable to ask the national news organizations the same question.

“But Fox News is far worse,” is frequently the first response when anyone suggests the news media is biased (particularly against Trump).

Well, yes and no. There is no question Fox News, under Roger Ailes leadership, pioneered a potent form of partisan advocacy within the context of a “news” organization. Ailes’ project turned the Fox News Channel into the nation’s most powerful cable news network.

Ailes’ formula was simple. Take selective, often loosely connected, facts and weave a storyline that fits a particular narrative favorable to the agenda of political conservatives.

For example, part of President Obama’s early childhood education was spent in a Muslim-majority community in the Indonesia. This is a fact. As President, Obama’s 2009 speech at Cairo University apologized for some past U.S. actions with respect to the Muslim world. Two facts with virtually no direct or concrete connection, yet, some Fox News commentators (e.g. Sean Hannity) openly conjectured over the possibility that Obama was secretly more sympathetic to the Muslim world than he was towards the U.S.

No serious person trying to understand U.S. policy in the Middle East under the Obama administration would make that connection, but Fox News did without hesitation or regret.

Fox News was, in that instance, engaged in an extreme form of what my former journalism professor called ‘interpretive’ or ‘conjectural’ journalism. In its non-partisan form, newspapers used to run these types of stories under the ‘news analysis’ banner. Such journalism serves a valuable purpose.

Standard journalism often provides only a gestalt-like representation of an event (such as the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation) and it is through interpretative (or conjectural) journalism that an event’s meaning or relevance becomes more apparent. Journalists and commentators are doing the public a service when they fill in those evidential gaps.

That is not what the major news organizations are doing today, however.  Instead, many journalists, who are often wholly dependent on anonymous sources (often within the government) for their information, are being fed false or un-contextualized information in order to craft news stories that fit into pre-determined narratives (i.e., the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton). Who concocts these narratives? It ranges from individual journalists, the incumbent administration, political parties, private corporate interests, to some combination therein.

Are the front line journalists and commentators complicit or just pawns in this symbiotic relationship? Considering that most broadcast journalists and political analysts are hired for their prior experience in either political campaigns or government service, it is likely the relationship between the news organization, the journalist and the source is a mutually-rewarding one for all involved.

In the big picture, it matter less that journalists are being manipulated than the fact that false, misleading, and/or illegally leaked information is increasingly entering the nation’s information blood stream.

So, how can it be mitigated or stopped?

Given the large news outlets are witnessing significant growth in their bottom line financials since the 2016 election, it is naive to think the news organizations and their corporate owners will kill their own golden goose.

They won’t. But, perhaps, the public can start holding news organizations more accountable for abusing their dependence on anonymous sources (i.e., power elites) for news stories.

The national news media’s failure is more fundamental than just a few ‘false’ news stories…

After reading the Greenwald piece on CNN’s most recent Trump-Russia collusion story retraction, I dug out an old essay I wrote last spring critiquing another CNN news “exclusive” on information they uncovered linking the Trump campaign to Russian intelligence operatives.

The March 22nd CNN story exemplifies the failure of modern, American-style journalism.

The substance of CNN’s story (here), written by Pamela Brown, Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz and Jim Sciutto, was in its first two paragraphs:

—————————————————————————————————————-

(Washington) – The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, US officials told CNN.

The FBI is now reviewing that information, which includes human intelligence, travel, business and phone records and accounts of in-person meetings, according to those U.S. officials. The information is raising the suspicions of FBI counterintelligence investigators that the coordination may have taken place, though officials cautioned that the information was not conclusive and that the investigation is ongoing. (March 23^rd revision, CNN.com)

—————————————————————————————————————-

I don’t doubt one word of the story.  But that’s the problem.  There is nothing to doubt.  It is devoid of substance.  Filtered throughout the entire story are modifiers like “possibly” and “may have.”  It’s not a news story, it’s a tease for an actual news story.

With this CNN story, and many like it since, we are either being entertained with the ‘sausage-making’ details of investigative journalism or, worse, being manipulated by anonymous sources who share the goal of bringing down a presidency that don’t like.

Woodward and Bernstein popularized anonymous sourcing, but they also knew its proper role in investigative journalism…

As news consumers, we should all be asking ourselves: What does good investigative journalism look like?  To what extent should we discount journalism that fails to meet our own expectations and standards for good news reporting?

These are not easy questions to answer.  But in my own effort to answer them, I reached into the news archives and re-read the actual reporting that led to our nation’s first presidential resignation. For me, what I found was stunning and more relevant than ever.

So, find an old pair of white stripe “Big E’ Levi pants (with the flared boot cut) and follow me back in time to the early summer of 1972…

Washington, D.C. (June 18, 1972):

Richard Nixon is in the middle of his presidential re-election campaign when a news story breaks in The Washington Post.  The headline on June 18, 1972 reads:  5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here (Original Story Here).  The first four paragraphs in the story, written by Alfred E. Lewis, reports about a simple break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.:

—————————————————————————————————————-

(Washington) – Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.

Three of the men were native-born Cubans and another was said to have trained Cuban exiles for guerrilla activity after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

They were surprised at gunpoint by three plain-clothes officers of the metropolitan police department in a sixth floor office at the plush Watergate, 2600 Virginia Ave., NW, where the Democratic National Committee occupies the entire floor.

There was no immediate explanation as to why the five suspects would want to bug the Democratic National Committee offices or whether or not they were working for any other individuals or organizations.

—————————————————————————————————————-

From this story, we know who, did what, where, when and how:  Five men, a former CIA employee, three Cubans, at DNC offices, June 17^th at 2:30 a.m. The most important paragraph is: There was no immediate explanation as to why the five suspects would want to bug the Democratic National Committee…or whether or not they were working for any other individuals or organizations.

Those questions, of course, eventually would be answered.

But this is just crime-blotter reporting. Right? It’s not investigative journalism. How can you compare court record regurgitation to the hard work required to understand the potential complexities of the Trump-Russia connection? You can’t. Enter Bob Woodward (who did the legwork on Lewis’ story) and Carl Bernstein — two young, ambitious Washington Post reporters who are given a story assignment that they cannot know beforehand how it will change this country’s history.

Their August 1, 1972 Washington Post story, three months before the general election, gives the first real glimpse into the potential scope of their investigation — which, itself, is mirroring an ongoing FBI investigation. Sound familiar?

The headline reads: Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds (Original Story Here).  The story’s primary information is not reliant on anonymous sources or baseless conjecture. No clever innuendo required:

—————————————————————————————————————-

(Washington) – A $25,000 cashier’s check, apparently earmarked for President Nixon’s re-election campaign, was deposited in April in a bank account of one of the five men arrested in the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters here June l7.

The check was made out by a Florida bank to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, the President’s campaign finance chairman for the Midwest. Dahlberg said last night that in early April he turned the check over to “the treasurer of the Committee (for the Re-election of the President) or to Maurice Stans himself.”

(Four more paragraphs down in the story…)

A photostatic copy of the front of the check was examined by a Washington Post reporter yesterday. It was made out by the First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton, Fla., to Dahlberg.

—————————————————————————————————————-

The story is a little over three months old when a September 29, 1972 Woodward and Bernstein story carries the headline: Mitchell Controlled Secret GOP Fund (Original Story Here).  The substance of the story connects the Watergate break-in to the Nixon administration:

—————————————————————————————————————-

(Washington) – John N. Mitchell, while serving as U.S. Attorney General, personally controlled a secret Republican fund that was used to gather information about the Democrats, according to sources involved in the Watergate investigation.

Beginning in the spring of 1971, almost a year before he left the Justice Department to become President Nixon’s campaign manager on March 1, Mitchell personally approved withdrawals from the fund, several reliable sources have told The Washington Post.

Those sources have provided almost identical, detailed accounts of Mitchell’s role as comptroller of the secret intelligence fund and its fluctuating $350,000 -$700,000 balance.

Four persons other than Mitchell were later authorized to approve payments from the secret fund, the sources said.

Two of them were identified as former Secretary of Commerce Maurice H. Stans, now finance chairman of the President’s campaign, and Jeb Stuart Magruder, manager of the Nixon campaign before Mitchell took over and now a deputy director of the campaign. The other two, according to the sources, are a high White House official now involved in the campaign and a campaign aide outside of Washington.

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There is no rhetorical hedging with words like ‘may have’ or ‘possibly.’  Note also that Woodward and Bernstein rely on multiple, anonymous sources.  And, more notably, these FBI sources, which are involved in an ongoing investigation, are willing to confirm names, dates, and timelines.  There is no conjecture or speculation.  The story is built on the best information available at the time.  Further down in the story, Woodward and Bernstein give the reader some important background information on the anonymous sources themselves:

—————————————————————————————————————-

Sept. 29, 1972 Washington Post story continued…

The sources of The Post’s information on the secret fund and its relationship to Mitchell and other campaign officials include law enforcement officers and persons on the staff of the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

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In today’s daily, often leak-driven, news cycle, such detailed background on anonymous sources is rarely provided.  When it is, it is so vague and amorphous it denies the reader any real context to judge the veracity or reliability of the source(s).

While there are still special prosecutors and congressional hearings to be appointed and held in the future, Woodward and Bernstein’s investigative work reaches its apex in their story on October 10, 1972.  Citing conclusions from the FBI and Department of Justice investigations, they lay the foundation for what will be a national obsession over the next two years.  The Post headline reads:

FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats (Original Story Here).  The story wastes no time cutting to the chase:

—————————————————————————————————————-

(Washington) – FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

The activities, according to information in FBI and Department of Justice files, were aimed at all the major Democratic presidential contenders and — since 1971 — represented a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort.

During their Watergate investigation, federal agents established that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nixon campaign contributions had been set aside to pay for an extensive undercover campaign aimed at discrediting individual Democratic presidential candidates and disrupting their campaigns.

—————————————————————————————————————-

On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon resigns from the presidency, over two years after the Post’s initial break-in story.

Folks, that is how high-quality investigative journalism is conducted.

Sadly, we must return to present day journalism…

…the times have changed and journalists have been forced to change with it.  The Washington Post in 1972 wasn’t competing with 24-7 cable news networks.  And is it fair to compare the journalism on today’s CNN with The Washington Post or any other national-audience newspaper?  They have different audiences and business requirements.  Nonetheless, we should all expect more from today’s journalists than what we getting in the coverage of the Trump-Russia connection.  The use of anonymous sources is just one mechanism today’s journalists use to generate more stories faster.  The blurring of hard news with news analysis also increases the volume of content.

And though I am singling out CNN here, I could have cited any major news organization.

After the March 22nd CNN story broke, none other than Carl Bernstein himself said on Don Lemon’s CNN Tonight, “I don’t think there is any question there is a cover-up and the people in the FBI will tell you there is a cover-up going on.”

Perhaps Bernstein will be proven correct.  But it is interesting that the other half of Woodward and Bernstein offered a different set of conclusions on the Trump-Russia investigation up to that point.

“Apparently, what had happened here is a couple of (foreign) diplomats who can be legitimately wiretapped were talking about meeting with Trump or people on his transition team,” said Woodward on the March 23^rd broadcast of Fox News’s O’Reilly Factor.  “Under the rules (for the U.S. intelligence community), and they’re pretty strict, it’s called minimization; you don’t name the American person who’s being discussed (and) the idea that there was intelligence value here is really thin…This could be criminal on the part of people who decided, ‘Oh, let’s name these people.’”

As of today, there is still no direct evidence of collusion between the Trump camp and the Russians.  On the other hand, we know intelligence leaks and the improper naming of U.S. persons within intelligence reports occurred during the Obama administration in its effort to collect intelligence on the Trump campaign and transition team.  In all likelihood, these were felonious acts.

My journalism school taught me about the reporting techniques of Woodward and Bernstein because they represented a clear break from the past.  Our uncritical acceptance of anonymous sources today was not the norm in the early 1970s.  The Watergate story would not have broken as quickly as it did without Woodward and Bernstein’s use of anonymous sources.  But, as the above Post excerpts indicate, their inclusion was supported by considerable biographical information regarding those sources.  And, even then, the Post received significant criticism (including by some journalists) for its use of anonymous sources.

So, while we should all take Bernstein’s comparisons of the Trump-Russia investigation to Watergate seriously, we need to be careful to separate fact from opinion.  On Don Lemon’s show, Bernstein was giving an opinion based on unsubstantiated facts to which we lack direct access.

After hearing Bernstein’s conclusions, even Don Lemon had to admit, “Nothing has been found yet.”

That remains essentially true nine months later.

Perhaps the most rational (while also cynical) reaction to the March 22nd CNN story came from Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov: “This is another piece of information without any sources which can’t be commented on, neither can it be taken as some serious thing.”

Was he wrong?

Good journalism requires multiple, independent confirmations of the crucial facts and their cogent, unbiased recitation by the journalist(s) or news organization.

The Only Reliable Defense for Bad Journalism, ‘Fake News,’ and Russian interference is an Educated Public

Can we expect today’s news consumers to consistently recognize and ignore bad journalism that fails to meet even the basic journalistic standards?  Perhaps not.

Can we expect the news and political opinion industries to self-police with respect to the dissemination of bad journalism and ‘fake news’?  Most definitely not. ‘Fake news’ in particular has set up a permanent encampment on the Worldwide Web.

So what do we do?

We must empower individuals to draw their own conclusions regarding the news they consume, and only then will our society and political system be protected from the corrosive impact of bad journalism and ‘fake news.’

