IF YOU ENJOY SR AND FIND IT USEFUL WOULD YOU PLEASE DONATE
When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Stephan: Again, I note that we need to be clear that the disparity between the presidential outcome and the down ballot outcomes is telling us something very important. The Democratic Party did not win. As a party they lost, and that holds many implications. For instance, almost immediately when the census comes in redistricting will begin, and the Republicans will dominate this in many states. This article explains what I mean.
Here’s something else Republicans can be happy about after Tuesday.
Protestors march in front of the Capitol in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday to demand all votes in the general election be counted. Texas Republicans will have total authority over the drawing of as many as 39 congressional districts in the state. Credit: Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman/AP
An abysmal showing by Democrats in state legislative races on Tuesday not only denied them victories in Sun Belt and Rust Belt states that would have positioned them to advance their policy agenda — it also put the party at a disadvantage ahead of the redistricting that will determine the balance of power for the next decade.
The results could domino through politics in America, helping the GOP draw favorable congressional and state legislative maps by ensuring Democrats remain the minority party in key state legislatures. Ultimately, it could mean more Republicans in Washington — and in state capitals.
By Wednesday night, Democrats had not flipped a single statehouse chamber in its favor. And it remained completely blocked from the map-making process in several key […]
Stephan: As I said yesterday, my big takeaway from this election is the support that a man who is an irrefutable racist, criminally corrupt, and incompetent businessman and president continues to command. Trumpism is clearly going to continue no matter how the election turns out. In fact, it is likely to get worse because the Trumpers are going to be angry and resentful if Biden wins. I think we can also say that the Democratic Party grievously miscalculated. They may get the presidency, but it seems unlikely they will flip the Senate, and they lost seats in the House. I spent much of the afternoon thinking about what would have happened, for instance, if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic candidate?
I think the Democrats need to sit down and rethink what their party is about. They clearly did not convert many Republicans nor, as much as I liked their ads, did the Lincoln Project. The hard and uncomfortable truth is that a large percentage of the American population is virulently racist against non-Whites, and indifferent to both corruption and incompetence because they don't like or trust democracy. I think we are a country on a knife-edge.
President Donald Trump’s last rally before the 2020 Election on November 3, 2020. Grand Rapids was also the site of his final rally in the 2016 election.Credit: Peter van Agtmael—Magnum/TIME
The car horns blared as Joe Biden took the stage just before 1 a.m.—not to proclaim victory, but to urge his supporters not to lose hope, no matter what President Donald Trump might say. “We believe we are on track to win this election,” the former Vice President told the crowd in Wilmington, Del., on Nov. 4. “It ain’t over until every vote is counted. Keep the faith, guys.”
As the new day dawned and dragged on, it increasingly looked as though Biden was right. Having flipped Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, Biden appeared to be inching toward victory. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina remained too close to call as of the evening of Nov. 4. Independent forecasters believed Biden was likely to eke out the requisite 270 electoral votes when all the votes were counted, over the President’s noisy objections.
Even with the White House nearing their grasp, […]
W. Joseph Campbell, Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication - The Conversation
Stephan: It is perfectly obvious to everyone, I should think, that once again the pollster community got hosed by the American population. The big question, of course, is how did this happen? I think the answer is that most people do not tell the truth when polled. It's a spectrum from hedging to outright lying. The reason is that what is really driving people is a taboo subject. The United States is going to become a majority-minority nation, according to the Census Bureau, by 2045. Very few people define themselves as racists, although that is their real position.
You can not support a man like Trump unless something overrides any concerns you have regarding his criminality, the corruption, the recurring sexually aggressive incidents. What is that? I think it is three things that align to create this trend: White supremacy, male dominance, and christofascism, and although someone will tell you their religious beliefs, only a minority will tell you they are racists. On top of that, one must add that the Trump population live in a non-fact basis reality. One has to watch and read a lot of this parallel university to understand, how thoroughly different that world is. Fox is the on the edge of that world; it gets much weirder.
The technology of polling must be transformed until it gives accurate answers. It is clearly not reliable.
CNN posted national polls on the presidential race, taken between 10/16/20 and 11/1/20. Screenshot, CNN, CC BY
Election polling is facing yet another reckoning following its uneven-at-best performance in this year’s voting.
Although the outcome in the 2020 presidential race remained uncertain the next day, it was evident that polls collectively faltered, overall, in providing Americans with clear indications as to how the election would turn out.
And that misstep promises to resonate through the field of survey research, which was battered four years ago when Donald Trump carried states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where polls indicated he had almost no chance of winning. Prominent, poll-based statistical forecasts also went off-target in 2016.
Those failings deepened the embarrassment for a field that has suffered through – but has survived – a variety of lapses and surprises since the mid-1930s. Many of those flubs and failings are described in my latest book, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.”
Criticism was intense in some quarters Wednesday. Politico’s widely followed “Playbook” newsletter was notably scathing. “The polling industry is a wreck,” it
Stephan: Here is another take on the psychophysiology of the Trumper world. We need to understand this. This is a group who by their voting pattern have shown they will not abandon their worldview. In my opinion, trying that is a waste of time. But understanding it is essential.
