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How Has The Radical Right Evolved Under Trump?

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 15:46:48 GMT

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Last Wednesday, the U.S. Capitol was attacked by a mob of President Trump’s supporters, many of whom had very explicit and not so explicit ties to right-wing extremism in the U.S. There are reports now, too, that there could be subsequent attacks in state capitals this weekend. President Trump’s time in office has undoubtedly had a mainstreaming effect on right-wing extremism, too, with as many as 20 percent of Americans saying they supported the rioters. But as we also know, much of this predates Trump, too. Right-wing extremism has a long, sordid history in the U.S.

The big question I want to ask all of you today is twofold: First, how did we get here, and second, where do we go from here?

Let’s start by unpacking how right-wing extremism has changed in the Trump presidency. How has it?

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): Well, the first and most obvious thing is that Trump has spoken directly to right-wing extremists. That is to say, using their language, condoning previous armed protests at government buildings and explicitly calling on them to support and protect him. And that, probably unsurprisingly, has emboldened right-wing extremists and made their extremism seem — well, less extreme.

That goes for a wide array of extremists in the U.S., too. I’m thinking, of course, about Trump’s comment after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he said there were “very fine people on both sides.” But Trump has also encouraged white Christian nationalists, anti-government extremists and other groups and individuals that I certainly never thought I’d hear a president expressing sympathy or support for.

jennifer.chudy (Jennifer Chudy, political science professor at Wellesley College): Absolutely, Amelia. And while the actual extremists may represent a small group of the public, the share of Republicans who support their behavior, whether explicitly or implicitly, is not as small. This is, in part, due to mainstream political institutions — like the Republican Party, with Trump at its helm — helping make their mission and behavior seem legitimate.

maggie.koerth (Maggie Koerth, senior science writer): I’ve been talking to experts about this all week, and I think it’s really interesting how even the academics who study this stuff are kind of arguing over the role class plays in it. People like Christian Davenport at the University of Michigan have argued that we should understand that all of this is happening in the context of decades of growing income inequality and political stagnation. In other words, he contends that there are legitimate reasons to be angry at and mistrust the government. But it also seems like this crowd was not even close to being uniformly working class and probably contained people from a range of different backgrounds. And that’s why I liked one of the points Joseph Uscinski at the University of Miami made: We might be seeing a coalescing of two groups: the people who have been actually hurt by that inequality and are angry about it AND the people who are doing pretty well but who feel like somebody might come and take that away. And, of course, both those positions can dovetail very easily into racial animus and white supremacy.

ameliatd: That’s interesting, Maggie. As you alluded to, though, it’s important to be clear that economic anxiety — which was used in the aftermath of Trump’s election to explain why so many Americans voted for a candidate who framed much of his candidacy around animus toward nonwhite people — doesn’t mean that racism or white supremacy isn’t a driving force here, too.

Part of what’s so complex about the mob that attacked the Capitol is that it was a bunch of different people, with somewhat disparate ideologies and goals, united under the “stop the steal” mantra. But underlying a lot of that, even people’s anger over economic inequality or mistrust in institutions, is the fundamental idea that white status and power are being threatened.

jennifer.chudy: There is also just a lot of evidence in political science that racial attitudes are associated with emotions like anger. Two great books, one by Antoine Banks of the University of Maryland and the other by Davin Phoenix of the University of California, Irvine, consider this point in depth. Insofar as right-wing extremists express anger at the system (in contrast to fear or disgust), their anger appears more likely to be motivated by racial grievances than by economic ones.

Additionally, the Republican Party’s base has, for years now, become more racially homogeneous, in part because of the party providing a welcome home to white grievances. But some have argued that this has also been exacerbated by the Democratic Party speaking more explicitly about racial inequality in the U.S., something that wasn’t the case in the 1990s. Regardless, a more racially homogeneous base can make a party’s members more receptive to this type of extremist behavior.

We also can’t underestimate the role that COVID-19 plays here. As Maggie and Amelia suggested in their article from this summer on militias and the coronavirus, many folks are at home and glued to their computers in ways that facilitate this type of organizing. They can burrow themselves into online communities of like-minded folks which may intensify their attitudes and lead to extreme behavior.

Kaleigh: (Kaleigh Rogers, tech and politics reporter): Polling has shown that ideas that previously had been considered extreme, like using violence if your party loses an election, or supporting authoritarian ideas, have definitely become more mainstream.

This is partly due to Trump’s own rhetoric, but also due to the effects of online communities where far-right extremists and white nationalists mingle with more moderate Trump supporters, effectively radicalizing some of them over time.

What’s interesting to me about all of these different factions, though, is there is actually a lot of division among these groups: Many members of the Proud Boys aren’t fans of the QAnon conspiracy, for instance. And a lot of white nationalists don’t like Trump, but they still end up uniting against a perceived common enemy. That’s why you saw people in the mob at the Capitol waving MAGA flags alongside people with clear Nazi symbolism. They are not all white nationalists, but they’re willing to march beside them because they think they’re on the same side.

But in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, those divisions are becoming more stark in these online communities. I’m seeing a lot of infighting over whether planned marches are a good idea, whether they are “false flag” events or traps or whether they should be armed. There just seems to be this heightened anxiety as they draw closer to an inevitable line that they can’t come back from: Biden’s inauguration.

sarahf: That’s a super important point, Kaleigh, on how different extremist groups have rallied behind this. But given how much Trump has directly spoken to right-wing extremists, as Amelia mentioned up top, can we drill in on the violence, as well? It’s not just that different factions have united or that these views have mainstreamed under Trump, but also that there’s been an actual uptick in violence, too, right?

ameliatd: One thing Maggie and I heard from experts on the modern militia movement is that these groups’ activity levels depend on the political context. The uptick in violence under Trump is real, but it’s not something that’s only happened under Trump. There was a surge in militia activity early in Obama’s presidency, too, for example.

maggie.koerth: Very much so, Amelia. The reality is that the right-wing extremism we’re seeing now is a symptom of long-running trends in American society, including white resentment and racial animus. And on top of that, you have these trends interacting with partisan polarization, which means the political left and right (which used to have fairly similar levels of white racial resentment) began to diverge on measures of racial resentment in the late 1980s and now differ greatly.

Kaleigh: Exactly, Maggie. That’s also why the FBI and other experts are particularly concerned about planned militia marches ahead of the inauguration. These groups tend to be much more organized and deliberate in their actions than the mob we saw last week. And because of that, they’re even more dangerous.

ameliatd: Right, so this violence isn’t new. But I do think it’s fair to say that Trump has raised the stakes so dramatically for right-wing extremists that we’d see a throng of them storming the Capitol. A lot of them see him as their guy in the White House!

So when he says, look, this election is being stolen from me, and you’ve got to do something about it, they listen.

jennifer.chudy: That’s true, Amelia, but work in political science shows just how much of this change was afoot prior to Trump’s election. Some tie it to Hillary Clinton talking too much about race during the 2016 election — they argue that this drove away some white voters who had previously voted Democratic (and could do so in 2008 and ‘12 because Obama, despite being Black, did not mention race much during his candidacy). But Clare Malone’s article for FiveThirtyEight on how Republicans have spent decades prioritizing white people’s interests does a great job of tracing these roots even further back.

maggie.koerth: Yeah, I’m really leery of the tendency I’ve seen in the media to act like this is something that started with Trump, or even that started post-Obama. Most of the experts I’ve spoken with have framed this more like … Trump’s escalation of these dangerous trends is a symptom of the trends. We’re talking about a lot of indicators that have been going in this direction since at least the 1980s.

jennifer.chudy: True, Maggie, from the beginning of the Republic, I might argue! But one reason the tie to Trump and Obama is so interesting is that Trump’s baseless claims around Obama’s birth certificate correspond with his debut on the national political stage. So even as there is a long thread of white supremacy throughout American history that has facilitated Trump’s ascension, there may also be a more proximate connection to recent elections, too.

ameliatd: Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke University, has done some really compelling research on white identity politics — specifically how the country’s diversification has created a kind of “white awareness” among white Americans who are essentially afraid of losing their cultural status and power.

This is a complicated force — she’s clear that it’s not exactly the same thing as racial prejudice — but the result is that many white people have a sense that the hierarchy in which they’ve been privileged is being upset, and they want things to return to the old status quo, which of course was racist. And the Republican Party has been tapping into that sense of fear for a while. Trump’s departure was that he started doing it much more explicitly than previous Republican politicians had mostly done.

So yes, Maggie, you’re absolutely right that it’s not like Trump came on the scene and suddenly right-wing extremism or white supremacist violence became a part of our political landscape. Or partisan hatred, for that matter! FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman has written about the effect of political polarization and how it’s created intense loathing of the other party, and he’s clear that it’s been a long time coming. It didn’t just emerge out of nowhere in 2016, as you can see in the chart below.

On the other hand, though, it’s hard to imagine the events of last week without four years of Trump fanning the flames.

maggie.koerth: Right, Amelia. Trump is a symptom AND he’s making it worse. At the same time.

Kaleigh: What you said, Amelia, also speaks to just how many Trump supporters don’t consider themselves racist and find it insulting to be called so. A lot of Trump supporters think Democrats are obsessed with race and identity politics, and think racism isn’t as systemic of a problem as it is. There are also, of course, nonwhite Trump supporters, which complicates the image that only white working-class Americans feel threatened by efforts to create racial equality.

ameliatd: That’s right, Kaleigh. We haven’t talked about the protests against police brutality and misconduct this summer, but I think that’s a big factor here as well — politicians like Biden saying that we have to deal with systemic racism is itself threatening to a lot of people.

sarahf: It does seem as if we’re in this gray zone, where so much of this predates Trump, and yet Trump has activated underlying sentiments that were perhaps dormant for at least a little while. Any child of the 1990s remembers, for instance, the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh, who held a number of extreme, anti-government views, or the deadly standoff between federal law enforcement officials and right-wing fundamentalists at Ruby Ridge.

And as Jennifer pointed out with Malone’s piece, the thread runs even further back. It’s almost as if it’s always been part of the U.S. but maybe not as omnipresent. That’s also possibly naive, but I’m curious to hear where you all think we go from here — in how does President Biden start to move the U.S. forward?

maggie.koerth: Honestly, that’s the scary part for me, Sarah. Because I don’t really think he can. Everything we know about how you change deeply held beliefs that have to do with identity suggests that the appeals of outsiders doesn’t work.

jennifer.chudy: Yes — one would think that a common formidable challenge, like COVID-19, would help unite different political factions. But if you look at the last few months, that’s not what we see.

maggie.koerth: Even Republican elites who they push back on this stuff get branded as apostates.

ameliatd: And there’s evidence that when Republican elites are perceived as apostates, they may also become targets for violence.

Kaleigh: But we also know that deplatforming agitators helps reduce the spread of their ideas and how much people are exposed to/talk about them. Losing the presidency is kind of the ultimate deplatforming, no?

jennifer.chudy: Is it deplatforming, though? Or is it just moving the platform to a different setting? I don’t know the ins and outs of the technology, but it seems like the message has become dispersed but maybe not extinguished.

sarahf: That’s a good point, Jennifer, and something I think Kaleigh hits on in her article — that is, this question of … was it too little, too late?

maggie.koerth: I think it has been a deplatforming, Jennifer. If for no other reason than it’s removed Trump’s ability to viscerally respond to millions of people immediately. And you see some really big differences between the things he said on Twitter about these extremists last week and the statements he’s made this week, which have had to go through other people.

It’s not so much taken away from his ability to speak, but it does seem to have affected his ability to speak without somebody thinking about the consequences first.

ameliatd: There is an argument that Trump’s presidency and the violence he’s spurred is making the underlying problems impossible to ignore. I’m not sure whether that makes it easier for Biden to deal with them, but it does make it harder for him to just say, ‘Okay, let’s move past this.’

Lilliana Mason, a professor at the University of Maryland who’s written extensively about partisan discord and political violence, told me in a recent interview that while someone like Biden shouldn’t be afraid to push back against Trump or his followers because it will lead to more violence (an argument against impeachment that’s circulated in the past week), she does think pushing back against Trump and his followers probably will result in more violence.

So that leaves us, and Biden, in a pretty scary place.

Republicans are in a bind, too. Electorally, many of them depend on a system where certain voters — white voters, rural voters, etc. — do have more power. So yeah, Sarah, that doesn’t make me especially optimistic about a big Republican elite turnaround on Trumpism, separate from the question of whether that would actually diffuse some of these tensions.

sarahf: One silver lining in all this is we don’t yet know the full extent to which Trump and Trumpism has taken a hit. That is, plenty of Republicans still support him, but his approval rating has taken a pretty big hit, the biggest since his first few months in office in 2017 — that’s atypical for a president on his way out the door. More Republicans also support impeachment of Trump this time around.