Until that day comes, the public is on its own.  There is no industry or government solution to this problem (though, God knows, the Congress and lobbyists are already writing laws and regulations in the attempt to solve the problem).

Yet, there is reason for optimism based on research regarding the ability of news consumers to discern the levels of quality and bias in news reporting.  One such study, a 2013 experiment conducted by the Ilmenau University of Technology and reported by the European Journalism Observatory (EJO), found that all types of news consumers (in terms of education and interest) could recognize the differences between high- and low-quality news.  Another study, also reported by the EJO, concluded that “media users recognize comparatively well whether a news article is up-to-date, answers the important questions of who, what, why, when, and gives information about causes, consequences, and classifications of an event.”  More importantly, the same research showed that media users are reasonably good at evaluating the bias in a new story.  Where media users came up short, according to the researchers, was in their ability to determine if the information in the news article was accurate and comprehensive.  That is where the news consumer is truly at the mercy of the journalist(s).

Therefore, as you digest future Trump-Russia collusion stories, I suggest you look for the following attributes to determine if the story is accurate and comprehensive:

• Are the story’s facts linked to named sources that would be expected to know such facts?
• If the story’s primary information heavily dependent on anonymous sources, is there sufficient background information provided on those sources to know if they would have likely access to this information?  Has the journalist or news organization referenced these same anonymous sources in previous stories and has their information proved reliable?
• Does the journalist connect the story’s facts in a logical and comprehensive way or does it seem more like an ad-hoc collection of information with no inherent or obvious connection?
• Is the story full of weasel-words like: “possibly,” “may have,” “could indicate” or “suggests”?

As for Trump-Russiagate, the reporting has typically violated these attributes.

A good example is a February 14^th New York Times story that broke the news that National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador talked about sanctions prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration (Original Story Here):

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(Washington) – Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said.  The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

—————————————————————————————————————

That last paragraph should have sent any discerning news consumer immediately to the sports page.  I am not quibbling with the Times running the story, even if the story read more like the notes a journalist would take while investigating a story.  With today’s infinite shelf-space for news, a journalist’s daily notes now qualify as news.  These are the times we live in.

Yes, the New York Times is more reliable than CNN (or any other cable news network).  That’s is not a high bar.  But, in comparison to the news stories associated with the Watergate crisis, the news industry covering the Trump-Russia story are peddling something in between “fake news” and high-quality journalism.  To put it differently, when I read the sequence of the Woodward and Bernstein stories, I was reading history.  Even when they were wrong on the facts (and there were at times), they corrected them (publicly and with high visibility) over the course of their investigation.

We are lucky to have the Watergate reporting legacy of Woodward and Bernstein to remind us what real journalism looks like.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, November 30, 2017)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

A new Justice League has formed.

No, not the bad CGI-laden movie that failed to break $100 million in box office receipts in its opening week. [Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) was still awesome though].

This new Justice League is real and believes its on a mission to save humanity from a rogue force far more menacing than Steppenwolf or Darkseid.

Their Hall of Justice, at 2446 Belmont Road NW in Washington, D.C., looms just a few blocks from this dangerous cozener’s current quarters, the White House.

Of course, Donald Trump is the existential threat in this picture and the new Justice League is led by our former president Barack Obama.

Joining Obama in the Hall of Justice are his former Attorney General Eric Holder, former campaign manager David Plouffe, senior political advisor David Axelrod, long-time aides Valerie Jarrett and David Simas, DNC chair Tom Perez, former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, White House speechwriter Jon Favreau and a host of other former cabinet officers, aides and Chicago friends.

Regular meetings are held in the Obama’s D.C. residence, according to a source directly aware of these meetings. So many, in fact, that rumors flew around in March within the right-wing blogs that Valerie Jarrett had moved into the Obama’s new $5.3-million mansion in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Though the Jarrett rumor proved wrong, the real story was no less significant. Obama was building a team to retake control of the U.S. government from Donald Trump and the Republicans using the Obama’s house as the operation’s headquarters.

Their mission is a straightforward: Get Democrats in control across all levels of government and restore the Obama legacy that Trump continues to dismantle.

Its not like Obama has been hiding his intentions regarding his post-administration activities.

“I won’t stop. In fact, I will be right there with you, as a citizen, for all my remaining days,” President Obama said in a farewell address to supporters in Chicago.

All the same, on January 21, it wasn’t clear what a relatively young 55-year-old Obama was going to do with himself in retirement, particularly at a time with his party in a ceaseless crisis over the Trump presidency.

Obama can’t just go away and write books like most other former presidents, can he?

Even before Obama left office, the obligatory presidential library was in the works and its parent organization, the Obama Foundation, created in 2014, was already laying the groundwork for the Obama post-presidency.

At its creation, the Obama Foundation’s board of directors included a Clintonesque mix of billionaires (John Doerr), investment bankers (former UBS Global Investment president Robert Wolf, GCM Grosvenor CEO Michael Sacks and Ariel Investments president John Rogers), friends (Vistria Group CEO Martin Nesbitt), political allies (former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick) and Obama administration holdovers (David Plouffe).

Its this nation’s A-team for neo-liberal corporatists. As one former Obama official told me, “If you don’t control at least a billion dollars, you ain’t gonna accomplish shit in this town.”

Obama Foundation CEO David Simas, a founding member of this new Justice League, describes the Obama Foundation’s purpose as being more grassroots oriented and focused on “identifying, training and connecting the next generation of civic leaders throughout the country first and then around the world.”

Where the Clinton Foundation facilitated opportunities for the world’s financial elites and oligarchs to participate in substantive, public image enhancing humanitarian projects, the Obama Foundation is more concerned about building a political infrastructure parallel to (if not in place of) more traditional political structures such as the Democratic National Committee.

And while the Clinton Foundation will die with Bill and Hillary Clinton’s political relevance, the Obama Foundation is designed to survive well beyond Obama’s lifetime — and, in that effort, Obama has a plan.

Step 1: Take control of the DNC

In February, Obama’s former Secretary of Labor, Tom Perez, was elected chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), stunting the attempted takeover of the DNC by the party’s progressive wing, led by Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison.

While Obama never inserted himself into the DNC chair election, his former Attorney General Eric Holder did when he endorsed Perez in early February.

“As we’ve seen since the inauguration, there is much at stake for our nation, and our democracy and our party. We need a DNC chair who is a proven fighter and a proven uniter. Tom Perez is that person,” Holder said in support of Perez.

Holder is a former cabinet officer, close Obama friend, and a direct proxy. By electing Perez, the DNC is now tentatively controlled by the Obama wing of the party.

Since Perez’ ascendancy, the DNC has seen dismal fundraising totals, despite a Republican president at historically low approval levels. In August 2017, the DNC reported raising only $4.4 million dollars, compared to $7.3 million for the Republican National Committee.

Yet, none of the Democratic Party’s senior leadership is suggesting Perez should be replaced.  Why? Because Perez wasn’t endorsed for the chairmanship position for his fundraising prowess. Perez takes anti-charisma to thermonuclear levels.

Instead, he is a caretaker selected for his loyalty to Barack Obama and willingness to act in the interest of the 44th president. More importantly, he prevents a Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders loyalist from sitting in the DNC’s command position.

For all intents, constructions, and purposes, Obama now controls the DNC, but to what end?

It is wrong to assume Obama wants to personally select the next Democratic presidential nominee in order to avoid the mistake made in 2016. Obama is too smart and too strategic to think in such a limited way.

Obama understands history. He, more than anybody, respects the importance of the competitive process in selecting a presidential nominee. The legitimacy of the nominee is predicated on the assumption that he or she is the preferred candidate of the majority of Democrats.

In 2008, when Hillary Clinton was the presumptive favorite for the Democratic nomination, it was Obama who emerged from the nomination process as the party’s nominee. As his stock rose among Democrats following his Iowa Caucus victory, Obama’s communications team eagerly juxtaposed Hillary’s establishment candidacy to Obama’s outsider status.

Given his thin resume in 2008, Obama benefited from the Democratic Party’s competitive nomination race. Merely going toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the early nomination debates lifted Obama’s credibility among voters.

In contrast, Hillary did everything in her power to limit the number of nomination challengers in 2016, thereby solidifying her establishment-candidate status at a time when the public mood was not favorable to such candidates.

Obama certainly understands this dynamic and recognizes a competitive nomination process in 2020 will help the Democrats’ eventual nominee.

That said, Obama has told confidants, according to our sources, that Hillary cannot be allowed to either run or be central to the process in picking the next Democratic nominee. While Obama genuinely believes the Russians interfered in the 2016 election and holds himself partially responsible for not doing more to expose Russia’s interference, he also believes Hillary was ill-equipped to overcome such a challenge.

“Anytime he (Obama) is reminded that Hillary blames him for not doing more to stop the Russians, he gets visibly upset,” says a long-time Obama friend. “He truly believes he would have run the 2016 race by more than 10 points — and thinks Joe (Biden) would have won by a similar margin.”

So, it should not surprise anyone that Obama is actively working to prevent something like Hillary’s covert takeover of the DNC in 2016 to happen in 2020. Obama simply will not allow it.

Step 2: Make the electoral field level again

Yet, for Obama’s Justice League to usher in the next Democratic governing majority, they also need to dismantle the structural barriers that disproportionately prevent Democrats from winning elections. Chief among those barriers, at least for U.S. House races, is gerrymandering.

The Associated Press estimated that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats in 2016 over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country.

Knowing this, the Obama team has asked Holder to oversee the Democrats’ National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) to correct gerrymandering and other structural barriers to fair elections. Partnering with the Obama-aligned progressive group, Organizing For Action (OFA), their plan starts with winning more state-level races.

“Fixing gerrymandering can be the key that unlocks progress on so many issues the American people care about,” says Kelly Ward, the executive director of the NDRC.

In an email, Obama told OFA volunteers they would “provide the grassroots organizing capacity and mobilization that we’ll need to win state-level elections and move other initiatives forward ahead of the 2021 redistricting process, making sure that states are in the best position possible to draw fair maps.”

Their task will not be easy and will not reap benefits any time soon, as the Democrats will need to control far more state legislatures and governorships than they do at present. Furthermore, redrawing congressional districts may not be enough to level the playing field. FiveThirtyEight.com’s David Wasserman contends that the Democrats have a geographic clustering problem that will work against their efforts to redraw electoral maps.

“Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats,” says Wasserman.

According to Wasserman this result is attributable to both GOP gerrymandering and Democratic voters’ clustering in urban districts.

“The net result is that the median House seat is well to the right of the nation,” adds Wasserman.

Redistricting is a long-pole project and the Obama team needs to address a more immediate problem: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Step 3: Unify the two wings of the Democratic Party by marginalizing the party’s two biggest names (not named Barack): Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

The Obama team’s efforts will be for naught if they allow Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders to lead the party going into the 2018 and 2020 elections. Hillary in particular has too many loyalists in key party functions, including fundraising among big donors, to assume she won’t leverage those connections for her own purposes, whether its running for president again or hand-picking the next presidential nominee.

To stop Hillary from injecting herself into the 2020 campaign, the Obama team is engaged in an ongoing and coordinated effort to discredit Hillary (and to a much lesser extent Bernie Sanders). The trick however is to do so without alienating Hillary’s core supporters.

Former DNC interim chair Donna Brazile launched the first attack in November when she released her book — Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House — about the 2016 election. Despite some recent backtracking, Brazile’s descriptions of the ham-fisted tactics used by Hillary’s campaign were less than flattering.

“As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet,” Brazile wrote in a November 2nd Politico article. “It (the Democratic National Committee) had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.”

In practical terms, Hillary Clinton used the Democratic National Commitee’s (DNC) as a fund-raising clearinghouse.

Federal Election Commission law limits direct individual contributions to presidential campaigns at $2,700, but the limits are less restrictive for contributions to state parties and the DNC.

As Brazile notes in her Politico article, “Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.”

In other words, the Clinton campaign engineered a fundraising system where money meant for the eventual nominee and state-level races was funneled directly to Clinton. Was that legal? Probably. Was it ethical? No.

Brazile’s skill for artful dodginess emerged a few days after her Politico article when she pulled the reins on those who interpreted her sharp criticism of the Clinton campaign to mean Clinton had rigged the nomination.

“I found no evidence, none whatsoever” that the primaries were rigged, Brazile said during a November 4th appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”

Despite Brazile’s tamping down of the ‘election rigging’ charge, the conclusion had already metastasized within the mass media and was impossible to depose.

And for good reason. While presidential nominees typically take control of their party’s administrative apparatus after they’ve secured the party’s nomination, the Clinton campaign, confident in its inevitability, absorbed the DNC months prior to actually winning the nomination.

Is that rigging the election? Given the facts and the timeline, it is a reasonable conclusion.

Bill and Hillary Clinton had no reason to expect Donna Brazile’s loyalty. Hillary had already been burned by Brazile during the 2008 nomination when Brazile, who was on the DNC rules committee, tried to block Hillary’s attempt to seat national convention delegates from Florida and Michigan, the majority of whom were committed to Clinton.

The problem for Hillary’s 2008 campaign was that those two states had violated party rules in scheduling their primaries and, according Brazile at the time, seating those delegates would have changed the rules in the middle of the game and that was tantamount to “cheating.”

Calling Bill or Hillary a cheater is a good way to get your name taken off the Friends of Bill (FOB) or FOH list and Brazile is permanently off that list — if she was ever on it.

