Republicans are scrambling to retire from red districts for three grim reasons https://t.co/IrLYTrgGlZ
— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) July 31, 2019
As too many of us know from experience, there’s a feedback loop at failing organizations. Those employees with the best chances, or the best reasons, to escape announce they’re going to ‘pursue other opportunities’. Everybody starts circulating resumes, stockpiling office supplies, and keeping a running tally of who’s taking long lunches or spending time with HR. Every new departure adds to the sneaking conviction that the whole group is irretrievably doomed…
Here’s an announcement that seems to bode particularly ill for the industry reputation of the Republican Party:
Texas Rep. Hurd, lone black Republican in House, won’t seek reelection – The Washington Post https://t.co/zCssojN7KD
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 2, 2019
Not surprised about Hurd’s retirement. I suspect he’s got more of a conscience than most of the Repubs, probably knows Trump is treasonous, knows he’d prob lose in 2020, & if TX Repubs need to sacrifice a Repub during redistricting it would almost certainly be him.
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) August 2, 2019
hurd leaving is basically an admission that he doesn’t think the GOP is going to change. and as nonwhites leave the party, what’s left of the guardrails (h/t @cjane87) keeping the party from explicit full white nationalist erode even further
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 2, 2019
Hard to overstate how much GOP leaders sought to elevate Hurd, protect him and make him the future of the caucus. Not just as the now-only black House R, but as a former CIA operative interested in tech policy and expanding the party’s appeal. Just a devasting loss for them.
— Mike DeBonis (@mikedebonis) August 2, 2019
Two years ago @TimAlberta wrote this excellent profile about how Hurd represented the future of the GOP. Worth another read https://t.co/0R4e68myBE
— Haley Byrd (@byrdinator) August 2, 2019
Agree w Marcy, & would add to what @TexasTribAbby says by suggesting House Repubs know they’re going to cast a vote on impeachment & don’t want to be concerned w how it affects their re-election & career. Some may also know Trump should be impeached & now they don’t fear Trump https://t.co/F09oZrCiGa
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) August 2, 2019
There are 277 Republican governors, senators and congresspeople.
Without Hurd, exactly one (1) is black. https://t.co/vD7hmr4L2C
— Dan Lavoie (@djlavoie) August 2, 2019
Should Democrats take Will Hurd’s seat next year, and retain the others in the region, they will have secured every seat along the Mexican border.
— David Dayen (@ddayen) August 2, 2019
Ummmm if you *still* don’t think the Texas House is in play, you definitely haven’t been paying attention to this #Bonnghazi thing. (BTW the State Board of Ed is also in play, that’s been kind of under-the-radar thus far) https://t.co/hvuSA65Kuw
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) August 2, 2019
Hurd’s decision was not made impulsively, overnight or in reaction to any specific event, according to a source close to his decision-making process.
— Abby Livingston (@TexasTribAbby) August 2, 2019
There’s also another reason why these retirements are rough on national Republicans: Texas members traditionally raise a ton of money for the NRCC.
— Abby Livingston (@TexasTribAbby) August 2, 2019
Members of Congress who are retiring because they don’t want to continue to associated with the party of Trump owe it to their constituents and to all Americans to speak up and speak out about what they’ve seen behind the scenes, and why they are packing it in.
— Carrie Cordero (@carriecordero) August 2, 2019
What’s a little unnerving about the Hurd & Olson retirements in particular is that they were members of the frontline incumbent protection program at NRCC. So not only are they gone, along w/ some targeted cash, but there are still two more Texans on the list. (One of whom is 77)
— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) August 2, 2019
Major Major Major Major
Good for our electoral chances, but otherwise, wake me up when he denounces the party.