There is a radicalized element here in American politics — and as you’ve all said — it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but I do wonder if we still don’t fully understand where this goes next.

Kaleigh: What gives me some peace in this time is looking back at history. America has dealt with far-right extremists before. It has dealt with violent insurrectionists before. We have continued, however slowly, to make progress. Sometimes the only way out is through.

Since The Capitol Attack, Trump’s Approval Rating Has Plummeted At A Record Rate

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 11:00:18 GMT

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll(s) of the week

In the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, public opinion is souring quickly on President Trump as he enters the final days of his term. Not only do a majority of Americans blame him for the riot at the Capitol and favor removing him from office, but his job approval rating has fallen faster in recent days than at any point in his presidency.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s approval tracker,¹ 39.4 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 56.3 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -16.8 percentage points). On Jan. 6, the day of the Capitol attack, Trump’s net approval rating stood at -10.3 points, which means his net approval rating has fallen 6.5 points in just eight days.

It turns out that’s the biggest drop in Trump’s net approval that our tracker has ever recorded. To put this into perspective, there have been only two other times when Trump’s net approval rating fell by at least 5 points over an eight-day period: once in February 2017, after he issued executive orders to begin construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and to suspend the refugee program and prohibit entry for visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries,² and then again in March 2017, after Republicans began their legislative efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.³ But the lack of sharp drops in Trump’s rating outside of these two episodes isn’t all that stunning, considering that both positive and negative opinions of him are largely baked in.

[How Has The Radical Right Evolved Under Trump?]

But now Trump’s tumbling approval rating suggests he is losing some support among his party base and swing voters (his approval rating among Democrats was already abysmal). Take Morning Consult/Politico’s latest survey, which found Trump’s net approval at +51 points among Republicans and -35 points among independents; these numbers might not sound that bad, especially among Republicans, but they were down 15 points among both Republicans and independents from mid-December. Quinnipiac University’s new poll also put Trump’s net approval among Republicans at +51, a decrease from +80 in early December, while independents fell to -37 from -15 in the same period. Additionally, a new survey from Marist College on behalf of PBS NewsHour found Trump at +56 among Republicans and -20 among independents, both down from +83 and -14, respectively, in Marist’s early December poll.

There’s also evidence of Trump’s image suffering in polling on impeachment and whether he should be removed from office. Back during Trump’s first impeachment in late 2019 and early 2020, net support for his removal never grew beyond +4. But now net support for removal stands at about +11, with about 53 percent of Americans supporting it and 42 percent opposing it. And while it’s still true that a majority of Republicans do not support Trump’s impeachment, the same pattern we observed in Trump’s approval rating (a dip among Republicans) is true here as well. The first time Trump was impeached, less than 10 percent of Republicans backed removing him from office, compared with 15 percent now. Among independents, the magnitude of the shift is similar, up from the low 40 percent range to 48 percent. And, once again, Democrats overwhelmingly back removal.

As Trump continues to falter, it’s worth noting just how atypical this trend is for a president in his last couple of months in office. Outgoing presidents often get at least a little bump in approval, regardless of whether they were popular or unpopular. For instance, President Barack Obama’s net approval rating rose from about +8 after the 2016 election to almost +20 when Trump took office, while President George W. Bush’s net approval rating rose from -43 in November 2008 to about -30 going into Obama’s inauguration in January 2009. Even President George H.W. Bush, the last incumbent president to lose reelection before Trump, saw his net approval go from -23 after the election to +18 by the time he left the White House. It’s hard to imagine such a huge shift in this more polarized era, but Trump’s net approval has definitely declined more than his predecessors’.

While commentators have often called Trump “Teflon Don” because few of his actions seem to stick and perceptibly alter public opinion, this has its limits. Inciting an attack on the American government is pretty damaging: It has caused a rapid decline in his approval rating, prompted more than half of Americans to support his removal from office, and even impelled 10 House Republicans to back his impeachment — the most members of a president’s party to ever do so.

Other polling bites

Americans are understandably concerned about the direction of the country given last week’s news. To that point, Morning Consult found that 81 percent felt the country was on the wrong track, while just 19 percent thought the country was headed in the right direction. These figures mark the most bearish responses to this question in Morning Consult’s polling over Trump’s entire presidency.
White identity and grievance politics played a major role in the attack on the Capitol, and 69 percent Americans said they view white supremacists as a very serious (52 percent) or somewhat serious (17 percent) problem, according to new polling from YouGov. Just 21 percent said they were not a very serious problem or not a problem at all. However, broken down by party, Republicans were much more equivocal, with 44 percent calling white supremacists a problem and 49 percent saying they aren’t. And despite the severity of last week’s events, these numbers — overall and by party — are mostly unchanged from those in an August 2019 YouGov survey.
Gallup’s annual report on Americans’ ideological views found that more people identified as conservative and moderate than liberal in 2020, in keeping with findings from previous years. According to the pollster, 36 percent described themselves as conservative, 35 percent as moderate and 25 percent as liberal, numbers that were largely unchanged from 2019. Overall, Republicans were more likely to be ideologically similar, with 75 percent identifying as conservative, whereas Democrats were a bit more mixed, as only 51 percent identified as liberal.
Americans continue to experience a lot of online harassment, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. Forty-one percent of U.S. adults said they’ve been attacked in some way, which was identical to Pew’s 2017 polling, but this time there was a reported increase in harassment across six specific types of abuse. Of the two less serious types, almost a third of Americans reported offensive name-calling and a quarter reported attempts at “purposeful embarrassment.” Among the four more serious types, about one in 10 reported some sort of stalking, sustained harassment or sexual harassment, while 14 percent said they’d received physical threats.
As COVID-19 vaccination ramps up, Gallup’s latest polling found that 65 percent of Americans would agree to be vaccinated if they were offered an FDA-approved vaccine at no cost, compared with 35 percent who wouldn’t. However, there was a pretty big partisan split over taking the vaccine: 83 percent of Democrats agreed to be vaccinated while only 45 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of independents said the same. Since Gallup began polling on this question in July 2020, Democrats have been far more likely to say they’d accept a vaccination, save for a period in September 2020 when Democratic receptiveness fell sharply, possibly in response to Trump’s claims that a vaccine could be ready by Election Day.
Trump’s incendiary use of social media led Twitter and other social media companies to suspend him from their platforms. Morning Consult polling found that 39 percent of Americans felt that approach was “exactly right,” while 33 percent felt it went too far and 28 percent felt it didn’t go far enough. There was a large partisan split over support for these moves, too, with 69 percent of Republicans saying the suspensions went too far, and 43 percent of Democrats saying they didn’t think they went far enough. And even though half of all respondents thought that Trump’s social media accounts should have been suspended earlier, only 15 percent of Republicans agreed compared with 77 percent of Democrats.

Why 10 Republicans Voted For Impeachment

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 02:34:34 GMT

In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, HuffPost’s polling editor, Ariel Edwards-Levy, joined Galen and Perry to discuss why the second impeachment vote for President Trump broke down the way it did, what the different camps within the GOP are and what happens next.

Politics Podcast: What A Second Impeachment Means

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 01:15:25 GMT

On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 232-197 to impeach President Trump. Ten Republicans broke with their caucus to vote with the Democrats — a more bipartisan vote than Trump’s first impeachment but still just a sliver of the GOP. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, HuffPost’s polling editor, Ariel Edwards-Levy, joined Galen and Perry to discuss why the vote broke down the way it did, what the different camps within the GOP are and what happens next.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Trump Has Been Rebuked Like No Other President — But Really Only By Democrats

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 22:21:11 GMT

Donald Trump has now been rebuked like no other president: He is the first-ever president to be impeached by the House of Representatives twice, and he is also the first-ever president to have the House call for his Cabinet and vice president to remove him from office.

In fact, there have been just four presidential impeachments in American history — and Trump now represents half of that total. The actual words used in the article of impeachment adopted by the House on Wednesday were both incredibly damning and also an accurate portrayal of the president’s conduct since November’s election. Trump, according to the House, was “inciting violence against the Government of the United States,” “threatened the integrity of the democratic system,” and “imperiled a coequal branch of Government.”

But the power of the rebukes of Trump is somewhat blunted by the fact that they have been largely partisan. No House Republican voted for Trump’s impeachment in 2019 over the pressure he exerted on the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens, and only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, supported removing Trump from office. In the wake of the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, only one Republican House member, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, supported invoking the 25th Amendment to have Trump removed from office on Tuesday, and today only nine House Republicans joined Kinzinger in supporting impeachment.

This strong Republican loyalty to the president is a very important and historic dynamic.

It’s important not to overstate the size of the opposition to Trump in the GOP simply because it includes some high-profile members of the party. Romney, the party’s one-time presidential nominee, and Rep. Liz Cheney, both the No. 3 Republican in the party’s leadership and the daughter of a Republican vice president, have cast Trump as a terrible president and supported his removal from office. A third major Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has allowed his allies to leak to the press that he believes Trump has committed impeachable offenses. A few other Republicans in the Senate, most notably Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, have suggested that they might back Trump’s removal from office or a post-presidency conviction of the impeachment charge, but it’s still unclear if they would actually do so.

But the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the House still voted against impeachment even after the invasion of the Capitol that put their lives at risk. McConnell is also not pushing to have a quick Senate vote to remove Trump from office, because it’s likely that most Republican senators don’t want to deal with the issue, not wanting to cast a vote in favor of Trump’s actions but also wary of trying to force him from office. Pence and Trump’s Cabinet opposed the idea of removing him via the 25th Amendment. And polls suggest that a clear majority of Republican voters don’t want Trump impeached or removed from office.

If there is a battle going on for control of the Republican Party, at least right now, those allied with Trump and Trumpism are winning — and it’s not particularly close. The Republican Party has a bloc of people like Cheney and Sasse that is clearly uncomfortable with Trump and Trumpism and a group that strongly embraces Trumpism, such as Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and others in the House Freedom Caucus.

But a lot of Republicans in Congress aren’t necessarily all that committed to Trumpism or all that firmly against it. Rather, they are politicians who are trying to land in the right spot to keep their jobs and position themselves for runs for higher office. And the impeachment votes from Republicans on Capitol Hill tell a clear story: They think the best bet for a Republican politician, at least right now, is to stay aligned with Trump, and that the party base is more connected to Trump than to traditional democratic norms and values or the GOP of the past, led by people like former Vice President Dick Cheney and Romney. In fact, the person who might lose their job through this process is not Trump but Liz Cheney, as Jordan and his allies are trying to have her removed from Republican leadership because of her impeachment vote.

Finally, despite this vote, it seems almost certain that Trump will get to finish out his term, something that didn’t seem so clear a week ago. This, too, is basically a story of the Republican Party sticking with Trump — the Cabinet was unwilling to remove him, and so were GOP senators.

Put all this together and you have a complicated story of the end of Trump’s presidency. The House of Representatives has rebuked him like it has no other president — passing two separate provisions (the 25th Amendment proposal, then impeachment) in a rush to get him out of office, even though he had only two weeks left in his presidency and had already been impeached once. But while it’s officially the U.S. House that rebuked Trump, it was essentially only Democrats who rebuked him. Trump will now get to finish out his term and avoid a complete repudiation of his presidency, with a lot of votes in opposition to him from both parties. So right now, it’s not clear whether Trump will be remembered as a historically terrible president — or just a historically terrible president according to Democrats.

What Kicking Trump Off Twitter Can — And Can’t — Do

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 17:58:59 GMT

It was The Trump Show 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For years, Trump has used social media to set the agenda with every one of his thoughts, policies and lies. Then suddenly, just like that, The Trump Show went off the air.

Last week, Twitter made the unprecedented decision to permanently suspend Trump’s personal account, saying he had broken the site’s rules by inciting violence. Facebook did the same, indefinitely, and Instagram (which Facebook owns) banned Trump for at least the duration of his term. Amazon made similar moves by kicking Parler, an alternative social media platform favored by right-wing groups, off its servers, causing the site to go dark. Reddit, Snapchat, Twitch, and many other platforms made similar moves to limit or ban Trump’s content.

These actions — with just days to go in the president’s term and only after a pro-Trump mob rioted inside the U.S. Capitol — will undoubtedly make an impact, but they’re not a panacea. Research shows that this kind of deplatforming can work, but millions of Americans have already been exposed to Trump’s lies and extremist rhetoric, and they won’t simply stop believing him because he can no longer tweet his thoughts.