And while Brazile attempted in the 2016 election to get back into the good graces of the Clintons by feeding debate questions to Hillary before a 2016 CNN-televised debate, everyone knows the Clintons have long memories.

However, Brazile’s Judas kiss didn’t sting the Clintons nearly as hard as the knee-to-the-crotch move New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand planted on them a couple of weeks after Brazile’s article.

In the midst of allegations that Minnesota Senator Al Franken had given a female performer an unwelcomed tongue-kiss during a 2006 USO tour in Afghanistan, Gillibrand was asked during a New York Times podcast if she thought President Bill Clinton should have resigned during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“Yes, I think that is the appropriate response,” responded Gillibrand.

While there is no evidence Gillibrand was acting as an Obama surrogate when she suggested the 42nd president should have resigned, she nonetheless helped the Obama team’s effort to weaken Hillary’s power within the party.

The woman hand-picked by the Clintons for the New York Senate seat vacated by Hillary when she became the U.S. Secretary of State had gone rogue. Cue the Clinton bootlickers.

Philippe Reines, a top adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, rebuked Gillibrand on Twitter:

Reines would have a point if we were just talking about a ‘consensual blowjob’ with an intern. Unfortunately, by the time the U.S. Senate voted to save Clinton’s presidency in 1999, journalists had documented our 42nd president’s lifetime of sexual predatory behavior and a repeated pattern of denials, lies and slut shaming — and the co-pilot through every new bimbo eruption? Hillary Rodham Clinton, the enabler-in-chief.

Even women that should know better defended Bill and Hillary from Gillibrand’s blindside attack.

“I admire her (Gillibrand) for speaking out and for being really honest and blunt and brutal about it, even when it comes to Democrats and even when it comes to President Clinton,” said longtime Democratic strategist Maria Cardona, a former Hillary Clinton aide…”

…here comes the ‘but’…

“…But, Gillibrand’s fight is far from a straightforward one even within the party, added Cardona. “President Clinton is beloved.”

As Cardona is learning, the #MeToo movement has ushered in a new paradigm for how men and women conduct themselves professionally (at least in the news media and entertainment business). Cardona and Reines are two decades behind the public mood and Bill Clinton is now the poster child (along with Harvey Weinstein, John Conyers, and Matt Lauer, and others) for a type of work behavior that is unacceptable going forward (we can hope).

As many of Hillary’s loyalists continue the attempt to put distance between Bill’s creepy history and the former First Lady, the Obama-wing of the Democratic Party has seized on the current zeitgeist to end any hope the Clinton’s had of being significant players in the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

While the Clinton machine easily dismissed Gillibrand’s comments as the calculated move of a potential presidential candidate, the broadside delivered by Obama’s Secretary for Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, made public a critique of Clintons that had, up to then, only been heard in the fringes of the Democratic Party (i.e., millennials and Bernie supporters).

Unlike Brazile or Gillibrand, Sebelius is still in good standing with the party establishment and her motives cannot be assigned to the strategic calculations of a likely 2020 presidential candidate.

It was during a podcast with former Obama senior strategist David Axelrod, a founding member of the new Justice League, that Sebelius decided to lay some serious wood on Hillary Clinton.

As Axelrod led the conversation into a discussion of the current sexual harassment and assault debate, Sebelius took the topic of Bill’s libertinism to a new level for mainstream Democrats.

“Not only did people look the other way, but they went after the women who came forward and accused him,” said Sebelius. “And so it (the White House) doubled down on not only bad behavior but abusive behavior. And then people attacked the victims.”

The next logical step for Sebelius was to go where no loyal Democrat had ever gone before.

Sebelius told Axelrod it is legitimate for Democrats to criticize the former first lady and Secretary of State for her role in what Sebelius called “a strategy of dismissing and besmirching the women who stepped forward” with allegations against Bill Clinton.

Though the mainstream media had moved on to the newest wave of sexual harassment allegations and the latest Trump tweets, the Democratic establishment heard Sebelius loud and clear: Hillary Clinton cannot be the standard bearer for the Democratic Party going forward — not in these new times. Her inability to effectively leverage the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape bears some responsibility for the electoral debacle in 2016.

Any other Democratic presidential nominee would have possessed the credibility to hit back hard against Trump. But not Hillary.

And it was no accident that Sebelius made this monumental statement on The Axe Files. Both Axelrod and Sebelius are Obama loyalists. Sebelius’ statement on Hillary was likely crafted at the highest levels of the Obama team.

Clearing a path to the nomination is not ‘rigging’ the election.

As long as Hillary Clinton continues to suck oxygen out of the Democratic’s Party’s air, rising stars like California Senator Kamala Harris (who was one of Obama’s earliest supporters in 2008) and Gillibrand are going to find it difficult to elevate their stature on the national stage.

It doesn’t help them that almost all big Democratic donors still have strong ties to the Clintons and, should Hillary run again, will be compelled to help her again amass a large campaign war chest going into 2020.

The Clintons have been playing this game for years and they are good at it.

The Clintons’ joint plan since Bill left office was a top-down strategy focused on facilitating Hillary’s rise to the presidency. Clinton Foundation fundraising, though ostensibly independent of Hillary’s U.S. Senate and presidential political campaign activities, shared many of the same big money domestic donors (e.g., Harvey Weinstein). This overlap, though legal, played close to the ethical margins and invited charges from Hillary’s political opponents that she was too often less than honest and always a bit dodgy. 

The Obama post-presidency, so far, is taking the opposite approach. Where the Clintons’ top-down leadership style kept the power and money under their control, the Obama approach appears, at this early point, to be directed towards building from the bottom up.

The irony here is that, during the Obama presidency, the Democratic Party’s state and national infrastructure was neglected. Perhaps driven by guilt, Obama now recognizes the Democrats will not realize the full extent of their demographic advantages vis-a-vis the Republicans until they regain their electoral footing at the local and state levels.

For almost three decades, since Michael Dukakis’ defeat in 1988, the Democrats have prioritized presidential politics over all other considerations.

It has paid dividends at the presidential level (Bill Clinton and Obama) and left the party needlessly weak and demoralized at other levels.

The Trump presidency has changed the Democrats’ orientation however — though it remains to be seen how the Resistance’s energy can reduce the Democrats’ geographic clustering problem. Unless there is a secret plan in the works to relocate some California Democrats to Montana and Iowa, the Democrats will struggle to win and maintain control of the U.S. House and the Electoral College will always confound their efforts to win back the presidency.

The good news for the Democrats is that Obama and his Justice League team are working all angles of the problem. They want the presidency back as well as control of the U.S. Congress and all other levels of government.

In this project, Obama will never publicly promote one presidential candidate over another until that person has secured the Democratic nomination, but he will never allow the Clinton’s to be significant players in selecting the next Democratic nominee either.

With an assist from the Russians and FBI Director James Comey, Hillary Clinton blew it in 2016 in part due to her inability to credibly exploit Trump’s documented mistreatment of women. Obama and his team have subtly but definitively let Democratic donors know that.

Hillary’s acolytes nonetheless continue to plant seeds of hope that she will run for president in 2020 (Mike Vespa’s plea is a good example) — but that will not happen. The Clinton era is finally over. And say ‘Hello’ to the Democrats’ next presidential nominee, Kamala Harris.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, November 28, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

Roy Moore is going to win the Alabama U.S. Senate race on December 12th.

That is bad news for the national Republican Party.

At a time when Nikki Haley and Paul Ryan should be the images of the party’s future, instead, we get a man that tacitly acknowledges, as a 30-something assistant district attorney, he dated minors (with their mother’s permission).

Jethro Bodine has a more honorable dating history.

But here are the facts on the ground…

As of now, the RealClearPolitics.com polling average for the Alabama U.S. Senate race shows former Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore (Republican) and Democrat Doug Jones in a close race with less than two weeks to go in the campaign.

To many observers outside of Alabama, it defies explanation that Moore is competitive after The Washington Post published allegations of improper sexual contact between Moore, a 32-year-old assistant district attorney at the time, and a 14-year-old girl.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell views the allegations against Moore as believable and the National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) said the Senate should expel Moore, even if elected by Alabama’s voters.

Democratic challenger Doug Jones, a bland politician generally seen as a “sober, competent public servant,” may become the first Democrat to win an Alabama U.S. Senate race since Howell Heflin in 1990. [Heflin was stridently pro-life and pro-gun Democrat — such people roamed the political landscape once.]

However, Jones knows clubbing Moore over the head with The Washington Post‘s sexual misconduct allegations is not a winning strategy for a Democrat in Alabama.

Jones has only tangentially brought up the Moore allegations during the campaign, which should signal to political pundits outside Alabama that the impact of the allegations is still unknown. So unknown that attempting to understand why Alabama might still elect Moore is a fool’s errand…

…but here it goes…

Moore is all too familiar to those of us who grew in America’s Bible Belt (…I grew up in Iowa and, yes, Iowa is part of the Bible Belt).

As others with an academic understanding of pedophilia have made clear, Moore cannot be classified as a pedophile based on the accusations of the women who have come forward describing their encounters with Moore when they were still minors.

“Moore is not a pedophile,” Rachel Hope Cleves, a professor of history at the University of Victoria, and Nicholas L. Syrett, a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas, write in The Washington Post. “If you believe his accusers, as we do, he is a powerful man who has serially harassed and even assaulted teenage girls.”

However, explaining Moore’s alleged behavior through the prism of “age, class, gender and power” differentials, as Hope Cleves and Syrett do, conflates contextual factors with causal factors. By explicitly linking Moore’s behavior to the #MeToo movement’s addressing sexual harassment and assault within the broader society — particularly in the workplace — Hope Cleves and Syrett are succumbing to a bandwagon mentality instead of an interest in doing solid social analysis.

There are obvious commonalities between Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore. No adult male pursues relationships with young girls or younger adult women without exploiting differences in age, class, gender or power — but those are situational prerequisites, not causal explanations.

Instead, our best (and still disturbing) understanding of Moore is offered by his own defenders within the evangelical community.

Pop psychology doesn’t get much creepier than Pastor Flip Benham, the national leader of North Carolina-based Operation Save America, a pro-life group, attempting to explain why a 32-year-old Roy Moore preferred female minors to women his age.

“All of the ladies, or many of the ladies that he possibly could have married, were not available then, they were already married, maybe, somewhere,” Benham told a reporter for The Hill. ”

It gets worse…

“The lady that he’s married to now, Ms. Kayla, is a younger woman.” Benham remarked about the 14-year age gap between Moore and his wife. “He did that because there is something about a purity of a young woman, there is something that is good, that’s true, that’s straight and he looked for that.”

So there you have it. It was most likely inconceivable to a 32-year-old Roy Moore to propose to a woman with prior sexual experiences — which ruled out most of the single women his age at the time. This scenario is not a justification for improper contact with a minor, but it is an explanation.

Roy Moore, in his mind, is not lying when he says he has never had inappropriate contact with underage girls, and while Moore and his supporters won’t say this outright (except for Pastor Benham), the 32-year-old Moore was probably trolling for a chaste wife when he approached a 14-year-old child. From their biblical-centered perspective, what Moore may have done in the 1970s to find a wife was entirely appropriate.

Laugh (or cry) in disgust if you must, but Jones’ avoidance of the allegations against Moore on the campaign trail signals it is not a laughing matter to Democrats still trying to win elections in the Heart of Dixie.

Liberals gleefully extol their belief in a corrosive connection between the religious right, sexual repression, and the anti-feminist political agenda of the Republican Party. They aren’t entirely wrong — which is why Roy Moore is so dangerous to the future of the Republican Party.

The Republican Party needs to be seen as the party of Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Rand Paul, Nikki Haley, and Paul Ryan, not Roy Moore.

Now is not the time for the Republican Party to re-wage its war on the sexual revolution. That war was lost long ago and there are too many issues far more important (size of government, taxes, regulations, Middle East war) to allow dinosaur’s like Roy Moore to tarnish the Republican brand.

The post-1960s sexual revolution changed Alabama just as much as it did other parts of the country. The religious right will not bring back the 1950s.

Instead, they will have to be content with sticking Roy Moore up the ass of Mitch McConnell and the U.S. Senate.

Despite recent polling trends, Roy Moore will win on December 12th.

Moore’s drop in the polls has reached bottom (around 46 percent of likely voters) and a more aggressive Moore has already started to emerge on the campaign stump in the past few days. Republican Lee Busby’s write-in candidacy will as likely take votes from Jones as it will from Moore. This means Moore can win without passing the 50 percent threshold.

Assuming the turnout differential between Democratic and Republican partisans holds fairly close to past elections, Moore will win in a close election. That, in itself, is a miracle of biblical proportions for the Democrats.

Whatever the outcome, expect the Democrats to over-interpret the result as further evidence of the Republicans’ forthcoming demise in the 2018 midterm elections.

The Republicans, for their part, will equally misdiagnose the results as a merely an outlier specific to the unusual factors present in the Moore-Jones race.

Both interpretations will have flaws.

The Democrats are far from certain to take back the U.S. House in 2018 and the Alabama special election, should Moore lose, will offer little insight into the 2018 midterms.

However, if Roy Moore becomes a U.S. Senator, the impact on an already damaged Republican brand could be the tipping point that brings not only the U.S. House but the U.S. Senate back into the Democrats’ hands in 2018.

Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? Far from it.