Betty Cracker
I don’t know Haley Byrd from a cuckoo bird and am not clicking through, but I have to wonder about the “excellence” of a two year-old article entitled “Will Hurd Is the Future of the GOP,” even with an asterisk. Noted invertebrate Marco Rubio was once hailed as the “future of the GOP,” as were Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal. Maybe elevating tokens in a white supremacist party is just dumb? I’m starting to think yes, yes it is.
jl
Any GOP Senators likely to call it quits?
boatboy_srq
@Betty Cracker: Notice that in each of those cases, the “future” was embodied in a non-white and/or non-male, which in the Age of Dampnut does not in the least represent the GOTea leadership or party direction. I would anticipate that Ronna McDaniel (sp?) Is herself having second thoughts about participating in the resurrection of the Caucasian Patriarchy.
boatboy_srq
In moderation for email fail. Please to fixing?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@jl:
Hopefully Susie Q will be gone in 2020
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: Alexander and Roberts have already called it quits.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
Yeah, that seems like a reasonable take. I think the desire to praise token minorities is basically a form of wishful thinking, both that white supremacy is close to its best-by date as an electoral strategy and that the Republican party is in the process of backing away from it as a strategy for dealing with that change. Instead, the Republicans have been proving that white supremacy will continue to work for far longer than predicted, both because our political system favors the places where Republicans are strong and because they’ve been far more effective with voter suppression and gerrymandering than we expected.
FWIW, this is the main reason I think the Democrats need to put voting rights at the top of their agenda if we manage to win control of the government. Making sure everyone gets to vote and every vote counts equally is our best strategy for maintaining control.
dedc79
If i were trying to identify all the “un-named Congressional Republicans” who appear in articles in Axios/Politico/WSJ/WAPO/NYT complaining about Trump but rarely do so publicly, i’d start with this list of people who have decided not to seek reelection.
MattF
I guess Hurd doesn’t see a way forward for a conservative AA in the future Republican party. I can’t argue with that.
jl
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I’ve seen video evidence that Suzy is very very disappointed in the Senate. i hope the 2020 election results can lead her towards a more satisfying and fulfilling direction in life, and that she can finally find some happiness.
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Thanks for info. I’ll go look up their states.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Roger Moore:
Is the country on the verge of becoming a larger version of California? I know that California didn’t have the voter suppression at the time that exists in other states now.
On top of that, I saw a headline the other day about Iran and other countries besides Russia were planning election interference for 2020.
Could such interference be in our (the Dems’) favor? I’d definitely rather win fair and square and don’t think that foreigners should influence American elections
HeleninEire
LOL. Ratcliff out!!!
Betty Cracker
Great news: Trump just tweeted that he’s pulling the nomination for lying liar John Ratcliffe as DNI. I have no doubt Trump will find another unqualified knob-polisher, but meanwhile, Ratcliffe is out and exposed nationally as a liar.
Gin & Tonic
@Betty Cracker: That went faster than I expected.
jl
@Roger Moore: Good tokens need to have at least the facade of some respect and dignity. If your tokens are obviously meaningless tokens, then they get treated like, well, tokens. Sadly, GOP tokens are becoming so obvious and absurd that they are tokenized and don’t do no good anymore.
The GOP has a token tokenization problem. So far mostly observed in various racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. But soon may spread more widely to women, people who tell the truth most of the time, people who can count, people who actually did something honest to earn their wealth, etc.
MattF
@Gin & Tonic: In the blink of an eye.
Betty Cracker
@Gin & Tonic: I was also surprised by the speed. It may have had something to do with Ratcliffe’s penchant for telling easily disprovable lies about his qualifications. Lying constantly didn’t disqualify Trump, obviously, but then again he hasn’t had to appear in person before Congress (or a special counselor) to account for his lies under oath.
germy
MattF
@Betty Cracker: The WaPo article on Ratcliffe was deadly.
germy
If it were Democrats who were rush retiring (fleeing a sinking ship) would I be seeing the word “unnerving” ?
Some of these twitter pundits seem nervous.