Trump is far from the first controversial figure to be booted off social media, which means we have some data showing how deplatforming can work. A 2015 study looked at Reddit’s decision to remove its most toxic subreddits and analyzed the behavior of those subreddits users after the ban. Using machine learning¹ the study found that many of the users stopped using the site entirely, and those that stayed posted far less hate speech on the rest of the site — by at least 80 percent.

Amy Bruckman, a professor and associate chair in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, is currently working on a study that looks at the deplatforming of major controversial figures like far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Though the study has not yet been peer-reviewed and published, Bruckman said it shows similar findings to the Reddit study.

“We found that after they’re kicked off Twitter people talk about them less on Twitter, and people talk about their ideas less on Twitter,” Bruckman said. “Looking at the supporters, we found that the toxicity of their speech went down.”

Of course, those who really want certain content can always just go somewhere else to get it. But deplatforming can still drain the bad actors’ audience and change the behavior of the subscribers left behind. A study posted on the prepublication site arXiv last fall analyzed what happened after Reddit banned r/TheDonald and r/Incels, both of which spurred users to create off-platform communities. The researchers found that, compared to the subreddits, “there was a substantial decrease in the number of newcomers, active users, and posts” on the new sites, but they also noted that they found “an increase in the relative activity for both communities: per user, substantially more daily posts occurred on the fringe websites.”

A similar pattern was seen after Facebook banned high-profile members of anti-vaccination groups such as Larry Cook, whose page had some 195,000 followers on Facebook. He moved to Parler where, before it was shut down, he had 14,000 followers.

Experts I spoke to also noted that removing bad actors from a platform can help prevent users who aren’t yet down the rabbit hole from being radicalized.

“We need to protect those normies, the normal users who don’t want to be radicalized into neo-nazism or whatever it may be. We need to protect them from being harassed and recruited,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies online extremism.

Of course, removing Trump himself from a platform is quite different from removing, say, a subreddit, or even an Alex Jones. Trump is the president, after all. He has spent the past four-plus years seeding many of the ideas that incited people to reject the peaceful transfer of power and storm the Capitol last week. Those ideas don’t just vanish along with Trump’s profile pages.

This is part of the reason why critics wanted tech companies to do something about Trump’s rhetoric before it got too late. When deplatforming is the last-ditch effort, much of the damage has already been done, according to Julia DeCook, a professor at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Communication.

“Most platform moderation policies, especially with deplatforming, are reactive instead of preventative,” DeCook said. “We’re not actually trying to prevent the spread of these kinds of ideologies on these platforms, we’re more just playing whack-a-mole and hoping that the things we do stick.”

So deplatforming doesn’t completely solve the problem of baseless or harmful language online. Banning Trump alone, especially after refusing to act for so many years, isn’t nearly enough to undo the damage and convince millions of Americans of the truth, that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. Just consider the potentially violent events already planned around D.C., and across the country, ahead of Biden’s inauguration.

Changing the channel on The Trump Show only does so much when its audience has reruns playing in their heads.

Do Americans Support Removing Trump From Office?

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 15:20:25 GMT

Do Americans Support Removing Trump From Office?

By Aaron Bycoffe, Mary Radcliffe and Laura Bronner

An updating average of support for and opposition to removing Trump from office before the end of his term, accounting for each poll’s quality, recency and sample size

JAN. 6JAN. 8JAN. 10JAN. 12JAN. 14JAN. 16JAN. 18JAN. 20050100%Attack on theU.S. CapitolAttack on theU.S. CapitolBiden’sinaugurationBiden’sinaugurationJAN. 13, 2021JAN. 13, 202152.7% Support52.7% Support41.7% Don’t support41.7% Don’t support

We collected all the polls we could find that asked some version of a yes-or-no question about whether respondents supported removing Trump from office, though some polls also offered a “don’t know” or “no opinion” option. If the same poll asked more than one removal question (using different wording), we included both questions, but the results of those questions were averaged together, then input into the model, so the poll was not double counted.

Latest newsJAN. 13, 2021, AT 9:58 AM

Late Tuesday night, the House passed a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to remove President Trump from office via the 25th Amendment. This was a historic vote, FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon Jr. wrote, because while the House has impeached three presidents (including Trump once before), it has never before suggested that a president’s Cabinet should remove him from office. But the vote was still largely symbolic in that Pence said in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi prior to the vote that he would not invoke the 25th Amendment. The real question today, then, is what happens in the House’s vote to impeach, which Pelosi said would be held if Trump administration officials didn’t act within 24 hours of Tuesday’s resolution. A handful of House Republicans have come out in favor of impeachment, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is also reported to believe that Trump has committed impeachable offenses, signaling that math for a Senate conviction might be different this time around, as some members of the GOP may sign on, though it’s still too soon to tell if Republicans will turn against the president en masse.

Support by party

An updating average of each partisan group’s support for removing Trump from office before the end of his term, accounting for each poll’s quality, recency and sample size

JAN. 6JAN. 8JAN. 10JAN. 12JAN. 14JAN. 16JAN. 18JAN. 20050100%Attack on theU.S. CapitolAttack on theU.S. CapitolBiden’sinaugurationBiden’sinaugurationJAN. 13, 2021JAN. 13, 202184.3% Democrats84.3% Democrats15.5% Republicans15.5% Republicans48.6% Independents48.6% Independents

The polls we included

We collected all the polls we could find that asked some version of a yes-or-no question about whether respondents supported measures that would result in Trump leaving office before the end of his term, including his resignation, use of the 25th Amendment, or impeachment and removal

		POLLSTER	SAMPLE	YES	NO	MARGIN
JAN. 11-12As you may know, this week the House of Representatives may consider impeaching Donald Trump, alleging: inciting violence against the government of the United States. Would you favor or oppose Donald Trump being impeached on these charges?
	B	YouGov	1,521adults	55%	45%	Yes +10
			384Republicans	15%	85%	No +70
			487Democrats	88%	12%	Yes +76
			485independents	54%	46%	Yes +8
JAN. 8-11Do you support or oppose the US House of Representatives impeaching President Trump for a second time? If impeached, President Trump would have a trial in the US Senate where Senators would listen to evidence and decided whether or not to remove President Trump from office.
	B	YouGov	18,985adults	59%	32%	Yes +27
JAN. 8-11Do you believe President Trump should resign from office before his term expires on January 20th?
	B/C	Morning Consult	1,996registered voters	55%	38%	Yes +17
			595Republicans	19%	76%	No +57
			813Democrats	86%	10%	Yes +76
			588independents	50%	38%	Yes +12
JAN. 8-11As you may know, the Constitution gives the House of Representatives the sole power to impeach the president. Once a president is impeached by the House of Representatives, the Senate has the sole power to legally try the president and, if convicted, remove the president from office. Would you approve or disapprove of the House of Representatives impeaching President Trump?
	B/C	Morning Consult	1,996registered voters	52%	41%	Yes +11
			595Republicans	12%	82%	No +70
			813Democrats	86%	10%	Yes +75
			588independents	45%	40%	Yes +4
JAN. 8-11Do you support or oppose Trump being removed from office before his term ends on January 20th?
		Global Strategy Group/GBAO/Navigator Research	1,000registered voters	53%	40%	Yes +13

What The House Vote On The 25th Amendment Says About Impeachment

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 04:57:12 GMT

Virtually all congressional Democrats and even some Republicans have condemned President Trump’s incitement of the insurrection at the Capitol. Virtually all congressional Democrats and even some Republicans appear to want Trump out of office as soon as possible. The U.S. House of Representative seems likely, this week, to impeach Trump for a second time, with at least five Republicans likely to vote in favor of it. Allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, as first reported by the New York Times and then confirmed by ABC News, say McConnell believes that Trump committed impeachable offenses and supports Democrats moving forward on impeachment.

Where does all that leave us? It’s complicated. It still seems fairly likely that Trump will remain in office until Jan. 20, with the House impeaching Trump on a mostly party-line vote but the Senate not taking up impeachment before Jan. 20, when President-elect Joe Biden takes office. Still, we’ll have to wait to see how it all unfolds to know for sure. Either way, we do know that one big step in this process occurred on Tuesday night: The House adopted a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence and the remaining members of Trump’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from the presidency.

This vote was historic — the House has voted to impeach three presidents (including Trump), but never before formally suggested that the president be removed by his Cabinet. At the same time, the vote has no real impact. Pence said in a letter to Pelosi released before the vote that he and the Cabinet will not try to force Trump from office via the 25th Amendment. So Tuesday’s vote was really only a prelude to a separate vote on Trump’s impeachment, which could come as soon as Wednesday. House Democrats have promised they will move to impeach Trump, for the second time, if the Cabinet does not remove him.

Tuesday night’s vote on the 25th Amendment resolution, while symbolic, does help us understand some dynamics within the two parties — particularly if you consider it alongside last week’s votes on whether to certify the results of the November election. Here are four things we’ve learned …

Most House Republicans are still strongly aligning with Trump.

Only 83 of the 204 House Republicans who participated in the vote opposed the effort last week to effectively disqualify the presidential votes in Arizona. Only 64 of the 202 House Republicans who participated in the vote opposed the effort to disqualify the electoral results in Pennsylvania. In other words, a clear majority of House Republicans voted to bar the presidential results from Arizona and Pennsylvania, joining with Trump’s effort to disqualify the votes of swing states where he narrowly lost. And these were votes held after Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol.

On Tuesday night, the number of House Republicans who were willing to call for Trump to be pushed out of office was even lower — just one, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, supported the resolution calling for Trump’s removal. There may be some Republicans who vote for impeachment but not the 25th Amendment resolution (more on that below). But it seems likely that the overwhelming majority of Republicans will oppose any effort to remove Trump from office, no matter the method.

The upcoming impeachment vote will be the fourth vote in the span of a week that is effectively a proxy for how loyal a House Republican is to Trump and strongly pro-Trump voters. And it appears that most House Republicans will take Trump’s side all four times despite an attack on the Capitol that was inspired in part by Trump’s words, resulted in the deaths of five people, and easily could have resulted in members of Congress and even Pence being killed.

It’s worth noting that the strong support for Trump among Republicans in the House may not be shared in the Senate. Only eight of the 51 Republicans in the Senate supported the efforts to contest the results in either Arizona, Pennsylvania or both states. Unlike McConnell, allies of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, have not suggested that McCarthy is open to Trump’s impeachment. That said, it’s not clear that a lot of Senate Republicans support invoking the 25th Amendment or trying to impeach and remove Trump either. (More on that in a minute).

There was a big difference between affirming Biden’s victory and calling for Trump to be removed.

The 63 House Republican members who affirmed the electoral results in both Arizona and Pennsylvania were from across the ideological and geographic spectrum — some were fairly moderate members from more liberal-leaning areas, such as Rep. John Katko of New York, but some were also conservatives from more right-wing areas, most notably the No. 3 Republican in the party’s leadership, Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

But voting to remove Trump appears to be a bridge too far, even for these Republicans. Reps. Fred Upton of Michigan, Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, Katko and Cheney have indicated that they will support impeachment, even though they didn’t also back the 25th Amendment process like Kinzinger did. But overall, there is little indication that most of these 63 members will vote for impeachment.

Impeachment in the House doesn’t really need Republican votes, since Democrats are in the majority and they are likely to be universally behind impeachment. But this House sentiment may be an indication of things in the Senate too …

It’s not exactly clear what Senate Republicans will do.

McConnell, while floating the idea that he is frustrated with Trump, has also suggested that the Senate can’t really start an impeachment trial until Jan 19, according to a memo he sent to Republican senators that was obtained by the Washington Post. If the Senate really wanted to push out Trump immediately, I think they would figure out a way to do it. What’s more likely is that McConnell wants to publicly get out the message that he personally is mad at Trump but not necessarily require Republican senators to go on the record with a vote. Remember that McConnell just won a six-year term in 2020 and is 78 years old. He probably isn’t that worried about being cast as insuffienciently pro-Trump and losing a Republican primary in 2026 if he decided to run for another term at age 84. But younger Republican senators, those with presidential ambitions and/or those coming up for reelection next year may want to avoid a vote either defending Trump or removing him from office.

So it’s not clear McConnell would move towards a vote before Jan 20. There is not yet a clamoring of GOP senators urging the Senate to meet immediately after the House impeaches Trump, nor is it clear that there are anywhere close to the 18 GOP senators that would be needed to remove him from office. So unless something dramatically changes, in terms of the posture of GOP senators, Trump is likely to remain in office on Jan. 20

By the end of this month, with a 50-50 Senate and Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote, Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer will be the majority leader. There is little precedent for this, but some legal experts say that the Senate could, in a two-thirds vote, convict Trump of the impeachment charges, even if he is out of office. Then, with a simple majority, the Senate could vote to disqualify Trump from holding any office again. But I should emphasize: We have no idea if any of that will happen. With Trump out of office, would Democrats, particularly Biden, be eager to focus on the Democrats’ policy agenda, as opposed to trying to punish Trump? Would Republicans in the Senate go along with trying to convict Trump and disqualify him from running for office again? Would a disqualification of Trump from holding other offices stand up against legal challenges?