Predictit.com shows a 31 percent chance of the Democrats regaining the Senate in 2018, and a 53 percent chance of taking back the House. If Republicans aren’t scared right now, they should be.

Arizona Senator Jeff Flake gets is exactly right. A Republican Party defined by Donald Trump and Roy Moore is not a winning national brand.

Should Republicans be rooting against Roy Moore on December 12th? Yes. Hell yes.

The economy is booming right now, due in part to the Trump administration’s swift rollback of burdensome regulations that were needlessly hurting U.S. companies and doing little good for the nation-at-large.

In typical times, strong economic growth would keep the incumbent party’s midterm losses to a minimum. These are not typical times.

Trump’s job approval ratings are stalling around 39 percent and do not appear linked to conditions in the U.S. macro-economy. Somebody in the White House that actually knows shit needs to step up and lead an effort to frame the 2018 midterms on the strong economy.

For the Republicans to have any chance of staving off the Democrats onslaught in 2018, the midterm elections need to be less a referendum on Trump and more on the state of the economy. As detailed in a previous NuQum.com post, under current (strong) economic conditions, Trump’s job approval numbers, as measured by Gallup, need to be north of 41 percent for the Republicans to have a chance to keep control of the U.S. House.

If Alabama elects Roy Moore on December 12th, keeping control of the U.S. House will become even more difficult than necessary.

K.R.K.

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, November 27, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

[This essay is in two parts: Part 1 examines the effect of today’s hyper-partisanship on Americans; Part 2 details some simple steps to recover from hyper-partisanship]

Hyper-partisanship is hurting the Democrats more than the Republican for one simple reason: the Democrats’ party ideology is predicated on the idea that the government exists to solve problems and facilitate economic growth, and without it working effectively, Americans suffer.

Yet, recent evidence calls the Democratic thesis into question.

Eight years of the Barack Obama presidency produced two major legislative accomplishments: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). And those historic pieces of legislation were passed without any bipartisan support.

Apart from those two accomplishments, Obama’s presidency is best described as eight years of partisan gridlock. And what was the result of that gridlock? Eight years of consistent (though stubbornly slow) economic growth.

Almost one year into the Trump administration and not one piece of significant legislation has passed Congress. And, again, the net result? The fastest economic growth in over two years.

It is not unreasonable to suggest the U.S. economy does not need increased interventions by the U.S. government to flourish. Hyper-partisanship, so far, has not hurt the U.S. economy.

Yet, collectively, there is a growing consensus that hyper-partisanship is hurting our daily lives in very tangible ways. Recently, two researchers found that hyper-partisanship has reduced the amount of time many of us spend with relatives around holidays.

Whether hyper-partisanship is depresses the U.S. economy is debatable; that it is hurting our civic culture is undeniable. Americans are divided on a scale we have not seen in our lifetimes and an increasing number of us are trying to find ways to reduce this dangerous tribalism.

The good news is that hyper-partisanship does not need to be a permanent aspect of our democracy. We can reduce today’s ideological polarization and the political dysfunction it breeds, and we can do it without shutting down Facebook or forcing people to watch broadcast television news again.

Six Steps to Partisan Detoxification

A full recovery program from hyper-partisanship requires a level of self-awareness most of us do not possess by nature. Therefore, we must through training create personal habits that compensate for our biological inclinations.

Thus, the first step is the most critical and complicated. Without it, the subsequent steps are impotent.

Step 1: Know yourself

Commonly in substance abuse recovery programs, patients are asked to first recognize they have a problem. Hyper-partisanship is no different. A person can’t complete a partisan detox program without first acknowledging they are a hyper-partisan.

What is a hyper-partisan and what if I am not one?

If the survey research is to be believed (and I do believe it), most adults in the U.S. are not strong partisans (hyper-partisans are a subset of this group). Pew Research identifies roughly one-third of the 2017 U.S. adult population as being at “consistently” ideological.

One-third of Americans as strong partisans seems accurate.

Hyper-partisans, a subset of strong partisans, are defined by: (1) long-term, straight ticket voting, (2) policy positions consistently to the left of their party’s opinion distribution (if they are a Democrat/liberal) or to the right (if they are a Republican/conservative), (3) their closest friendships are exclusively with people that conform to their opinions and beliefs, and (4) the vast majority of their information intake comes from sources that conform to their opinions and beliefs.

Hyper-partisans live in the proverbial “bubble.” They actively avoid and reject information contrary to their partisan view of the world.

Given this definition, most people can quickly determine if they are a hyper-partisan. Some people will resist the label, and for those that do, they should have their hyper-partisanship assessed by a third party — a casual friend or colleague — preferably with an opposing political perspective. Like-minded friends and family are often useless for this task. They will tell you what you want to hear.

If the majority of those third party assessments describe the person as hyper-partisan, then that person is probably a hyper-partisan.

Anyone identified in Step 1 as hyper-partisans can therefore move on to Step 2. Anyone not accepting the label are either like the majority of Americans — non-ideologues — or in complete denial of their hyper-partisanship.

For the those uncertain of their ideological leanings, I recommend using Pew Research’s online political typology tool which uses a respondent’s answers to a series of policy questions to assign them to an ideological category. It is not perfect, but the tool is good at differentiating strong partisans from weak ones.

Step 2: Take inventory

Once someone has determined their status as a hyper-partisan, the next step is to identify the positive and negative impacts of hyper-partisanship on their daily life over the past year. This can include family, friends, neighbors, work colleagues, online friends, and strangers.

Ask these questions:

Of the people you talk to on a daily or weekly basis, how many do you feel comfortable talking ‘politics’ or sharing strong personal opinions?

Have you had any conversations in the past year that turned heated or confrontational because of political topics?

Conversely, have you come to a ‘meeting of the minds’ in the past year with someone you previously disagreed with on a sensitive political topic?

There are no right or wrong answers here. This step simply allows someone to refresh their memory about where partisan politics enters their regular routine.

Step 3: Humble yourself and build a bridge

I do not have any generalized empirical data on the percentage of hyper-partisans that have had a confrontational experience with someone in the past year on a political subject. However, my very biased sample of hyper-partisans (family members) finds that every single one has experienced at least one heated and unproductive confrontation with someone in the past year on a political topic — often with someone they know through their social media activities.

The third step, therefore, is straightforward. Hyper-partisans need to reconnect with at least one person they’ve had a recent unproductive political or ideological confrontation.

Just reconnect. There doesn’t need to be a reconciliation on the disputed issue, but there does need to be some acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the opposing view. That’s all. “I heard what you said, and while I still disagree, I understand your point of view.”

Warning: In building bridges, do try to avoid condescension. People have an uncanny ability to know when they are being talked down to by someone else. Remember what we learned earlier: Everyone, including very highly-educated people, believe in some ideas that are just plain wrong. Nobody, regardless of education, is immune from false consciousness. Nobody. That includes YOU.

What if my argument was with a neo-Nazi white supremacist on genetic determinism?

A simple answer: Some bridges aren’t worth building. So, move on to a past confrontation over a more mainstream issue. Those issues can be nearly as contentious (abortion, Middle East conflicts, immigration, etc.) but those are the bridges we, as a society, need to build up again.

Step 4: Cleanse your media palate

My experience is that this step can be the most surprising and rewarding. For at least one week, stop using your typical news and information sources and, instead, rely exclusively on a small number of ostensibly non-partisan media outlets. So, if you are a hyper-partisan Democrat, do not turn off MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and watch “Fox and Friends.” That is too big of a leap at this stage. It runs the risk of increasing your ideological entrenchment.

Rather, choose a comparatively non-partisan news source.

Do they even exist? Even BBC America has a globalist, if not left-leaning bias, after all.

Actually, according to the media bias watchdog, allsides.com, the BBC is centrist. But there are also other non-ideological new services left in the world. As such, I have found these news services (in no particular order below) to be refreshing in their generally non-partisan, though often bland, presentation of U.S. news:

• CCTV – the major state television broadcaster in mainland China provides a number of English-service news channels available through local cable and the internet. While I wouldn’t recommend CCTV for news on Chinese politics or U.S.-Chinese trade policy, their coverage of U.S politics and events unrelated to China is remarkably uncontaminated by ideological bias. CCTV is almost annoyingly non-partisan.
• BBC World Service – the most popular international news service in the U.S. and for good reason — the BBC remains the gold standard for international news. Its news features often have an internationalist (globalist) perspective that could be viewed as biased towards Democrats/liberals, but on most stories covering the U.S., they avoid the overbearing partisan trappings found on mainstream U.S. cable networks (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News)
• Al Jazeera – based in Qatar and created by former BBC staff, this may seem like a controversial choice as non-partisan news option, but this news service comes the closest to the BBC standard — and in some ways — surpasses the BBC. Their English-language service covers a wide range of U.S. news events and, with the exception of U.S. policy in the Middle East — mostly avoids anti-Trump and other tiresome, partisan rants.
• i24news – based in Israel and available in English, French and Arabic, I recently stumbled upon i24news while searching for Middle East news. Though its only been available since February 2017, I was surprised at the quality, breadth and depth of this news services’ U.S coverage. Apart from its coverage of U.S. policy in the Middle East, particularly as it relates to Israel and the Palestinians, their other U.S. coverage was remarkably blunt and free of partisan politics. For an American hyper-partisan, this news service will not feel like MSNBC or Fox News. They are clearly trying to draw a line somewhere in between.
• The Christian Science Monitor (CSM) is an international news organization that, in their words, “delivers thoughtful, global coverage via its website, weekly magazine, and daily news broadcasts. As a young journalist in the 1980s, I considered the CSM newspaper and its companion radio news service to be our nation’s closest equivalent of the BBC — much more so than National Public Radio (NPR). Economics have eroded the breadth and quality of CSM news coverage, but as an alternative to today’s mainstream news networks, they are still relatively non-partisan and objective.

Of course, someone is free to find their own non-partisan news services for this fourth step. The point of this step is simply to reacquaint hyper-partisans with what objective news coverage looks, sounds and feels like. After a week of going cold turkey on U.S-based news networks, a few hyper-partisans will even find it hard to go back. For some, this step will feel analogous to going from breathing Los Angeles’ air to breathing the air in Wyoming’s Rocky Mountains. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News are polluted with former White House and partisan political operatives. They are not news services, they are partisan propaganda entities.  Hence, it is impossible to discern objective truth from partisan agendas on these networks. Impossible.

Step 5: Be humble, be teachable, and always keep learning

One of my former bosses had a sign above her office door that read: “Be humble, be teachable, and always keep learning.”

That is a good summary for Step 5.

Regardless of age or educational background, find an issue, preferably one that is new or with low visibility on the national policy stage, and do some deep-dive research on the topic, making sure all possible perspectives are considered.

After a week or two of intense study, share the knowledge with a wide range of people — but do not give a policy prescription. Instead, let others give their opinions and policy preferences. Anyone completing this step with an open-mind and heart may be surprised at the people with whom they share the most agreement.

The objective in this step is not to persuade someone to agree with your position on a subject. Quite the opposite, if done earnestly, this step will allow many hyper-partisans to experience what it is like to have their opinion formed or modified by someone else’s opinion.

Presently, persuasion is a lost art. Both political parties in this country openly reject persuasion as a tool of electioneering and governance. That is a sad outcome of our current political system.

This fifth step is based on class exercise I experienced during my first-year as political science graduate student. According to the professor, the exercise was designed to disabuse first-year students, who often come into political science graduate programs with strong partisan views, to understand the potential bias inherent in any objective analysis driven by partisan prejudices.

Partisanship kills objective analysis. If you are a partisan, you are not capable of doing meaningful journalistic or academic research.

Step 6: Share your partisan detoxification experience with others

This final step is the easiest. Having successfully completed the previous steps, now is the time to share that experience with others.

Perhaps it is a new favorite news channel or website you discovered in Step 4. Or share any new ideas or expertise gained from Step 5. Whatever is shared, it should be bring comfort to others knowing that living outside the partisan bubble is not disorienting or destructive to anyone’s self-esteem.

These six steps to partisan detoxification, moreover, are not intended to turn a hyper- or strong partisan into a centrist. That is not only hard to do, it is not the point here. The purpose of partisan detoxification is to expose and minimize, if not eliminate, the arrogance and intolerance that infects today’s political partisans.

Failing to fulfill this purpose on a national scale sentences us to a future defined by political stalemate.

And, no, Donald Trump did not cause the political stalemate we see today in Washington, D.C. Its roots likely go back to the Reagan administration, when Democrats, much like today, were in a constant tizzy over what would happen to this country with an B-movie actor for a president.

We prospered economically and defeated the Soviet Union, for those unacquainted with this period in American history.

Partisan detoxification does not forbid disagreements on policy. It does however admonish those who judge someone’s intelligence, or social background, or motives based merely on their policy views. Once we’ve gone down the hyper-partisanship path, we have entered a battle arena where acts of cooperation, compromise and consensus are signs of weakness and where cunning, inflexibility and conquest are the coins of the realm.

Today’s politics is like watching a badger fight a wolverine. Only one outcome is certain — one of them will die.

Winning and losing will always be apart of American politics. As Barack Obama liked to say, “elections have consequences.” Unfortunately for his administration, that view stunted any chance he had of securing a positive and lasting impact on American society. When your governing principle is, “We won.” The result becomes, “We all lose.”

Regardless of which side started today’s partisan gridlock, the future is not as bright if this political polarization continues.