Roger Moore
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
I doubt the country is going to start following the California trajectory any time soon. While I think there’s some similarity in the GOP reaction now to what happened in California in the 1990s, I think the process in California was massively sped up by bigots who didn’t want to deal with diversity taking off for other states and being replaced by transplants who are OK with it. That obviously isn’t happening to any significant extent at the national level, which means the process of becoming much more liberal is going to take a lot longer at the national level.
germy
@HeleninEire:
The writers of this timeline are getting so lazy and over the top with their character names. I mean, RATCLIFF?
germy
Donald Trump is the future of the republican party.
Fair Economist
@Betty Cracker:
Sounds like you’re treating this as honest analysis as opposed to propaganda. There is essentially no honest analysis left on the conservative side and none whatsoever from the Republican Party itself. The point of these pieces is to keep Republican voters uncomfortable with the current out-and-loud racism in the party by implying that reprehensible behavior is fringe or temporary with puff pieces on the “great future” of these (rare) non-white Republicans.
Mandalay
@dedc79:
I’m really torn on articles written about that specific group.
On one hand it’s generally poor journalism to have unnamed sources as the center of a political story which is not about anything illegal or corrupt, but essentially just gossip. And the NYT constantly publishes such stories with unnamed sources, which is blatantly against their own guidelines.
On the other hand, if the story is specifically about politicians being afraid to be named for fear of retaliation from the president, then it’s too big to ignore – it really is news. But it’s just not very persuasive news, since nobody has the stones to go on the record.
Roger Moore
@germy:
I hope that’s true, and that the future of the Republican Party is slinking off and hiding.
HeleninEire
@germy: LOL
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore: California is something like 50 years ahead of the country as a whole in the transition to majority minority. It will be a while before the country as a whole follows, and even longer before a majority of the Senate follows.
germy
@Roger Moore: So even the “nice” token republicans lie. “Hurd’s decision was not made impulsively, overnight or in reaction to any specific event, according to a source close to his decision-making process.”
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@jl:
LOL, I loved that campaign ad. Very effective imo.
jl
@Roger Moore: I think CA GOPers were smart enough to back away from the overt racism and bigotry after they looked at the train wreck of the Pete Wilson approach. But then they really had nothing to say. I remember, when they were in the process of going down electorally, when every interview I heard on the state and local news was just complaining and yelling and wild accusations (unclear often what the accusations were about).
You’d tune into the end of an interview with a state level GOP politician and hear something like an angry old (very old) man or women yelling ‘Get off my lawn!” of “Stupid!!” and you’d think ‘Huh, they must be interviewing a Republican bigshot again”.
MattF
@Fair Economist: On the other hand, when the shift occurred, it happened quickly. Like they say– gradually, and then suddenly.
L85NJGT
@jl:
It’s a short term strategy that benefits Trump and MoscowMitch. They are writing off the house, state leges will be a bloodbath, but even if Pennsylvania and Michigan flip back, Dems only get to 268. There’s a similar dynamic in the Senate, with a Democratic majority likely needing to pick off Arizona or North Carolina.
TenguPhule
@germy:
These are the Days of Our Lives.
Fair Economist
@germy:
Nope, they’d be chittering about “great opportunities for Republicans”. They’re usually a little better about covering up their biases, and I suspect the choice of “unnerving” may say something. I am really wondering whether these retirees are seeing more than just a couple terms in the minority. This may reflect an expectation that some of the massive Trump scandals are going to get more press in the near future, or that yet bigger ones are to come.
TenguPhule
@germy:
A 239 pound prick on the face of the downtrodden, Forever.
sukabi
@boatboy_srq: doubt that. She’s been pushing some of the WORST crap.
Fair Economist
@MattF:
It wasn’t all that fast. It was 12 years from when Cali became majority minority in 2000 to when we got to effective Democratic rule in 2012. Republicans are amazingly good at messing things up.
catclub
@jl:
Sounds like the Peter Navarro interview defending Trump tariffs this morning.
germy
@TenguPhule: Their next trump will be a younger, smoother, more subtle devil. Tom Cotton? Josh Hawley?
jl
@Fair Economist: One of my less cynical theories is that corporate media and pundit hacks and political party hacks have a natural affinity for each other. So whatever happens in the GOP is viscerally exciting and engaging to them. Whatever happens in the Democrats is treated with the disdain worthy of rubes and other loser non-hacks.
germy
@Fair Economist: Chittering. That’s an excellent word; that’s exactly what they’d be doing.
catclub
@TenguPhule: trump doesn’t like other liars getting too much coverage.
dedc79
@Mandalay: That’s where I land on this stuff too.