Democrats are rebuking Trump like no other president has been rebuked.

All of the 222 congressional Democrats who participated in the vote on Tuesday supported invoking the 25th Amendment. Impeachment is also likely to be a unanimous vote among Democrats. This is not surprising — in 2019, all but three of the 232 House Democrats backed Trump’s impeachment over his scheme to force the Ukranian government to investigate the Bidens. There has been some turnover in terms of members, but the overwhelming majority of House Democrats have already tried to force Trump out of office and probably feel comfortable casting such votes again, particularly in light of last week’s terrible incident at the Capitol.

Combining today’s 25th Amendment resolution with the 2019 impeachment, Democrats have ensured that Trump will have been rebuked by the House of Representatives in a way that no previous president has: Both impeached and urged to be removed from office by the president’s Cabinet. No president has been impeached in two separate instances (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached on multiple articles, but in the same series of House votes). House Democrats are almost certain to make Trump the first this week.

How Much Danger Is American Democracy In?

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 20:17:21 GMT

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): On Wednesday, a mob of pro-Trump rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to certify the 2020 presidential election results. But as shocking as Wednesday’s events were, they were, in many ways, the culmination of the past four years of Trump’s presidency.

President Trump has long spewed lies to his supporters about the election, refusing until very recently to concede, and routinely has shown his disdain for both the integrity of America’s elections and its tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. And right before the chaos broke out on Wednesday, Trump had just finished urging his supporters to protest Congress’s vote to certify the election results, telling them “[Y]ou’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” Within an hour, the Capitol was under attack.

This violent episode raises many questions about the future of democracy in America — not only its continued health, but the extent to which the U.S. has already become less democratic. So let’s first unpack this question by diving into this data point: Polls show while the majority of Americans condemn what happened on Wednesday, a plurality of Republican voters support it. What does that say about the current state of democracy in the U.S.?

jennifer.mccoy (Jennifer McCoy, professor of political science at Georgia State University): It shows that Americans are terribly divided over the perception of democracy itself — including whether it is even under threat and who is responsible for the threat. This makes it extremely difficult to propose solutions. But it’s important to keep in mind that we’re talking about 15 percent of the population, maybe 20 percent, who said they condoned the violence.

lee.drutman (Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America and FiveThirtyEight contributor): Democracy requires parties that are committed to free and fair elections and will accept the outcome — even if they lose. So if the dominant position in the Republican Party is that the only free and fair elections are those where Republicans win, and anything else is “stolen” and fraudulent, then we’re on the precipice of not having a democracy.

But as Jennifer said, the one silver lining here is that the overwhelming majority of Americans reject the anti-democratic rhetoric of Trump and his allies. This is important.

cyrus.samii (Cyrus Samii, professor of politics at New York University): I find it helpful to place this moment in a broader historical context, as I think there are two trends at play here. First, decades of mobilization and a fight for a more democractic, inclusive society have brought about generational changes in America’s politics, including more women, people of color and other long-excluded groups now having a seat at the table. That has made our politics more inclusive and more democratic, but there is a second trend here — a politics of resentment that cannot tolerate this growing diversity. This mindset is particularly rampant within the Republican Party, and part of what CNN’s Van Jones has called a “whitelash,” or conservative white Christian Americans mobilizing against the type of progress embodied by President Barack Obama’s time in office. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has also written on the pendulum swinging between moments of progress on inclusion and white resistance.

Last Wednesday embodied this dynamic in the span of a few hours: We had the historic election of two Democratic senators in Georgia, followed then by a mob, including a number of white supremacists sacking the Capitol in the name of Trump, and most Republicans to date being unwilling to do much about it.

jennifer.mccoy: Yes, and I think the question now is whether this unwillingness to condemn the mob, or call out their colleagues who are perpetuating the myth of a “stolen election,” is the dominant position in the Republican Party or only a faction that can be contained.

sarah: Do we have a sense of what is driving these attitudes?

jennifer.mccoy: The politics of resentment, written about by a number of scholars, including Kathy Cramer and Arlie Hochschild, who wrote definitive books on the topic, derives from perceptions of unfairness or injustice that accompany the diversification of one’s workplace or community, changing the power structures that Cyrus spoke about. The urban-rural divide in America’s politics exemplifies this. Rural Americans, mostly Republicans, perceive urban dwellers, more Democratic and more racially diverse, as receiving more than their “fair share” of tax revenues and opportunities. With wage stagnation and the growing service-based economy, white males without a college degree, in particular, feel a loss of social status that can lead to rage and support for more authoritarian politics. This is why “identity politics” are arguably more of an issue for the GOP than the Democratic Party today. What’s particularly troubling here, though, is that the political rhetoric from politicians and media personalities are really whipping up latent attitudes of resentment to create the politics of outrage we saw on display last Wednesday. Republicans have gone further than Democrats in using vilifying language and painting horrific scenarios if the “radical, liberal, socialist Democrats” and their “anarchic mobs” take over.

lee.drutman: To follow up on Jennifer’s point about politicians driving some of this, take what Vice President Mike Pence said at the Republican National Convention this summer. He said that the election was about “whether America remains America.” Those are incredibly high stakes, so when you add that kind of rhetoric to our winner-take-all election system, you have a recipe for a very angry minority convinced that the system is rigged against them. As we saw last Wednesday, one response is to take matters into their own hands through violence.

We also know that opposition to democracy is much stronger among Republicans who have beliefs that political scientist Larry Bartels has called “ethnic antagonism,” a measure of “unfavorable feelings towards Muslims, immigrants and other out-groups … [and] concerns about these groups’ political and social claims” in his research.

The chart below is extremely striking as it shows that among Republicans, the higher the level of ethnic antagonism, the more likely they are to say they don’t trust election results, use force as an alternative and support authoritarian stances. (Bartels “normalizes” the distribution so that half of Republicans are above zero on the ethnic antagonism scale, and then presents the data two ways — using statistical analysis to estimate values (left) and reporting the actual data in the limited survey sample (right).) Overall, though, the takeaway is clear: Bartels finds troublingly high support for these sentiments among Republicans.

sarah: Is what happened Wednesday, then, a somewhat expected consequence of what happens when a sizable portion of the electorate loses faith in our elections and institutions?

jennifer.mccoy: To be clear, the research we have doesn’t necessarily show that losing faith in elections and institutions leads to violence. It can, for instance, have repercussions like withdrawal and political apathy. We saw this in Venezuela when the opposition cried fraud, without evidence, after losing a referendum to remove President Hugo Chávez in 2004. They had trouble turning out supporters in governor elections right after, and then called for a boycott in the 2005 legislative elections, handing total control to Chávez’s party and enabling them to name loyalists to all of Venezuela’s political institutions. It took another decade before Venezuelans could mobilize to win back the legislature, but by that time, Chávez’s successor had turned even more authoritarian and remains in power today.

However, if political rhetoric is drumming up violence, using demonizing and dehumanizing language and glorifying battle language, then yes, supporters are likely to engage in violence, thinking their leaders are urging that, as we saw last Wednesday.

lee.drutman: Jennifer’s point about political rhetoric is extremely important. The level of nativism, or anti-immigration sentiment, has been roughly consistent in the population for a while now. But there are signs that it has become a much stronger partisan issue in the last decade or so as Trump and other Republicans have played with rhetorical fire. It’s true that far-right leaders have been stoking this issue in multiple western democracies, and as the chart below shows, it’s evident among Republicans in the U.S.

jennifer.mccoy: And the future of the Republican Party is absolutely key to what happens to U.S. democracy. Early signs after Jan. 6 are not encouraging — the party reelected Trump’s hand-picked candidates for the RNC, chair Ronna McDaniel and co-chair Tommy Hicks, and many party leaders have also avoided calling for any accountability for Trump, instead saying that this will further divide the country when we need to unify.

sarah: Some historians have argued if there isn’t accountability, this will all escalate. Is that accurate? How are you all thinking about the importance of consequences for what happened Wednesday for democracy moving forward?

Historian of coups and right-wing authoritarians here. If there are not severe consequences for every lawmaker & Trump govt official who backed this, every member of the Capitol Police who collaborated with them, this "strategy of disruption" will escalate in 2021

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) January 7, 2021

cyrus.samii: If there is no accountability, then the lesson for Republicans will be that they can continue to use illiberal means to maintain a grip on power. And on the left, this might play into the hands of those who would say there is no point in sticking with liberal institutional processes when the other side doesn’t. A clear recipe, in other words, for escalation.

jennifer.mccoy: And if there isn’t any accountability for what happened Wednesday, it gives organized citizens, as well as the next generation of political leaders, license to engage in the same — or worse. Political learning is a real thing, and it can be positive or negative.

If Congress or others fail to act, the road remains open to Trump (and anyone else) to continue to act with impunity, run for office again or support future violent acts. Congress has the ability to impeach Trump and take the extra step of disqualifying him from running again, and the power to censure and even expel the members of Congress who spread the same disinformation about the election and voted against the certification of results in two states. This is important because failing to condemn the exclusionary and hate-filled rhetoric Trump used in his presidency means that catering to the fears, anxieties and resentments of a portion of the electorate might remain a viable political path moving forward.

sarah: Let’s take a step back. In November, The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz wrote a feature on how civil resistance can stop authoritarian-style leaders from cementing their power, comparing what’s happened in the U.S. under Trump to other parts of the world. “In the past 15 years, there has been a marked global increase in what international relations scholars call ‘democratic backsliding,’” wrote Marantz, “with more authoritarians and authoritarian-style leaders consolidating power.” To what extent is there democratic backsliding in the U.S.?

lee.drutman: If democracy depends on a set of shared rules for free and fair elections, we are definitely in a period of backsliding.

cyrus.samii: I don’t know, the term “democratic backsliding” is problematic in my opinion insofar as it fails to clarify how the conflict in the U.S. is between those using democratic means to achieve progressive change (and succeeding at some moments) versus those who want to push back against that change by undermining democracy. The fact is, a lot of progress is occurring through the ballot box, the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia being a prime example, and this is precisely why Republicans are intent on throwing up obstacles to its broad-based use. Republicans have been trying to disenfranchise minority voters, for example, and these efforts are subject to heated legal fights.

sarah: So as Cyrus said, democratic backsliding may be too toothless of a term, but how would we describe the trajectory of democracy in the U.S.? Are we less democratic than one year ago? Four years ago?

jennifer.mccoy: According to international rankings, U.S. democracy is eroding faster than what we see in other major western democracies — it is more on par with Brazil, Bangladesh, Turkey and India, according to the global think tank V-Dem Institute’s 2020 democracy report. The Economist Intelligence Unit also downgraded the U.S. to a flawed democracy in 2016. Expert surveys of political scientists, such as Bright Line Watch and Authoritarian Warning Survey, also measure higher threats.

Each of these groups measure democracy using different measures — electoral integrity, rule of law, media and academic freedom, civil liberties, to name a few. But one measure I want to zoom in on is “toxic polarization” (which I call “pernicious polarization” in my research with Murat Somer), as we’ve found it’s especially delegitimizing and on the rise. Essentially, it’s when society is divided into two mutually distrustful camps and there is increased demonization and delegitimization of opponents. Our research has found that it can often result in calls to violence, too.

It’s also something V-Dem uses in its assessments. It found in a 2020 paper that the Republican Party was on par with autocratic parties in Turkey, India and Hungary on their new illiberalism index, especially in their use of demonizing language to describe political opponents, disrespect for fundamental minority rights and encouragement of political violence.

lee.drutman: (If you’re interested in how these various surveys evaluate the quality of a country’s democracy, here’s a great paper that outlines the different ways they measure democracy — summary table below.)

sarah: It’s true that in survey after survey, Republicans, as you all have said, have expressed less support for democracy than Democrats, but I was hoping we could unpack a little more the debilitating effect that this has had on American democracy writ large.

For instance, in the wake of the protests in Portland, Oregon, last summer, FiveThirtyEight’s Maggie Koerth and contributor Shom Mazumder found evidence of members of both parties holding anti-democratic views.

