Posts published in “Campaigns and Elections”

In the 2020 Election, It’s Not the Economy, Stupid, But Maybe It Should Be

In the 2020 Election, It’s Not the Economy, Stupid, But Maybe It Should Be

By John R Guardiano on February 6, 2020

James Carville, the colorful Democratic political strategist who helped mastermind Bill Clinton’s 1992 win, famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

The notion that American presidents are reelected or thrown out of office based on the nation’s economic performance has since become conventional wisdom. Yet, that maxim doesn’t seem to apply this year because of all the political drama, Sturm und Drang, that surrounds President Trump.

Impeachment is the latest drama, but there have been many others—Charlottesville, the Mueller investigation, the crisis at the border, the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination, the government shutdown, Khashoggi, Syria, Ukrainian aid, et al.

Some of these crises, like the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination, are beyond Trump’s control and must be laid squarely at the feet of his political opponents, who are determined to stop the GOP’s policy agenda, either by hook or by crook.

To the diehard partisans of the left, it doesn’t matter who is president. They would fight to the political death against any Republican President, be he Trump, Bush, Romney, or Mother Theresa.

But it’s also true that Trump has been his own worst enemy; and that his utterly undisciplined, shoot-from-the-hip nature has seriously exacerbated his political problems and created crises that need not have occurred.

Charlottesville, for instance, was a completely self-inflicted wound that could have been avoided entirely had Trump simply chosen his words more carefully and been more disciplined when responding to reporters’ questions.

This is why, despite relative peace and prosperity, Trump has been unable to achieve a 50-percent job-approval rating.

So it was good to see the president use his State of the Union Address to deliver a clear, coherent, and compelling message of American renewal led by a strong and resilient U.S. economy that is very much the envy of the world.

Trump called it “the great American comeback… The years of economic decay,” he declared, are over.

From the instant I took office, I moved rapidly to revive the U.S. economy—slashing a record number of job-killing regulations, enacting historic and record-setting tax cuts, and fighting for fair and reciprocal trade agreements.

Our agenda is relentlessly pro-worker, pro-family, pro-growth, and, most of all, pro-American…

Since my election, we have created seven million new jobs—five million more than government experts projected during the previous administration. The unemployment rate is the lowest in over half a century…

The unemployment rate for African-Americans, Hispanic Americans and Asian-Americans has reached the lowest levels in history… The unemployment rate for women reached the lowest level in almost 70 years…

Real median household income is now at the highest level ever recorded…

U.S. stock markets have soared 70 percent, adding more than $12 trillion to our nation’s wealth, transcending anything anyone believed was possible. This is a record. It is something that every country in the world looks up to and admires.

Consumer confidence has reached new highs. Millions of Americans with 401(k)s and pensions are doing far better than they have ever done before, with increases of 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 percent…

Critics will carp that Trump inherited a growing economy, and this is in part true. But it’s also true that wages were stagnant and the economy was slowing. Trump has reversed that, and the U.S. economy has performed far better than the critics predicted when Trump took office.

Indeed, three years ago we were warned that the sky would fall. Today, by contrast, it seems as if the sky’s the limit.

“In just three short years,” Trump boasted, “we have shattered the mentality of American decline. We have rejected the downsizing of America’s destiny… and we are never, ever going back.”

The 2020 election doesn’t seem to be about the economy, but maybe it should be. America could be doing a lot worse than it is now, and the choice in policy direction—more or less government, higher or lower taxes, a bigger or smaller private sector—could not be more stark, and certainly not more economically consequential.

Feature photo credit: Getty Images via the New York Post.

Democrats Botch the Iowa Caucuses and Biden Is the Biggest Loser

Democrats Botch the Iowa Caucuses and Biden Is the Biggest Loser

By John R Guardiano on February 5, 2020

The Iowa Caucuses took place Mon., Feb. 3, but have not had the same catalyzing effect on the presidential race that they have had in past election cycles. That’s because, remarkably, Iowa Democrats were unable to announce an actual winner Monday evening.