MattF
@germy: I don’t think a subtle ‘Trump’ would work. The 27% hard-core stupid + racist demo needs to be smacked on the head, repeatedly. Just IMO.
germy
jl
@germy: Younger people on average have no significant holdings of anything, and don’t see much hope for holdings in the future. GOP forgot that if you overly impoverish everybody, you will impoverish you future followers as well. And you need some good explanation for why they are not doing as well as their parents. GOP is running out of explanations. GOP is kind of like a fussy parent who comes in and shuts the teen party down for no damn reason, and is running out of explanations for why the parties stink, because they get shut down for no reason.
Mike in DC
I wonder if it will dwindle down to 277 straight white Christian Males, all over 45. It’s down to 13 women in Congress, and I think they have maybe 2 or 3 Jewish congressmen. 16 Latinx congress critters. So, about 90% SWCM already. Median age 55. The best part is that rank and file base voters think there’s nothing wrong with this status quo.
Betty Cracker
@Fair Economist: I didn’t take it seriously enough to click through, but I do wonder why people keep engaging in this futile exercise, regardless of motivation. After a while, designating one great non-white hope after another only to watch them immediately flame out is like lighting and relighting an exploding cigar. If the aim is to provide cover for the GOP’s racism, it’s worse than ineffective.
trnc
@jl:
I hope she’s miserable every day, regardless of what she chooses to do with her wishy washy little life.
waratah
Texas A&M student spoke to the news after 2018 election that climate change and the jobs it would produce to fix it he agreed with Beto.
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
I could quibble a bit, but I think this basic point is right. I can come up with excuses for why the Democrats weren’t able to take complete control sooner than they did- the absurd 2000 gerrymander to maximize safe seats, the bizarre budgeting process that gave the minority party too much power, the Gray Davis recall, etc.- but there’s no reason to think the process of taking over will be any easier at the national level. Even if the Democrats have demographics on their side, they’ll have stumbles on the way to taking over, and the setup of national politics is likely to make those stumbles worse than the ones they faced in California.
Mai Naem mobile
At some point can’t you not gerrymander anymore? I am not talking about demographic change(age,race) and areas becoming more urban/suburban vs. rural. I am talking about the actual mapping out the districts. GOP has gerrymandered so many states how much more can they milk out of gerrymandering? Then there is the demographic issue which at some point can bite them in the ass foe the gerrymandering.
jl
@Roger Moore: Also, California has been way more diverse in all sorts of ways, even outside the big cities, for a very long time, than most of the country. So, overt racism and bigotry that CA GOP tried turned off more Whites more quickly, perhaps. Threat of majority-minority thing less pronounced. Not one particular minority that is going to ‘take over’, except maybe Hispanics. So for many Whites, there was the ‘how would we even notice it’ issue. And in most places there have been a lot of Hispanics, connected to overall community, since basically forever. So, while a lot of systematic institutional discrimination in CA, and segregation, etc. maybe not the visceral fear as in other places. So, somewhat different social setting in CA.
And been that way for a long time. Many stories in my family going back to Depression and WWII of extreme racist attitudes of Whites from other parts of the country that Californians found puzzling. Not there wasn’t prejudice. You might want to rent to an African-American, but what was the problem with eating a sandwich next to one in diner, or patronizing a diner that a Black guy owned? Or doing business with one out on the farm?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@jl: Arnold was the Cal GOP high water mark, they had a populist celeb governor, control of the assembly and promptly proved to be utterly useless, couldn’t even get the budget balanced. After that the Republicans seem to have just given up. If Trump = Arnold then that makes Warren = Jerry Brown, and Brown just killed the GOP in Cal by both balancing the budget, proving good government and getting a lot liberal stuff done.
mskitty
@MattF: Do you recall where the conclusion came from that 27% of voters were stupid/racist/irredeeemably Republican – was it a Romney event? Competing factors … I’d like to look over that analysis again.