There will be time when Americans will need both parties working together to solve a major problem in the country. In 2008, George W. Bush and the Republicans made the necessary compromises to ensure this country did not fall into an even deeper recession than necessary. The Obama administration, likewise, worked initially to reinforce the bipartisanship of late 2008.

Unfortunately, this bipartisanship died quickly and has been replaced by today’s toxic partisanship. Finding blame for this tribalism is fruitless. Instead, we need to move on and prepare ourselves and our government for the next existential crisis that may arise where we need both parties working together to solve a serious problem.

We know we can do better than what we see today in Washington, D.C. We just have to starting doing it…soon.

K.R.K.

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, April 11, 2018)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

[This essay is in two parts: Part 1 examines the effect of today’s hyper-partisanship on Americans; Part 2 details some simple steps to recover from hyper-partisanship]

Our political system is broken. Not exactly a new observation, but it can’t be repeated often enough.

Our political system is broken.

Nothing gets solved anymore. Problems get pushed down the road, real people suffer, and our media stars make seven-figure salaries stewing about it as they preen before TV cameras.

And while we are all distracted by their self-promoting piety, we fail to notice our country’s debt recently passed the $21 trillion mark. Our national debt as a percentage of the economy now approaches levels only seen during World War II.

We were fighting in Europe, Africa, and Asia in 1944. Taking on some debt in the service of defending the world from fascism is understandable. Today, however, we are not fighting two of the biggest military powers in the world. Our typical enemy combatants anymore don’t even have navies or air forces and they number in the thousands, not millions.

You would think our national dialogue right now would be laser-focused on whether we can afford an over $700 billion annual defense budget.

But, alas, according to the cable news networks, we have bigger issues to worry about. Or, rather, two big issues: Stormy Daniels.

Or whatever else is orbiting Planet Trump on a given day.

This isn’t going to end well for any of us, regardless of party or ideological preference. The Trump-Russia obsession is making both political parties look feckless and intellectually sterile (They were long before Donald Trump, by the way). In Noam Chomsky’s words, “Russia hysteria is making the U.S. an international laughing stock.”

I blame hyper-partisanship, which predates the current presidency. And even though this phenomenon may be a symptom rather than a cause, it is certainly not working towards the public good.

Hyper-partisanship amplifies social problems yet prevents the solutions

Hyper-partisanship gives us the worst-of-all-possible worlds: it amplifies societal problems and then serves as the major impediment to enacting any solutions. The partisan divide in this country has risen to a such degree that it has become toxic to our basic social institutions.

Yet, for all pundit chatter about today’s extreme partisanship, there is no serious social movement attempting to repair this damage to our political culture.

If you think Donald Trump and the Republicans are the cause of our dysfunctional political system, you will be disappointed when the national dialogue doesn’t improve under President Kamala Harris and a Democrat-controlled Congress.

The problem is not politicians. The problem is us.

Hyper-partisanship gnaws at the foundations of collective action.

Empirical evidence is building that excessive partisanship in our daily lives is causing increased levels of stress at work and home. In an opinion poll conducted by the American Psychological Association last year, just over half of Americans (57%) said that the current political climate was a “very” or “somewhat” significant source of stress in their lives. This level of stress was even higher among Democrats (72%), for obvious reasons.

Self-reported stress measures are correlated with individual-level physiological stress indicators which medical research informs us can shrink our brains, lower our IQ (at least temporarily), increase heart disease, and wreck our personal relationships.

Hyper-partisanship may be destroying us physically.

At a societal-level, an increase in political polarization corresponds to a geographic polarization with liberals clustering in urban areas and coastal regions, and conservatives living in rural areas and middle America.

Geographic clustering is consequential as it has led to more ideologically homogeneous congressional districts, making it harder to find electorally competitive districts. Over time, as the electorate has polarized along geographic and ideological lines, the number of competitive U.S. House races has been in decline.

Only 40 of the 435 seats in the U.S. House were considered competitive heading into the 2016 election, according to David Wasserman, an analyst for the non-partisan Cook Political Report in Washington. In contrast, in the 2010 U.S. House elections, over 100 seats were considered competitive just before Election Day.

While the 2018 U.S. House elections are looking more competitive with 50 races being classified as competitive by 270ToWin.com, when considering the average tenure of U.S. House or Senate members, our current legislators are near record-breaking levels for average length of tenure (see chart below).

The result of this polarization is a political system less responsive to voters. From a policy output perspective, the politicians elected from increasingly ideological polarized districts are less likely to be ideologically “moderate” and less willing to compromise on policy when they enter state and national legislatures.

The loss of “moderates” in the U.S. House has been especially dramatic among Republicans (see chart below), who started their ideological long march from the center just prior to the election of Ronald Reagan’s in 1980.

In terms of actual policy output, the last three congressional sessions witnessed near record lows in the amount of legislation passed each session (Perhaps that is a good thing…don’t we have enough laws already?).

A polarized American electorate is not simply a psychometric phenomenon, but a social one that has led to tangible changes in this country that will be hard to reverse. Our political system is more rigid, unresponsive, and less productive. In good economic times, many could argue we don’t need an activist government passing large numbers of laws. But there will be economic downturns in the future when we will require an engaged, responsive and productive Congress — — the question is: will our political system be ready when it is called upon to do its job.

What are the barriers to partisan detoxification?

If we are to reduce the electorate’s polarization, we will need to understand the many aspects of human psychology that foster hyper-partisanship and become barriers to its reversal.

The biggest barriers may be the hardest to change: our general lack of self-awareness, fragile egos, imperfect ability to empathize with others, and basic physiological need for companionship.

Taken together, our human flaws conspire against our ability to open our lives and minds to new ideas and alternative points of view.

For example, on average, we think we are smarter and better-looking than any objective measure would indicate. Human conceit may be a constant through history, but with the rise of social media these psychological frailties can distend into narcissism and other forms of self-absorption.

Social media is now the primary news source for 60 percent of Americans and its effect on the electorate may be central to understanding recent trends in political polarization. But it may also be leading to other negative outcomes in the electorate.

Dr. Larry Rosen, professor of psychology at California State University, presented study results at the 2011 annual convention of the American Psychological Association showing how teens who spend more time on Facebook are more likely to show narcissistic tendencies and other behavioral problems (such as low academic performance).

A 2010 study of Facebook users from ages 18 to 25, conducted at York University (Canada), assessed the subjects on the Narcissism Personality Inventory and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. The researchers also measured each subject’s level of ‘self-promotion’ on their Facebook pages, defined as updating their status every five minutes, frequent posting of pictures of themselves, photos of celebrity look-alikes, and quotes and mottos glorifying themselves. The researchers concluded that the people who used Facebook the most for self-promotion tended to have narcissistic or insecure personalities.

Neither of these studies prove that frequent use of social media sites causeincreased levels of narcissism, but they do suggest a strong link between social media use and various personality disorders.

Additionally, studies have shown that social media use can limit the breadth of our information sources and reduce our exposure to other points of view. If true, that is a toxic outcome for a democracy.

Ashik Shafi (Bethany College) and Fred Vultee (Wayne State University), in their analysis of a 2014 survey of students at a large Midwestern university, found that “social media use negatively predicts respondents’ knowledge about political processes, institutions and current events when other possible predictors of political knowledge are controlled.”

While their study does not prove a causal link between social media use and political knowledge, it does suggest social media may negatively impact users’ political knowledge through two mechanisms: (1) information filters — where social media allows users to systematically filter out specific sources of political information, and (2) time replacement — where the time people spend on social media replaces time they would have spent engaging in social activities in the meatsphere (real-life).

This process mirrors Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s ‘bowling alone’ thesis that explained Americans’ declining participation in social activities, such as bowling and political activism, by their increased time watching television.

Through social media, we create personalized echo chambers that reinforce our existing opinions, resulting in increasingly intransigent opinions vis-a-vis other opinions in the world we purposely tune out of our Facebook news feeds and posts.

Social media narrows our knowledge base and filters out evidence of our own fallibility, creating a feedback loop that inflates confidence in our own capacity to comprehend complex social phenomena. This feedback loop limits our exposure to divergent opinions and maximizes inputs from like-minded people, thereby reinforcing our existing partisan biases. The more we personalize our media choices, the more partisan we become.

Social media has turned us all into thinking we are PhD. sociologists and economists and, subsequently, less willing to consider opinions and ideas from actual PhD. sociologists and economists.

Political scientists that study ‘media effects’ refer to the partisan selective exposure among information seekers to explain the potential effects of social media on political partisanship and ideology. In other words, we avoid information that might contradict our existing opinions and seek out information that confirms them. Political scientists W. Lance Bennett and Shanto Iyengar call this ‘individualized reality construction’ — — and it may not be a good thing for sustaining a healthy, constructive political culture.

The rise of social media (and individualized reality construction) has also coincided with a demise of the inadvertent audience.

“During the heyday of network news, when the combined audience for the three evening newscasts exceeded 70 million, many Americans were exposed to the news as a simple byproduct of their loyalty to the sitcom or other entertainment program that immediately followed the news,” according to Bennett and Iyengar. “It is likely that this ‘inadvertent’ audience may have accounted for half the total audience for network news.”

During the peak audience years for broadcast network television, a significant percentage of Americans were exposed to news and political information that they would not have sought out on their own. One result of this large ‘inadvertent audience’ may have been that it helped build a national political culture where people, regardless of political orientation, shared the same information sources.

Social media may be eroding mass media’s function as a cultural bonding agent and replaced it with an information environment that now divides us more than unite us. We can delude ourselves into thinking our 1,000+Facebook friends actually measures something good about us, but it may indicate something much more privative.

Along with our new social media-driven echo chambers, there are two other flaws in our neuro-cognitive biochemistry that deserve mentioning and that may stunt any attempt to open our minds to new opinions and ideas.

We are often bad at making predictions…

If we are honest with ourselves, we realize most of our personal predictions never come true. In fact, psychological research on generalized anxiety disorder has found that more than 80 percent of our negative predictions never materialize. And even when these predictions do occur, the consequences are often far less serious than we had previously imagined. Nonetheless, the anticipation of negative events cause levels of stress that can drive us deeper into the dark dynamics of individualized reality construction.

Most of what we believe as fact is, in truth, wrong…

In addition to our attraction to negative predictions is our tendency to believe things that are just plain wrong. We may think we know how the economy works, or why some kids grow up to commit crimes and other don’t, or how human activities affect the global climate, but in most cases, we don’t. Most of what we believe is superficial and often not true on some important, fundamental level.

Ask a well-educated, partisan Republican about the likely effects of lowering federal taxes for the economy-at-large, and you will get a simple, coherent answer: “Lower taxes will grow the economy.” But that opinion is just wrong.

Does lowering taxes increase economic growth? The economic research does not provide pithy answers to that question.

Two economists at the left-leaning Brookings Institute, William G. Gale and Andrew A. Samwick, concluded in their 2014 study that “if the tax cuts are not financed by immediate spending cuts they will likely also result in an increased federal budget deficit, which in the long-term will reduce national saving and raise interest rates.” Even if there is a short-term boost to economic growth from a tax cut, the long-term net result may be small or even negative, according to Gale and Samwick.

Even the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation has concluded that simple statements such as “lower taxes lead to economic growth” do not reflect reality enough to inform budget and tax policies.

The Tax Foundation’s William McBride writes: “The economy is sufficiently complex that virtually any theory can find some support in the data.”

Yet, the Republican Party has achieved 40 years of political dominance partially around the much over-simplified belief that lower taxes lead to more growth.

But its not just the GOP. You can’t go to a Democratic Party rally without someone calling for an increase in the minimum wage, on the belief that such a policy move would increase the economic security of millions of working Americans.

Would it?

The economic research is mixed, at best, at the effectiveness of minimum wage increases at increasing the standard of living for low-skilled labor. Some research suggests raising the minimum wage actually reduces employment opportunities for low-skilled labor. The very people that need these minimum-wage jobs the most may be most harmed by increasing the minimum wage.

Yet, Democratic Party leaders are not held accountable for the empirical weaknesses in their policy proposals. Sure, Fox News and the Republican Party will hold them accountable, but today’s partisan voters are so well-trained to avoid contradictory information that they may never hear substantive counter-arguments to raising the minimum wage. In Walter Cronkite’s 1968, the average voter had a good chance of inadvertently coming into contact with information that might challenge the voter’s view of the world, but not today.

Are we doomed to hyper-partisanship forever?

You know partisanship has gotten out of control when a U.S. Senate candidate, asked whether he dated teenage girls when he was in his 30s, replies, “Not generally, no…” and he only loses the election by one and a half percentage points. Granted, it was Alabama, but still…

But now for the good news…hyper-partisanship is not necessarily a permanent aspect of our modern democracy. We can reduce today’s ideological polarization and the political dysfunction it breeds. And we can do it without over-regulating Facebook or forcing people to watch broadcast television news again.

In a follow-up to this essay, I will share how I re-trained myself to stop passing new information through a partisan or ideological lens and to instead do something few of us are good at any more.

It is called listening. And it turns out to be much harder to do than it sounds.

Part 2 of this essay provides some simple steps to recover from today’s hyper-partisanship epidemic.

K.R.K.

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, November 8, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

Rush Limbaugh tried hard on Wednesday morning to rationalize the Republican defeat in Virginia as something unrelated to President Donald Trump — but, after an hour, his enthusiasm for the project waned.

“I don’t do phony optimism and I don’t try to cheer people up when it isn’t warranted…I’m the mayor of Realville,” said Limbaugh.