As the chart illustrates, this was especially true among Republicans, so I’m not trying to “both sides” this, but I do want to unpack the effect that severe polarization might have on democratic erosion. That is, how do you factor in polarization when looking at how the U.S. has become less democratic? Is it the number one factor driving what we’re seeing? Or is that too simplistic?

cyrus.samii: Breakdown by party is exactly the right way to look at it. Democrats are involved in a bottom-up struggle to broaden political inclusion while Republicans have been fighting to limit that, including in this past year’s elections. And so it is not so much a question of democratic backsliding at the country level, but rather in terms of whether parties see themselves as being competitive democratically or whether they need to use anti-democratic strategies to maintain their grip.

lee.drutman: Jennifer’s work on pernicious polarization is incredibly important here, and has really influenced my thinking. When politics becomes deeply divided in a binary way along cultural and identity lines (as it is now in the U.S.), democracy is in a really dangerous place.

jennifer.mccoy: And this type of polarization is more likely to lead to democratic erosion because it is based on an “us vs. them” division, not just disagreement on issues.

lee.drutman: On that chart, Sarah, showing support for strong leader/army rule, I’ve co-authored two recent reports on the topic, one in 2018 and another in 2020. And it’s true, we did find some support for these alternatives to democracy on both sides, which is worrying. But again, the overwhelming majority of Americans are in support of democratic institutions.

But here is where political leadership is so important. That some voters have weak connections to democracy is not a new problem. In fact, research has found that is typical among those who are the least educated and least politically engaged. The new problem is having political leadership that encourages and stokes these anti-democratic sentiments.

jennifer.mccoy: And as partisan antipathy grows, perceptions of out-party threat grow, and that leads people to challenge democratic norms so as to keep their own party in power and keep the others out.

cyrus.samii: The way I interpret the question, Sarah, is: How does polarization affect Republicans’ thinking on whether or not to abandon the strategy of limiting democratic processes to retain their hold on power, rather than seeking new coalitions, broadening their appeal and making themselves more competitive democratically?

In other words, it’s all about the strategy that the Republicans pursue. So when you take that into consideration, increased polarization — by which I mean distancing oneself from and dehumanizing outgroups — could sustain Republicans’ fixation on limiting democracy because they cannot see themselves forming any new alliances with people outside their traditional white Christian base.

lee.drutman: Cyrus — that is the central question, but I think there is a significant division among Republicans. So let me reframe your question slightly: What will it take for Republicans who want to build a more inclusive, pro-democracy party to triumph over those who are committed to ethnonationalism and grievance?

cyrus.samii: Yes, Lee, exactly.

lee.drutman: And as long as we think of this as a zero-sum Democrats vs. Republicans fight, we’re stuck. But if we think of this in terms of the forces of democracy vs. the forces of ethnonationalism (or whatever you want to call it), I do think we can make some progress.

sarah: Are there institutional changes (abolishing the Electoral College, reforming the Senate, etc.) that would bolster American democracy or make it less vulnerable to similar challenges in the future?

lee.drutman: I’ve written a lot about what would happen if the U.S. moved to a more proportional voting system, and I do think that would enable a center-right party to operate independent of a far-right party. It also might allow for a broader governing coalition that could keep the far-right out of government, as has happened in many Western democracies with more proportional voting systems.

And maybe we see this play out a little in the U.S. That is, I could see a pro-democracy faction within the Republican Party joining with Democrats to support electoral reforms (such as the Fair Representation Act, a piece of election reform legislation that would establish multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting).

cyrus.samii: Institutional changes to the Electoral College or the Senate would certainly make a difference, since those institutions are a part of what Republicans currently rely on in the anti-democractic aspects of their strategy. But changing them is probably too hard, politically.

Of course, once, say, Texas goes blue, those institutions will come to have the opposite effect and lock out Republicans — unless they change who they can attract. Also, Sarah, I think the idea that “overall trends point to increased illiberalism” is only true when it comes to the kinds of strategies that Republicans are using to try to maintain a grip on their power, rather than with respect to U.S. democratic politics as a whole.

lee.drutman: Yes, changing the Electoral College or the Senate would require constitutional amendments. Enacting proportional representation, interestingly enough, is entirely within Congress’s power, though.

jennifer.mccoy: I want to go back to an earlier point about HOW we get here. I’ve written with Somer about how democracies could solve this dilemma by “repolarizing” along democratic lines vs. authoritarian lines, and what we found is very similar to Lee’s and Cyrus’s point about inclusive movements vs. exclusionary ethnonationalist movements. That is, shifting the axes of polarization to the principle of protecting democracy instead of a divide between different partisan and social identities could actually help protect democracy, as long as it’s not done with demonizing or hyperbolic language.

And that’s important, because as political scientist Daniel Ziblatt has written, a principled conservative or center-right party is essential for a functioning democracy. Even President-elect Joe Biden has reiterated the need for a Republican Party for the health of our democracy. The problem is our two-party system is currently mired in toxic polarization and so the extreme elements within the parties are amplified. We need institutional reforms to allow for political incentives to change.

lee.drutman: I do think the events of Jan. 6 have been a tremendous wake-up call to many on the urgency of democracy reform.

cyrus.samii: It certainly was a wake-up call, Lee. I also think that the incredibly tumultuous times that current 18- to 35-year-olds have endured — 9/11, the Iraq War, the Great Recession, Trump’s presidency, the events that inspired the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, and of course, COVID-19 — could generate a political consciousness that we haven’t seen since the 1960s or 70s.

lee.drutman: Cyrus — yes, there are lots of similarities to the Great Society Era which was the last era of major democracy reform and included major voting rights reform. There are also lots of similarities to the Progressive Era, which was the previous era of large-scale democracy reform.

So if you believe in political scientist Samuel Huntington’s theory that there is a 60-year cycle of democracy reform movements — that every six decades or so, American democracy falls short of its democratic ideals and reform movements emerge to expand our democracy, we’re right on schedule.

Why Trump’s Second Impeachment Will Be A Political Test For Both Parties

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 01:18:16 GMT

In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew unpacks some of the factors that contributed to a mob of Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol. They also discuss the calculations being made by Democrats and Republicans about how to hold President Trump legally and/or politically accountable for the attack.

Politics Podcast: What Led To The Attack On The Capitol

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 00:13:46 GMT

A number of elements led to the riot at the U.S. Capitol last week: Trump’s incitement leading up to and on Jan. 6th, false claims made by Trump and many Republicans that the election was fraudulent, white nationalism, militia movements on and offline, a lack of preparation from law enforcement, and more. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew unpacks some of the forces behind the violence. They also discuss the calculations Democrats and Republicans are making about how to hold President Trump legally or politically accountable for the attack.

Slightly More Americans Are Ready To Impeach Trump This Time Around

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 21:42:52 GMT

For the second time in his presidency, the House of Representatives looks set to impeach President Trump — this time over his role in inciting a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday. And public support for removing Trump from office may be higher now than it was during the previous impeachment proceedings.

So far, we’ve identified 13 poll questions (fielded in nine discrete polls) that have asked some version of a yes-or-no question about whether Trump should leave office before his term is up. A weighted average of these polls, accounting for their quality, recency and sample size, finds that 52 percent of Americans support Trump’s ouster, while only 42 percent oppose it. By contrast, throughout last fall and winter, support for removing Trump from office over the Ukraine scandal consistently hovered around 47 or 48 percent in our impeachment polling tracker. This isn’t a huge difference, and it’s early yet; we still haven’t gotten a ton of high-quality polls on this question. But it’s not good news for Trump and the final days of his presidency.

As you might expect, Democrats are the most eager to see Trump’s term cut short: 82 percent support it and only 13 percent oppose it. That’s about equivalent to the share of Democrats who supported Trump’s removal amid his impeachment at this time last year. Notably, however, independents and Republicans are both a little more more supportive of Trump’s removal now than they were a year ago. Currently, 47 percent of independents support Trump’s departure,¹ up from about 42 percent last year. And during the 2019-2020 impeachment, only about 8-10 percent of Republicans supported Trump’s removal; now, an average of 15 percent of Republicans support Trump leaving office early (with 80 percent opposed).

It’s important to note that, during the last impeachment, we found that how a poll question was worded, or what stage of the process it asked about, could affect how many people said they supported it. For example, support for beginning an impeachment inquiry was consistently a bit higher than support for actually impeaching or removing Trump. (As a refresher, the House of Representatives impeaches the president — the political equivalent of an indictment — with a simple majority vote, putting him on trial before the Senate. A two-thirds vote in the Senate is required to convict the president, and a conviction would remove him from office.)

However, this time around, the preponderance of polls suggest that the people who want Trump out of office don’t much care about how that’s accomplished. So far, an average of 49 percent of Americans support Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet removing Trump from office by invoking the 25th Amendment — which they can do by informing Congress that the president can’t perform his duties — though so far we only have two polls asking that question.² A similar 51 percent of Americans, in an average based on five polls,³ answered in the affirmative to more generic poll questions about Trump’s removal that didn’t specify the means of his departure. And an average of 53 percent were supportive of four poll questions that mentioned impeachment.⁴ Finally, the one pollster so far (Quinnipiac) that has asked whether Trump should resign found that 53 percent of Americans support that idea too.

A couple polls, though, suggest that Americans might be most comfortable using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office rather than ushering him out some other way. (The 25th Amendment may also be the safest choice politically — which might explain why the House plans to vote on a resolution urging Pence to invoke the 25th before voting on articles of impeachment.) An Ipsos/Reuters poll asked respondents which of four scenarios they preferred: 30 percent said Trump “should be immediately removed from office using the 25th Amendment”; 14 percent said he “should be impeached and removed from office by Congress”; and 13 percent said he “should resign from the presidency.” (The remaining 43 percent said he should serve out the rest of his term.) And a Morning Consult/Politico poll likewise found that registered voters were a bit more open to removal via the 25th Amendment than to impeachment. Respondents supported invoking the 25th Amendment 49 percent to 37 percent, but they were split, 44 percent to 43 percent, over whether Congress should “begin impeachment proceedings to remove President Trump from office.”

At this point, it’s unclear whether Trump will be removed from office, but it does seem as if public opinion, at this early stage, leans toward his removal. We’ll be keeping an eye on the polls to see how that changes — if at all — and whether public preferences coalesce around any one method of removal.

Aaron Bycoffe and Mary Radcliffe contributed research.

Biden’s Record-Breaking Cabinet Nominees, In One Chart

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 18:44:04 GMT

Joe Biden’s Cabinet is set to make history. If all of his nominees are confirmed, 12 of the 24 offices he has designated as Cabinet-level¹ will be held by women. And as the chart below shows, that would break a record. Up until now, the most women to serve in these positions at once was eight, first during Bill Clinton’s administration and then again during Barack Obama’s administration.² What’s more, under Biden, women will occupy three high-profile Cabinet-level posts for the first time: vice president, secretary of the treasury and director of national intelligence.

An equal number of men and women in the Cabinet is a rare accomplishment indeed. It would be the first gender-balanced Cabinet in U.S. history. And it’s rare globally, too. According to data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union and UN Women, as of Jan. 1, 2020, only 14 countries had cabinets or cabinet equivalents where at least half of the appointments were held by women. (The U.S. would also be the largest of these countries by far.)

Biden’s Cabinet is also poised to reach another remarkable milestone: A majority of its members aren’t white, and many will break barriers by serving in their future role.³ Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, for instance, will be the first Black person and first South Asian American to serve as vice president. And Lloyd Austin would be the first Black secretary of defense in American history, while Xavier Becerra and Alejandro Mayorkas would be the first Latinos to lead, respectively, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security. Meanwhile, Deb Haaland would be the first Indigenous person to lead the Department of the Interior, which includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs and has jurisdiction over all public lands, which Native Americans have been fighting the federal government over for centuries. And Council of Economic Advisers Chair-designate Cecilia Rouse, Office of Management and Budget Director-designate Neera Tanden and U.S. Trade Representative-designate Katherine Tai would also be the first women of color in their respective roles. In total, Biden’s Cabinet picks include six Black people, four Latinos, three Asian people and one Native American.

[What We’ve Learned About The Biden Administration From His Staffing Choices So Far]

This all represents progress, to be sure, but some barriers remain unbroken. For instance, the “inner Cabinet” — the vice president, attorney general and secretaries of state, defense and treasury, who typically have the closest ties to the president — will still be three-fifths white and three-fifths male. And the most diverse part of Biden’s Cabinet will be the Cabinet-level positions that are not part of the presidential line of succession (the bottom grouping of offices on the chart). So just because women and people of color are equal in number to men and white people does not mean they are equal in terms of influence. And even though Biden has appointed a historic number of women, they still struggle to gain a foothold in stereotypically male Cabinet posts; we have still never had a female secretary of defense, secretary of veterans affairs or chief of staff.