In fact, only now, two days later, are we getting what appear to be final, clarifying results.

Iowa Democrats blame the delay on “inconsistencies” in the reporting of election data, and insist that the online app they developed for the caucuses was not hacked or compromised.

Maybe, but their failure to launch, so to speak, has invited understandable skepticism and snark. National Review editor Rich Lowry, for instance, wryly observed that “after years of obsession with the Russians, the Democrats somehow managed to hack their own election.”

“Cybersecurity experts,” reports the New York Times, “said that the app had not been properly tested at scale, and that it was hastily put together over the past two months…

“This is an urgent reminder of why online voting is not ready for prime time,” J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, told the Times.

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale gleefully piled on: “Democrats,” he said

are stewing in a caucus mess of their own creation with the sloppiest train wreck in history. It would be natural for people to doubt the fairness of the process. And these are the people who want to run our entire health care system?

This lack of clarity and confusion allowed all of the Democratic Party candidates—Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and and even Andrew Yang—to give what essentially were victory speeches Monday evening.

After all, if it can’t be shown that you lost, then you might as well say you won, while vowing to fight on to New Hampshire! And indeed, that’s pretty much what all of the Democratic presidential candidates did.

But, as the Times notes, the award for real chutzpah has got to go to Buttigieg:

“What a night!” he yelled to a mass of cheering supporters late Monday, declaring—with zero percent of precincts officially reporting—that “by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.”

“Because tonight, an improbable hope became an undeniable reality.”

In truth, that reality was very much deniable…

“So we don’t know all the results,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “But we know by the time it’s all said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation.”

Well, that much is certainly true, albeit probably not in the way Buttigieg meant it.

As it turns out, Buttigieg wasn’t blowing smoke. He and Sanders are in a virtual tie for first place in Iowa. However, their momentum has been dampened and blunted by the delayed reporting of the results.

The Biggest Loser. What was clear Monday night, and is even clearer today, is that Biden is the big and perhaps irreparable loser in Iowa. He finished fourth, well behind Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren, and not much higher than Klobuchar.

“His poor performance in Iowa this year reflected the ways in which Biden is bad at winning elections,” argues Tim Carney in the Washington Examiner.

He was in first or second place in all statewide polls. That makes sense, given his high name recognition. Yet despite this advantage, Biden was out-fundraised by Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg. Biden was clearly out-organized, too, as the caucuses showed.

“Biden had every advantage in Iowa,” adds Quin Hillyer. “If he couldn’t make Iowa at least close, he evinces a politically hollow campaign.”

Indeed, polls show that Biden may also lose next week’s New Hampshire primary and is poised to win only in South Carolina and Alabama. Sanders, meanwhile, appears to be the frontrunner in most other states.

That would mean Buttigieg and Warren are Sanders’ only real opponents. But despite being slick and brainy, Buttigieg’s only real accomplishment in public life has been to serve as mayor of a small city (South Bend, Indiana) that most people have never heard of, and for good reason.

Warren, meanwhile, is fading in the polls and is hardly a plausible moderate alternative to Sanders. Instead, she occupies much of the same political space (on the far left wing of the Democratic Party) as Sanders.

All of which is to say: get ready for Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nominee, but this time largely in spite of Iowa, not because of it.

Feature photo credit: Google News.

Trump’s State of the Union Address Shows That He Intends to Compete Hard for Black Votes

Trump’s State of the Union Address Shows That He Intends to Compete Hard for Black Votes

By John R Guardiano on February 4, 2020

The most politically significant thing about President Trump’s State of the Union Address is that it shows he intends to compete hard for the votes of African Americans in the forthcoming 2020 election.

