Month: November 2018
A serious choice
This seems good for election day:
Best guesses are a Democratic win in the House, Republicans retaining the Senate. But if 2016 taught us anything it is not to depend on polling. Polls are heavily dependent on assumptions about turnout, which are particularly difficult this time around. There are lots of indications that more people will vote than usual in midterm elections.
What difference will it make? In foreign policy, the President has free rein. He can pretty much do as he likes, unless legislation constrains him. That is unlikely if the Democrats control only the House, not the Senate.
But there are some issues on which sentiment among both Republicans and Democrats in Congress is different from the White House’s inclinations. Support for NATO and understanding of the European Union, opposition to Russian malfeasance worldwide, sympathy for refugees, doubts about the Yemen war and North Korea, interest in bringing US troops home from Afghanistan and the Middle East, and support for open societies and free economies are all more evident in Congress than in the Administration. If they use their oversight responsibilities well, House Democrats could make common cause on at least some of these issues with like-minded Republicans. That would strengthen the professionals inside government and might lead to some modest course corrections.
But on other issues Democratic control of the House is unlikely to make much difference. They would have preferred that the US stay in the Iran nuclear deal, but they aren’t going to speak up, for fear of being tagged as pro-Iranian, against the renewed sanctions the Administration has imposed. Nor will Democrats strongly oppose tariffs, which some of the party’s traditional support base likes. Certainly China has few sympathizers among Democrats. Support for Israel among Democrats is strong, making it unlikely there will be strong dissent from Trump’s heavy lean against the Palestinians. The areas of bipartisan agreement on foreign policy are not as wide as once they were, but there are still some in which Trump can rely on the House Democrats to be uncritical.
Apart from the specific foreign policy issues, the significance of this midterm election lies in the choice of what kind of America its citizens want. In his pursuit of making America great again, President Trump has tried hard to sharpen the lines of difference between Democrats and Republicans, to appeal to racists, anti-Semites, and xenophobes, and to frighten Americans into voting for incumbents. They include people whose ideal is an America that treats dictators as friends, closes itself off from much of the world, treats even allies as threats, and arms itself to deal with a world in which no norms are the norm. The Democrats, while focusing mainly on domestic issues like education and health care, are projecting a more open and optimistic vision of an America more engaged diplomatically and ready to maintain and expand international norms and commitments.
This is a serious choice. Go vote.
PS: A friend sent this:
I write this on the verge of the 2018 by elections in the United States. I implore you to make this a repudiation of the divisive and anti-democratic tendencies of Trump. As many of you might know, I served 25 years in the US Army defending the Constitution that Trump flouts almost on a daily basis. His rants against the media reveals his distaste for the 1st Amendment (freedom of press and expression). His desire to repeal the 14th Amendment with an executive order shows his lack of knowledge about how Amendments evolve. His political theatre of sending US troops to the border area suggests he does not understand that they cannot engage in law and order enforcement as forbidden by the posse comitatus act of Congress. Most importantly, he has the instincts of a dictator and employs many of the same tactics as used by President Orban who has become an authoritarian leader of Hungary that has attained his power by turning segments of the nation against one another, racism and control of the press and justice system. With 16 years serving with the UN in Former Yugoslavia, I have witnessed first hand how such divisiveness and artificially induced hate of the “other” can destroy a nation.
Vote and repudiate Trump and his enablers.
PPS: Another friend sent this:
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Midterms
Attention is focused today on the likely outcome of tomorrow’s midterm election. I’ll get to that, but first a word about the process, mainly for my many non-American readers.
The United States is a federation, which means it is a union of distinct states that on many issues govern themselves. That includes setting the rules for, and conducting, election of 438 members of the House of Representatives and one-third of the 100-member Senate every two years. Representatives are elected from single-member districts. Senators represent entire states, which also elect their own governors and members of state legislatures. The result is a hodge-podge of rules on how Congressional districts are drawn, where the polling places are located, the hours the polls are open, how people vote (on paper or machines, for example), what identification is needed, and how the votes are counted, as well as on registration, early voting, and absentee voting.
There has been a lot of controversy on these issues in the run-up to the midterms. It is possible, even likely, that some of these controversies will persist even after election day in some states. The big issue is whether citizens have been allowed a fair and equal chance to have their vote count. Voter ID laws that discriminate against American Indians by requiring a street address their reservations don’t use is just one example. In some states, polling places have been closed in minority neighborhoods, voter registrations have disappeared, and voters have been purged from the register without being informed. All these complaints come mainly from the Democratic side of the political equation.
Republicans claim there is a problem with voter fraud, that is people voting who are not legally entitled to do so or people who vote in more than one place. There have been few demonstrated cases of voter fraud in the US (the rightist Heritage Foundation database claimed 1132 proven cases in 47 states last summer, not enough to decide more than a tiny fraction of elections). It is true that many people are registered in more than one state, since Americans move frequently and rarely un-register after they do. This is one reason turn-out numbers in the US are seemingly so low: there are a lot of people on some voter rolls who have moved (or died) and have no intention of again voting in a state they were previously registered in. But you should expect to hear in close races claims that they were decided fraudulently. It’s part of the political game.