Georgia Was A Disaster For Republicans, And It’s Not Clear Where They Can Go Next

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 11:00:49 GMT

The terrifying mob attack on the Capitol on Wednesday, among its many effects, quickly shifted focus from the other big news of the week: the runoffs for U.S. Senate in Georgia. Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff defeated Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively, giving Democrats control of Congress.

Like a lot of recent political events, the Georgia runoffs are more significant the further you zoom out the lens. In one sense, the results were not that unpredictable. The final polling averages showed both Democrats ever-so-slightly ahead, and it was clear that the races were shaping up in such a way as to make the Democrats extremely competitive.

But the Georgia runoffs were full of practical and symbolic significance. They exposed the limitations of the Republican coalition, with or without President Trump, leaving the party further in the electoral wilderness — it’s not clear where the Republican Party goes from here, especially in the wake of the violent insurrection by Trump supporters at the Capitol.

First, the significance of Georgia specifically. I’ll spare you some of the boilerplate about the more obvious implications, but having a Senate majority is a big deal. It means that Democrats should be able to confirm Supreme Court justices and President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet. They’ll likely be able to pass additional COVID-19 stimulus legislation at the very least, along with other budgetary policies through reconciliation. Other policy changes would require eliminating the filibuster — unlikely — or getting cooperation from enough Republicans. But at least Democrats will have the chance to bring to the floor election-reform bills like H.R. 1 and policies like Puerto Rico statehood, giving them a fighting chance instead of having Majority Leader Mitch McConnell squash them from the start.

And symbolically? Well, it’s Georgia. With the possible exception of Texas, no other state has been as much of a symbol of an emerging Democratic coalition of college-educated white voters and high turnout among Black voters and other minority groups. Both Warnock and Ossoff are breakthrough candidates, not the moderate, white Blue Dogs that Democrats have traditionally nominated in Georgia. Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, will become the first Black senator from Georgia and the first Black Democrat ever to serve in the U.S. Senate from the South. Ossoff will become the youngest senator elected since Biden, in 1973, and the first Jewish senator elected to the U.S. Senate from the South since the 1880s.

Then there’s the fact that the runoffs came during a lame-duck period in which — in a predicate to Wednesday’s violence — Trump and other Republicans tried to overturn and subvert the results of the election and undermine faith in the democratic process. If Republicans get the message that anti-democratic actions have negative electoral consequences, they may be less inclined to push democracy to the brink in the future.

Republicans may not take away that lesson, though. One school of thought is that because Warnock’s and Ossoff’s wins were narrow — once all votes are counted, Warnock should win by around 2 percentage points and Ossoff by about 1 point — we shouldn’t make too much of them.

I don’t find this convincing. The way political actors react to elections is usually based on who wins and loses, not on their margins of victory. For example, nobody thought that Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were brilliant politicians because they only narrowly lost in key Electoral College states.

But it’s also not clear that these races really had any business being close to begin with. Consider the following:

Georgia is obviously a purple state now, but it’s still somewhat to the right of the country overall (Biden won in Georgia by 0.2 points compared with 4.5 points in the national popular vote). And the state has historically been redder in runoffs than in regular elections.
Perdue was an elected incumbent (and Loeffler was an appointed incumbent, though appointed incumbents have much worse track records) whereas Ossoff and Warnock had never won an election before. Although the bonus associated with incumbency is much less than it used to be, it’s still hard to beat incumbents, especially with inexperienced opponents.
Although the Georgia runoffs occurred under unusual circumstances, it was reasonable to think the electoral environment might resemble that of a midterm election. Typically, what happens in midterms is that voters seek out balance and the president’s party loses ground in Congress. (The “midterm penalty” we encode into our congressional model works out to around 5 points.) In this case, one might expect that to work against Biden, with voters keeping the GOP in charge of the Senate as a check against Democratic power. Instead, there was roughly a 3-point shift toward Democrats relative to the November vote.¹

Indeed, after Georgia, Republicans’ track record in the three general elections (2016, 2018, 2020) plus the various runoffs and special elections that took place under Trump now starts to look mediocre:

Republicans went 1-1 in the Electoral College.
They lost the popular vote for president twice, extending their streak to seven popular-vote losses in the past eight elections.
Republicans narrowly lost control of the U.S. Senate, which it held 54-46 prior to the 2016 election.
The GOP also narrowly lost control of the U.S. House, which it dominated by 247-188 heading into 2016. This had a complicated trajectory, however: Republicans lost a few House seats in 2016 and a ton of seats in 2018 before regaining some ground in 2020.
Republicans have gone about 50-50 in gubernatorial races in major swing states, winning in Florida, Georgia and Arizona, for example, while losing in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
On the positive side of the ledger, the GOP has done well in keeping control of state legislatures, although many of those are dependent on gerrymandering.

So, it hasn’t been a terrible time to be a Republican running for office, but it hasn’t been a good one, either. Typically, a party would be looking to move beyond a one-term president who had cost his party control of both houses of Congress. Actually, that’s being kind: Typically, a party wants nothing to do with a losing presidential candidate.

When it comes to Trump, though, that calculation isn’t necessarily so simple because of his tendency to punish his intraparty adversaries: Republicans who tried to cross him, such as former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, were sometimes forced to retire rather than face the president’s wrath in a primary.

Yet the GOP has done especially poorly in Trump-era elections without Trump on the ballot, too. Republicans lost the popular vote for the U.S. House by 8.6 points in 2018 without the president on the ticket. And while some Republicans are blaming Trump for their losses in Georgia, the fact is that Perdue won the plurality of votes in November with Trump on the ballot but lost to Ossoff without him. Tuesday’s loss came primarily because of lower turnout, especially in red, rural counties where Trump can bring voters to the polls.

To step back a bit, the success of an electoral strategy basically comes down to four dimensions:

How good is it at turning out the party base?
How much does it turn out the other party’s base?
How well does it do with swing voters?
How efficiently is the party’s coalition configured electorally?

In Trump-era elections, Republicans have tended to do well along two of these dimensions and poorly along the other two. Namely, Trump gets very high turnout from his base. What’s just as important, rural white voters who are the core of that base have far more power in the Electoral College and U.S. Senate than their raw numbers would imply, making their coalition electorally efficient. Hence, their strategy has performed well along dimensions No. 1 and No. 4.

Conversely, Trump is extremely motivating in turning out many parts of the Democratic base (dimension No. 2). And he’s a big turn-off to swing voters, or at least he’s proven to be after four years in office (dimension No. 3). After narrowly beating Clinton among independent voters in 2016, Trump lost them to Biden by 13 points in November. Swing voters also haven’t been very happy with the GOP with or without Trump on the ballot: They backed Democratic candidates for the U.S. House by 12 points in 2018. Republicans have had especially big problems with suburban swing voters, including in places that were once GOP strongholds.

We’ll have to wait and see, but the violence at the Capitol last week may only exacerbate the GOP’s problems on dimensions No. 2 and No. 3. In the few polls conducted since, solid majorities of Americans overall, including almost all Democrats and a majority of independents, said the storming of the Capitol represented a threat to democracy. Similar shares of Democrats and independents said Trump and congressional Republicans bore at least some blame.

Republicans are in a fairly precarious position. At best, they are often fighting to a draw, and one that would often be a losing strategy without the structural advantages built into the system for rural voters. And if Republicans don’t get spectacular turnout from their base, everything else potentially starts to crumble. Even a modest decline in turnout from people who are pro-#MAGA but not necessarily part of the traditional Republican base can leave the GOP in a losing position.

Nor do Republicans have any sort of obvious role model for how to achieve consistent electoral success. The previous Republican president, George W. Bush, saw his second term in office end with landslides against Republicans in 2006 and 2008. A series of recent presidential nominees associated with the party establishment (Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bob Dole) all lost their elections, meanwhile. You really have to go back to Ronald Reagan for an example of an unambiguously broad and successful Republican electoral coalition, and that was a generation ago. Republicans who cast their first votes for Reagan at age 18 in 1984 will be 58 years old in 2024.

This doesn’t mean Republicans are helpless, by any means. Under McConnell and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, their congressional agenda has also been largely unpopular. If you’re consistently pushing positions that a majority of the public opposes, you’re liable to pay a price for it. Republicans’ structural advantages (especially in the Senate), and Trump’s ability to drive turnout in the places where those structural advantages matter, served as cover for a minoritarian agenda.

For all that said, the tendency of the opposition party to regain ground at the midterms is very strong. One would not want to bet that much against the GOP winning back one or both houses of Congress in 2022. (The House, where Republicans should pick up some seats from redistricting, might actually be the better bet than the Senate, where Democrats have a relatively favorable map.)

After last week, though, I’m not sure I’d want to place a lot of money on the GOP in 2022, either. If the Georgia runoffs served as a quasi-midterm, they might suggest that the GOP can’t count on the sort of gains that a party typically wins in midterms. As in the primaries leading up to 2010, the GOP is likely to have some vicious intraparty fights, possibly leading it to nominate suboptimal candidates in some races. And with the violence last week and Republican efforts to contest the Electoral College outcome in Congress, Democrats may be very motivated again in 2022, feeling — not unreasonably — as though democracy itself may be on the line.

Why Police Aggression Is Far More Pronounced Against Left-Leaning Protesters

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 00:43:14 GMT

While watching footage of the pro-Trump mob storming the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, many Americans noticed far less confrontation with the police than they saw during the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. Here, senior science writer Maggie Koerth explores what the data shows about how right- and left-wing movements are policed.

Trump Helped Take Extremist Views From The Fringes Of Society To A Mob Attacking The Capitol

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 20:18:35 GMT

Faith in the integrity of the presidential election has been concerningly low for months — in large part because of President Trump’s repeated false claims that the election was stolen from him. And on Wednesday, we saw an extreme example of the consequences of that mistrust when pro-Trump extremists briefly but violently occupied the U.S. Capitol.

This was undoubtedly a historic and disturbing moment. But it’s important to remember that it did not happen in a vacuum, which we can see from polling on topics related to Wednesday’s breach — faith in the election, support for the president, trust in institutions — as well as a comparison with the most analogous event in recent U.S. history: the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Taken together, these suggest that the attack on the Capitol shows how right-wing extremist views have become palatable to more members of an increasingly isolated and angry Trump base, even as they shock the rest of the country.

“There were no ordinary people in Charlottesville, it was just the hardcore extremists. But on Wednesday there were [ordinary people],” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “In many ways it’s a metaphor for Trumpism. He has taken these ideas and mainstreamed them in a way I think no one thought possible. It came to light Wednesday in an extraordinarily ugly and violent way.”

Polls so far — and we are still very early in this news cycle — have found that a solid majority of Americans opposed the unrest in Washington, D.C. In a YouGov poll, 71 percent of registered voters opposed the “storming of the Capitol” (63 percent of them “strongly”), and 62 percent viewed it as “a threat to democracy.” Similarly, 70 percent of respondents to an Ipsos poll opposed “the protesters who broke into the Capitol.” And, according to a Morning Consult/Politico survey, 59 percent of registered voters think the perpetrators should be viewed as “domestic terrorists.”

However, a not-small 19 percent of Ipsos respondents said that they supported the rioters. In the YouGov poll, 21 percent said the same (including 14 percent who strongly supported storming the Capitol), and 32 percent did not believe that the occupation constituted a threat to democracy. Those who backed it were disproportionately Republican: 45 percent of GOP voters supported the siege, while 43 percent opposed it.

Older polls asking how Americans feel about the legitimacy of the November election — the grievance that fueled the uprising — are also telling. A couple weeks after the election, our colleague Dhrumil Mehta wrote that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Republicans doubted that the election was conducted fairly (it was), according to several polls. And a recent gold-standard¹ national poll, conducted Dec. 16-20 by Suffolk University, found that 37 percent of registered voters — including 78 percent of Republicans — did not believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected president.

Those polls asked about people’s confidence in the election results — not whether they were willing to accept the results, which is much harder to measure. You can imagine, for instance, that some people thought the election was unfair but were resigned to the fact that Biden would eventually take office. But there are some polls that suggest a significant number of Republicans wanted to actually overturn the result of a free and fair election and install Trump for a second term. The exact number depends on the poll and its question wording, but in general it is close to the half of Republicans who have said they supported the siege on the Capitol. To wit:

According to a survey conducted just before Election Day by Brendan Hartnett and Alexandra Haver of Tufts University, around 40 percent of Trump supporters wanted Trump to attempt to stay in office even if he lost. Notably, between a third and half of Trump voters said the same thing almost regardless of how much Trump lost by, suggesting that those respondents were willing to overturn the election even in the event of an overwhelming Biden win (up to about 12 points) in order to get their preferred president.
A YouGov/Bright Line Watch poll from shortly after Biden won the election found that 48 percent of Trump supporters expected Trump to be inaugurated on Jan. 20. And around 20 percent of Trump supporters said they would resort to violence if Democrats won the election.
And in the aforementioned Suffolk poll, 26 percent of all voters, including 57 percent of Republicans, still thought Trump should not concede the election, even though the Electoral College had already voted, sealing Biden’s win, by the time the poll was conducted.
Most recently, in a poll conducted Monday and Tuesday (just before the attack), Morning Consult found that just 24 percent of all registered voters said members of Congress should object to the certification of the Electoral College vote. However, a majority (53 percent) of Republicans thought Congress should object.