For those of you not sure, Realville is not an actual place — which was symbolic of Rush’s plea to his faithful listeners. His rationalization of the Virginia elections was going nowhere.

[Fact Checker’s Note: There is, in fact, a Réalville. But it is in southern France and we verified that Rush Limbaugh is not their mayor.]

There is no positive spin Republicans can assign to the Democrats’ victories in Virginia (and elsewhere). The GOP didn’t just lose in Virginia, they weren’t even competitive. More distressing to them should be the turnover of Virginia’s lower house to the Democrats.

The Democratic Party’s victory on Tuesday was deep in northern Virginia, and may foretell the ‘Thus Always to Tyrants‘ state finally becoming reliably blue for Democrats.

Hillary Clinton won Virginia in 2016 by a 50 percent to 44 percent margin, with 6 percent of the vote going to third party candidates. Ralph Northam beat Ed Gillespie by a 54 percent to 45 percent margin, with only one percent going to Cliff Hyra, the Libertarian candidate.

Without an intensive look at individual-level vote data (such as The Washington Post’s exit poll data), it is difficult to make strong conclusions about the 2017 Virginia elections; however, Tuesday’s election results are consistent with Berniecrats’ claims that a large majority of the third party presidential vote in 2016 would have gone to the Democratic candidate had the nominee been anyone other than Hillary Clinton.

Yet, the shift of 2016 third party voters to Northam in the Virginia gubernatorial race is not the takeaway from Tuesday’s elections. The story was the vulnerability of incumbent Virginia legislature Republicans in what had been strong Republican districts.

Democrats won Virginia districts in places they had no business being competitive.

A 73-year-old Republican incumbent, Bob Marshall, an aggressively anti-LGBTQ state house legislator, lost to Danica Roem, the first openly transgender candidate in U.S. history. Their northern Virginia district is an historically conservative district along Highway 28 with a resident population that is prosperous with strong ties to the Washington, D.C. and federal government economy.

That Virginia state house race saw Roem pursue a clear, but understated, millennial-centered social justice agenda versus a Republican incumbent clinging desperately to a worldview that fit well in 1957, not 2017.

The Republicans should hope that race does not reflect nationwide trends. However, it probably does.

However, let’s step back from the this week’s GOP shellacking and think more strategically about the lessons both parties should have learned from the Virginia results. The early conclusions from mainstream pundits, unsurprisingly, are punctuated with hyperbole and unsupported speculation.

This was a referendum election, not an ideological one. Virginia independents, representing about 28 percent of the voter population, went slightly for Gillespie over Northan (50% to 47%, respectively), according to the Washington Post’s exit poll analysis. Gillespie did slightly better than Trump among independents.

Still, beyond the importance of partisanship and turnout, there are other significant lessons both parties can take away from Tuesdays results.

First, the Republicans:

Lesson 1:

The American political system is venting Republicans like Bob Marshall. Their worldview is not relevant or sustainable in our country’s globalized, intercultural social landscape.

A good share of these Republicans will survive in a smattering of Southern and Midwest states, but the Bob Marshalls are done. Being a bigot isn’t just a bad way to go through life, in politics it produces socially radioactive fallout whose blowback is hard to predict and control. The Republicans don’t need that uncertainty right now. And they definitely don’t need it

The Republicans of the future are going to be more like United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley or U.S. House Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Washington’s 5th congressional district). If the 2017 Virginia results teach the Republicans anything, it is that the GOP old guard needs to retire — which they are…in droves.

To paraphrase Gothmog, lieutenant of Morgul in The Lord of the Rings, “The age of old white men is over, the time of multi-ethnic women has come.”

Nikki Haley, Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard, Tammy Duckworth, Jaime Herrera Beutler…..

To be fair, not all white men need to retire.

Bernie Sanders thrives because he speaks with credibility and passion on the issues and concerns of millennials and young, working-class Americans. The Bob Marshalls (and Chuck Schumers) do not.

Just as many of us prepare for winter by sorting through our firewood supply and throwing out the wet and rotted logs — usually the older logs on the bottom of the pile — that is what the Republicans are doing in preparation for 2018 and 2020.

In this way, the 2017 Virginia state house results did the GOP a favor.

Lesson 2:

The Virginia 2017 election results were a referendum on Donald Trump, not on conservatism.

As far as we can tell from the aggregate voting data on Tuesday, the results were not rooted in an ideological re-alignment of voters, but rather resulted from a partisan turnout differential caused by an unpopular president. In northern Virginia, populated by a high percentage of federal government workers and contractors, the voter turnout was decisively in favor of the Democrats.

The Washington Post’s election analysis describes well the dynamic in Virginia. The vote was highly partisan — very little voting across party lines. In addition, Democrats were far more energized than the Republicans. That is the definition of a ‘referendum’ vote. Democrats are angry and frustrated and they took it out on Virginia Republicans.

There is no indication, as yet, that weak Republican partisans or Republican-leaning independents made a wholesale shift towards the Democrats. If that did happen, then the Republicans would really be in trouble going into 2018 and 2020.

For now, they have a much more tractable enthusiasm problem.

Lesson 3:

Donald Trump doesn’t really care about Republicans or conservatism, or anything requiring significant amounts of intellectual investment. It took him about 10 minutes to throw his own party under the bus after learning about the Virginia results.

That was a predictable prick move on the part of President Trump. We’ve come to expect this from him. [Is anyone in a near-orbit to Trump telling him that the strong economy is not translating into support for his presidency?]

Electoral success at all levels of government requires a coherent and coordinated team effort and it hurts a party on the down-ballot races when their own president shows no propensity for teamwork. [Obama and the Clintons weren’t much better in this regard — ‘cult of personality’ candidacies never end well for the respective party]

He still inspires a significant percentage of disgruntled Americans — perhaps as high as 40 percent and as low as 30 percent of Americans. He does not, however, appear capable of inspiring another 10 to 15 percent of Americans required to form a durable electoral majority at all levels of government.

That is a problem Republicans need to address ASAP.

Now, for the Democrats:

Lesson 1:

There is no evidence Tuesday’s results were ideological. It was a referendum on Donald Trump. This is hardly news, but its strategic ramifications are still too often over-looked.

The vote outcomes in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia and Washington state were turnout-driven partisan body counts. Democrats (and Democrat-leaning independents) came out to vote and they voted for the Democrats. In contrast, the now infamous Trump working-class Democrats did not show up in high numbers. Republican incumbents, never previously considered vulnerable, went down all over Virginia and Georgia.

The ‘not Donald Trump’ message will probably work just as well in 2018 (though one year is a long time in politics). The past failures of the Democrats’ mobilization-centric strategy — where money and time is spent on getting partisans to the polls and little spent on voter persuasion — will most likely work well in 2018.

But, the Democrats cannot pretend that the 2017 results are more than this simple fact: a large majority of Americans in shock about the behavior of their current president and are going to take it out on the party that enables him.

The Virginia vote does not portend a larger movement in support of the national Democratic platform. Danica Roem talked more about road building and infrastructure than social justice issues.

Had we seen traditional Republican voters turning out to vote for Democrats, then an ideological shift could be conjectured. As far as we know now, that did not happen.

Lesson 2:

Democrats can be competitive in districts presently viewed as ‘safe Republican’ districts. If the conditions behind the 2017 results hold, the Republicans will lose the U.S. House and it won’t even be close. It could be on a scale similar to the meltdown the Democrats experienced in the 2010 midterms.

A good example of this new competitiveness is found in Virginia’s 10th House of Delegates district, which covers much of the U.S. Highway 50 corridor west of metropolitan Washington, D.C. The Republican incumbent Randall Minchew received more votes in the 2017 election (14,014) than in any previous election, and still lost to Wendy Gooditis by over 1,000 votes.

That is what a partisan edge in voter turnout will do for the Democrats. But the important lesson to Democrats is that they should never be slaves to data analytics and simply ignore districts the “models” deem unwinnable. The models have been wrong in many important races, and they will be wrong again.

Lesson 3:

The Democrats need to hedge their bets and move to the political center.

The enthusiasm may not always be on the side of the Democrats. To assume so, and thereby continue their mobilization-focused strategy in 2018 and beyond, risks the momentum the Democrats currently possess.

It is not a crime against the political gods to hedge one’s bets going into the 2018 midterms. As underwater as Donald Trump’s approval numbers are right now, nobody knows where his approval numbers will be in November 2018.

One substantial international confrontation could overnight put him over 50 percent. And it won’t require a 35-point approval jump George W. Bush saw after 9-11. President Kennedy saw his highest popularity ratings just AFTER the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. President Ford’s approval ratings jumped sharply after the May, 1975, rescue of the Mayaguez ship crew — where 41 U.S. troops were killed! It is hard to predict how Americans will react to the next international crisis, but don’t assume Democrats and independents, especially those with family members in the military, won’t rally around the Trump presidency during a crisis.

More likely, the American economy will remain strong and at some point that will pay real dividends to the Trump presidency. It hasn’t happened yet, but many Americans still attribute the current economic strength to the Obama administration. That will change as time passes.

In that event, the Democrats need to reacquaint themselves with the political center.

But didn’t I read recently that there is no political center in the U.S. anymore? We are a ‘Center-Left’ country after all.

Many political analysts are saying the growing partisan divide in this country has left the political center empty. Go here and here for recent examples. And many Democratic-leaning pundits have argued the U.S. is a fundamentally Center-Left country (here and here).

All of these conclusions have serious analytic problems.

They are over-reliant on survey-based data, confuse statistical artifacts as findings, misinterpret existing research, and are just blind to the countervailing evidence. Even using the same data and research the ‘go left’ advocates cite, not only is the political center obvious, it is large and still determines close elections in the U.S.

Pew Research’s portrayal of the ideological structure of the American voting public shows a significant political center.

Yes, America is more politically polarized than ever. That does not, in itself, negate the political value of moving to the center. As you can see in the above chart, half of American voters are still between the mean ideological positions of the two parties, but that doesn’t alone justify moving to the center. For example, research is consistently finding that even moderate voters prefer candidates that take distinct policy positions. In corporate marketing, they call it brand differentiation. But taking a distinct policy position is not the same as taking a strong ideological position.

It is possible to be a distinct politician without being a highly ideological.

Here are the three realities that should drive Democrats (and Republicans too) to consider the need for a move to the center:

• When looking at Americans’ opinions on a wide range of topics, particularly outside of a political context, they are predominately non-ideological.
• Americans have a very unfavorable view of both parties (and it is not because they want the parties to become more extreme!)
• Objective policy results still matter in American politics — believe it or not.

Americans are politically ‘Center-Right,’ even if they may be socially ‘Center-Left’

Democratic pundits suggesting we are a ‘Center-Left’ nation put too much weight on survey data alone. Yes, public opinion surveys provide insight into voters’ minds. But these measurement instruments are mirrors, not crystal balls. Change the survey context or the questions themselves and you can get dramatically different results.

Furthermore, the term ‘Center-Left’ is relative. ‘Center-Left’ to what? And is it possible that Americans could be socially liberal, but not politically liberal (Author’s note: That has been my position on this topic in the past).

There are many analytic comparisons a researcher can employ to make this judgment:

• Compare Americans within one election or period of time (cross-sectional)
• Compare Americans over time (longitudinal)
• Compare Americans to other countries (cross-national)
• Compare actual policy outcomes to ideological divisions (Outcome approach)
• Compare Americans using a relativist measure of ideology (Relativist approach)
• Compare Americans to an objective measure of ideology (Objectivist approach)

I won’t go through all these approaches, but would like to highlight the last one.

The Voter Study Group’s lead analyst, Dr. Lee Drutman, takes the objectivist approach in which the center position in a survey question represents the dividing line between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives.’ The researcher determines objectively what defines a ‘liberal’ from a ‘conservative’ and looks to see how the American public matches up to the researcher’s definitions.

There is a significant danger of bias in such an approach. It is prone — scratch that — it invites the results to conform to the researcher’s view of the political world. It fulfills what conservative pundit Ben Shapiro describes as the left’s pathological need to believe most Americans agree with them. This approach imposes a cognitive structure on respondents that doesn’t necessarily mirror how respondents actually think.

Furthermore, the objectivist approach ignores the ability of political parties to strategically redefine ideology within the dynamics of electoral politics.

The objectivist approach becomes obsolete as soon as one party redefines what it means to be ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal.’

Oh, when has that ever happened?!

Most recently, the dramatic ideological shift on trade policy is one example of when assumptions on what is the ‘left’ versus ‘right’ position has proven to be fluid relative to time and space.

But the most dramatic example is the Republican Party in the mid-1970s.

The Republican Party in the mid-1970s was a smoldering wreckage following Watergate and the Vietnam War. The dominant question within the Republican Party in 1975 was “what do we stand for?”

“Moderate” Republicans such as President Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller were not popular with the Republican base.

Enter Ronald Reagan who redefined ‘American conservatism’ in a way that persists to this day.

And, subsequently, in reaction to the Reagan revolution, Bill Clinton redefined liberalism, not just to re-center the Democrats on economic policy (which he did), but to define a new form of ‘liberal’ that embraced free markets and the progressive Democratic social agendas (minus LGBTQ issues that would need to wait until the Obama administration to see significant positive action).

Ideological plasticity is where strategic-thinking parties and politicians excel  in order to win elections.

So, Democrats, there will always be a ‘conservative’ America out there, regardless of how you define ‘conservative.’ And, over time, they will win half of all elections.