Roger Moore
@Mai Naem mobile:
There are practical limits to gerrymandering, which is why the Republicans have been making noise about changing apportionment and redistricting by the number of citizens or even registered voters rather than by the total population. It’s another way of changing the rules to let them push gerrymandering further.
Mai Naem mobile
@Mike in DC: I thought Eric Cantor was the only GOP Jewish congressman when he was around. Most of the Latin ones are Cubans. I think there’s one Mexican American in Texas. The women stat is embarrassing. I am betting Obama had more females in the upper echelons in his admin than this number. There’s more female senators than GOP house reps and the way theyre going there’ll be more GOP senators than GOP congresswomen.I think there’s 6 GOP senators currently.
Manxome Bromide
@mskitty: It was Kung Fu Monkey and the data point was Obama’s defeat of Alan Keyes, back when Obama was just a local politican.
Mai Naem mobile
@Roger Moore: I don’t see how the registered voter thing flies. How do you not count kids when funding for schools is a big deal for states. How about prisons in rural areas.
trollhattan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
They self-deported. Cali’s demographic shifts can’t be explained by growth, as it’s been a slow upslope for quite awhile, very unlike 20-40 years ago. Lots of Republican types have decamped for various other, mostly western states.
I want to start a Russia-style campaign suggesting Devin Nunes is a closeted Mexican.
Yellowdog
@germy: Tom Cotton is not of our species. The neck of his human suit gives it away.
jl
@Roger Moore: That is a good point. As I understand it, if districts represent persons, under current interpretation of the Constitution, there is a trade-off between number of seats a party can control on average, the number of safe seats in bad cycles. And at some point that trade-off becomes very steep. So, just change what the districts represent to further stack the deck in your favor.
jl
@jl: Meant to type “You might not want to rent to an African-American”
Remembering oldsters and their friends talk in my family when I was a kid, they were much more relaxed about race and ethnicity and religious differences that you see even today in many parts of the country. But the impulse to housing segregation was pretty strong.
Sheldon Vogt
@jl: Collins-ME.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Betty Cracker: Haley Byrd is wingnut reporter who appears on Chris Hayes’ show. She became “famous” for being banned by Paul Ryan from the halls of congress for wearing sandals during a DC heat wave.
waspuppet
When Tim Scott goes and there literally isn’t a nonwhite Republican in Congress, will THAT be enough for the Chuck Todds of the world to admit that there might be a teensy problem? Or will the GOP’s standard “If black people weren’t so dumb and lazy they’d realize Democrats are the real racists” be seen as sage heartland wisdom?
MattF
@mskitty: My recollection is that a weirdly large number of polls found that exactly 27% of the population had extremely peculiar opinions. Then it became a meme, and then it became an accepted crowd-sourced truth. But I don’t think it was ever a respectable ‘fact’.
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker:
Betty, your word pictures always bring a smile to my face, but this one just made me crack up uncontrollably.
Shana
I spent all my life up until the age of 33 living in Illinois and never had a problem finding a Democrat to vote for. We then moved to northern Virginia in 1992 and learned that our congressperson was Tom Davis, a Republican. I seem to recall that there was one year when he didn’t have an opponent. He was an old school R, for DC voting rights, reasonable on most social issues, good for the largely Federal workforce that made up his district.
Then came 2008 and the Tea Party. He saw the writing on the wall and retired. AFAIK he’s still a Republican and has some sort of lobbying position. You see or hear him talking about the state of R politics from time to time. I think of him again this year with all the retirements.
tokyokie
@Fair Economist: Or as the fiercely anti-fascist Marlene Dietrich says to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, “Your future’s all used up.”