In trying to put this week into context, we don’t have a clear analog. However, one comparison would be the rioting and violence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, where a counter-protestor was killed. Trump weakly condemned those events, as he did with the mob at the Capitol on Wednesday, and in both cases the violence was inextricably linked to issues of white identity and grievance — issues that motivated many perpetrators of the attack on Washington this week.

Polling conducted after Charlottesville found that Republicans were more likely to express a strong attachment to a white identity than other Americans. For instance, a survey from Reuters/Ipsos and the University of Virginia Center for Politics found that while about one-third of Americans agreed that “America must preserve its White European heritage,” twice as many Republicans (44 percent) agreed as Democrats (22 percent). And whereas 38 percent of Republicans felt that racial minorities were “under attack” in the United States, 63 percent said the same of white people. So even though polls generally found that 10 percent or less of all respondents were supportive of concepts like “white nationalism” or groups like the “alt-right” when they were called by those names, a substantial number of Republicans felt their white identity was under threat and needed to be protected, aligning themselves with elements of white supremacist ideology once the label was removed.

Republicans also were much more likely to hold favorable views of Trump’s response to the violence — in which he said there were “very fine people on both sides” — than were most Americans. For instance, Quinnipiac University found that only 32 percent of registered voters approved of Trump’s response, but 69 percent of Republicans backed it. And 59 percent of all respondents thought Trump’s decisions and behavior had encouraged white supremacist groups, but only 18 percent of Republicans felt that way.

However, it does seem as if more Americans — including Republicans — might be willing to fault Trump this time around than after Charlottesville. That poll from Morning Consult found, for instance, that 63 percent of registered voters think Trump was responsible for the mob attack in Washington, including 41 percent of Republicans. Similarly, 66 percent of voters told YouGov that Trump was to blame, though in that poll, only 28 percent of Republicans agreed.

What happened following Charlottesville might still provide some clues to where things will go from here. After the Unite the Right rally, there was some splintering among far-right groups, according to Alex Newhouse, the research lead at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at Middlebury College. The Proud Boys, for example, battled internal turmoil over some members’ attendance at the rally and some of its leaders made an effort to distance the group from white supremacy, at least on paper, Newhouse said. But other far-right groups were roused by the events in Charlottesville.

“Despite the public outrage, despite the death of a woman and the arrests that followed, the white supremacists were emboldened, especially after the president said there were ‘fine people on both sides,’” said Greenblatt.

For the wider American public, Charlottesville was a wake-up call that revealed how hearty the white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements remain in the United States. But while many politicians, including Republicans, condemned the rally, Trump’s response only further bolstered existing far-right views, Newhouse said.

“These far-right groups were feeling more and more isolated from mainstream media and mainstream politics, and some of them saw Trump as their only defender in that,” Newhouse said.

There are many differences between these two events, but one important distinction is the fact that, as Greenblatt mentioned, the Unite the Right rally was attended almost exclusively by white nationalists, while Wednesday’s insurrection at the Capitol included many more people who aren’t part of an organized white supremacist group. This, Greenblatt stressed, is concerning as it indicates that these ideas are seeping out of the fringes and into the mainstream. And that seepage, combined with fears over white identity and Trump’s incitement, may have broadened Republican receptiveness to political violence. A January 2020 study of Republican voters by political scientist Larry Bartels found that 51 percent agreed that the “traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

And these dramatic events are products of a much larger issue: Faith in our institutions and in democracy itself is eroding in this country. Last year, a report from the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group found that a third of Americans had supported authoritarian ideas at some point in the previous three years, and polling from YouGov Blue that our colleagues reported on last year found that Republicans, in particular, were souring on democracy and the institutions that uphold it. As the events of Wednesday make frighteningly clear, this is not simply a philosophical debate. It’s a real and present threat to our very way of life.

Storming The U.S. Capitol Was About Maintaining White Power In America

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 16:56:50 GMT

On Wednesday, after weeks of refusing to accept the outcome of the election, President Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol of the United States as members of Congress were meeting to carry out their duties to certify the election results and confirm Joe Biden’s victory.

Much will be said about the fact that these actions threaten the core of our democracy and undermine the rule of law. Commentators and political observers will rightly note that these actions are the result of disinformation and heightened political polarization in the United States. And there will be no shortage of debate and discussion about the role Trump played in giving rise to this kind of extreme behavior. As we have these discussions, however, we must take care to appreciate that this is not just about folks being angry about the outcome of one election. Nor should we believe for one second that this is a simple manifestation of the president’s lies about the integrity of his defeat. This is, like so much of American politics, about race, racism and white Americans’ stubborn commitment to white dominance, no matter the cost or the consequence.

It is not by chance that most of the individuals who descended on the nation’s capital were white, nor is it an accident that they align with the Republican Party and this president. Moreover, it is not a coincidence that symbols of white racism, including the Confederate flag, were present and prominently displayed. Rather, years of research make clear that what we witnessed in Washington, D.C., is the violent outgrowth of a belief system that argues that white Americans and leaders who assuage whiteness should have an unlimited hold on the levers of power in this country. And this, unfortunately, is what we should expect from those whose white identity is threatened by an increasingly diverse citizenry.

[Republicans Control Whether Trump Stays Or Goes]

Let’s start here: Scholars interested in the sociological underpinnings of white racism often call our attention to concerns about group status as starting places for understanding white Americans’ attitudes toward members of other social groups. In a famous essay from 1958 on the topic, entitled “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Herbert Blumer, a noted sociologist, wrote the following:

There are four basic types of feeling that seem to be always present in race prejudice in the dominant group. They are (1) a feeling of superiority, (2) a feeling that the subordinate race is intrinsically different and alien, (3) a feeling of proprietary claim to certain areas of privilege and advantage, and (4) a fear and suspicion that the subordinate race harbors designs on the prerogatives of the dominant race.

Building on Blumer’s early work, other scholars have highlighted the consequences that result when white Americans perceive threats to their dominant position in the social hierarchy. Some research by social psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, for example, finds that reminding white Americans of changing racial demographics causes them to adopt more negative racial attitudes toward minority groups. These same researchers also find that these reminders lead politically unaffiliated white Americans to report a stronger attachment to the Republican Party and to express greater political conservatism. These findings make sense, as the GOP is widely perceived to be a party that caters to white interests, a perception that predates the election of Trump but that has undoubtedly been strengthened by his ascendance to power in the party. In her award-winning book, “White Identity Politics,” Ashley Jardina goes further than any scholar to-date in documenting the causes and consequences of white identity, arguing that the increased salience of whiteness as a social category corresponds largely with how demographics have changed in this country. Jardina finds in her research that this, in turn, has created a fear among some white Americans that their hold on power has become increasingly precarious, highlighted most sharply by the ascendance of Barack Obama, a Black man, to the White House.

And most recently, Larry Bartels, a renowned scholar of American politics at Vanderbilt University, wrote the following in his research focused on the erosion of Republicans’ commitment to democracy:

The support expressed by many Republicans for violations of a variety of crucial democratic norms is primarily attributable not to partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, or general cultural conservatism, but to what I have termed ethnic antagonism. The single survey item with the highest average correlation with antidemocratic sentiments is not a measure of attitudes toward Trump, but an item inviting respondents to agree that “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” Not far behind are items positing that “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country,” that immigrants get more than their fair share of government resources, that people on welfare often have it better than those who work for a living, that speaking English is “essential for being a true American,” and that African-Americans “need to stop using racism as an excuse.”

To summarize Bartels’s claims, white Republicans who have come to oppose democracy do so, in part, because they don’t like those whom they believe democracy serves. And, more than that, they believe that the interests of nonwhite Americans have been given priority over the interests of their racial group. Many white Americans seem to be asking themselves, Why act in defense of a democracy that benefits “those people”?

[The Police’s Tepid Response To The Capitol Breach Wasn’t An Aberration]

So, let’s return to the images of Wednesday, when a crowd of white people gathered at the Capitol with American flags and Trump flags and symbols of the Confederacy. For these white Americans, the notion of America itself is likely one that is white, making the American flag they so proudly wield as a symbol also one of white supremacy and white racial domination. Of course, the iconography of the failed Confederacy, alongside other reminders of white racial violence, including the placing of a noose around a tree near the Capitol, are intentional, too. For those who broke glass in windows of the Capitol, who marched in opposition to American democracy, who held up as a model the seditious behaviors of slaveholding states, who threatened the lives of elected officials and caused chaos that lays bare the dangerous situation we are in as a country — these are not political protesters asking their government for a redress of grievances. Nor are they patriots whose actions should be countenanced in a society governed by the rule of law.

Instead, we must characterize them as they are: They are a dangerous mob of grievous white people worried that their position in the status hierarchy is threatened by a multiracial coalition of Americans who brought Biden to power and defeated Trump, whom back in 2017 Ta-Nehisi Coates called the first white president. Making this provocative point, Coates wrote, “It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true — his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.” So, when we think about those who gathered in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday and who will surely continue their advance in opposition to democratic rule, let it not be lost on us that they do not simply come in defense of Donald Trump. They come in defense of white supremacy.

Republicans Control Whether Trump Stays Or Goes

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 23:08:13 GMT

Graphics by Ryan Best

More than half the Democrats in the House are calling for President Trump’s impeachment and removal from office in the wake of his supporters invading and taking control of the Capitol on Wednesday. That’s according to a whip count by the left-leaning site Daily Kos as of Thursday afternoon. While many of the pro-impeachment Democrats are from very liberal districts, the effort has fairly broad and growing support.

So an expanding majority of the 222 House Democrats are backing impeachment, and at least 16 senators, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, also joining the call.

That leaves four big questions:

Will Trump administration officials invoke the 25th Amendment and remove the president from office by declaring that he’s unable to perform his duties, rather than waiting for Congress to act?
Will House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bring the House back to vote to impeach Trump a second time, as she suggested on Thursday that she might do if Trump’s Cabinet does not remove him?
Would the House then actually impeach Trump, which would require basically all Democrats to be on board, as it’s unlikely any House Republicans would support that effort?
And if the House impeaches Trump, are there 66 senators (including 18 Republicans) who would vote to remove him from office this time around?

Let’s look at those questions one by one. According to Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, which has not been invoked before to remove a sitting president, the vice president and a majority of the members of the Cabinet can sign a written statement saying that the president is not fit to perform his duties, which allows him to be temporarily replaced by the vice president.

But removing Trump from power for his final 13 days in office would be super complicated, and there are a couple of reasons that this probably won’t happen. For starters, Section 4 seems designed to deal with a president being seriously injured or mentally incapacitated — it’s not written like a tool that allows officials to replace someone whose decisions people disagree with, as is the case with Trump. It’s not clear either if the “acting” members of Trump’s Cabinet, who have not been confirmed by the Senate, would be able to participate in such a vote. There’s also the reality there might not be enough votes. Trump has sacked Cabinet officials who aren’t loyal to him, like one-time Defense Secretary Mark Esper. And the Cabinet secretaries horrified by Trump’s actions may simply resign, as Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao did on Thursday, joining a number of other senior administration officials.

Impeachment might be a long shot too, as there are two big reasons that House Democrats might not wind up with an overwhelming majority of their caucus joining that push. First, Trump has less than two weeks left in office, so some of them may view trying to remove him earlier as fairly fruitless. And secondly, some House Democrats may be reluctant to impeach Trump if there is no appetite to remove him in the Senate, where convicting him would require a lot of Republican votes. The Democrats tried to get Trump out of office once before and Republicans wouldn’t go along, so some might be reluctant to try again.

There are likely procedural ways to force an impeachment vote, but realistically I would assume a vote won’t be held unless Pelosi favors the idea. On Thursday, she pushed for the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, but she did leave open the possibility of a House impeachment vote if that doesn’t happen. I tend to think impeachment would pass the House if it came to a vote, with nearly all Democrats in favor and most Republicans opposed.