Using the opinion survey method to map ideology includes other qualifiers. If you ask the right set of questions framed in a specific context, Americans can look as leftist (or rightist) as you want them to look. That doesn’t mean the objectivist approach is fruitless, but it does mean a skeptical person should look for additional information before concluding we are a ‘Center-Left’ nation.

So here is a brief look at another ideological data source…

University of North Carolina political scientist James Stimson has been tracking the political mood of Americans for most of his academic career. Unlike Pew Research or the Voter Study Group, Stimson’s measure of public mood (which is analogous to ideology) looks out over 60 years of survey data using multiple survey vendors and questions (an in depth methodology description of Stimson’s public mood measure can be found here). Pew Research and The Polling Company (the survey vendor for The Voter Study Group) do good survey research. But I prefer a survey-based opinion measure that aggregates multiple survey vendors and questions over time and looks at more than just voters, but the entire U.S. adult population.

Stimson’s most recent update on public mood shows America (as of 2016) is still centrist, compared to other times in American history since 1952.

The mean value in public mood is 63, almost exactly where American public mood stood in 2016. As I’ve said, it is very likely this country has become significantly more liberal since the 2016 elections. That is the common ideological reaction to a new president. Notice that prior to 1980, America’s mood was the most conservative it had ever been since 1952. Hence, Ronald Reagan wins in landslide over Jimmy Carter. Immediately after the 1980 election, we witness the American mood becoming more liberal.

[Author’s note: Many of us still remember how the American mainstream media outlets ‘freaked out’ at Reagan’s victory in 1980, in much the same way they are reacting to President Trump today.]

In 2016, heading into the November elections, Americans were about as liberal as they were in 1984, right before Ronald Reagan won the biggest presidential landslide since FDR in 1936.

However, the real power of Stimson’s public mood measure is its visualization of the significant year-to-year elasticity in public mood. Real changes in public mood materialize in relatively short periods of time. This is why we shouldn’t be too surprised when opinion data in 2017 is more ‘liberal’ than it was prior to the 2016 elections. It also means analysts, researchers, and pundits should confess more humility before making declarations about how this country is ‘Center-Left’ or ‘Center-Right.’ [Author’s note: I would benefit from some of that humility too.]

To declare that Americans are more liberal today than on November 7, 2016, that’s fine. It doesn’t change the fact that we were a centrist country going into that election and any ideological moves since then can be quickly reversed or accelerated.

Maybe the real conclusion should be that declaring the the U.S. as “Center-Left” or “Center-Right” is analytically unproductive. Any such judgment is as permanent as a child’s sand castle. Perhaps the real effort from analysts and party strategists should instead be focused on the forces that build (and destroy) those ideological castles.

Yes, there is a political center and it deserves our attention

There need not be a large number of voters at the political center for the strategy of moving to the center to be effective. Voter behavior is not as spatially-driven or as simplistic as often assumed by the “go left” Democrat crowd. Gabriel Lenz’ research shows that many voters move their attitudes towards their preferred party and candidates’ positions, not the other way around. So parties or politicians aiming for the thick part of the ideological distribution are not necessarily the most successful. Thus, the ideological distribution of Americans today is not, ipso facto, an argument for where the party should go in the future.

Here is the actual secret sauce to durable and sustainable electoral success in the U.S. political system….

…enact good public policies (which, sometimes, means ‘do nothing’) and voters will reward the party and politicians in power. Good policies attract voters.

Is that why incumbents win over 90 percent of the time?

No, not entirely. But it would be inaccurate to suggest this country has made a lot of bad public policy decisions. This country is as strong economically as it as ever been. For the  most part, our political leaders make good policy and are thus rewarded for this.

Are you out of your f**king mind?! Have you heard of G. W. Bush’s Iraq War? The Defense of Marriage Act? The Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988?

Yes, there are really bad U.S. public policy decisions in the history books. In most cases, the incumbent party was punished for them.

We can’t allow an aggregate statistic such as incumbent re-election rates to blind us to the real political changes that occur during bad economic times or counter-productive military adventures.

Americans reward good policy and punish bad policy.

And knowing that should shape how the Democrats move forward.

If Democratic leaders believe raising the minimum wage to $15-an-hour, or providing free tuition to public universities for qualified students, or raising taxes on high-income households, or imposing a carbon tax on energy users and producers, or creating a single-payer health care system, or creating government-funded child care are good public policies, then, absolutely, the Democrats need to move left.

If you are skeptical that these policies can be implemented in a cost-effective manner (or would even work if implemented) and that there is a limit to the long-term debt our economy can carry, then, as a Democrat, you must pump the party’s brakes on these leftist economic policy ideas.

That leaves the social justice issues as the only other area where the Democrats can move left. But here is the problem with that move….the Democrats are already on the extreme left on many of these issues. There is no place farther left position than your last presidential nominee’s position of ‘unrestricted access to abortion.’  Allowing people to choose their bathroom based on their self-determined gender identity, independent of their birth sex assignment, is ex vi termini the ‘extreme left’ position. Where is there left, pardon the pun, for the Democrats to go?

The ‘go left’ Democrats are still fighting the war against Hillary Clinton — a unapologetic centrist that put corporate interests ahead of all other considerations. But, Hillary’s problem wasn’t her squishy centrist positions. The problem was her. She was too unlikable to overcome her bland ideas. As we saw in Virginia when the Democratic base in energized, the Democrats win. In 2016, the Democratic base was’t energized, but it wasn’t because of Hillary’s tendency for centrism.

Had Hillary Clinton been even a little more honest, a little more transparent, a little more charismatic, and not deny attention to working-class America, I wouldn’t have been forced to wake up to this picture today:

K.R.K

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, November 1, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

How many people died in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria? It is an important question that needs a serious, non-partisan answer.

An answer we will not get from CNN or any of the major news outlets covering the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Why? Because they are not really in the news business. They are in the Trump-bashing business. News stories are not pursued on their merit, they are selected based upon how well they serve the current popular narrative — and that narrative since November 2016 is: “Trump-is-a-liar-and-an-incompetent-Russia-colluding-stooge.”

Why focus on the narrative over objective facts? Because strong narratives build audiences, much like presidential candidates with the strongest narrative attract the most voters. Humans prefer narratives over hard, cold facts. The research supporting this conclusion is long, varied, and convincing.

The major news outlets’ coverage of the Hurricane Maria aftermath in Puerto Rico is an exemplar of this ‘feed-the-narrative’ journalism and its hurting their credibility and the people of Puerto Rico.

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, but by all objective accounts, the immediate death toll was relatively small

The official death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria stands today at 54. These are deaths directly related to the storm — mostly caused by drowning, blunt force objects, and stress-caused physical traumas, such as strokes and heart attacks. This official number includes deaths in the more remote sections of Puerto Rico, according to the Puerto Rican governor’s office.

It is not a perfect number and probably an under-count, given the realities of Puerto Rico’s terrain and socio-economic conditions.

But the news media have decided to manipulate the suffering of Puerto Ricans for a political purpose. They have discovered local and state Puerto Rican officials willing to suggest over 900 people in Puerto Rico died due to Hurricane Maria.

Here is just a sampling of recent headlines suggesting this death toll:

ABC News: 900-plus cremations since Maria, but hurricane death toll still 51

Newsweek: Puerto Rico says more than 900 people were cremated after Hurricane Maria

The Hill: Puerto Rico says over 900 people died of ‘natural causes’ after hurricane: report

Is The Hill‘s convenient use of quotations around ‘natural causes‘ meant to suggest someone is doctoring the death toll? Perhaps Donald Trump is doing it himself between 3 a.m. tweets? As if Donald Trump or anyone in his administration would be connected or knowledgeable enough to manipulate a death toll count generated by Puerto Rico’s state bureaucracy. [See, even I am willing to hitch a brief ride on the ‘Trump-is-incompetent’ narrative]

How did the news media get to this 900+ number? Its a bit murky and unsystematic, but, generally, it is coming from body and cremation counts from local morgues and funeral homes across Puerto Rico.

On a superficial level, that approach may make sense to a journalist or the general public; but, in practice, it yields an inaccurate and biased number.

CNN reporter John Sutter’s approach to covering the death toll has been particularly creepy and dishonest. It is revealed in the first personal story he offers in his Oct. 27th article on CNN.com titled: Puerto Rico’s uncounted hurricane deaths — CNN visits every funeral home in one town to test the government’s count.

He writes: “Isabel Rivera González was 80. She loved to dance, and was known in this hilly enclave of Puerto Rico for her Saturday-night merengue moves…On October 15, three weeks after the storm, Rivera died awaiting a procedure at a hospital that had lost power in the hurricane and whose backup generator failed, according to several of her family members.”

Rivera was 80 and in poor health (prior to the hurricane). This is a sad death and possibly an indirect (not direct) result of Hurricane Maria. The direct versus indirect distinction may seem hardhearted, but it is an important distinction to those who study natural disasters and help prepare local, state and national governments for the next natural disaster.

Indeed, Sutter could have saved himself a lot of effort trolling Puerto Rico’s funeral homes had he first talked to an epidemiologist or public policy expert specializing in natural disasters. His methodology, which he painfully details in his Oct. 27th article, is not appropriate for measuring direct or indirect fatalities related to Hurricane Maria.

Here is why: people die in Puerto Rico every day. They were dying long before Hurricane Maria and they will die in Puerto Rico long after the visible effects of Maria have vanished. In fact, prior to Maria, around 80 Puerto Ricans were dying every day, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

This is why epidemiologists and policy experts establish mortality rates prior to an event (e.g., hurricane) and re-measure that rate during a post-event period of time when assessing the impact of natural disasters.

Establishing a baseline mortality rate is a normative benchmark that can be compared to the post-Maria mortality rate. This methodology in its simplest form is called a Pre-Post measurement design.

The following research study on the measurement of indirect deaths related to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan is an excellent example of a high-quality scientific study measuring natural disaster-related mortality rates. A more basic analytic approach was employed here to measure the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the mortality rate in the Greater New Orleans area in Louisiana.

Yet, even a quick, back-of-the-envelope attempt at understanding the deaths related to Maria reveals the inherent flaw in the news media’s unscientific assertion that 900 people died in its aftermath.

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on September 20th. The 900+ death toll estimate being promoted by the media emerged around October 26th. Lets assume those estimates were derived in the week prior to the news stories, that puts us around October 20th. Rounding, that is 30 days between landfall and the 900+ death count.

Based on U.S. Census Bureau data, in just a normal 30-day period Puerto Rico would have seen around 2,400 deaths. That is the number of deaths without a hurricane at the start of the period. This makes the 900+ fatalities number a little suspect, I would say. At a minimum, it demands more information before we can take it seriously.

In fact, I wonder if Puerto Ricans didn’t become even more attentive to their sick and elderly in the hurricane’s direct aftermath, thereby decreasing (if only temporarily) the mortality rate in Puerto Rico.

No, I’m not going to go that far. That would make me no better than CNN. And it may be true that the post-Maria mortality rate is higher in Puerto Rico. Counting cremations and dead bodies in morgues however is not a reliable way of getting to that true number.

This is why the news media’s ‘feed-the-narrative’ motivation is so important to understanding what it reports as news. The primary concern of CNN or The New York Times or MSNBC or The Washington Post is not understanding the impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico. Their primary motivation is finding ways to make Donald Trump look bad.

‘So what if the news media is reporting a sketchy death count, does it really matter?’

Unbiased mortality, morbidity, and financial loss estimates due to natural disasters are critical to understanding trends and long-term disaster planning. When these numbers are manipulated for political and economic reasons, public policy suffers.

“This poses a problem for any attempt to characterize trends in disaster impact and – maybe more importantly – to use those trends to identify optimal policy choices,” according to Dr. Llan Noy, from the Victoria Business School (Canada). “Trends in disaster losses are crucial because the distribution of losses across regions – and across countries at various levels of wealth and development – informs the discussion of climate change mitigation policies.”

Inflating the Puerto Rican death count may cultivate the news media’s anti-Trump narrative, but it harms those trying to prepare the world for the possible impact of climate change and natural disasters in general.

There is not going to be a quick answer to the “How many people died in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria?” question. In the meantime, exploiting this period of scientific uncertainty to bash Donald Trump should be beneath the ideals of the news media. Unfortunately, it is not.

K.R.K

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

A post-essay addendum:

I used these two imaginary scenarios to explain to my son how someone might measure the impact of Hurricane Maria:

In the first scenario, a hurricane hits an island and, sadly, a boat with 200 people from the island capsizes and everyone dies. However, on the island, nobody dies and power and normalcy return quickly. Using the Pre-Post design, the researchers would see a spike of 200 people (above the normal mortality rate) but the rate would promptly return to its historical norm. Deaths directly attributable to the hurricane would stand at 200 and indirect deaths would be around zero (assuming the 200 people that died on the boat weren’t all doctors and first-responders from the island).

In the second scenario, a hurricane hits the same island but nobody dies on the day of the hurricane. Instead, the island’s power and transportation infrastructure is destroyed and is not repaired for weeks, even months. In this case, the researchers would see no spike on the day of the hurricane but may see a steady — maybe even abrupt — increase in the island’s post-hurricane mortality rate. This mortality rate change is the estimate of the hurricane’s impact.