He thus directly appealed to these voters by pointing, with justifiable pride, to his record as president:

The unemployment rate for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans has reached the lowest levels in history. African-American youth unemployment has reached an all-time low. African-American poverty has declined to the lowest rate ever recorded…

Workers without a high school diploma have achieved the lowest unemployment rate recorded in U.S. history. A record number of young Americans are now employed…

In eight years under the last administration, over 300,000 working-age people dropped out of the workforce. In just three years of my administration, 3.5 million people, working-age people, have joined the workforce.

Since my election, the net worth of the bottom half of wage-earners has increased by 47 percent, three times faster than the increase for the top 1 percent.

After decades of flat and falling incomes, wages are rising fast — and, wonderfully, they are rising fastest for low-income workers, who have seen a 16 percent pay increase since my election.

This is a blue-collar boom…

Our roaring economy has, for the first time ever, given many former prisoners the ability to get a great job and a fresh start.

This second chance at life is made possible because we passed landmark criminal justice reform into law. Everybody said that criminal justice reform couldn’t be done, but I got it done, and the people in this room got it done.

Trump’s concerted effort to win the support of African Americans will strike many political pundits as either fanciful or ludicrous; but it’s actually very wise and strategic: because black voters may well hold the key to Trump’s reelection.

Conservative pundits think it’s fanciful because, they note, African Americans have been reliably Democratic voters for generations, and there is little reason, they think, to believe that will change in 2020.

So-called progressive pundits, likewise, think it’s ludicrous because, in their view, Trump is an obvious racist whom African Americans could never seriously consider supporting.

Trump and African Americans. But both the left and the right are wrong about Trump and the black vote. The Senate’s only African American Senator, Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum this evening that four recent polls show Trump getting as much as 30 percent of the black vote.

Scott said we should discount those numbers and cut those estimates in half. He thinks around 15 percent of the black vote is a reasonable target for the president. If that’s true and those numbers hold up on election day, Trump will easily win reelection.

(Scott, not coincidentally, was specifically recognized by Trump for sponsoring Opportunity Zones in disadvantaged neighborhoods, many of them predominantly African American.

(“Jobs and investments,” said Trump, “are pouring into 9,000 previously neglected neighborhoods thanks to Opportunity Zones, a plan spearheaded by Senator Tim Scott as part of our great Republican tax cuts.”)

The Democrats simply cannot afford to lose more than 5-10 percent of the black vote, especially in key swing states like Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Wisconsin. And, despite Trump’s myriad flaws, the man is clearly not a racist, and most African American voters know this.

Certainly, the African American celebrities whom Trump has befriended and worked with over the past several decades know this. They can attest to Trump’s good will, even if his rhetoric is sometimes lacking and occasionally cringe-inducing.

Right Action. Competing hard for the votes of African Americans is smart politics and the right thing to do. It is smart politics, because America is rapidly becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Thus to remain electorally competitive in 2020 and beyond, Republicans very much need to win more of the minority vote.

More importantly, though, it is the right thing to do. All Americans have a stake in our future and thus deserve the respect and consideration of our two major political parties.

National unity and social cohesion, moreover, are best served when key racial and demographic groups are well-represented throughout the political spectrum and across the political aisle.

Plus: competition in the political marketplace, no less than competition in the economic marketplace, spurs policy excellence and innovation.

The president may or may not win 15 percent of the black vote; we’ll see. But both he and the Republican Party, as well as the nation, will be better off and better served for seriously trying to do just that.

Feature photo credit: The New York Times.

Will Bernie and the Woke Progressives Lead the Democrats to Certain Defeat in November?

Will Bernie and the Woke Progressives Lead the Democrats to Certain Defeat in November?

By John R Guardiano on January 27, 2020

Are the Democrats blowing it? Are they about to hand the election to the one man they despise above all else, Donald J. Trump? That’s the fear of David Frum, who makes precisely that case in a brilliant and insightful essay in The Atlantic.