Polls close in some districts as early as 6 pm and many by 7 or 8 pm. But of course the continental US is spread across three time zones (five counting Hawaii), so it may be midnight or later when control of the House and Senate are decided. Lots of states will also be electing governors and state legislatures. Those contests may give an early indication of who is up and who is down. If black candidates Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum were to win in normally Republican Georgia and Florida, for example, it would be a relatively early indication that the Democrats have been successful in turning out their voters.
On this last day before the election, Democrats are up by an unusually wide 8.2% margin in generic polling about control of Congress. But generic polls don’t count tomorrow. Polling on the House races gives the Democrats an 85% chance of gaining a majority. Polling on the Senate races gives the Republicans an 85% chance of retaining their majority. But polls are all based on assumptions about turnout that could be dramatically wrong this time around. Both Republicans and Democrats seem energized and early voting allowed in many states has been massive.
How will we tell who won? At the very least, to win the Democrats need to capture control of the House, which would enable them to hold oversight hearings and issue subpoenas to compel testimony. Winning control also of the Senate would spell a smackdown. Continued Republican control of both Houses, even if by smaller margins, would be a triumphal confirmation of Trump’s presidency. While presidents often shy from exposure during the midterms, he has been actively campaigning, in particular to try to defend the Republican majority in the Senate. Success in that, while losing the House, he will be prepared to claim as victory.
More on the foreign policy implications of these possible outcomes in a future post.
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Canvasing
I spent yesterday afternoon in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, where State Senator and former prosecutor Jennifer Wexton is challenging incumbent Republican Congresswoman Barbara Comstock. Comstock is widely thought to be vulnerable. It’s one of the contests that will decide whether Democrats gain control of the House on Tuesday. I went because it is not certain Wexton will win, so my efforts might make a tiny difference, and because historic Leesburg is a nice place to have lunch.
At this point in the campaign, it’s all about GOTV: get out the vote. Canvasers are not encouraged to try to win people over, only to persuade people who support their candidate to get to the polls Tuesday. The lists of addresses and names they are given are supposed to be all on the “right” side, though that of course is not 100% accurate. Most people aren’t home on a sunny Saturday afternoon, so you leave a bit of literature stuck to the window, hanging from the doorknob, or inserted in the door jamb.
A lot of my addresses were few and far between. That meant I was mainly in Comstock country, which was also apparent from the lawn signs. The demographics were what you would expect: most of the people on my list of expected Wexton voters were women, many but not all from obvious immigrant backgrounds. Conversations were mostly easy: yes they would vote for Wexton, they knew where the polling place would be, and they had clear plans to go Tuesday.
A few interactions were less pleasant. Men answer the door much more often than women, and many of them are not voting Democratic. At one house, a middle-aged man followed me outside after I had asked to speak with a 19-year-old woman listed at his address as likely to vote Democratic. He wanted to make it clear that his entire household was solidly MAGA (Make America Great Again), including the young woman.
I suspect the 19-year-old might feel differently. I hope she didn’t get in trouble with this rather aggressive pater familias. Family voting at the polling booth is a big problem in many countries, when men crowd into the booth to “help” their spouses or daughters vote. I have to wonder whether the increased use of absentee ballots might be making American family members much more vulnerable to intimidation.
Those men who weren’t voting for Wexton all quickly identified themselves as Trump supporters. Comstock might as well not exist for them. The avowed Trumpistas were all white. The sense one gets–but of course these are brief conversations and the cues are at least partly non-verbal–is that they expect nothing more from him than to restore their sense of pride and preserve some vestige of white privilege. No one was threatening, but several were less than friendly.
Apart from the Comstock yard signs, there was no indication of a comparable Republican push in the small section of Leesburg I visited. I met no Republican canvasers and saw no Republican literature at the front doors. Maybe Comstock is confident of how people there will vote. Or maybe they’ve miscalculated. There is no way of knowing until Tuesday.
I am heading back to Leesburg this morning. The effort yesterday seemd worthwhile. The canvasers I met were enthusiastic and committed, perhaps a bit more so than for Hillary in 2016. One was a retired Foreign Service colleague, another a dean I know at George Washington University. I assume both traveled the hour out to Leesburg for the same reason I did: so much is at stake in this mid-term election that I don’t want to feel afterwards that I might have contributed more.
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American Islamophobia
The scale of Islamophobia in America is startling. On Thursday New America and the American Muslim Institution (AMI) unveiled their study on perceptions of Muslim Americans among non-Muslims. The survey conducted roughly 1,000 interviews nation-wide and zoomed in on Washington DC and 3 other cities for additional insight. Only 56% of respondents saw Islam as compatible with American values, and one in three respondents would feel uncomfortable with seeing a Muslim woman wearing a veil, or with a mosque or Islamic center being opened in their neighborhood.