Of course, reality is more complicated than offered in these simple scenarios. For example, life-expectancies can change due to natural disasters and would not be easily discernible a simple Pre-Post measurement design. For this reason, researchers employ much more sophisticated (but analogous) statistical techniques to assess the impact of natural disasters.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, October 27, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

It was one of the busier slides in a grievously long student presentation on nuclear proliferation at the National Defense Intelligence College (NDIC) in 2009.

Buried in a slide explaining the nation’s sources of strategic minerals, such as uranium, was an indented bullet point about the pending acquisition of the controlling stake in a Canadian-based mining company (Uranium One) by a Russian entity (Rosatom).

The significance of the bullet point missed most of us in the class until the professor noted that this acquisition, if approved by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the U.S. (CFIUS), would give the Russians mining rights to a significant percentage of U.S. uranium deposits.

It was a WTF!? moment for me. Can the Russians really do that?

“Yes, they can,” the professor said. “It’s called an open economy.”

The professor then told us, under federal law, the CFIUS reviews any foreign investments in the U.S. with possible national security concerns. Uranium would quality in that regard.

The professor, a retired intelligence officer, was memorable in how he would lean back in his chair and start caressing his temples anytime he had a problem with some aspect of U.S. national security policy — which was most of the time. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (known as ITAR) were a particular sore spot with him.

As to the pending Uranium One sale, he told us: “The committee (CFIUS) can approve acquisitions, but only the President can disapprove of them.”

“Will they approve of this sale?” someone asked the professor.

“I don’t know why they wouldn’t,” he responded, without any temple rubbing. In his view, access to uranium ore is not a substantive barrier to nefarious entities wanting to build nuclear weapons.

The student moved on in her presentation and I wouldn’t think about Canadian mining companies or uranium mining rights for another seven years.

Until the 2016 presidential election. And, even then, the controversy of whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had greased the skids to get the Uranium One deal approved, in exchange for past generosity to the Clinton Foundation, was buried under the coverage of her “email problem.”

However, the recent story by The Hill that the FBI was investigating Russian spy activities and possible bribery surrounding the Uranium One deal returned my thoughts to that NDIC class on nuclear proliferation eight years ago.

Many of the details from that class have faded from my memory, but some of the general ideas remain, such as:

• Conceptually, it is not hard to build a simple, fission bomb. On a practical level, however, it still requires nation-state-level resources and commitments.
• There are intelligence officers in the U.S. intelligence community (USIC) that ALL they think about is nuclear proliferation: What countries have fully developed nuclear weapons? What countries quickly could, if the need arose? What countries control any of the constituent parts and knowledge bases required to make nuclear weapons?
• This country puts forth a considerable effort to track the intermediary and constituent parts needed to build nuclear weapons, including: raw uranium ore, weapons-grade fissile material, timing devices and detonators, centrifuges, advanced milling machines and metalworking, etc.
• No detail is too small for intelligence officers to track if it relates to the proliferation of nuclear materials and technologies across the globe. They care about who controls the world’s uranium ore. And there is a zero chance they would stay silent if the Secretary of State (or President) fast tracks the sale of a uranium mining company to the Russians if, collectively, they believed the sale was a threat to national security. A zero chance.

As the most recent headlines emerged concerning the Uranium One deal, I couldn’t help but think about that class. How the professor seemed nonplussed by the idea of the Russians controlling up to 20 percent of U.S. uranium mining still resonates with me.

Fox News’ narrative is seductive — that something inappropriate, at odds with this nation’s security, was involved in the Uranium One deal. That somehow Hillary Clinton was repaying a debt when she made no effort to stop the acquisition of Uranium One by the Russians.

Yet, I have no evidence to suggest the intelligence community, or anyone with a non-partisan perspective, viewed the acquisition of Uranium One by the Russians as a threat to national security.

So when the Hillary Clinton says on CSPAN that the “pay for play” accusation with respect to the Uranium One deal has been debunked, I have no reason to doubt her…

…but I still have a problem with Hillary’s connection to the Uranium One deal.

Why? Because I believe the type of structural corruption the Clinton’s have exploited since they left the White House is exemplified by the Uranium One deal. This deal was right in their soft corruption wheelhouse.

My graduate school mentor always asked his students to start any social inquiry at the most general level. “Don’t get buried in the details,” he would say.  “Nuance and details are likely to deceive rather than inform.”

What is the 30,000-foot view of Bill and Hillary Clinton?

Since leaving the White House, the Clinton’s have amassed one-quarter billion dollars in net worth. How? By selling their access to power.

It’s not complicated and, worse yet, its not illegal.

Generally, it is legal to offer a service where your access to power elites can benefit others who want access and favorable decisions from those power elites. That is called special interest lobbying. You have to register with the U.S. government to do that on an international level, which is why Paul Manafort will be spending a lot of time in front of a judge over the next year.

The Clintons, of course, have no need for the special interest lobbying model. Too plebeian. Its beneath their status. Instead, they have created a hybrid approach through their intermingling of genuine humanitarian efforts with private, corporate interests. For this effort, the Clintons profit both directly (speaking fees and campaign donations) and indirectly (the Clinton Foundation).

Access to power is what the Clinton’s peddle and that is why they may retire as near billionaires once all is said and done.

However, the fact that this is legal doesn’t make it ethical. And even though Bill Clinton has made positive contributions to the world since his presidency, it doesn’t justify the methods he has used to enrich himself (and his family) since leaving office.

This truth gets lost in MSNBC host Joy Reid’s self-serving setup of a conservative journalist who didn’t understand the real meaning of the Uranium One deal. The Clinton’s are not in the quid pro quo business. Amateurs are in the quid pro quo business. The Clinton’s are in the access selling business, at a level only ex-presidents, some U.S. cabinet members, and a few former U.S. Senators can realistically claim.

You will never find an audio recording or an email where Bill or Hillary Clinton communicate, “If you give to our Foundation X number of dollars, we will  make sure Y happens.”

That is quid pro quo for dumbkopfs. That is what Paul Manafort might have engaged in, but that is not what the Clinton’s do. They aren’t so pedestrian.

Rather, this is the deal the Clinton’s have sold the world’s elites since 2000: I am Bill Clinton, a former U.S president married to a U.S. Senator and future U.S. president. Give to our family foundation and we will learn about your interests and give you access to any world leader you require to fulfill those interests.

That is the Bill and Hillary Clinton business model. It is an awesome and lucrative model. It is the model Barack Obama is poised to employ and modify over the remainder of his post-presidency. Obama will die a billionaire if our nation’s laws don’t try to address this form of soft corruption.

If you are OK with that, than the Uranium One deal really is a nothin’ burger. If, on the other hand, you have a problem with a former U.S. President and U.S. Secretary of State engaging in that type of influence peddling, then the Clinton’s are the exemplar.

For all intents and purposes, Uranium One deal is business-as-usual for the Clintons

There is a reason politicians rarely go to jail. Lawyers understand how difficult it is to prove criminal intent (mens rea). It is their ‘get out of jail free’ card and they are not embarrassed to use it.

Former FBI Director James Comey’s decision not to indict Hillary Clinton for the mishandling of classified information was largely rooted in the knowledge that proving Clinton’s general intent — the lowest level of criminal intent — would be difficult. Nay, impossible.

The most direct evidence of general intent is a defendant’s confession, which prosecutors cannot force from a defendant given their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Or sometimes general intent is discerned through a wiretapped conversation.

Without concrete evidence of general intent, much less specific criminal intent, the Uranium One deal is a dead-end for Clintons’ critics. And the smart critics know it.

Besides, that is not how modern influence peddling works…not the way it is practiced by the Clintons.

The Uranium One deal was not about U.S. mining rights

James Conca, a geologist writing for Forbes magazine, offers a lucid summary and explanation of why the Uranium One deal is not going to yield any serious criminal investigation.

“Those U.S. facilities obtained by Russia produce almost nothing, ” writes Conca. “The uranium deposits are of relatively poor grade and are too costly to compete on the uranium market, but the facilities do have good milling capacity to process ore, if anyone gives it to them, which hasn’t happened in about 10 years.”

Conca lays bare any suggestion that national security was at stake with the Russians purchasing control of Uranium One. “The real reason Russia wanted this deal was to give Rosatom’s subsidiary Uranium One’s very profitable uranium mines in Kazakhstan ― the single largest producer of commercial uranium in the world,” writes Conca. [Rosatom is Russia’s state atomic energy corporation and is the world’s largest uranium enrichment leader.]

National security aside, the suggestion that Canadian businessman Frank Giustra’s $140 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation was related to CFIUS’s approval of the Uranium One deal is equally specious. As emphasized in MSNBC host Joy Reid’s take down of Washington Examiner reporter Jen Kerns, Guistra had divested himself from Uranium One three years prior to the sale to Rosatom. Though, Reid fails to mention Ian Telfer, another Uranium One investor, who donated $1.3 million to $5.6 million to the Clinton Foundation during and after the CFIUS review.

Five million dollars is not as eye-popping as $140 million, but nonetheless invites suggestions that more was going on between the Clintons and Uranium One than just a lot of good intentions.

Also feeding the conservative media’s feeding frenzy on the Uranium One deal is Bill Clinton’s $500,000 speaking honorarium in 2010 from a Russian bank connected to the Uranium One deal. However, given there will never be an email or recorded phone conversation where Bill Clinton says, “You pay me $500,000 and I will make sure you get CFIUS to approve your Uranium One acquisition,” any suggestion of wrongdoing on Bill’s part is purely speculative and nowhere close to an indictable offense.

Those types of emails or phone calls will never be uncovered, not just because the Clinton’s understand the legal concept of criminal intent, but because that is not how their influence peddling operation works.

It is far more sophisticated and, yet, still simple.

The Clintons’ activities are filled with interpersonal relationships that feed conspiracy theories the guileless conservative media inevitably promote as the next ‘greatest scandal in American history,’ only for the Clinton-friendly mainstream media to, on cue, easily knock it down like the green pigs in an Angry Birds game app.

No, the Clinton influence peddling model is far more subtle.

The Clintons are a symbiotic dream team. One is a former U.S. president and the other is (was) a future U.S. president. They have a charitable foundation that does good work throughout the world. This foundation offers to its major donors this obvious benefit: high-ideal, visible philanthropy. In Frank Giustra’s own words: “I admire what he (Bill Clinton) does and I want to be a part of it.”

But, this is where it gets murky, and deliberately so. The Washington Post reported that a Canadian charity, founded by Giustra in 2007, kept its donors secret, despite an agreement between the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton that the Clinton Foundation would reveal its donors.

Hillary Clinton never intended to honor her agreement with the Obama administration, whose malignant indifference to Hillary’s side businesses would define their reaction to Hillary’s “reckless” mishandling of classified information and destruction of government records as Secretary of State.

The Clinton Foundation’s connection to Giustra’s Canadian foundation allowed anonymous donors, “including foreign executives with business pending before the Hillary Clinton-led State Department,” to funnel money to the Clinton Foundation.

And, boy, did they.

Over 1,000 donors to Giustra’s charitable foundation are tied to the Clinton Foundation and remain unknown to the public, according to The Washington Post.

Anyone concerned about the integrity of charitable foundations should be outraged at the lack of transparency provided by the Clinton Foundation.

Is it at a criminal level? Unknown. Is it unethical? Absolutely.

According to The Washington Post, “Bill Clinton has used Giustra’s MD-87 luxury plane 26 times for foundation business since 2005, including 13 trips in which the two men traveled together.” The Clinton Foundation does not reveal Bill Clinton’s travel behavior, including modes of transportation or travel companions.

More importantly, Giustra’s private business activities benefited directly from his connections to Bill Clinton.

To business titans like Giustra, international philanthropy enhances both his reputation and bottom line. By coincidence or intent, Giustra entered into some of his biggest deals of his business career in the same countries where he traveled with Bill Clinton for philanthropic purposes.

That is the Clinton business model exemplified.

For example, at the same time he was dining with Bill Clinton in Kazakhstan, Giustra concluded a massive purchase of uranium mines in the same country. Coincidence? That is what Bill Clinton, Frank Giustra and Joy Reid want you to believe.

Kazakhstan president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, became Kazakhstan’s first elected president in 1991 with 99 percent of the vote. By any sensible definition, Nazarbayev is a dictator and has been accused of significant human rights abuses by various human rights organizations and the United Nations.

Is there evidence Bill Clinton personally intervened in Giustra’s negotiations with Nazarbayev? None, but again, that is the hallmark of the Clinton business model. It doesn’t require Bill’s personal negotiation skills. It only requires his personal connections. Whether Giustra has the skill to negotiate with Nazarbayev is Giustra’s problem.

When Giustra formed a Colombian oil company it received important drilling rights from Colombia’s state-owned oil company, Ecopetrol. When did this happen? After Giustra met the Colombian president through his affiliation to the Clinton Foundation.

Again, coincidence? Giustra insists the approval of the Colombian government was not required for his company’s Colombian drilling rights. We have to take his word for it, but forgive those that have doubts.

But, once more, this timeline regurgitation confuses the real power the Clinton’s offer global elites. Bill Clinton (and his wife) aren’t about the negotiation details. They are about facilitation and the mutual understanding that comes with being part of the world’s economic and political elite.

If you give to the Clinton Foundation, Bill and Hillary will know everything they need to know about your private business interests. You don’t need to ask them for help. If you give them (or rather, their foundation) enough money, they will learn what they need to know about your private business interests and how they can help.

It is a nice business model if you are an ex-U.S. president (or married to one). And it is all legal.

K.R.K

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.