Frum, of course, is the intellectual leader of the Never Trump movement and someone who’s moved left politically in the past 15 years, ever since warning of the “axis of evil” as a speechwriter for George W. Bush in 2003. Still, he is a keen observer of the political scene and someone well worth listening to.

Frum focuses his firepower on Bernie Sanders, who continues to surge in the polls. Bernie, Frum argues, can’t win. His positions on matters of economic and foreign policy are too extreme and too easily caricatured and attacked to prevail against Trump.

Plus: he has real trouble appealing to suburban women and African Americans, “the two groups whose greater or lesser enthusiasm will make the difference for a Trump challenger in November,” Frum argues.

Equally worrisome: Bernie has something of a glass jaw. He “is a fragile candidate… [who has never] had to face serious personal scrutiny.” He and his team

“are experts in Democratic Party factional infighting. Few have dealt with people who do not play by the rules of the mainstream Democratic Party. They have always been the rule breakers, the people who got inside the other team’s decision cycle.

“They have been the Minutemen fighting the Redcoats, picking off the other side’s regulars from behind trees and fences. Now they are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off on an open field against a ruthless modern army with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.”

But if Bernie is the Democrats’ weakest candidate and a surefire loser in a general election matchup against Trump, the source of his political appeal is nonetheless instructive, says Frum, and something that Dems need to understand, internalize and embrace.

Simply put, Bernie is an old-fashioned socialist who focuses on bread-and-butter economic issues—jobs, healthcare, education, student debt relief, the social-safety net, et al. Other left-wing progressives running for president—Elizabeth Warren most notably—focus more on identity politics and on being “woke” or politically correct.

Frum is too polite to explicitly say it (especially in the pages of The Atlantic, which caters to woke, upscale progressives), but identity politics, left-wing cultural grievances, and PC purity tests are a real turnoff to most ordinary, working- and middle-class voters, black and white.

In fact, I believe that Trump’s 2016 win is far more attributable to the Democrats’ increasing embrace of cultural Marxism than it is to Trump’s embrace of economic populism.

Frum rightly fears that if the Dems continue to lean forward where they are weakest, on matters of culture and identity politics, they will lose in November to Trump. Thus he implores Democrats to lay off of their obsession with woke, identity politics, and, instead, to embrace Bernie’s more universal, broad-based, populist appeal.

It’s sound political advice, but will Democrats accept it?

Frum points to the fundamental divide within the Democratic Party: between the mostly white, affluent, upscale, college-educated progressives, for whom being woke is everything; and less affluent working- and middle-class blacks, who care more about the practical bread-and-butter issues that are at the heart of the Sanders’ campaign.

The white, affluent elite dominate the political dialogue and discussion and are the Dem’s donor class. However, the less affluent middle- and working class blacks are “in many ways the true base of the Democratic Party,” Frum says. They are the voters who will make all the difference in the South Carolina primary and, on Super Tuesday, in the South and industrial Midwest.

Ironically, Sanders has had real difficulty appealing to black voters; but Frum sees evidence that this is changing. “The latest CNN poll,” he notes, “showed Sanders erasing Biden’s lead among nonwhite voters—perhaps in spite of Sanders’s indifference to identity politics, or maybe, just maybe, because of that indifference” (though Frum acknowledges that this CNN poll may be an outlier).

If the polls are correct, then Biden is Frum’s only real hope for stopping Sanders and beating Trump. Biden has held up well, but he is still 77 years old and clearly not the man or candidate he was 10 or 20 years ago. He’s lost a step, and father time can be unkind.

Yet, as Frum observes, “the left-but-not-woke idea does have power—including with many members of racial minorities.” What we don’t yet know is whether that idea has enough power to overcome the Democratic Party’s woke brigades, or whether, instead, that idea will become their latest victim. All eyes are on Iowa, New Hampshire, and especially more racially and ethnically diverse South Carolina and Nevada. Stay tuned.

Feature photo credit: Associated Press via VOA News.