A Trump campaign rally
The orange spray-tan was barely wiped off Donald Trump’s inauguration Bible before the mainstream media went on Trump Voter Remorse Watch. Working off a common but incorrect understanding of human psychology — that, given evidence and time, people come to regret their worst decisions — journalists kept interviewing Trump voters over and over, in “heartland” diners and farm fields and gargantuan exurban malls, in search of evidence that doubts were starting to creep in.
I found the whole thing exhausting fairly quickly. In June 2017, I published an article in which I concluded, after interviewing psychological experts, that “the answer to the question of when Trump voters will come around is somewhere between ‘a long, long time from now’ and more likely ‘never.’”ON THE PODCAST: Election Day 2000… all over again?
Here we are, three and a half years later, and things have gone even more poorly than we could have imagined. Trump was impeached for trying to extort a foreign leader into smearing a political opponent, the economy is in the toilet and getting worse, and 231,000 Americans […]
Stephan: We are so diminished. Everything Trump does makes us appear thoughtless, vulgar, and incompetent.
President Donald J. Trump joins G7 Leaders for dinner Saturday evening Aug. 24, 2019, at the Biarritz Lighthouse in Biarritz, France. (Official White House Photo. Credit: Shealah Craighead)
All over the world, President Donald Trump drew widespread criticism on Wednesday, November 4 for demanding the vote-count cease in the 2020 presidential election even though thousands of votes had yet to be counted in key battleground states. Some of the criticism of Trump’s behavior has come from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
For almost two decades, the 57-member organization has been monitoring U.S. elections at the invitation of the U.S. Department of State. But in 2020, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has been troubled by what it observed in the United States.
The Week’s Catherine Garcia reports this year, participants accused Trump of making “deliberate attempts” to “weaken confidence in the election process.”
German politician Michael Georg Link, according to Garcia, complained, “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president — including on Election Night — harm public trust in democratic institutions.” […]
Stephan: No matter who wins the presidency, Trump or Biden, one thing is clear and irrefutable. A large segment of the White American population is racist, increasingly pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic, and uninterested in having an ethical government of integrity. If that sounds harsh swallow it anyway because the facts of the vote are the reality. And what that is also telling us is that we are a society scarily close to degenerating into violence and collapse
Image by Kenji Aoki/ The New York Times
When I first spoke with Joseph Tainter in early May, he and I and nearly everyone else had reason to be worried. A few days earlier, the official tally of Covid-19 infections in the United States had climbed above one million, unemployment claims had topped 30 million and the United Nations had warned that the planet was facing “multiple famines of biblical proportions.” George Floyd was still alive, and the protests spurred by his killing had not yet swept the nation, but a different kind of protest, led by white men armed with heavy weaponry, had taken over the Michigan State Legislature building. The president of the United States had appeared to suggest treating the coronavirus with disinfectant injections. Utah, where Tainter lives — he teaches at Utah State — was reopening its gyms, restaurants and hair salons that very day.
The chaos was considerable, but Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has […]
Stephan: This is the view of America and the election from the most prestigious English language newspaper in Europe. What it makes clear is that those who used to be considered America's allies, today see us as a savagely diminished nation, a country more to be pitied than admired. What happened? Because, as I said in my comment about the previous report, the world sees that a large percentage of our White population are uninterested in climate change or democracy, and happy to support a grossly corrupt and dishonest man for president as long as he supports male dominance, christofascism, and White supremacy.
Demonstrators gather in front of the White House on election day in Washington DC. Credit: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty
Whoever wins this year’s election, America remains a country bitterly and evenly divided. It has been more than three decades since the last presidential landslide. Despite polls suggesting that Donald Trump was poised to suffer a sweeping rejection by the voters, there was no repudiation of the president. Rather, just a fraction of the popular vote separates Joe Biden and Mr Trump.
Our view was that Mr Trump deserved to lose and in a big way. His mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis, which cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, was cause enough. But there were numerous reasons for Mr Trump’s ejection from the White House, given he ran the worst administration in modern US history.
It is small comfort that Americans understood the threat that Mr Trump represented and turned out in record numbers to vote against him. Yet, as this election depressingly revealed, there was an almost equal and opposite reaction from Mr Trump’s base. The president’s appeal, it seems, has only widened and deepened since he […]
Heather Gillers and Gunjan Banerji, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: This, I think, is a major alarm bell about the economy no matter who wins the presidency.
Connecticut acted fast. Social distancing, lockdowns and testing slashed Covid-19 cases in the spring.
But when Comptroller Kevin Lembo opened an email from his budget director on April 15, it was clear the state’s quick action to contain the pandemic hadn’t insulated its finances.
“We hit the brakes so quickly on the economy that we went through the windshield,” his deputy wrote.WHAT’S NEWSU.S. States Face Historic Cash Crisis00:001xSUBSCRIBE
Connecticut is projecting a total revenue decline of $8.4 billion through the 2024 budget year—more than twice the rainy day fund built up over the past three years.
“All you can do is grip the bar as tight as you can, make the smartest decisions you can in real time, plan for the worst and be surprised at something less than worst,” said Mr. Lembo.
Nationwide, the U.S. state budget shortfall from 2020 through 2022 could amount to about $434 billion, according to data from Moody’s Analytics, the economic analysis arm of Moody’s Corp. The estimates assume no additional fiscal stimulus […]