The Senate currently has 99 members (Georgia’s David Perdue, who just lost his reelection bid, left a vacant seat when his term ended Jan. 3) so it would need 66 votes to remove Trump — including 18 Republicans. Earlier this year, only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, backed Trump’s removal. You could imagine that perhaps Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Ben Sasse of Nebraska would back Trump’s removal this time around, motivated by a combination of anger over Wednesday’s events, frustration with Trump’s refusal to concede and the security of knowing they won’t face reelection for another six years. But even though many Republican lawmakers were furious about Wednesday’s invasion of the Capitol, most of them have not been directly criticizing Trump, perhaps worried that he still has a lot of pull with the party’s base. It is hard to see eight Republicans backing Trump’s removal, much less 18.

In short, neither the executive-branch-driven 25th Amendment process nor the congressional impeachment-and-removal process seem likely to force Trump out of office, and both processes would likely fail for the same reason: They would require Republicans who have been aligned with Trump — like Sen. Lindsey Graham and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, or Secretaries Mike Pompeo (State) and Ben Carson (Housing and Urban Development) — to dramatically turn on the president. Wednesday was a terrible day in America, as many Republicans have publicly said. But it still seems unlikely that, after having been allied with him for four years, these Republicans will embarrass Trump by forcing him out of the White House days before he will have to leave office anyway.

How Democrats Won The Georgia Runoffs

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 19:47:33 GMT

On Tuesday, Democrats won both Georgia runoff elections — and control of the U.S. Senate. Democrat Raphael Warnock defeated Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler 50.8 percent to 49.2 percent in the special election, and Democrat Jon Ossoff defeated Republican David Perdue, whose term as senator expired on Sunday, 50.4 percent to 49.6 percent in the regularly scheduled contest.¹

It’s hard to overstate how precedent-shattering this election was. Going into 2020, it was a political axiom that Democrats always fared worse in runoff elections than in the general; Republicans had improved on their margins in seven out of the eight previous runoff elections in Georgia history. But this week, Ossoff and Warnock won despite Republicans getting more votes than Democrats in both races in November.

For just the second time, Dems gained in the runoffs

Shift in vote margin between the general election and the runoff, for statewide races in Georgia

Year	Office	General Margin	Runoff Margin	Diff.
2020	U.S. Senate	R+1.8	D+0.8	D+2.6
2020	U.S. Senate*	R+1.0	D+1.7	D+2.7
2020	Public Service Commission	R+2.9	R+1.1	D+1.8
2018	Secretary of State	R+0.4	R+3.8	R+3.4
2018	Public Service Commission	R+2.1	R+3.5	R+1.4
2008	U.S. Senate	R+2.9	R+14.9	R+12.0
2008	Public Service Commission	D+0.6	R+13.0	R+13.7
2006	Public Service Commission	D+2.6	R+4.4	R+7.0
1998	Public Service Commission*	D+15.8	D+31.4	D+15.6
1992	U.S. Senate	D+1.6	R+1.3	R+2.9
1992	Public Service Commission	R+0.7	R+13.6	R+12.9

That might have been made possible by the fact that turnout was completely off the charts. Over 4.4 million people voted in Tuesday’s election — more than double the number who voted in Georgia’s 2008 Senate runoff, which was previously the highest-turnout runoff in Georgia history. A full 60 percent of eligible voters (as estimated by Michael McDonald of the University of Florida) cast a ballot — higher than Georgia’s turnout rate in the 2016 presidential election! It looks like the high stakes of the election (it determined control of the Senate) and the massive amount of money spent ($833 million between the two races) really motivated people to vote.

Turnout in the Georgia runoffs shattered records

Three ways to measure turnout in every runoff election in Georgia

			Share of …
Cycle	Office	Runoff Turnout	Nov. Turnout	Eligible Voters
2020	U.S. Senate*	4,444,832	90%	60%
2020	U.S. Senate	4,444,780	90	60
2020	Public Service Commission	4,397,407	91	60
2008	U.S. Senate	2,137,956	57	34
2008	Public Service Commission	2,010,329	56	32
2018	Secretary of State	1,473,904	38	20
2018	Public Service Commission	1,465,820	38	20
1992	U.S. Senate	1,253,991	56	26
1992	Public Service Commission	1,159,605	57	24
2006	Public Service Commission	215,092	11	4
1998	Public Service Commission*	114,343	9	2

Indeed, turnout was nearly 90 percent of what it was in the general election. That probably made the runoff electorate look more like the general-election electorate than it does in a typical runoff, which may help explain why Democrats gained ground rather than lost it.

Looking at county-level results, we can see a couple of trends, the most important of which is that Warnock and Ossoff both tended to improve on Joe Biden’s margin in places with a large share of Black voters. (To keep things simple, the charts below show just Ossoff, but Warnock’s results look almost identical.) This includes both suburban counties like Clayton, in the Atlanta metropolitan area, where Warnock did 6 percentage points better than Biden, as well as more rural counties like Randolph, in Georgia’s Black Belt. And turnout among Black voters seems to have been up, as well: According to the Fox News Voter Analysis, Black Americans made up 32 percent of the runoff electorate, up from 29 percent in November. This corresponds with trends at the county level, which also show higher turnout in counties where a larger share of the population is Black.

At the same time, though, Warnock and Ossoff actually slightly underperformed Biden in counties with a particularly high share of college-educated voters, such as Forsyth, where 52 percent of the population has a college degree but only 3 percent is Black.

It’s obviously hard to know whether these demographic relationships we see at the county level will hold among voters across the state — we won’t know that until we have more detailed voter data. But after suburbanites, especially white college-educated ones, were credited with swinging the state blue in the presidential election, these charts suggest that the Democratic senators-elect owe their wins to Black voters. It seems that split-ticket voters from the general election — who voted Biden for president but Republicans for the Senate, and who were largely concentrated in the wealthy Atlanta suburbs — were not key to the Democratic victory after all.

The second trend we can spot at the county level is that GOP turnout seems to have been down. Headed into the election, party officials worried that some Republicans might be discouraged from voting due to Trump’s continued false claims of election fraud that have now resulted in violence and insurrection at the Capitol. Early and absentee voting lagged in redder parts of the state, for instance, and while Republicans hoped Election Day turnout would make up for this deficit — GOP voters were generally less likely to vote by mail or at early-voting locations — it seems their fears were somewhat realized. As the chart below shows, the better Trump did in a county in November, the more its turnout tended to drop in the runoffs compared to the general election.

We should be careful, though, not to overstate the extent to which Trump’s claims discouraged Republican participation. After all, plenty of Republicans still showed up to vote — enough to help set a record for runoff turnout. But critically, turnout tended to be just a bit higher in more Democratic-leaning areas of the state. So the upshot is that while Trump’s approach may have encouraged plenty of Republicans to vote, he probably pushed plenty of Democrats to go to the polls, too.

Of course, there are two other factors here that are a bit harder to untangle. First, some Republican voters may have been harder to motivate than they were in November because Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot — after all, the runoffs mirrored other off-cycle elections, like the 2017 Alabama Senate special election or the 2018 midterms, where Republican voter turnout was down and the Democrats outperformed their recent presidential benchmark. Additionally, the fact that Trump’s approval rating has slipped since November probably hurt the GOP, too. (For context, Trump’s approval rating in November 2018, when Democrats won back the House of Representatives, was roughly the same as it now — in the low 40s.)

Whether Democrats can keep their foothold in Georgia is another question. Trump’s unpopularity likely contributed to a Democratic-leaning national environment that may not hold in, say, 2022, when Warnock will have to run for a full six-year term. And according to the presidential results, Georgia is still a slightly Republican-leaning state (Biden won the state by 0.3 points, but he won the national popular vote by 4.4 points, so Georgia remains more Republican than the country as a whole). Tuesday’s results certainly hold promise for Democrats hoping to turn Georgia into the next Virginia — a formerly Republican Southern state turned solidly blue by demographic change — but nothing is guaranteed.

The Police’s Tepid Response To The Capitol Breach Wasn’t An Aberration

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 18:52:28 GMT

As images from Wednesday’s riot by pro-Trump extremists at the U.S. Capitol filled our TV screens and social media feeds, one thing was notably absent: the kind of confrontation between police and protesters that we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. Even though the Capitol mob was far more violent — and seditious — than the largely peaceful BLM demonstrators, police responded far less aggressively toward them than toward BLM protesters across the country. Researchers who track this sort of thing for a living say that fits a pattern.

Instead of National Guard troops being posted en masse around landmarks before a protest even began, we saw the Defense Department initially deny a request to send in troops — and that was after the Capitol had been breached. Instead of peaceful protesters being doused in tear gas, we saw a mob posing for selfies with police and being allowed to wander the corridors of power like they couldn’t decide whether they were invading the Capitol or touring it. Instead of President Trump calling these violent supporters “thugs,” as he called racial justice protesters, and advocating for more violent police crackdowns, we saw him remind his followers that they were loved before asking them nicely to go home.

“It feels really unbelievable,” said Roudabeh Kishi, director of research and innovation with the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. But, she said, it’s also totally unsurprising.

That’s because the discrepancies we saw Wednesday are just another example of a trend Kishi’s team has been tracking for months as they collect data on protester and law enforcement interactions across America. “We see a different response to the right wing,” she said.

While protesters themselves have long perceived that police tend to crack down on left-wing protesters and align with those on the right wing, there hasn’t really been data to demonstrate that effect before, said Ed Maguire, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University and an expert on police and protester interactions.

But in 2020, Kishi’s ACLED — a data-reporting project that began documenting armed conflicts and protests in African nations — extended its work into the United States. Using information gathered from local media, NGOs, individual journalists and partner organizations, ACLED researchers have catalogued months of detailed information about protests, including when clashes with law enforcement have happened and the type of force used by police. “We don’t necessarily have information on the number of Black vs. white protesters … but we do have a larger view,” Kishi said. “How is law enforcement responding to demonstrations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement versus demonstrations by the right wing … in support of [a] president that may or may not involve organized armed illegal groups?”

What they have found is striking.

Between May 1 and November 28, 2020, authorities were more than twice as likely to attempt to break up and disperse a left-wing protest² than a right-wing³ one. And in those situations when law enforcement chose to intervene, they were more likely to use force — 34 percent of the time with right-wing protests compared with 51 percent of the time for the left. Given when this data was collected, it predominantly reflects a difference in how police respond to Black Lives Matter, compared with how they respond to anti-mask demonstrations, pro-Trump extremists, QAnon rallies, and militia groups.

The differences in intervention weren’t because BLM protests were particularly violent. ACLED found that 93 percent of the protests associated with BLM were entirely peaceful. “Even if we were to put those [7] percent of demonstrations aside and look purely at peaceful [BLM protests], we are seeing a more heavy handed response [compared with right-wing protests],” Kishi said.

This data is new and limited, but it is in keeping with long-documented biases in how police think about and treat Black people compared with white people, and with research that shows police and military personnel overlapping significantly with the same far-right groups they treat preferentially.

It is also in keeping with how different groups of protesters perceive the situation themselves, Maguire said. In his years spent traveling to protests and embedding in crowds to observe and document police and protester interactions, he has interviewed protesters extensively. “Protesters on the left virtually universally believe that police are rougher on them. And protesters on the right almost universally believe police are on their side,” Maguire said. Some of that sentiment was evident yesterday:

“This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.” https://t.co/XN2pSct54i

— The Nation (@thenation) January 7, 2021

Even absent statistical evidence, those beliefs have consequences, Maguire told me. “I think protesters on the right, because they view the police as in their corner, they feel a sense of tacit permission,” he said. This is only exacerbated when police live up to those expectations. But, while it is true that law enforcement responded with far less force to Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol than to Black Lives Matter protests, there was some force, which resulted in one woman being shot and killed by police.

And Maguire says this represents a jarring breach between the treatment right-wing extremists expect and the reality. The consequences of that worry him. He’s been watching this year as those extremists’ beliefs about themselves and their relationship with police grew increasingly religious and apocalyptic. “[They told me] that leftists are godless and they hate god and hate America. That’s what I heard from folks on the right. [But] they were god fearing moral people and police would always back them for that reason,” he said. Now, you have a situation where police are giving these people more leeway and, at the same time, right-wing groups may perceive their relationship with police being undermined. “I can … see the possibility that people who feel the police have broken some type of implicit or imagined pact may try to outmaneuver police and behave destructively,” he said.

The police, meanwhile, he worries, are likely to see criticism of a lack of force in D.C. and respond with more force elsewhere — whether that be against right-wing or left-wing groups. “Every other police department facing an angry crowd will be concerned about being overrun, and overcorrecting in response to that concern may lead to overly forceful, unconstitutional responses.”

Violence, as they say, begets violence. And disparities in police force may well beget more disparities.