Why, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Trump is Fighting for Black Votes and Dems Are Desperate to Stop Him

Why, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Trump is Fighting for Black Votes and Dems Are Desperate to Stop Him

By John R Guardiano on January 20, 2020

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most significant political legacy, of course, is enfranchising millions of black voters in the South and raising the importance of the black vote there and, indeed, nationwide. Black voters before and since have voted overwhelmingly Democratic.

However, today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2020, we see clear indications that Democrats and Republicans alike are fighting hard, if not always scrupulously, for the votes of African Americans.

President Trump and Vice President Pence, for instance, both went to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., to pay their respects to the slain civil rights leader. The White House made a video of their visit, which the President tweeted to his 71 million-plus followers.

Trump also issued a Presidential Proclamation commemorating Dr. King and pledging to ensure that all Americans, regardless of their race, class or gender, “have every opportunity to realize a better life for themselves and their families.”

Trump touted the nation’s historic economic growth, the creation of more than seven million new jobs, and record-high employment for backs and other minorities. “Economic opportunity,” he noted, “is the greatest engine for empowering individuals and families to overcome adversity, and we will continue to fight for opportunity for all Americans.”

And of course, Trump took to Twitter to underscore, in his own inimitable way, the good news for African Americans:

Trump and the GOP are wise to fight for black support. The President and his team have a very good story to tell and an impressive record of achievement that, arguably, has disproportionately benefited African Americans and other minorities.

Indeed, not only is the unemployment rate the lowest that it’s been in half a century, but wages are rising and the barriers to entrepreneurship and business formation are falling.

Trump and the GOP also can point to criminal justice reform, which disproportionately benefits African Americans and other minorities by allowing federal inmates early release opportunities and a second chance to find work.

Doubting Thomases complain that these efforts are all in vain because Democrats have a hard lock on the black vote. African Americans, after all, vote 90-percent+ for Dem presidential candidates and have been doing so now for decades.

History. This is true, but the past is not necessarily prologue. Recall that from the end of the Civil War in 1865 up until the New Deal in 1936, African Americans were a reliably Republican voting block. Voting patterns can and do change over time, but only when candidates and parties actively reach out to voters and seek their support.

So, it is good thing that Trump and the GOP are making a genuine, good-faith effort to reach out to black voters. It is not good for the country when one political party monopolizes a key voting demographic. Competition in the political marketplace, no less than competition in the economic marketplace, is beneficial because it spurs (policy) excellence and innovation.

As for the Democrats, they, too, recognize the importance of the black vote. Thus eight of the party’s presidential candidates locked arms today and marched together toward the state capital building in South Carolina to commemorate the King holiday.

Paradoxically, the Democrats’ utter dominance of the black vote may make them more vulnerable politically—if not in 2020, then certainly, in the years and decades to come. It would take just a small shift in the black vote, after all, to completely upend the Dems’ strategy for victory in presidential contests.

“Increase Trump’s share of the black vote to even as low as 15 percent, and Democratic chances of winning the electoral college become very low,” writes long-term political observer Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Dem Desperation. In short, the Democrats desperately need to retain their lock on the black vote and they know it. Which is why their default position every four years is to accuse GOP presidential candidates of racism and bigotry. Their intent is to scare black voters, so that they keep voting Democratic.

It was not surprising, then, that Joe Biden went to a black church in South Carolina Sunday and charged that Trump is allied with the Ku Klux Klan. Although ludicrous, outrageous, and clearly beyond the pale, such a charge is utterly unsurprising.

This is what Democrats running for president do: because they know that they can ill-afford to lose black voters, either now, in the primaries, or in the November presidential election. Just win, baby.

These vicious and unscrupulous race-baiting tactics are a stain on American politics. The good news, though, is that both political parties recognize the importance of black voters and are competing hard for their support, and that’s something to be thankful for on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Feature photo credit: The Valley City Times Record.