Bill Arnold
@MattF:
Sheesh. Do you want us to derive it from first principles?
Bill Arnold
@germy:
Wow. Worth reading just for the grimdark laughter:
Climate Could Be an Electoral Time Bomb, Republican Strategists Fear (Lisa Friedman, Aug. 2, 2019)
Certain Doom!!! For The Republican Party!
They should be seriously thinking about roving elite assassin squads 30 years from now.
Ken
@Bill Arnold: As a start, the wikipedia page for the number 27 notes that “Dark matter is thought to make up 27% of the universe.”
(Also that “The unique simple formally real Jordan algebra, the exceptional Jordan algebra of self-adjoint 3 by 3 matrices of quaternions, is 27-dimensional” but that seems a little harder to tie to the crazification factor.)
J R in WV
@mskitty:
It was when Obama ran for Senate in Illinois. The GOP had a hard time rounding up a candidate who might have been able to beat him, and in the end a crazy RWNJ black guy NOT from Illinois ran for the seat against Obama. He had nothing going for him, Rs in Il aren’t known for electing black candidates, he had no policy ideas, and still got 27% of the vote.
Alan Keys if I recall correctly. Google will provide more details. But it got tagged the crazification factor at that time. You had to be crazy to vote for the guy, yet 27% did vote for him.
Jinchi
@mskitty:
It may be a little late for this thread, but we should never forget the awesome origins of the Crazification Factor:
Spider-Dan
@Mai Naem mobile: Keep in mind that Dems got 53% of the vote in WI, yet the GOP controls the state Assembly 63-36. In other words, in a blue wave election, Republicans still control ~2/3rds of the seats.
There is a lot of gerrymandering slack remaining; e.g. the GOP can aim for 50 WI seats instead of 65.
Spider-Dan
@waspuppet: Even without Tim Scott, there are plenty of nonwhite Republicans in Congress (Rubio, Cruz, etc.). Scott will just be the last black Republican.
Jinchi
@waspuppet:
No…. No it won’t.
Another Scott
@Shana: Tom Davis was chair of the committee that subpoenaed Terri Schiavo. I was so furious about his behavior there that I wrote him a letter (he was my Congressman then, too). I guess he got lots of nasty letters because he didn’t run again.
But, of course, he gave over $1M from his campaign war chest to try to get his wife elected/re-elected. She lost too, IIRC.
Good riddance.
tl;dr – even the “reasonable” ones are horrible.
Cheers,
Scott.
Anne Laurie
@trollhattan:
Start a FaceBook rumor that his family changed the pronunciation from ‘NOON-ez.’ That tactic was/is a got-to for Repubs looking to remind their ‘base’ voters about candidates with Jewish names.
(Of course Devin’s ancestry is actually Portuguese, IIRC, but I have met entirely too many morons who think of the Portuguese as people ashamed of being, y’know, sp*cs. There’s a lot of Cape Verdeans in Massachusetts, and therefore far too many Massholes who complain about the ‘not just colored, but Spanish to boot! signs / stores / neighborhoods… )
Anne Laurie
@MattF:
Without understanding the math, I’ve been told the exactitude of the “27%” is a statistical artifact. But the ‘artifact’ keeps turning up because a predictable percentage of poll responders are just that
dumbunmovable.Turgidson
@MattF:
27% is the percentage of the vote Alan Keyes got against Obama in the 2004 IL-Sen race. The theory went that since both politicians were black, there was no Bradley effect-type element to worry about. Keyes is batshit loony toon wackjob, and Obama was, obviously, not. And compared to each other, Obama was Abe Lincoln and George Washington rolled into one while Keyes was a raving lunatic with a concussion. The notion that 27% of people would vote for Keyes over Obama was about as close to a perfectly controlled experiment as you can get for determining just how many people are fucking crazy morons. Thus the “crazification factor” was born.
Turgidson
@Jinchi: Oops, you got there first.