Panelists Robert McKenzie, Director and Senior Fellow at New America, and Shafiq Khan, a Board Member at AMI, were also surprised by the results from DC. It was their expectation based on their own experiences and conversations with many local Imams and community leaders that DC was a significantly more open and worldlier city than the United States as a whole. Instead, the results showed that on some questions DC exhibited more bigotry than the national average.
Partisan affiliation was the best predictor of anti-Muslim attitudes, with Republicans 30% more likely than the overall group to see Islam as incompatible with American values. This result dovetails with recent work
showing that American’s racial attitudes are increasingly organized along with the partisan divide.
The average respondent put Muslims at 17% of the America population, while the real makeup is somewhere closer to 1 percent. Disproportionate media coverage may be to blame, especially in the larger context of conspiracy theories, “culture wars,” and majority fears about marginalization. If so it would raise the question of how best to fight the caustic narrative around American Muslims without continuing to blow the issue out of proportion.
Unpleasant surprise was the major takeaway from the discussion. Islamophobia, despite expectations, is not relegated to some extremist fringe, but is now widespread among the American populace.
Still, further investigation is in order. The interviews were intentionally conducted in October of this year, when Islamophobia would be heightened due to the midterm elections. But as of yet there is no second round of surveys to confirm or rebut that assumption. The survey made no distinction between American views of Muslim and other immigrants, or between recent immigrants and the long established African-American Muslim community.
After delivering evidence of the scale of the problem Khan and McKenzie seemed unsure of what is needed as a remedy. McKenzie wanted to hand the report over to local journalists and politicians, hoping they would leap into action to address their communities and set the record straight. The report and its presentation raised more questions than it answered.
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The flim flam election
Here are just a few of the nonsense claims I am hearing a few days before the American midterm elections, which will decide the January majorities in the House and Senate as well as control of state legislatures and governors:
- The migrant caravan in southern Mexico is a threat to the national security of the United States. It is not. The few thousand mostly women and children walking north are still at least a month away from the Texas border. Judging from past “caravans” of this sort, fewer than half will arrive there and present themselves as asylum-seekers, a claim that will be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis in accordance with US law. There is no evidence at all that there are “unknown Middle Easterners” and gang members in the group, as President Trump has claimed.
- George Soros and other Democrats financed the migrant caravan. There is also no evidence whatsoever for this claim. In Latin America, Soros’ Open Society Foundation addresses mainly governance and human rights, focused on Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. I’d guess the program is far more likely to contribute to people staying in their home countries than leaving them, by addressing local grievances and improving government performance.
- The US military deployment will protect us. No, because the US military is not allowed to do so inside the US. Nor will it fire, as President Trump has suggested, on stone throwers. The 5000 or so troops he is ordering to the border (supposedly to be increased later) will do support tasks for Customs and Border Protection, which has handled similar caravans in the past without much strain. This is an unnecessary and costly deployment ordered purely for political reasons: to show the President is doing something about the threat he has hyped.
- President Trump has negotiated a great nuclear agreement with North Korea. There is no nuclear agreement with Pyongyang, only a one-page statement that is not as strong as previous North Korean commitments to denuclearization. Kim Jong-un has stiffed Secretary Pompeo, who has been trying to convert that very general commitment into a real agreement. The lovefest has produced no offspring. The North Koreans have not even produced a rudimentary inventory of their nuclear program, never mind signed up to the kind of detailed constraints that Obama imposed on Iran in the nuclear deal from which Trump has withdrawn.
- The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is much better than the lousy North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and is already having an impact. The two are basically the same, with some updates that include both things the US wanted and things Mexico and Canada wanted. USMCA doesn’t go into effect until 2020. NAFTA governs trade until then.
- Trump has been great for the economy. The economy is good, largely due to the almost eight years of growth under President Obama. The employment gains and fall in unemployment since January 2017 are nothing more than continuation of the what was already happening:
But there are storm clouds on the horizon: short-term interest rates and inflation are headed up, the stock market is teetering, and the Trump tariff war is endangering US exports and increasing the price of US imports.
7. The Republicans will provide better health care, with insurance for people with pre-existing conditions. This proposition doesn’t pass the laugh test. The Administration is determined to annihilate the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Without Obamacare, which ensures that healthy people have incentives to sign up for health insurance, there is no way to cover pre-existing conditions except by charging market rates that will eliminate coverage for most people with them. No one should be fooled.
This is the flim flam election: a test of whether Americans can see through the lies and realize that they have been conned. I’m not predicting the outcome, but I will canvas over the weekend in Virginia’s 8th Congressional District and hope everyone I know will be trying to get the vote out.
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